Community Guy – Jake McKee

Word of Mouth and Small Business

Having successfully made it to Seattle, I’ve been caught up in the haze of work, two year old, and unpacking. What better time to point out a guest post I wrote a while back over at the GasPedal blog. Since it’s summer, it’s time to talk smoothies.

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The medical community might tell you that blended fruit and ice don’t actually contain any addictive qualities, but I’m not convinced. I’m physically unable to pass a new smoothie shop without stopping to sample the wares. I can’t see “smoothie” on a menu without feeling a longing.

Last week I downloaded the Yelp.com iPhone application and tested it by… you guessed it… looking for local smoothie shops. To my extreme pleasure, I discovered Icey (http://www.yelp.com/biz/icey-garland), a new shop that had just opened down the street. Within hours, I was inside ordering my first smoothie. (It was far and away the best I’d ever had)

As I walked out of the store, tasty smoothie in hand, I found myself wanting to do whatever I could to ensure their ongoing existence. Horror stories abound about the failure rate of small businesses, and this simply can’t happen to Icey. Where would I get my fix if they close the doors??

If they ask (I’ve already volunteered), here are 6 points I’d share with them about how they can build Word of Mouth for their incredible business.

Tell a story

Icey isn’t just a “smoothie shop”. They’ve created a menu that includes Bubble Teas, Sweet Ices, and a range of non-traditional items. Why this menu? What makes it unique? Give me something I can learn, then in turn share with others to show how smart I am. For instance: “Sure Icey doesn’t have the boost powders like Jamba Juice, but that’s because they offer such fresh ingredients, they don’t need to”. (I’m making that up, but you get the point.

Help me decide

When I see a new menu item that I don’t understand, I’m more inclined to revert to my old standby than I am to try something new. With pictures, descriptions, samples, and encouragement, help me branch out. When I have a teacher, the shop is my classroom. And a classroom inherently encourages frequency.

Drive repeat visits through awards

A friend of mine has been on a quest to achieve the coveted “Gold Plate” status at a local pub, the Flying Saucer (http://www.beerknurd.com/). You see, the pub has hundreds of beers available, and when you’ve tried all of them, you are immortalized by having your name put on a gold plate, hung on the wall. Not only has this program given my buddy a reason to come back regularly, it’s also given him an incredible knowledge of beer. The more Icey introduces their customers to the full menu, the more likely they are to come back. And the more knowledge these customers have, the more likely they are to bring a friend with them that they can show off their in-depth knowledge to.

Do something to stand out

When the Icey staff hands over your hand crafted drink, it comes in a plastic cup with a sealed sheet of plastic on top. So sealed, in fact, you can turn the cup upside down without the slightest risk of spilling. The way you actually consume this drink is to punch a hole in the top with an oversized straw. If the drink really is “unspillable”, why not hand over the drink upside down?

Brand everything

While I was walking around the shopping center, tasty drink in hand, I noticed that the cups didn’t have any sort of logo on them. How were people to know that this delicious looking concoction was created by Icey and not Starbucks?

Have a web site

This may be a bit obvious, but build a basic Web presence with your location info, a bit of your story, and an overview of what you serve. This doesn’t need to a complex, data heavy site, but it should look great. The primary goal is creating a destination that can be emailed, blogged, and generally shared. (You’ll notice I had to use the Yelp.com link to get you to them in the beginning of this post) The incredible cupcake bakery, Sprinkles (http://www.sprinklescupcakes.com/) launched with an incredibly lightweight site, which even helped them create an ambience of exclusivity.

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UPDATE: One more point I’ll make that wasn’t part of the of the original post…

Listen to experienced professionals

Seriously, this seems basic but when you’re getting freebie consulting from high paid, highly experienced professionals you might want to considering following their advice. I’ve been talking to a number of small business owners locally since the original post went up about their marketing efforts. The one piece of advice I’ve consistently give each and every one of these small business owners is simple: Buy Word of Mouth Marketing , read it, and then we’ll sit down and talk about how to implement the principles of the book.

You know how many have both bought and read the book? None.

As a small business owner, I know how difficult it can be. I understand how many hours go into running the business. But if you’re not always, and I mean ALWAYS thinking about how to drive your business to the next level, you’re failing. There’s are plenty of reasons a vast majority of small businesses fail, and lack of forward planning is big one.

Why do startups fail?

My friend, Jeremy Leonard made a great comment about why startups typically fail. I thought I’d share.

There are three reasons partnerships fail: 1) they under perform and everyone gets upset 2) they don’t do anything and everyone gets bored 3) they over perform and everyone gets greedy.

Other than that, they typically work very well.

Are dead communities the sign of a dying industry?

With each new hype, new projects form often without appropriate staffing and resources, only to die down or off a short time later. Today, for instance, the Web is littered with corporate community projects that have little or no traffic or interest. Concern mounts that this dead community litter is the sign of something scary for the health of the social engagement space.

I’m not worried.

As with any hype cycle, there are two parallel paths taking place:

• The Hype Path: Combining the “It’s new, therefore it’s amazing!” news cycle with a very vocal and enabled celebrity crowd creates a standard bell curve of hype.
• The Implementation Reality: On a more random, yet mostly trending upward curve, people are learning growing, doing, and gaining. More people try, some fail, but the trend overall is more not less social stuff.

