This morning, I had an interesting experience. Among many emails, tweets and webinar offerings, I managed to expose myself blindly to two that focused on one challenge I have to overcome the most – talking too much and listening too little. Interestingly enough, neither of the messages was specifically targeting individual or style shortcomings, and the subject line of these presentations was not about listening skills. If this is not a moment of serendipity, then I don’t know what is. BTW it also synch with my favorite definition of serendipity: “…is when you come to look for a needle in a stack of hay, and you end up finding a farmer’s daughter.”

The first piece of content is a video from http://www.entselling.com/ that talks about challenges of entrepreneurial selling and is not focused on the selling or listening style at all. It is very good and I strongly recommend it to any startup team, but the listening piece resonated with me the most. I’ve been trained on the importance of this skill for selling many years ago, and judging by my performance at the time, I have even learned to apply it. However, as it may be obvious to people who know me, it is not one of my natural qualities . The more I get excited about the subject of conversation, the less patient I get with listening to my conversation partners, particularly if I think I already figured out what they are trying to communicate.

I may be right about that, but it doesn’t create a great conversation experience, nor does it make them feel that they have been heard and that I actually do understand their concerns or problems I am proposing to address with my product or service. Apparently, it is a very common problem undermining many startup founders who are understandably excited about their creations to a detriment of their potential customers’ comfort, and subsequently a sales success. Maybe I should start looking for a startup founders “shut up and listen” support group. Please let me know if such a group exists.

The second piece is even more interesting and was presented by Rebel Brown at the Defy Gravity webinar sponsored by TreeHouseInteractive. Rebel is a very dynamic and passionate speaker, and she was talking about many marketers trying to use social media as traditional content broadcasting channel. The main lesson I took out of this presentation is about a challenge of institutionalized listening that needs to become a part of personalized conversation if a brand wants to be successful in social media. I suppose that no brand will be able to survive without social engagement with their customers, as the customers are creators of a brand.

“Advertising can help you sell good products, but only your customers can help you build a great Brand!”

The challenge is in learning what is important to your customers and communicating with them about this, as opposed to focusing on your product or your brand. I think the most difficult part is to not assume that we already know what it is, and not be afraid to learn from these communications.

Rebel also made a great point about the practice of counting followers and “likes” as a result of social media efforts. I will paraphrase it here as, “Do not confuse tactical metrics with actual meaningful results.” Let’s face it – these only exist because they are easy to count. Their relevance to business outcomes is very questionable, and the only thing they help to learn is how to manipulate or game the counting mechanisms.

I don’t think a “real” marketer can be helped by a mere support group or volunteer 12-step program. Perhaps there is an opportunity for a true “rehab.” All you need is a recovering marketing celebrity lending their name to this venture.

   For those of us who are deeply involved with online marketing research, it may appear that the proliferation of Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs is exploding these days. However, recent Forrester’s research found that 56% of the executives they surveyed were not aware of any formal VoC program in their companies. One of potential explanations to this discrepancy may be the fact that many companies conduct localized, departmental initiatives that are not visible to the rest of the organization.

Indeed, an amount of online surveys I am bombarded every day is staggering. It seems that people who designed every website I stop by want to know my opinion… even before I had any time to form one. Availability of inexpensive and easy-to-use technology for conducting online surveys is not a good excuse for harassing your site’s visitors to collect “short” and “easy” response to the closed-ended questions structured on a scale of 1 to 5.

There are 3 reasons why an inadequately administered survey is harmful to your business:

• Popup surveys reduce visitor engagement with a site, and therefore promote high bounce rate.

Many people commenting about their site user experience are complaining about the timing of these interruptions and their inability to respond to posed questions at a time they are being posed. Timing the request to allow a customer to experience your product or service would provide more meaningful reaction and responses.

•  Questions that do not align with customer’s experience and perspective do alienate the customers.

The closed-ended questions you pose to your customers may be very important to you and your company. However, if answering them does not provide any value to the responder, why would they want to waste their time? It is much better to provide generous space for comments and reflections of their experience from their perspective, and let them tell you what elements of this experience are important to them. Make it easy for them to say what they want to, not what you want to hear. They are not in the business of validating your assumptions.

