Forrester Social Computing Summit in Cambridge - Part 1

Two weeks ago, Forrester Research held a one-day session in their Cambridge office entitled “Social Computing: Tapping Into the Power of Connected Customers.” I was lucky enough to spend the day with analysts Peter Kim and Jeremiah Owyang along with several other attendees across a broad range of industries, discussing examples of companies (both B2C and B2B) using the various aspects of social computing to better engage with their customers.

These experiences and interactions were all framed up with Forrester’s P-O-S-T framework, the cornerstone of Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s latest book Groundswell.

Below is an overview of P-O-S-T, plus the five different objectives that should be considered for social computing* success. I’ll be exploring these five objectives in more detail in a future post.

*Note: According to Owyang, Forrester refers to these tools and technologies as “social computing” rather than “social media”. Per Owyang, “media” implies specific types of media used as a tool to connect. “Computing” implies a mix of culture, business, and marketing, and the impact these tools have to change our respective corporate cultures and organizational structures.

P-O-S-T

Before embarking on a social computing journey, you need to stop for a moment and consider HOW you’ll get to your destination. The order of the steps you take is critical; while many companies become enamored of a specific tool (like blogs, wikis, podcasts, social networks, etc.), the “T” in tools comes last.

Consider a typical scenario:

An executive at your company (or even yourself, despite your best intentions) reads about a new social media toy, or has a friend send a link to a new web 2.0 website, and she immediately falls in love and demands that you implement something similar. Sound familiar? If not, I can assure you that in most cases you'll blaze bravely down the road to fast-track an implementation (of what, you're not quite sure, because you don't really have the time to stop and ponder).

You implement, turn the key, start the engine, and then....nothing. Two weeks later no one is quite sure how to use this new toy, and four weeks later you're all collectively shrugging your shoulders (or worse, pointing fingers and tossing blame like a hot potato), and the project is doomed. Worse, in classic one-bitten-twice-shy mode, it's 10x more difficult to launch the next social media idea, even though you know this is something that your company has got to move forward with.

To help avoid some of these pitfalls, Forrester prescribes the following approach:

P – People: Where do your customers spendtheir time online? Are they already on Facebook, or Twitter, or mySpace? Is there an existing online community where they’re already connected with other like-minded individuals? If so, perhaps
you can use this to your advantage. If not, perhaps you’re better off looking somewhere else.

Bottom line: Don’t go with Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams mantra…you may build it, but it doesn’t mean that they’ll show up!

O – Objectives: What are you looking to accomplish? Today you can create a blog in minutes. The technology part is easy. But why are you starting a blog in
the first place? If the driver is to use blogs as a mean to communicate new products and services that your company offers, great. If you’re starting a blog
because your competitors have one, you’re doomed. You need to have a clear answer behind this, because these initiatives are long-term branding initiatives.

Bottom line: Without true clarity around what they are and what they’re for, you won’t have a solid framework in place to guide through the tough times or give you the backing you need when your initiative comes under fire from disgruntled factions within your company that may not be as supportive.

S-Strategy: How do you expect your relationship with customers to change? This is perhaps the most important question you should ask yourself, because
it forces you to ask yourself internally what you’re really hoping to get out
of this exercise. Are you looking to improve your transparency, and to build more trust with your customers? Are you looking to get direct customer
feedback from some or all of your customers to drive your product development
activities? Are you looking to use these tools as ways to identify those vocal brand advocates that to date have remained hidden, but now that you’ve found them, you can energize them as a secondary sales force to support your brand?

Bottom line: You’ve got to be absolutely
clear in your own mind how you can see the dynamic between your company and your customers changed as a result of using these tools and technologies. Otherwise, you’re not truly ready to jump off and run the risk of hitting one or more bumps along the road (some of which could have been avoided with some careful pre-planning.

T-TechnologyWhat tools and technologies can you use to support these goals? It’s no accident that the technology aspect comes last. Again, implementing the technology is the easy part. It’s designing your organization and your approach to these new tools where the real work comes in.

Bottom line: Choose the technology solution AFTER you’ve gotten clarity internally on WHY you’re doing this, what you expect to get out of it, and how you expect your relationship with customers to change.

