Your Employees Are Rock Stars
I go to a lot of conferences. Usually they’re a combination of customer user group meetings and analyst days and we all hear more or less detail about product futures, new functions and features, and policy rollouts.
If you know how to look at these events, you can see repeated a scene of a customer meeting an employee face to face for the first time with the customer gushing like a kid meeting a rock star. Ok, that might over state the case by a tad but you’ve probably seen the same thing or been part of such an encounter.
Often the customer had a difficult issue to resolve and one employee, frequently from the service organization, stayed with the issue until it was fully resolved and the customer was profoundly grateful. The people involved all have the same shared experience even though the relationship that grew up from adversity was only long distance. The eventual meeting is therefore cathartic for numerous reasons.
But why should service and support people have all the fun? And why should this kind of relationship building only come from direct communication between a customer and an employee? Why should it happen only in dire circumstances? The short answer is that it doesn’t have to be that constrained. In fact, based on my understanding of the mechanics, if direct communication is the only channel you have for building those relationships, you’re probably missing out on many other opportunities.
Many of the employees I’ve seen in these moments humbly say that they were just doing their jobs and they are right. The special knowledge they have comes simply from repeated exposure to the problems and issues associated with a product, version, or process. They literally become the one eyed man in the land of the blind and they are rewarded for that at live user encounters.
So, how can we leverage all this potential good will in a business setting? After all we can’t expect to convene a customer meet-up more than once a year in most cases and it’s prohibitively expensive to send service people to customer sites except in certain cases such as when there’s a big device or appliance involved.
Simply put, each employee can share his or her knowledge through the myriad channels that have sprung up in social media, blogs, email, and whatever else you’ve got. The key to turning what your employees know into enhanced customer relationships involves organization and method, both of which are embodied in an emerging class of software that focuses on empowering employees to post what they know. The secret is in making their posts easily accessible which goes through the idea of search engine optimization (SEO) and therefore method.
That’s what employee advocacy, an emerging category, is all about. Advocacy tools can be an important part of an inbound marketing program because they enable your company to strut its stuff so to speak by showcasing the knowledge and problem solving abilities of its people.
When a customer, or even better a potential customer, uses a search engine to find a solution to a problem, your employee’s ideas bubble up to become not simply solutions but also a kind of thought leadership that customers latch onto and this often results in sales and sometimes rock star status.
To be effective, you can’t leave to chance all the details of who you aim your solutions at, i.e. the personas you want to reach and their status in evolving from disinterested party to someone with a legitimate need for your product — that’s also where method comes in. If you know that a customer persona has a particular business pain, you need to ensure that your thought leadership covers that domain. This is yet another place where method comes in.
But all that said, inbound marketing via employee advocacy can help turn individuals into rock stars and your company into the go-to source for trusted information on how to solve specific business problems, and that’s not a bad thing. So the next time you are staring at your measly marketing budget and wondering how you can leverage it, think a bit further about how you can leverage your employee’s knowledge too. They’re all rock stars in the making.
Nunna and Krigsman, Machiavelli and Holmes
Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Good friend, all around smart guy and kitchen magician, Michael Krigsman reviews Gartner analyst Tina Nunna’s new book, The Wolf in CIO’s Clothing: A Machiavellian Strategy for Successful IT Leadership, and wonders about the appropriateness of using Machiavelli as a model. After all he was so…Machiavellian, and his approach leaves moralists cold, but I would differ with them.
Machiavelli gets a bad rap in my book, largely due to some people misunderstanding his purpose for writing The Prince and other works like The Art of War. In War, he cut to the chase and said if you’re going to have a war, and you’re going to be good at it, you’ve got to kill people. It seems obvious and that’s the kind of frankness that can seem chilling. Perhaps we are instinctively repulsed at killing and an ambition to be good at it when we should be repulsed by war itself. Regardless, from this we may have gotten the sage phrase that if you want to make an omelet you have to break some eggs.
People think that in The Prince, Machiavelli was dispensing advice for how to act as a ruler and while to a degree he was, he was really boiling down some case study data into some applicable practices. He may have been the first true political scientist and in Machiavelli’s writings you get a strong sense of the scientific method at work. His observations form the write-up of natural experiments, not the controlled things we do in labs but the equivalent things that happen in life when, for instance, identical twins are separated at birth. If you study enough of these situations you can see patterns emerge that are noteworthy. In short, Machiavelli was telling us what he saw in everyday practice and in The Prince, and many of his writings, he was simply telling us where the eggs are stored in case we’re making breakfast.
Later generations see Machiavelli as all kinds of things — as a proponent of ends justifying the means, of opacity when transparency is needed, but I don’t. I see him more the way I see the brilliant author of The Common Law, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Holmes was many things, above all a highly original thinker, a Supreme Court justice, and a thrice wounded Union officer and Civil War Veteran. I see each man as a scientific observer of his time reporting on natural experiments, on what is rather than what some moralist sees who is intent on prescribing what should be.
