I was talking to one of my customers about her experience trying to introduce the use of metrics into the business processes she is managing. Janet is in the gourmet food marketing business and was hoping to use analytics for discovering the patterns of shoppers’ consumption of her products by the time of day, as well as an impact of promotional events on the sales results. The food business, in her words, is a very fragmented environment and even the simplest business process tends to involve a number of companies to perform.

Clear understanding and measurement of the metrics, which Janet is interested in, would bring substantial financial benefits to all of the participants in this process, and yet they passively resist any attempt of implementation. Her frustration level was rising as Janet was describing the excuses she was getting from her customers and partners. They were not saying no to her proposal and even promised to make some information available, but ultimately no progress was ever made. Let’s make it clear that a cost is not a factor, as Janet’s company offered to underwrite the implementation.

“So why do ‘go-get-them’ people usually become so passive-aggressive when the analytics are involved?” Janet asked me. This question made me look back on my experiences, and it occurred to me that they invariably are similar to Janet’s. For over decades of my business career, I was charged with development and implementation of KPI’s many times in large and small companies engaged in different industries, but the outcome is always the same – passive resistance.

There are a few business processes that universally accept and practice metrics. The most common example are Sales and Call Center processes, but anyone who has managed sales forecasting will tell you that the efforts required to drive it are very substantial.

Recent explosion in web analytics technology brought to us a myriad of products that capture, measure and present dashboards of transactional data that may correlate to specific business process performance, but are very far removed from actionable KPI metrics that most of us need to manage business. Even marginal improvement in measuring performance of advertising investment disrupted the entire industry and created new multi-billion dollar players like Google. Imagine what could be done if we could measure actual impact of a given decision on the bottom line results. However, that would not be likely to happen anytime soon because of fundamental characteristics of human behavior – we will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid personal accountability.

The numbers can shine a light on our performance and quality of our decisions that can be too bright and harsh. Our organizational structures and compensation systems are too binary, with a few exceptions, to compensate for actual performance. Too commonly we get and keep our jobs not for delivering exceptional results, but for “fitting in” and showing up on time, for being efficient and working long hours, but not necessarily effective in producing the “right” results.

The key to successful, productive adoption of analytics into organizational fabric is careful selection of only those metrics that measure elements of a process that can be proactively managed by the parties involved to their performance benefit. The fewer relevant, actionable KPI metrics that help to take meaningful actions is much better than dashboards full of charts and numbers you have no control over. Relevancy beats ease of generation and drives user adoption.

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.

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.

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

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.

The program was surprisingly good as I wasn’t sure what to expect. The day started with breakfast for new CEA (Consumer Electronics Association) members and I was invited as Amplified Analytics became a member in the beginning of this year. It was good to meet some new and some veteran members and conversation was pretty lively.

The first session I attended was “Five Technology Trends to Watch”. I am not sure whether there were in fact 5 technology trends discussed, but it was interesting and engaging even though 2 out of 3 panelists did not show up. Jon Healy of LA Times along with Shawn DuBravac and another CEA VP discussed trends in consolidation of customer entertainment experience and implications of these trends for environment participants. I am still trying to digest the information discussed and see if it has any implications for our business or business of our customers.

The second session was presented by Brian Wesbury, “Top Economic Forecaster” and contributor to Wall Street Journal. The man is surely entertaining, but people like that give economists a bad name IMO. I suppose he is not funny enough to make a living as a stand up comedian and training in mathematics, he eluded to, makes it difficult to gather large enough audiences. I found methodologies he seem to follow, too loose for my taste and interpretations of economic data to be be either bad or not too honest. At some point I got an urge to heckle and decided to walk away instead. Relatively large part of audience did the same, muttering something uncomplimentary under the breath.

Mike Allen, Chief Political Correspondent for Politicos.com offered his speculations for the next few years. The most interesting part for me was his observations about fragmentation of news sources and how content is disseminated by White House, political parties and businesses. All points to loss of marketing muscle by traditional media outlets. I would conjure that it translates into gain on marketing power by socially driven online outlets. This is surely not a surprise for me, but an interesting confirmation from yet another source.

Mitch Joel “blew off” the roof of the house. His presentation really rocked. Mitch is the author of “Six pixels of separation”and a very dynamic and engaging speaker. God knows there are tons of Social Media gurus making speeches on trade sponsored circuit, but there are very few who really understand  the “soul” of the subject as well as Mitch. His examples were agnostic, practical and actionable, the way he answered some of the questions was very impressive. It was interesting to watch audience, that was a bit leery about subject of digital marketing, being won over and energized like that.

Throughout 3 out of 4 presentation there was an undercurrent of potential conflict between social media, digital marketing and privacy issues. This obviously hold more than casual interest for me , Amplified Analytics and many other market participants. CEA Market Research Analyst, Sean Murphy wrote a piece that is addressing this issue, and I had a private conversation with him on this subject. I also asked Mitch about his view of this potential problem. I want to address this issue in this blog later as I do some more research and I will quote the answers from Sean and Mitch at that time.

iStage presentations and competition for new products from small companies was quite interesting and while some of these products look intriguing, none of them sent me into “I want it now” frenzy.