• Customer Feedback that does not result in action is a waste of time – yours and your customer’s.

A disconnect between cause and effect explains low participation of voters in a political process. Customers want to help you improve your product or service and will provide you with clues to how to do it, if you “listen”. There are tools available for automated processing of unstructured customer comments and reviews that are called Opinion Mining platforms. Use them to help you discover the insights into their experience. You can get results within 24 hours. Let the customers know that their efforts are not wasted. Communicate back what you have learned from them and what actions you plan to take in an effort to improve their experience.

Social media monitoring quickly becomes a “commodity” with hundreds of companies’ rummaging through fire hose streams of communications published, re-published and re-tweeted every second of a day. Brands want to know what people think about them and are prepared to pay for this knowledge. But why is this so? What is the value of knowing that people communicate a positive sentiment about your brand today?

I would speculate that most companies make this investment without specific strategy or process on hand, and some companies do it to manage the reputation of their brands or in other words, to do PR damage control and risk mitigation. A very few do so to systematically improve their customers’ experience.

Most of Social Media chatter has relatively low value for opinion mining efforts, which need to be given attention if you want to extract actionable knowledge for systematic change.

Furthermore, it is important to understand the differences between the types of communications that use Social Media channels:

• People often refer to Word of Mouth (WOM) in Social Media as a buzz and focus too much on technology at the expense of the appropriate targets, actions and measurements.
• The Voice of the Customer (VOC) is a subset of WOM that can be directly attributed to the customers of your product. It is very similar and as valuable as, if not more valuable than, customer feedback collected by many companies through their “walled garden” channels at a great expense.

The opinion mining operation that is focused on the Voice of the Customer “ore” delivers significantly higher yield compared to the overall Social Media buzz in terms of actionable knowledge. It is possible because it provides a very close correlation to specific products and often describes holistic customer experience with these products. I refer to “holistic customer experience” in the context of the customer’s effort required to achieve a desired outcome. An example of a desirable outcome is a new roof for the house or a quality audio experience while exercising in a gym.

We consider all steps – from the initial purchase research to the selection, purchase, delivery and setup, and to a completed realization of the desired outcome – measure it as a difference between the customer’s expectations and their perception of reality (their actual experience). Examples of VOC “ore” include—in ascending order—customer forums, blogs and customer reviews published online.

Recent Forrester’s research found that 14% of executives surveyed said that their companies don’t solicit customer feedback at all, while 56% of the respondents said—or were not sure if—their companies do not have a formal VOC program. However, the most shocking finding is that nearly one out of every four executives said that they seldom or never use customer feedback to change a business process (source: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=142811).

The Temkin Group research identified it as the one of Top 10 Customer Experience Incompetencies, as shown in the table on the left.

There is a good reason why so many companies find it difficult to mine Social Media for improving customer experience:  most content generated by customers is unusable by corporate information systems that are built to process structured data.

The following steps have to be taken to address the big challenge of translating seemingly anecdotal evidence into a scalable, corporate process:

1. Aggregation, capture, cleansing and authentication of Voice of Customer data
2. Conversion of this data into structured information
3. Alignment of this information with corporate targets, i.e. conversion of this information into corporate knowledge
4. Integration of that knowledge into existing, repeatable business process.

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You are invited to register for the “Getting Your Customers to Do Your Marketing for You” webinar hosted by CEA.

Event Overview

DATE: Tuesday, January 25

TIME: 2-3 p.m. (ET)

Presenter: Gregory Yankelovich, CEO, Amplified Analytics

Register Now!

Please RSVP by Monday, January 24. Registration is limited.

Questions? E-mail the Webcast Team or call 703-907-7797.

Description:

Participants will learn the methods, techniques and best practices for use of online Word of Mouth (WOM) to stimulate demand for CE products; methodology and tools for market research of social media to measure product reputation and customer satisfaction without breaking the bank.

Who should attend:

Marketing Product Managers, Market Research and Market Intelligence professionals, PR and Marketing Communications professionals interested in product and brand equity management.

Presenter Bio:

Gregory Yankelovich has been involved with customer centric product management and marketing, CRM process best practices and their automation for the last 15 years. He currently serves as CEO of Amplified Analytics, the firm that specializes in use of opinion mining and natural language processing technologies for analysis of CE Customer reviews, word of mouth and other forms of customer feedback.