Think about how many social networking sites have come and gone, yet Facebook is still a massive audience. And this isn’t a new trend: I remember dead BBS, dead Geocities pages, and dead email lists. But online discussion, personal Web pages, and email all carry on more robust than ever. Perhaps robust because of these early experiments that failed.

While many are talking about the hype of the shiny new thing, there’s a group of people working largely behind the scenes to create, learn, improve and create again. In the corporate environment, dead communities come in no small part from the lack of investment in anything past the launch. We’ve seen examples of simple, ugly sites generating large audiences and revenue (hello, Craigslist!) while impressive tech fails to bring in much attention at all (new Friendster, I’m looking at you!).

If community is about building relationships, we can learn a lot about community building by considering how we find, build, and support our personal relationships.

• We date many more people than we marry. (i.e. There’s bound to be plenty of failures in our quest to create something grand)
• If we blow a month’s salary on the first date, there’s not chance we’ll be able to afford the second date (i.e. If you’re budget, time, and energy are solely focused on the launch, what happens after you launch when the real work begins?)
• The backbone of a quality relationship is intimacy, and intimacy takes time and is difficult to get right (i.e. Expecting overwhelming success withing days or weeks or even years after launch is ridiculous)
• Outsourcing intimacy is call prostitution. (i.e. Saying to your agency “we give you a check, you give us an effective community is an unhealthy approach)

Honestly, I’m not really worried about the stage of the game we’re at right now. We’ve gotten through the “so that’s what the kids are doing” reaction, and now we’re onto the “how can we use this in our business” reaction. Dead communities are a sign of experimentation and experimentation leads to learning. Sure, some execs might be turned off by social projects that don’t work and pull the budgets for future development. But we’ve also passed the tipping point where that type of reaction means much for the long term. Businesses are all having to deal with customer expectations built daily based on what other businesses, inside and outside our own industries are doing. When my cable company is responding to my rants on Twitter, I start asking why my favorite shoe company (Nike) isn’t doing the same.

We’re in a fantastic place and we’re moving into a fantastic path towards the future. Failure is all part of the process as long as we’re learning from our mistakes and paying attention to the context those mistakes are taking place in.

UPDATE: Sam weighs in on this topic!

The power of a great story

Shortly before Christmas last year, I needed a new watch. It was time to step up to a “big boy watch”, forsaking the $100 jobs I’d been used to. Since this was likely to be a large purchase, I started searching the Web. I found a number of fantastic watches, each of them with a great story.The WWII Soviet watch on eBay, for example, wasn’t functional, but holy cow did it have a great story! But yeah, actually being able to report time seemed like a major criteria, so I headed to the jewelry store.

When I started shopping, I didn’t have much interest in brands, and certainly didn’t know the difference between Breitling, Omega, Tag Heuer, or Rolex. Regardless of quality or even style, I couldn’t really get excited about spending money on “just a watch”. So I told the salesman that I wanted a watch with a story. He showed me the Omega Speedmaster and told me that it was the first and only watch worn on the moon. Sold!

Well, not quite. I left the store without the Speedmaster, but lusting after it nonetheless. I went home and checked online to see if this story was correct; according to the Omega Web site, it sure was. But their own excitement about this story was, as you can see, less than compelling.

But after a few days, I realized I’d been talking all about this watch to friends and family. I was telling the story of this watch over and over again.. and I didn’t even own it. The depth of the story was selling me.

Christmas morning, I was overjoyed to find the Speedmaster under the tree. I couldn’t wait to learn more about the story of this watch timepiece. But in the box was literally nothing related to the story. Not one mention of its history and barely anything about its functions. (Although the manual was translated into 753 languages… gee thanks, that’s helpful)

But this watch’s story was so easy to share, that I found myself sharing it. Bragging about my new present, sure. But it was also about space, watches, the design style of the 1960s.

Stories are not just about the person tell it though, they’re also about what happens when someone hears it. Like my father-in-law who sent me the photo below from the Houston Space Center museum on his recent vacation trip. The story I told him about the watch, my passion at the time, provided context for him to both understand my passion and be on the lookout for it in the future.

There are two key lessons to learn from this experience:

1. Providing a story about your product makes it easier for people to talk about your product. If this was just a nice watch, how would I show it off without looking like a jackass? When I can talk about the story, it’s much easier.

2. Stories explain passion. It’s easy to understand why I’m excited about a watch, and it’s easy to create a reason for people to be on the lookout for the Omega brand if those people understand why I’m so excited.

It’s incredibly disappointing that Omega is overlooking such a great opportunity to let their customers tell great stories about this product, or I assume the rest of their product line.

Maybe that’s a good thing though… I don’t have to share this story with anyone!

7 New Community Jobs

A lot of great new Community Jobs this week.

• *HOT NEW* Social Network Coordinator/Facilitator, Boca Raton, FL
• *NEW* Community Manager Team Leader, Gibraltar
• *NEW* Community Manager, Gibraltar
• *NEW* Community Manager, Anywhere
• *NEW* Social Media and Content Strategy Guru, Seattle or Telecommute
• *NEW* