@christineptran

If Toyota Had a CCO

photo credit: blue_j

On the drive home last night, I heard this Talk of the Nation story on NPR: How to Bounce Back from a PR Disaster. Obviously about Toyota if you’ve been following news for the past week. A good listen – and imho, the most reasonable assessment of the situation I’ve heard and read yet.

Take a look at the news and you see headlines like: Toyota’s Digital Disaster, Toyota broke cardinal rule of crisis management, and Toyota’s Recall Antics Spread Virally.

My take?  You can’t argue with decades of leadership in automotive reliability. It’ll take a lot more than this recall (which happen all the time and affect all companies) to diminish my trust in Toyota.

By the way, I just bought a new used car, and during the process only sought out Toyotas, Scions (Toyota brand), and Hondas. Reliability was my top criteria. While I ended up with a Honda, this recall and the so-called “PR disaster” wouldn’t have turned me a way from a Toyota if I were still looking for a car.

Though it does appear that I don’t represent the mainstream view, as public perception of the Toyota brand has dropped significantly.

So what’s Toyota to do?

A couple posts ago, I wrote about an HBR article concerning the customer-centric organization. In it, the authors presented their vision of the Chief Customer Officer.

Imagine if Toyota had a Chief Customer Officer.

As the public face of the company and most senior internal evangelist, a Toyota CCO would be the first to acknowledge the issue and offer a sincere apology to customers. A Toyota CCO would brief the executive team on how to handle the customer crisis from a customer-centric point of view. A Toyota CCO would engage dealerships, ensuring a positive experience for customers who bring in their Toyotas for repairs.

A Toyota CCO would work closely with corporate communications and customer support to disseminate this message to its customers, wherever they may be off- and online. A Toyota CCO would reach out to, seek feedback from, and rally customer advocates, who prior to the crisis were already engaged in a formalized customer advocacy program. A Toyota CCO would coordinate efforts to listen to customers – collecting customer sentiment/feedback and funneling it back to the company. A Toyota CCO would empower a team to respond to detractors (like this one) and redirect the message back to Toyota.

I don’t think Toyota’s botched the recall by any means (yet). In fact, I think they’re handling it as best as most companies would. But Toyota would be better served if it had a CCO, who could coordinate the customer-centric response and inject the customer point of view across all facets of the recall process.

Social Search: Intimacy Over Authority

I’ve been using Aardvark, a social search engine, since last summer. I use it a good number of times every week, and continue to be amazed by the quality and speed of answers, and the helpfulness of strangers in my extended social network.

What is social search? It’s search that relies on your social graph. Whereas, in a traditional search engine the challenge is to find the right link, in Aardvark it’s to find the right person. Their analogy: Google follows the “library paradigm of information retrieval,” Aardvark is like the “village paradigm.” In Google the algorithms determine authority (PageRank), in Aardvark the algorithms determine intimacy.

Aardvark works best when you ask questions of a highly contextualized or subjective nature – the average question on Aardvark is 18.6 words compared to 2.2-2.9 words on a web search. Questions and answers are received via IM, email, and SMS – modeling the real-world process of asking questions to friends.

Here’s a look at the type of questions asked on Aardvark:

Today, Aardvark blogged about a conference paper they submitted, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Social Search Engine. For inquiring users like myself, it was an incredible look at how a social search engine works.

How It Works (Roughly)

A crawler and indexer indexes “topics,” which are submitted by users or extracted from users’ Facebook page, Twitter messages, Facebook news feed items, or messages sent to other users.

Aardvark creates an index with scored lists of user IDs and topic IDs. When a user enters a question into their chat window, for example, a question is sent to Aardvark’s conversation manager, which sends the question to its question analyzer, which issues a routing suggestion request to the routing engine, which searches the index and social graph of suggested user IDs.