Forrester’s Five Key Social Computing Objectives:

• Listening
  
• Talking
  
• Energizing
  
• Supporting
  
• Embracing

More to come on these five objectives in a future post. In the meantime, feel free to check out Forrester’s Groundswell site for more info.

What P-O-S-T means for other businesses:
Can social computing initiatives be done without following this approach? Sure, and it happens a lot more than any of us would care to admit. And most often, the technology solution is picked long before any thought is given to objectives or strategy, or even if this will resonate with one’s customer base. (joking referred to as T-O-P-S instead of P-O-S-T).

But if you subscribe to Forrester's theory, you’ll save yourself considerable time, energy, and money by adopting POST, and most importantly this can help you build some early credibility through a few quick wins targeted on some achieving some concrete business goals. Even if you're a small business that's considering launching a blog, start by asking yourself "How do I want to change my relationship with my customers?" If you can answer this, you've already safely navigated through several potentially dangerous pitfalls.

The concept of social computing often leads to murky waters at many companies, and with the first sign of blood the sharks will swarm, devour the victim, and quickly disperse, moving on to business as usual.

Don’t let your social computing efforts become wasted chum. Instead, consider using this philosophy to clarify “why to do it” rather than “how to do it”. Hopefully you’ll avoid a lot of pitfalls along the way, and will build some early successes that can translate to bigger initiatives to help enhance your business.

Good luck!

Top 5 Takeaways From Bazaarvoice’s 2008 Social Commerce Summit

Two weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend Bazaarvoice’s first annual “Social Commerce Summit” in Austin, TX. Designed to be a small, intimate affair with some of Bazaarvoice’s key customers, partners, and employees, this was a great collection of people who have lived in the trenches and lived to tell the tale (or multiple tales).

The list of attendees and presenters included Petco, Dell, Golfsmith, Wal-Mart, BestBuy, and others, as well as some keynote speeches from Josh Bernoff (co-author of Groundswell), Andy Sernovitz (author of “Word of Mouth Marketing), and Kelly Mooney, author of The Open Brand).

At PC Connection, we’d just recently launched Bazaarvoice’s Ratings and Reviews service across our 4 corporate websites. I was excited to go and hear about how some of the companies listed above have used these tools and technologies to their advantage, and to learn from those around me in the hurried conversations between sessions and at the networking events what ways this could really help change the way we engage with our customers.

Below is a list of the top 5 takeaways that I wanted to share. This became a much longer blog post than I had originally intended, so here’s a quick list of the 5 key takeaways that I wanted to share (feel free to click each header to read more and see what some leading companies are doing in this space):

Lesson #1: Negative Reviews: Expect them AND embrace them.

Lesson #2: It’s all about the art of the “Thank You.”

Lesson 3: Testing – Most of us DON’T do it!

Lesson #4: Ratings and reviews can go far beyond your web channel.

Lesson #5: True power comes from infecting your entire organization

As always, feel free to comment and discuss. It’s a fascinating area of study, with some tremendous opportunity for those of you that have not yet added this feature to you site, and for those of you that have there’s more you can do to extend the lifetime value of this commentary and feedback, benefiting your customers AND your organization as a whole.

Enjoy!

Lesson #1: Negative reviews: Expect them AND embrace them.

So what happens when someone says something negative about your product? First of all, note the question is not “if” someone says something, but “when.” Negative reviews, like many things in life, do happen. And in reality, they’re a necessary part of any dialogue between a customer and a company, or for a customer doing the research before making a product buying decision.

Think if you ended up at a site with no negative reviews. Imagine an endless list of 4- and 5-star products. Would you find this supposed mecca believeable? Doubtful. You need the negative reviews to give your site credibility, and to help spark ideas in potential purchasers.

For example, I recently went shopping for a new digital camera. Not only was it helpful to search for top-rated cameras, but also to look at customers negative reviews to uncover potential pitfalls I may not normally have considered. One review I read said the camera was a 4-star, and what prevented it from being 5-star was the slow shutter speed with a flash; the owner had small children and was a bit frustrated that the camera didn’t perform as well as expected when trying to take pictures quickly of his kids, especially indoors and in low-light conditions.
This information was extremely valuable for me. I didn’t buy this particular product, but did buy a different model…from the same company that offered these reviews. The negative review drove me away from the product, not the retailer, and in reality, the fact that the retailer offered this negative criticism yielded more trust in this brand and they ended up getting the final sale from me.