That is my report. I am going to Amazon now  to buy Mitch’s book now.

Good night.

Many Social Media proponents, activists and analysts express strong believe that its advance creates revolutionary changes to role and importance of consumer voice in market dynamics.

So far it gave birth to hordes of consultants and marketing services that promote ideas of influencer chasing and reputation management monitoring technologies, however the “scream” of offerings seem to counteract the idea of increasing the volume of the voice of customer.

One example is a number of websites, offering depository of customer reviews about products and/or services, outnumber the customers who are willing and capable to contribute to these depositories. The end result seems to be counterproductive as consumers who look for such information are hassled to sites that have no content to offer.

Some companies spend substantial energy to explore and pursue some form of activity involving Social Media and there are very few, but loudly celebrated examples of those. However that doesn’t seem to change overall reputation of these companies. One of my favorite whipping “boys” – Comcast is still rated dismally for the delivery of their customers experience, despite heroic efforts of their Social Media team on Twitter and Facebook.  Here is another example, a darling of the Social Media mavens – LinkedIn. Based on Customer Service Scoreboard scores

LinkedIn is ranked #253 out of the 273 companies that have a CustomerServiceScoreboard.com rating with an overall score of 19.35 out of a possible 200. This score rates LinkedIn customer service and customer support as Terrible.

There 56 negative comments vs 1 positive one and most of them by paying subscribers, who cannot get their issues resolved. Ironically the 19.35 score is below the LinkedIn lowest monthly subscription fee of $24.95.

I know that 56 complains is a very small number considering millions of people who use the network, but I wonder what is a percentage of them who actually use it actively enough to care, and even more interesting is how many actually pay for it. I personally am one of them and my experience is one of neglect. I have an issue outstanding for almost two years without resolution. The issue resurface from time to time and causes me a lot of aggravation and waste of time. I finally decided to use LinkedIn Inmail to escalate the problem to the founder of the company, Reid Hoffman.

On 7/2/10 12:18 PM, Gregory Yankelovich wrote:
——————–
I am expending a valuable Inmail credit and hope that you will read it.

This is the 3rd time I am erroneously locked out of my ability to ask for Introduction. I am paying customer, but I cannot get resolution for almost 2 years. The 1st time I have experienced this problem, I reported it 10/27/2008 and I am having problems with it once again and it negatively impacts my efforts to bring my product to the market.

I rely heavily on my network to reach out to potential customers and partners. However every time I encounter this problem I have to wait for 2-3 days for your Customer Support to reset the system’s counters. 2-3 days are a long time to waste in the life of a startup. I understand the power of reputation more than most people and don’t want to scream #fail all over Twitter. Please help.

To Reid’s credit he responded

Gregory,
I am reading it; I’ll put your issue into the executive escalations. Since I don’t know what you’re doing that hits problems, I don’t know if we support what you’re doing or not. (For example, not saying that this is what you’re doing, but we have very clear messaging limits to prevent spam.)
Hope it all works out. (And, btw, you can write what you feel is right on twitter: I apologize for where we step when we’re wrong or slow.)
all the best,
Reid

However his response was the only one, I am still waiting for any contact from the Customer Support. I eventually did express my frustration on Twitter:

Wasted yet another day waiting for help from #LinkedIn technical support – still no love.

What is a reasonable response time for #customersupport? Does anyone else has #LinkedIn Introduction Withdrawal or is it just me?

and here the reaction I have received

@piplzchoice Do you have a free linkedin account? If so, be thankful you get to use linkedin at all. Just sayin.

I did not write this to whine about my “misfortunes”, but to explore what, if anything, is actually changing with advent of Social Media in respect to the treatment of the customers. Advertisers keep complaining how difficult it is to gain share of consumer attention, yet when a company like LinkedIn or Facebook, does manage to do it, and end up raising enormous amounts of capital based on that fact, our attention doesn’t seem to be that valuable anymore. Let’s face it, Social Media is nothing more than another communication channel, like a next generation of telephone, radio, TV and email. All of these improved our life experiences at some cost to our privacy or quality of life, but how we use these channels is the only thing that may influence how Market delivers our Customer Experiences.

As any business seeks to better understand customer needs and behaviors, it’s no secret that Social Media has opened more doors to CRM opportunities than ever before.  Last week while reading a recent marketing blog, I was amazed to observe that the writer failed to suggest the current trend of social networking as a frontline method for creating a relationship with customers.

Like never before, Social Media is providing a colossal platform allowing us to hear what our customers are saying.   It is quickly becoming one of the best ways to engage a customer and gain valuable insight into their experience with our products as well as those of our competition.  Are you listening?

This explosive technology could permit any business to identify competitive threats or opportunities through information that might not otherwise be detected without listening to thousands of customers.  Historically, formal focus groups were utilized as the most common means of collecting this data in-person from the end user.  Perhaps one could imply that today social media is quickly becoming the new “focus group”.