What’s Interesting

Users aren’t just ranked by topic knowledge, but also by the “degree of social connectedness and profile similarity.” Profile similarity is determined by demographic data and social graph overlap, and also by matching vocabulary, chattiness, speed, verbosity, and politeness (e.g. Thanks!). Aardvark has found that if users have friends in common or match demographically, for instance, the questioner is more likely to receive a good answer. Also, if a user has friends with expertise in the topic, than Aardvark will judge that user as having higher expertise.

I continue to be surprised by the quality of answers I get every time I use Aardvark. I once asked how to create a pivot table in Excel, only I didn’t know it was called a pivot table and had to explain in detail what I wanted to do. I received a step-by-step answer from a gentlemen in San Francisco (read the entire thread).

According to Aardvark, users answer questions from strangers because it’s a “very gratifying experience: they’ve been selected by Aardvark because of their expertise, they were able to help someone who had a need in the moment, and they are frequently thanked for their help by the asker.”

The Impact

As of October 2009, more than 90,000 users have created accounts on Aardvark from just 2000 users in March. Over half of its users have asked a question on Aardvark and the average volume of questions per day is 3,167.2. The numbers are not insignificant and indicate a need that hasn’t been satisfied very well up to this point.

Social search like Aardvark helps tease out information from the right people – people in our social graphs who have some degree of connectedness and profile similarity to us. It’s the recognition of intimacy as just as important, if not more, than authority.

Why I’m Not Using Facebook Connect

I’ve got a pretty public profile these days. You can find me on this blog of course, plus here (Facebook), here (LinkedIn), and here (Twitter).  I’ve cultivated all these public profiles over the past 2-3 years. The reason I spend so much time doing this is for the same reasons most people do: reach out to friends, make professional contacts, keep up-to-date with the industry, create a personal brand, and (previously) job seek.

This is what I tell all my friends who haven’t quite crossed the chasm yet.  Though most I know – and this seems to be true for the general public – aren’t comfortable having such public personas.  Most are willing to share and comment, but not yet produce and curate.

I’ve been thinking more about our online identities recently, especially in light of Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments on evolving social norms. While Facebook has an obvious interest in reducing privacy and creating a more open platform, it’s true that high schoolers today are growing up in an age where most of what they consume and communicate is online. We’re true to ourselves (generally) when we interact with people in our physical world, and this is mimicked to an increasingly large extent in our digital world. Some of us are already comfortable being ourselves online. In fact, we seek that authenticity, those honest interactions, and real human-to-human relationships in our everyday online activities.

In real life we can craft different personas in different environments. At the very least, there’s the “work” Christine, the “home” Christine, the “social” Christine.

Online, there’s the “public” Christine – which to date includes articles I’ve written, my blog, my Twitter/Linkedin profile, and public information on my Facebook page. Then there’s the private Christine – the rest of the information on my Facebook.

And that’s how I like to keep it. Online, we need both our public and our private personas.

Meanwhile, it sounds as if Zuckerberg and Facebook are heading in a different direction: “We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.”

While I agree that social norms are evolving, there’s always going to be a desire for people to keep some information private – that’s definitely the “home” Christine and to a large part the “social” Christine. This is why Facebook took off in the first place – it was a closed network of university students who felt safe sharing their personas with peers.

Recently I made my Facebook settings even more private. I also removed dozens of fan pages I had joined, recognizing that the affiliation was part of my public online identity. I’ve also stopped using Facebook Connect, despite its promise that users “take their Facebook identity, network, and privacy settings with them as they browse and interact with the rest of the Web.” Read their terms of service, as well as this earlier ReadWriteWeb article and this more recent CNET article to understand more.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to blog and send out Tweets – these are facets of my identity that I opted in to make public. I’ve already noticed sites using a “Twitter Connect,” and this is a feature I’ll gladly use (if only OpenID had taken off). And, it appears that we’ll be seeing a lot more of “Twitter Connect” in 2010.