Some companies have gotten very sophisticated with using negative reviews, in some cases setting policy to contact all customers that rank products with a 1- or a 2-star rating. This helps give them better insight into problems with the product that they can take back to the respective manufacturer, but also helps solidify the relationship between the reviewer and the retailer.

Bottom line: Negative reviews inspire trust, and should be expected, not feared.

Today’s consumers expect to be able to rate products, but not all of those reviewers expect to hear directly from the company. This is a great way to surprise and impress those customers that have invested several minutes of their valuable time leaving comments on your site, and if you’re really committed to doing something with this information, you’re demonstrating the value your company places on getting this unfiltered criticism from your customer base.

Lesson #2: It’s all about the art of the “Thank You.”

Andy Sernovitz’s Word of Mouth Marketing is an easy-to-read book (literally read in the airtime between Cincinnati and Austin) that harps on a lesson our parents (generally) taught us. Be polite, and always remember to say “Thank you.” It’s simple, it’s free, and it’s one of the most powerful things you can do for your customers, ESPECIALLY those that are not happy about your products or services (or both). And if they’re upset enough to spend two minutes on your site telling you what they don’t like, it’s very possible they could say the same thing on their own blog or in any number of other online outlets.

Regardless of what you do with this customer feedback, oftentimes a sincere, human acknowledgement of a problem can go a long way to defusing the potential PR bomb (and let’s face it…the major problems someone is experiencing is probably not really a secret internally, now is it?). And who knows? It could even turn a detractor into a supporter, depending on how you manage the interaction and take the criticism to heart.

Bottom line: The art of saying thank you I soften lost in the frenetic climate of today’s business, but this can make a huge difference..
It doesn’t sound like a truly ground-breaking tactic, but some leading companies have found great, systematic ways of doing this and are reaping the benefits of happier customers (because we all know that happier customers purchase more, and encourage their friends to do so as well, so they become a really powerful secondary sales force for us).

Important note: We’re not talking form letters, either, as sincerity has to be the underpinning. If you don’t really mean it, don’t say it, and certainly don’t set up an automated email auto-responder program to flood your customers with this baseless messaging, either.

Lesson 3: Testing – Most of us DON’T do it!
I’ve had the opportunity to work with several different companies in the online space, but no matter where I’ve been I’ve never felt like we’ve really got the whole testing thing down. No matter how much you want to A/B test and analyze and re-test, this area never seems to get the amount of attention you know that you should invest nor are you able to do as much as you’d really like. Well, I can breathe a bit easier, as apparently 75% of the Internet Retailer Top 100 also don’t test as much as they’d like, either.

So two reactions to that:

Reaction #1: Relief. I spend a lot of time looking at competitor sites and some great industry best-practice sites, and I’ve always gone in with the assumption that design choices and feature sets have been the result of careful testing, planning, and controlled execution. While this may be the case for some retailers, one of the sessions I participated in helped show (if for no other reason than the results of a show of hands) that that while that may be the case for some, it may not be the case for all of us.

Reaction #2: This means that any testing we are doing is a great investment of time and can almost be considered a competitive advantage (if we’re turning the assumption that everyone is testing on its head, and instead assume that NO ONE is testing).

Bottom line: Generally speaking, we’re never doing as much testing as we think we should, but neither is “the other guy”, so stop, take a deep breath, and know that you’re doing better than you think (just don’t use this as an excuse to stop moving forward).
While beta sites and usability studies and sophisticated multi-variant testing is a great utopian goal to shoot for, often a good sit down with your web analytics software for an afternoon can help you glean some significant insight into your actual user behavior. If you use this metric baseline and ask for some customer feedback on some proposed changes, you may be surprised at what you’ll find. And if you’re able to incorporate this kind of analysis pre- and post-campaign, you’ll be taking a big step in the right direction (and don’t have to feel so terrible about the lack of testing that you’re committing to on your websites)!

Lesson #4: Ratings and reviews can go far beyond your web channel.

Ratings and reviews the technology is relatively new. Peer recommendations have been around for centuries. What drives sites with this feature, just like the marketplaces of old, is that product sales are heavily influenced by “people like me”. And at the end of the day, this feature can go far beyond some stars on a website.