Please share this invitation with your colleagues and friends.

My hero, Peter Drucker, is often quoted to say (I paraphrase here) “What you cannot measure, cannot be managed” and this idea inspired many analytic initiatives by large companies as well as by budding startups, like this one. There are hundreds of companies that monitor, listen and analyze every aspect of web traffic, impact of media messages, both digital and analog, and just about anything else under the sun. There is surely no shortage of technology and tools, and current interest from businesses and consumers is quite high, but…there is still not enough conclusive evidence that measuring and managing to the specific parameter can produce measurable result. It often is still a challenge to interpret measurements into predictive models, that produce or support specific actions or decisions. Perhaps it is just my personal, limited experience and I look forward to be proven wrong  in your comments, but for now I would like to propose a few potential reasons for these disappointing experiences.

Is it possible that we often measure wrong things? Many people would argue that NPS (Net Promoter Score) is a meaningless thing to measure and the Social Media influence, measured by Klout and others, does not translate into any specific action. We often measure what is easy to measure, listen to what is easy to hear, without a difficult effort of understanding and interpreting into an action that can produce measurable improvement. Many people find it easy to identify metrics that measure the worth of their work:

salespeople have sales targets, production managers track whether inventory is delivered on time and under budget, but for most of us it is very difficult to associate and measure our direct contribution to the desired outcome.

Perhaps the most actionable metrics are derivative – a combination of a signal, statistics, interpretation and analysis. Measurement of atmospheric temperature and pressure, compared with historic observations and combined with predictive algorithms, do produce relatively reliable weather forecasts. Perhaps measuring multiple aspects of customer experience, compare them with competitive alternatives and combining it with  predictive algorithms, can produce more accurate sales forecast.

Is it possible that we have unreasonable expectations? We often expect direct causation while operating in an open system environment. Business environment is not a scientific experiment and unpredictability of market conditions cannot be isolated to prove validity of specific measurement methodologies.  We only can improve odds, but we often expect certainty. Uncertainty is the reason for any important measurement effort. Measurement improves confidence in a quality of the decision is supports, but it cannot guarantee an outcome, after all according to Warren Buffet “It is better to be approximately right than to precisely wrong.”

This analysis was updated. Click to see the new report

I am getting ready to buy one, but buying one is just a beginning of the experience. The trick is to select the DMR that will give me more joy than a headache. Somebody said that there are 3 kinds of people:
1. people who learn from other people mistakes
2. people who learn from their own ones, and
3. people who never learn.
Let’s try to be the first kind of people and learn from others about their DMR experiences.

Let’s start with filtering the DMRs that have most customer reviews available on Social Media venues as there is a safety in numbers. I am not saying “Eat shit – 5,000,000 flies can’t be wrong!”, but there is a value in statistically representative information and it is much more difficult to plant a large number of reasonably descriptive customer reviews – just ask the Idiot Marketers who tried and got caught.

Comparing the “stars” of these receivers does not reveal much

as all of them sport 3.5-4 stars forcing me to sift through hundreds of reviews to decipher which one would give me the most satisfaction with the least risk and headache. This problem provided motivation for development of Opinion Miner® software and applications that are using it to produce the following score card.

The green shadowed cells indicate the highest score for an attribute and the red one highlight customer disappointment.

This makes my selection much easier as I can see that Roku XD delighted their customers with most of the attributes important to them. More than any other receiver we considered. However I also have information to make this decision personal, not just following the math – I do not buy from a company that disappoints their customers with Customer Support that makes…..

Drum rolls please!

The winner of 2010 Piplzchoice Award in the Digital Receiver Category is Apple TV 2010

I have written and published reviews online about books and products for over 10 years. Primary motivation for doing it is to share my experience with other consumers to help them make a choice, and with manufacturers to learn about customer experience with their product. I know that only a tiny number of consumers find it important to write the reviews as on the average well under 1% of a product customers review them, but my motivation is the same as most reviewer’s:

“Fully 90% write reviews in order to help others make better buying decisions, and more than 70% want to help companies improve the products they build and carry.”