In The Common Law, Holmes examined a hodgepodge of laws that seem to make little sense and are sometimes outright contradictory but he sees them as unified for one very important reason — practice. The common law is the way it is because that is the way we are: contradictory, in the moment, and even Machiavellian.
In Krigsman’s review of Nunno’s book, he laments the sometime lack of morals that accompany leadership and those times when we need to be manipulative to get what we want for the good of the enterprise, which could happen anywhere but his focus is the IT arena. To this I say, and?
Saying we are manipulative is stating the obvious and condemning it is wishful thinking, and it also misses the point. Blaming Machiavelli for being the news instead of being the messenger is the obvious mistake here.
One of the hallmarks of our species is our ability to manipulate our environment and the environment includes other humans. We’ve developed it into quite an art form or possibly even a science but certainly into a set of business practices lately with new disciplines springing up such as behavioral economics and behavioral finance all supercharged by social media. We study these things for the same reasons medical students study anatomy — not simply for their own sakes but to give us insights we need to diagnose and prescribe.
Holmes studied law, not in the abstract but as it is practiced in the real world and I think that’s all Machiavelli did, a few centuries earlier and at a time when human life was cheap and murder in the furtherance of a political cause could be easily justified.
The CIO who is Machiavellian is so to further the aims of his or her department and enterprise and while I now need to read Nunno’s book to be sure, I deeply suspect that her insights based on Machiavelli are rooted in identifying best practices in the real world rather than best intentions in the realm of the theoretical. For my money, business is amoral and Machiavellian in the best sense of the word, and it should be.
Enter Ahrendts
The Forbes website posted a very short story about Angela Ahrendts, exiting as the CEO of Burberry to head up Apple’s retail operations. If you thought Apple had broken a lot of ground in technology retailing already, hang on.
You might remember Ahrendts as the pretty, stylish, and all business-gravelly voiced guest on stage with Marc Benioff during recent Dreamforce extravaganzas. Her face was plastered on a wall of the Moscone Center too. Ahrendts took on Salesforce and its social approaches to all things related to customers and transformed Burberry stores around the world to the point that the iconic fashion brand also became the hip tech retailer inserting technology and information into the customer experience.
The result has been a shopping experience that puts the customer into a mindset that envisions the experience of ownership and that’s a long way from simply having a great shopping experience. Hey, if you’re shopping at Burberry’s you are going to spoil yourself so the shopping part of the experience hardly needs work.
So, Ahrendts will presumably bring her avant guard retailing savvy to Apple and perhaps help transform it further from purveyor of consumer technology to one that helps customers make a statement about themselves through their technology choices. Maybe she’ll even upgrade the geeky T-shirts the staff wear.
That’s a smart move for Apple. Given the recent activity in wearable technology such as the watch (for which Apple owns the trademark on iWatch) fashion might be the next tech battleground. The only question in my mind is what role Salesforce might play in this configuration.
A Social Branding Moment
A little while ago I wrote about New Coke and the time in the 1980’s when Coca-Cola tried to change its formula (without much prompting from customers). As you may recall, especially if you were alive and drinking the stuff at the time, the customers didn’t much like it.
They were miffed about the new taste but probably more so over the way the company more or less unilaterally made the change without a great deal of consultation. No doubt there were focus groups and surveys but the essential fact of the matter is that Joe customer felt left out and that wasn’t good.
That incident lives on not only for Coke but as a vivid object lesson for any company trying to deal with customers in an up front and transparent way — the only way to do it today. So imagine the surprise in some circles over the last couple of weeks when the Washington Redskins football club got into a tussle with its fans over the name.
Some customers, another name for fans, feel that the name is demeaning to Native Americans and it is not the only example of a team being named after some pejorative sounding moniker for the folks who greeted Columbus. So the Washington brouhaha is just the latest in a long line of old-think in which an out of touch owner or CEO attempts to stonewall a much-needed change to reflect the realities of the day.
Team owner Daniel Snyder said that there was exactly zero chance the team would ever change its name and not surprisingly, the clamor has not died down — the new York Times likes to run stories every few days on the subject — though other events transpiring in the nation’s capital have certainly taken over the headlines.
What’s a team or a fan to do? It is reasonable to assume that some fans are as adamant as the owner about not changing the team’s name. There is, as Snyder indicated, a great deal of tradition and history invested in the team name and that all militates against change. This in itself is a terrible bit of logic and flys in the face of more advanced thinking that would seek to cut loses rather than let them mount. But there are times when emotion overrules logic. What can the fans do?