From Transactions to Relationships

There’s a really great, in-depth article in this month’s Harvard Business Review titled Rethinking Marketing. You can read an excerpt here and below, but you’ll have to pick up an issue at your bookstore or pay online to read the article in full.

This excerpt outlines what most of us already know, yet captures the sentiments really well so I wanted to include it:

“…Never before have companies had such powerful technologies for interacting directly with customers, collecting and mining information about them, and tailoring their offerings accordingly. And never before have customers expected to interact so deeply with companies, and each other, to shape the products and services they use. To be sure, most companies use customer relationship management and other technologies to get a handle on customers, but no amount of technology can really improve the situation as long as companies are set up to market products rather than cultivate customers. To compete in this aggressively interactive environment, companies must shift their focus from driving transactions to maximizing customer lifetime value. That means making products and brands subservient to long-term customer relationships. And that means changing strategy and structure across the organization—and reinventing the marketing department altogether.”

Heard it before? It’s amazing how relevant the Cluetrain Manifesto is still, more than 10 years after it’s publication. The above sentiments also remind me of a number of essays by U of Michigan professor C.K. Prahalad on customer “co-creation.”

But this lengthy article goes beyond describing the changing landscape of marketing. The authors continue in great detail, to lay out their vision for an organization that is restructured to respond to and embrace these changes. To move from a traditional company to a customer cultivating company.

Altimeter Group advises clients to shift their thinking from transactions towards relationships. Similarly, this article discusses the following shifts:

• Away from Product/Brand Manager-Driven towards Customer Manager-Driven
• Away from pushing products towards building long-term customer relationships
• Away from product profitability towards customer profitability
• Away from brand equity toward customer equity
• Away from a marketing department towards a “customer department”
• And most interestingly: Away from a CMO towards a CCO, or Chief Customer Officer. The authors note that there are more 300 CCOs worldwide today.

Get your hands on a copy of this article and read all the details in its entirely. A great read and highly recommended.

Engagement and Influence Through Sharing

This isn’t exactly what our parents had in mind when they told us to share.

ShareThis are the makers of this ubiquitous button:

Last month, they released some interesting data about sharing, as a social engagement activity online. Here are some numbers:

• ShareThis saw a 200% increase in shares per page view across their 125,000 sites in 2009.
• Sharing is accounting for as much as one third of the traffic driven by traditional search.
• Sites in ShareThis’ network see 50% more engagement, or page views, from sharing over search.

Tim Schigel of ShareThis writes: “We believe your friends and family across all social networks should be your filter for the web, and influence isn’t just made by a few, it’s created by everyone who shares. What all this adds up to is a picture of sharing as a growing piece of the social Web.”

Read the entire blog post here: The Value of Sharing: Social Engagement.

While many of us are beginning to take sharing for granted, it’s a key online activity and behavior. Sharing is important to those who share (builds influence) and those who receive (benefits from social filter).

Altimeter Group’s Engagement Pyramid includes sharing as one of five key online behaviors. Later this month, we’ll be hosting a webinar focused on understanding “socialgraphics,” or how and where customers engage online, which includes a review of the Engagement Pyramid. For now, you can take a quick peak at the Pyramid here – see Slide 29. Details about the webinar will be announced soon on the Altimeter Group blog.

Is Apple the Most Social Brand?

This article in Ad Week names Apple as the top social brand. Read here:

The key to brands coming out on top on the social Web is to have great products people want to talk about. It should come as no surprise then that Apple dominates a new list of the world’s most social brands.

via Apple Dominates Social Brand Ranking.

These rankings were conducted by social media management company, Vitrue. The announcement hasn’t been made on their blog yet, but here’s the methodology from last year’s Social Media Index rankings, which sounds to be the basis for this year’s Social Brand ranking:

The Vitrue SMI calculates scores about the brand’s social conversations. We apply a series of algorithms to reflect the frequency of usage, the size of the social media environment, and the magnitude of the conversation. The result is a single numeric score for each brand: the Vitrue Social Media Index (SMI).

via The Virtue 100 – Top Social Brands of 2008

Product leadership and buzz are great, but it doesn’t make a brand social. In fact, Apple is arguably one of the most anti-social brands. I’ll give them credit for their annual MacWorld and a great in store experience, but Apple doesn’t undertake any social or community marketing efforts. While there are legions of adoring fans (me included) talking about Apple, Apple doesn’t really care to talk with us.