Sounds like a truly win-win proposition until dishonest, idiot marketers come with “brilliant” idea to manipulate customer’s feedback. We will never know what financial impact was experienced by Belkin after their reviews manipulating scheme was publicly revealed, but the brand reputation stain keeps lingering years after it became public. Just Google “Belkin reviews scandal”

Belkin became a “poster child”, but it surely is not the only perpetrator of public trust. There is a long list of slimy morons who figured out it is easier to brake the law (yes, it is illegal) than to produce really good product the customers would be inspired to write about. I can’t imagine that economic value of results produced using cheap manipulation can possibly justify the legal and financial risk involved, yet in spite of all scandals and successful legal proceedings the practice continues, and cheap labor providing sites are flooded with ads like this

I don’t want to single out travel industry, but hotels seem to be the worst offenders as these ads are running for years

All of these activities are unethical and illegal, practiced openly through Social Media channels and yet did not destroy public trust in value of Customer Reviews.

Are consumers dumb and unaware of chicanery or is it a testament to human resiliency and faith? My bet is on the second and we will continue to work on development of algorithms to help us minimize influence of the disingenuous product reviews.

Many marketers are wrestling with practical implications of Social Media Marketing concept. One of the challenges is a lack of a clear and practical concept definition. Everyone seem to know what it means and doing “something” about it, but only very few can boast a provable and measurable success. I chose to focus on a specific subset of the SMM that in my opinion provides the most effective method on increasing sales without monumental budget requirements.

If you agree that consumers, and that include businesses in context of this conversation, fundamentally shop for “desirable outcome” and a shopping process is focused on risk reduction of achieving that outcome, you would probably see why the customer reviews are so important. Many marketers are often uncomfortable with an idea of funding a messaging effort without retaining control of the content, but that is precisely why this Media is called Social.  A customer review is usually a personal “story” describing how a person, who had expectations (possibly similar to yours) experienced reality of of their decision to purchase that product or service. A “negative” review can often sell your product or service more effectively by alleviating prospective customer’s fears because the review writer expectations were different from the the reader’s, the writer’s experience was closer to the reader’s desirable outcome, and negative tone gives the story a lot more credibility.

Let’s assume that I masterfully convinced you that customer reviews, under curtain conditions, provide sizable uplift in sales. If you don’t buy this line of reasoning there is some research on that subjects which supports the premise. You can find here and here. If you knew it all along, you are more interested in what are the “certain conditions”, and how exactly do you get your customers to write these reviews.

Humans communicate by telling the stories – stars (Liekert scales and such), attribute ratings and any other attempts to filter and organize customer reviews, are helpful, but they often fail to produce sales uplift if used excessively. They distract consumers from reading the “stories” and prevent them from personal engagement. The idea of engaging customers in writing more reviews by offering them “fill in the blank” forms often leads to waste and distrust as consumers, who look for this product reviews, feel cheated when they land on the product page with  pre-fabricated, check box reviews.

Number of reviews is critically important for production of sales uplift. There is no exact, magic number that would guarantee the desired effect as it is highly contextual to the complexity of the product or service and its price (i.e. risk involved). Too few reviews for a product may make it look not credible to many consumers, and too many reviews may intimidate some from even making the decision. The latter case could possibly be mitigated by thoughtful “filtering” mechanisms and it is not a problem for most marketers. Only a very small number of customers are engaged enough to write a review. I “mashed” TV units shipped data from iSuppli Market Research with a number of reviews for these TV brands available online to come with an average that is well below 1%.

Engaging your customers to write more reviews is probably the most challenging task. There is no shortcuts here. Any marketers who succumbed to a “brilliant” idea of planting reviews written by not-customers should know that it is illegal ( it was successfully prosecuted in NY),  it produce adverse effects, and did I mention that it is not ethical? Misleading social media seeding techniques have become so widespread that the European Union enacted Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations to protect the public from the most deceitful activities.

To do it right you need to understand why customers write the reviews on the first place. What are the motivations? There are a few studies conducted by Cone Research and others that delved into this subject. When you understand what motivates very few of your customers to write the reviews you need to select appropriate existing interaction points between your company and a customer, such as warranty registration process or scheduled maintenance, to ask them for it. The way you communicate the request is very important and has to loop back to the motivations. If you ask for endorsement or referral – you miss the mark and fail in this Social Media Marketing class.