Petco has worked with Bazaarvoice in the past on a number of case studies highlighting their successes with integrating top recommended products into their email marketing campaigns (claiming to have 5 TIMES the click-thru rate than regular email messages, even those pitching the same products)! Best Buy have done some weekly circulars based on top customer rated products and actual customer review content. And some retailers are also experimenting with repurposing the actual review content itself in in-store signage, in essence tapping a vast network of customer content for free marketing and promotion of key products. It’s similar to in-store reviews and recommendations from staff I’ve seen in some good independent bookstores, but done on a massive, and highly systematic (read: repeatable) fashion).

Bottom line: You may be capturing ratings and reviews on your website, but don’t stop there when it comes to repurposing this marketing goldmine. Provided your terms and conditions are structured accordingly, you own this content. And unlike the finely crafted message your Marketing teams have agonized over creating, this raw feedback from your customers is a much stronger call to action for other customers than you’ll ever write yourself. Now that you’ve got it, think about where else you can use it (catalogs, circulars, flyers, email campaigns, in-store displays, box stuffers, etc.) The list is truly endless, and you haven’t spent a dime writing the content!

Lesson #5: True power comes from infecting your entire organization

This goes one step beyond lesson #4, and is truly the end nirvana of user generated content. It’s one thing to capture it, it’s another thing to repurpose it, but it opens up a whole new world when you let it infect your entire organization.
Here’s just a few thoughts on how this can improve areas beyond Marketing and Sales for your organization:

Product development: Give your dev teams direct customer feedback on features that don’t work or features they need to have reworked or redesign to work much better. Throw out the old surveys; this gives you a continuous feedback cycle that can significantly reduce planning cycles and get newer product versions out to the marketplace much quicker than ever before. Dell did this when they launched their IdeaStorm product (a site that enables customers to submit ideas for new Dell products and vote on the ideas of others, giving Dell a real-time engine to gather new feedback). One of the first ideas was rolling out a desktop that supported Linux, which was suggested, conceptualized, and made ready for development in mere weeks).

Product Marketing and Merchandising: Why pick Featured Products on your website anymore? Why not have those product choices dynamically generated based on the average rating and the number of reviews? Companies like Macys have done really well when it comes to dynamic merchandising, but this is after a product has been purchased and stocked. But really, ratings and reviews can serve as a great early warning system when it comes to product defects. Imagine a world where average ratings are used to drive purchasing decisions (here’ s a hypothetical purchasing policy in a post-ratings and reviews age: “We no longer buy large initial quantities of a product, but instead buy a pilot run, gauge the ratings feedback, and require an average 4.2 rating before re-ordering.” Think of the returns that you’ll save by pulling poorly performing products from your online shelves, as well as using data like this to drive the initial product purchasing before filling up your warehouse(s) with badly performing products?

Legal: Yes, it’s one that people do shy away from, but every now and then someone will make a claim (legitimately or otherwise) that your product caused serious harm, if not death. This obviously must immediately be escalated to your company’s legal team, but getting that feedback through this channel can give you an opportunity to hit claims like this head on and to defuse some potentially very public and damaging accusations BEFORE they become something uglier and nastier (and in the limelight).

Customer Service: In many ways, it’s a no-brainer. Your CS team is already getting customer feedback (positive and negative) via phone and email. Now they’re getting it directly from your site. In the phone/email channels, one-off customer situations come up, get actioned, and are put to bed, often with little fanfare. Ratings and reviews offers similar challenges in terms of how to manage complaints, but in some cases, where these complaints have warranted changes to a product’s design or updates to shipping policies, companies have the option to publicly comment on these reviews, helping put the company in a strong light by showing that they are open to comments from customers and committed to taking action to those ideas that are appropriate (and not afraid to comment using this channel). And given that these comments will live for the life of the product, it serves as a permanent advertisement to the fact that your company is listening, is responsive, and is committed to delivering the best customer service experience it can (one claim that many companies today can not in all honesty make)!

Bottom line: Adding ratings and reviews to your website is the first step on a journey of a thousand miles. The end state should be a completely changed company and culture, where this direct customer feedback becomes the lifeblood around which all company decisions are made. And along that long and winding road, there are multiple aspects of your company that will be touched (and need to embrace this change to make it a success.