So, Apple isn’t a social brand – but not every brand needs to be social. Then again, not every brand continually delivers innovation and carves out whole new industries.

Update:

I wrote this post yesterday (Sunday), and Vitrue updated their blog with the official announcement today. You can read it here: The Vitrue 100 – Top Social Brands of 2009. Their methodology includes a daily analysis of online conversations taking place in these areas:

• Social Networking – general sharing
• Video Sharing – high engagement of viewing time and authenticity of dimension
• Status Updates – aka Micro-Blogs; key influencers who chatter and actively push content
• Photo Sharing – social meta data
• Blogs – general blogsphere, commentary mentions

1000 Tweeting Tax Pros at H&R Block

This tax season, H&R Block is making a big push for its “H&R Block at Home” software with a social marketing campaign.  Previously fearing that digital would cannibalize its retail business, management now recognizes that digital can’t be ignored and hopefully, will drive more business to their 4000 plus franchises.

Here’s an interesting peak at what they’ve got up their sleeves:

The core of the social-media plan is a 1,000-member tax-professional team, chosen from 100,000 H&R employees across the country, who have been “social-media-qualified.” The tax pro force’s main domain is the home website, where there are both community pages as well as direct “Ask a Tax Advisor” buttons staffed beginning Jan. 5. The tax team will answer questions directly, of course, but will also “listen” in to concerns or problems being discussed within communities and forums and respond accordingly.

via Digital: Tweeting Tax Pros Leads H&R Block Social-Media Push – Advertising Age – Digital.

Sounds like a really promising idea. This is a great way to engage prospective customers. They’ll feel good about getting free and quick advice from a tax professional – and for many, online interactions will lead to more in depth person consultations. H&R Block breeds goodwill and builds brand loyalty, while cross promoting their digital and retail services.

I’m curious to know what criteria H&R Block used to select the 1000 member team, and the training each member received. Sounds like a fun way to keep your own employees engaged as well.

Social (and Not-So-Social) Destinations

Last month, I heard Chris Chambers of Tourism Queensland speak about their Best Job in the World campaign (and posted about it here). Last week, I found a few more good and not-so-good examples of (tourist) destinations using social in their marketing campaigns. Thought it’d be worth sharing here.

Queensland may or may not have been the first, but it certainly was the most successful in terms of its worldwide media coverage. It looks like the contest has become a go to strategy for other destinations as well, in addition to the requisite Facebook/Twitter profiles.

Check out Dublin’s Flickr photo competition (below), which has over 1000 entries. A nice idea to start with, but there’s no platform for discussion. The winners are chosen by a panel of judges, not by regular fans. First lesson if you’re going to have an online contest – make it social, at least if you want to reach more people.

If you’re a budding filmmaker, you can enter to win the Bahamas 14 Islands Film Challenge. Unfortunately, their site and YouTube channel displays a low numbers of views, comments and no interaction. It’s too much of a niche target and the entries don’t have any mainstream appeal. There are be plenty of people outside this demographic that the Bahamas should want to reach. Second lesson – think about your audience, and the content/tools that would enable you best to find them.

Here’s my favorite example. This fall, Thailand launched it’s Ultimate Thailand Explorer contest. Winners to receive $10,000 cash and $5000 in prizes. Online voters select the 5 finalists and the winner in separate voting rounds, and are eligible for prizes as well. The finalist page includes a bio, YouTube video, links to social profiles (Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and WAYN), and a blog – see here for example. Talk about covering all your bases. Let the people vote (and win). Make it easy to share content. Empower contestants to be your destination ambassadors across multiple channels.