This is an attempt to put the content business disruption that came into our experience with development of Internet distribution channel.

There is no secret for anyone today that business models of modern content management companies are being violently disrupted. However it seem to me that the arguments on both sides are missing some of the root causes of the disruption. At least I have not encountered anybody making this point before.

Business of charging units of economic value (money) for consumption of content, such as book, newspaper, music recording or film, is relatively new business model in terms of historic perspective. It only became available with advent of industrialization, i.e. nearly 200 years ago. Before that time the mass re-production of content for consumption was not economically viable as manual re-production methods were not scalable, potential customers did not have ability to consume yet as they had no money to pay, leisure time to consume or ability to consume (read). At these times only organized religions and states could afford to produce content, because the content they produced helped them to “market” (i.e. enforce) their economic and administrative powers.

It all started to change with invention of printing press that heralded appearance of “unofficial” content we call literature. Traditional purveyors of content surely tried to participate in democratization of printed word, however even small members of literate market, given the choice preferred the content of higher quality and started to support economically market oriented content production.

Given relatively fast (historically speaking) economical development of industrial societies, the availability of leisure time and common literacy quickly produced strong demand for content with a cost of production lagging behind. That is when a content became the king. Any content would sell regardless of its quality and the content packaging, distribution and marketing machinery of publishing, news and studios was born.

When Internet distribution platform started to threaten this machinery, two currents have merged:
1. Economics of scalable distribution no longer required massive capital for logistics and marketing, as realities of digital distribution and consumption eliminated them;
2. The production of content started to meet, and exceed the demand. This manifested itself in demand for higher quality content as oppose to any content.

This second point is really worth further exploration. Consider music record model – create one hit and market it to stimulate the demand, package it with 9 or 10 mediocre tracks, and sell them at the price of an album to produce healthy royalties and profits even after the cost of printing, tracking, retail selling and unsold inventory destruction. And this worked until the market became flooded with too much mediocre music and costs of marketing became too difficult to bare. Enter digital distribution that does not need to support legacy infrastructure and enable customers to buy only the track they want. Industry cannot exist on $.99 price per track (unit of content) and internal cost of royalties distribution of $2.99 per album. And it will not, but we will end up with better music quality and only truly creative artists who are and will be rewarded. Perhaps not as lavishly as they were in very short era of misbalanced supply and demand, but this era only lasted for a few decades and before that the artists were starving.

Take this logic to the newspaper publishing business and you will see that the pattern is repeated. The quality of the news content kept deteriorating to reduce cost of content creation while marketing and re-production costs kept growing until people started to read blogs instead because their content became more interesting. Truly gifted, creative and honest journalists are finding the consumers for their content that allow them to monetize that content. The opinionated political pundits of each persuasion seem to find their respective niches without any editorial oversight because people who “buy” their content do not care whether it is the “truth” as certified by self-important authority.

The book market seem “frothy” now with everybody and anybody is publishing books that are supposedly doing well on numerous lists. Some of them are very good, but most make think that the tree was killed for no good reason. I wonder how long will this last?

The point I am trying to make is that digital distribution based on internet protocols and platforms will make a content a true king, but not just any content, the great content only.

As of this date Piplzchoice Award research is read by 15,126 people. In this study we analyzed Mobile Phones. We are currently tracking 98 products in these categories and analyzed 7,529 reviews written by their customers. However some of these products have not accumulated enough reviews to produce statistically representative and accurate metrics, so we filtered them out of the competition. The second round disqualified any product that failed to meet Customer Expectations with its Functionality, Reliability or Support.

Blackberry Torch 9800 is a newcomer that quickly captured the top spot for it’s Functionality and Reliability reputation.

RIM Blackberry Torch 9800
2010 Piplzchoice Award winner
59% above average Customer Satisfaction in its Category
The winners are chosen by their customers

This Phone’ Reliability score is 42% higher than the category average. See mobile phone brands analysis study below. For the free full copy of this study contact greg@amplifiedanalytics.com