Well, taking a page from the New Coke experience and a liberal dose of CRM and social thinking, the solution is fairly obvious. While Daniel Snyder may own the logo and pay the salaries, in a very real sense the fans own the brand. Without fans, a.k.a. customers, the franchise is not worth much so something more than a flat rejection is in order. But even beyond this, naming reflects popular use, not simply what the owner decides to call a team.
In my native New England we have a team called the Patriots and they play at Gillette Stadium but the local sportscasters, resentful of giving a free plug to the razor company whenever they mention the place, long ago resorted to calling it “the Razor” a nice moniker that evokes (at least) mock terror in anyone who is part of a visiting delegation to boot.
So, my recommendation to all Washington fans is to take a similar tactic. Develop a preferred nickname. I suggest “the Nickels” since the logo looks a lot like the head on an old five cent piece. The Nickels would take some getting used to but like the Razor, it has some built in advantages. When the team wins you can praise the alloy, and the nickel defense might get extra meaning. When the team loses, as it seems to do with verve these days, you can fatalistically claim that you got your nickel’s worth. Think of the possibilities.
Starting a social media campaign to bring the Nickels into popular use shouldn’t be difficult and it seems to be just the job that social was invented for. After a few days of “#Nickels is better than @Redskins” it would be embedded in the collective consciousness of the team and its fans. Better still, the logo (which I think is quite handsome and stoic) can go right on being used without a hiccup.
This isn’t as far fetched as it seems. In the 19th century it was customary to adorn our coinage such as the nickel and the penny with Native Americans. It was also customary to resort to classical allusions of liberty as a goddess or even the god Mercury for other coins. But over our history the country developed its own heroes, Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, and FDR, people who deserved a place of honor on our coinage. This takes nothing away from the Native American heads that were positioned on our coins as tribute to their pluck and determination at resisting American westward movement.
But times change, what was once tribute came to be seen as Chauvinism. We changed our coins and it’s time to change some team names. If the team owners can’t see this, there is no reason for the brand owners to wring their hands thinking they can’t do anything. Not today, not in the social era.
The Watch
Don’t look now but I think someone just invented the computerized watch. I know there have been attempts, most recently by Samsung but the critics have been a bit harsh as in this review from the New York Times. Also, Apple has been scooping up rights to iWatch but so far no product has emerged.
One of the tough parts of inventing a category like this — even for the inventor — is trying to figure out what goes into the product. If it’s a slavish imitation of what’s already in market as an analog product, why would you buy it? If you envision something more functional, then what are the functions? What makes it unique and not simply a miniaturized version of, say, a smartphone?
The first computer watches all seem to suffer from smartphone-itis, the need to reproduce every function of the small screen on the teeny-tiny screen. Seriously? Yup, you know they’re out there. But the path to the new, new thing is through a small identity crisis that asks what’s unique about me?
Well, as it turns out in pure Cartesian logic, I am what’s unique about me. I think, therefore I am has morphed into I respire therefore I am. That sort of reduces humanity to the simple ability to fog a mirror but there’s more to it than that.
Fitbit, if you don’t know, is a little device that straps onto your wrist and records the activities that are unique to your day. Based on a few parameters you input at Fitbit.com, the system tracks the steps you take (and other activities) and figures out how many calories you’ve burned and how many you are (gasp!) entitled to if you expect to fit into that holiday outfit. Even your blood pressure and glucose reading can be entered so that you have an up to the moment digest of the many important health parameters that are unique to you.
So it had to happen at some point. The sleek wristband that formerly simply lit up to tell you about some goal reached has morphed into a watch with a digital readout where the blinking lights used to be. Now Fitbit is a data collector and a watch that synchs with your iOS and Android devices and can feed any apps in those ecosystems with your unique data for further processing. Think about that.
Watches that enable two way communication or social media hookups or listening to songs or that let you watch the World Series on your wrist have missed the point. A compass? Spare me. All those functions have homes on the device and they are not needed on the wrist. They might run on the wrist the same way that spreadsheets also ran on the laptop but it took the graphics packages and slide show software to make the laptop an indispensible part of business life.
And so it is with the computing watch. Sure it tells time and so does your handheld or a Timex but just as the handheld became the social location (close to us but still somewhat apart) the wrist has now been claimed as true personal computing space. The watch sleeps with us, showers with us; it is designed to not come off except for charging about once a week. The Watch is part of us yet at the same time it incorporates our other devices and computers through ecosystem apps — a good balance that’s low on redundancy and high on added utility. Most importantly, it captures some of our most intimate data helping us manage our bodies.
That’s it. Future generations of watches might incorporate more personal functionality (blood chemistry through sweat analysis, perhaps?) but they won’t bother with email or they’ll end up looking like over engineered Swiss army knives. That knife has a lot of useful stuff, many even have a knife and fork but did you ever try to cut a steak with one?