Now, my the question is: How can I stay up to date with all these destination campaigns so I can enter myself? :)

If you’ve got other good examples, please leave a comment and let me know.

Geolocation, Geolocation, Geolocation!

I’m loving the idea of geolocation, and can’t wait until it becomes more widely accepted. Geolocation, or location based services (LBS), is the “identification of the real-world geographic location of an Internet-connected computer, mobile device, website visitor or other” (Wikipedia).

It’s already available on our mobile apps, for example, Yelp or Google Maps. You log on, your device asks you if it can use your current location, and you’re off – to (in theory) discover new and cool things in the nearby world around you.

What’s cooler than such basic uses of geolocation, is geolocation for social networking. For instance, if you’re using a location-enabled device, tool, or service, you can opt in to notify your social network of your current location. Google Latitude offers continuous location sharing, which allows you to connect with friends who happen to be nearby. Foursquare uses a “check-in” model instead, which may be easier for new users to stomach. Twitter and WordPress are announcing geolocation tools as well. Here’s a neat article on ReadWriteWeb about how geolocation improves Twitter.  And check out Twitter 360, a new Twitter client that really takes it to the extreme by integrating augmented reality and geotagging. Turn on your iPhone camera and see arrows indicating who is Tweeting near you. It’s just a matter of time before Facebook rolls out a more prominent, though probably less invasive, role for location too.

Honestly, I can’t wait for geolocation to become more mainstream. It may be intimidating now and remain an opt-in service for the next few years. But I anticipate that geolocation will become opt-out within 5 years, meaning that most services will set geolocation on by default. It’s the next step towards making our social networks really social. Location gives us another layer of context – a very valuable one. Just think about Facebook status updates posted by local friends or Tweets from Twitterers in the area – much more relevant.

When this happens, you’ll be able to log on to Facebook and see where your friends are posting from and how they’re moving around. Right now, I’m in Southern California for a week visiting family. On my flight down, I was scratching my head trying to remember people in the area I’d want to connect with. That doesn’t even account for the people who happen to be in town on a visit, and obviously not think to let me know.

I’ve loved Facebook ever since I first joined, because it gave me a way to stay in touch with friends who live far away. I’ve been looking forward to the day when I can say, “Hey Jennifer, I’m in Seattle finally. Let’s meet up!.” But how much more compelling will Facebook be when I can see on my news feed that Jennifer posted an update from New York City, where I happen to be for a weekend conference?

It’s a great feature for friends and family, a little less so for our wider social networks. But on Facebook, geolocation integrates well – our closest friends and family are on it, we’ve created different profiles, and we’ve set privacy controls.  That’s why geolocation will be Facebook’s “killer app.”

Ditching Social Media

I may read about, blog about, research, and generally spend lots of time on what many call social media, but personally I try my hardest to avoid the term.

Why don’t I like it? Mainly because it’s been used to describe just about everything that’s happening on the web to the point that it’s almost useless. I understand that easy to use, widespread publishing tools like blogging platforms and Twitter have disrupted traditional media – and in regards to this upheaval, a term like social media makes a lot of sense.

But for companies that want to listen to and and start a dialogue with their customers, the term social media is less relevant.

For me, a more interesting way to reference what’s happening on the web in terms of customer-company interaction is to focus on the relationships and the community.

People now have infinite numbers of tools at their disposal to share, communicate, and discover. Companies do too. And both are taking advantage of the spirit of openness online to build relationships. People with their families, friends, and networks. Companies with their customers. People are nurturing personal and professional communities. Companies are nurturing communities around their products/services. Brilliant.

If I had a company, I’d ditch the social media strategy, and focus on how to build relationships with and community among my customers. For me, the terms are: customer strategy, customer engagement, and something like community management, community marketing, or community development. If you’ve got a suggestion, I’d love to hear it.