Consider for a moment that while traditional focus groups draw in customers to discuss their experiences, so are Social Networks providing the same information.  Is there really a significant difference?  The value of a focus group depends largely on quality of questions posed to the participants with all the biases that are incorporated into a question. The main disparity is that social media presents a very public review of a product or company’s benefits and even shortcomings.  However, we must not ignore the exponential numbers of consumers who are vocalizing this valuable data.  It is often more candid than any focus group could provide.

Getting connected with them is just part of the solution.  Connecting & engaging within these social mediums is relatively easy part.  Nevertheless, just like any other ‘marketing” effort, its success is not realized without measurement.  Therefore, the opportunity exists in figuring out what to do with the unstructured data.

Fortunately there is technology available to “interpret” this valuable data. Utilizing a multi-dimensional analysis, we convert various forms of feedback into an actionable plan then we take it one step further.  We are examining customer ratings across the market of nearly 20,000 products.  Many of the companies who have attempted their own translations had to invest very significant amounts of money into text mining implementation projects that allow handling feedback about only their own products.  With more than 2 million reviews, our database can deliver satisfaction scores from real world consumers about your products as well as that of your competition.

Self help author and motivational speaker, Robert Kiyosaki,  was quoted last year as saying ‘I am a bit old to focus on social media now but I spend an average of two hundred thousand dollars monthly through hired employees or consultants on social media, online reputation etc’.  While the use of social media as a marketing tool is still in its early stages, let’s not ignore this novel opportunity to act on customer feedback.

Clay Shirky once said in on of his presentations – “There is no information overload – it is filters failure”

Some people complain that the Internet has created overwhelming volumes of information.  Is there really too much information about objects of interest or is the perception of overwhelming volume actually misstated? Perhaps the issue is not quantity but level of quality. It is a matter of perception and focus; the ability to discriminate signal from background noise.  Both producers and consumers care about what is said about a product or service equates to dollars or pounds or yen because positive statements will usually translate into higher demand.  It is ironic how growing numbers of sophisticated product producers and consumers are tapping into the same information stream that has only recently come out of emerging social networks; a kind of digital crowdwisdom.

Whether consumers are overwhelmed by the amount of product information or just lazy, many consumers apparently prefer the conversation threads shared by digital “friends” in their social network over search engine result pages generated by a product’s keywords and metadata tags. There is a very human tendency to seek out the opinion or advice of a “social herd” of like-minded people with similar values, interests, and needs.  It is more than just a contemporary cynicism of Madison Avenue hype and infomercial verbiage. Following the “virtual herd” may at first sound like a derogatory statement but it is in fact fair and descriptive.  Herding is an adaptive trait that fosters very important social behaviors. Though it can, if carried to an extreme like lemmings jumping off a cliff appear pointless, following a “digital” herd saves time and minimizes personal risk. Whether inexperienced or as mentioned above, overwhelmed by too much information, “attending” to what the other member’s of one’s social circle say, do, or prefer is like a filtering device. Some people feel that the wider their circle and the greater the consensus toward a selection, the less risky their final choice. This filtering is especially cost-efficient. A consumer, after finding a common and comfortable social niche, has to neither spend additional time nor effort to select objects of value or need; they just follow the Word-of-Mouth recommendations of their trusted circle and their satisfaction is guaranteed.

Sophisticated product producers recognize that tapping into these social niches, if they can find them, provide free and truthful evaluations of what is right and wrong with their product line.  Crowdwisdom would appear to reflect unsolicited, and therefore one hopes, unbiased evaluations of many different facets of a product. If postings in some niche social network discuss a product, its reputation, and its brand over some reasonable time frame, a producer could conclude the data is accurate rather than misrepresented, for example, by a competitor’s planted remarks or their own staff trying to “market” company goods. They could conclude it is balanced rather than atypical and biased when, for example, a single irate customer monopolizes bandwidth with redundant rants.  Producers who cast their virtual nets over social networks to catch real-time comments must follow the best practices in statistical sampling and testing of experienced psychologists and trained sociologist. Crowdwisdom is not necessarily wise but it is, when collected carefully, extremely relevant. Especially in this digital age where many people struggle to find the signal in all the noise, it is cost-effective and an adaptive trait that minimizes personal risk. It doesn’t matter whether or not you trust or even like everyone in your social circle, if the group hangs out at a particular water hole, it must be safe to go there to drink.

This excellent article by Eric Tsai is full of practical and useful information. I am glad Eric have addressed the issue of customer insights and how it can be used in an organization.

If the sales staff knows what words or questions your target audience used most frequently when talking about your product, they can craft a better sales pitch.  If product engineers realize how many different ways people actually use the products they create, they can improve and create better products. If the design team identifies how your customers come to visit your page and where they clicked, perhaps they can increase the conversion rate on your next campaign.

In my experience this knowledge, even if it is available within an organization, is rarely utilized for a process of resolving customer problems with a specific product or in a new product development process. Product Marketing organizations often seem to be more inclined to use “customer” feedback they solicit, via panels and focus groups other then analysis of unsolicited voice of the real customers, who actually purchased their products. I suspect it is the issue of control, and in my opinion, it contradicts the notion of “Social” relationship with customers. Another potential reason of the disconnect is a nature of “soft” raw data, extracted from chats and and forums, does not easily translates into the structured information required by enterprise processes and systems.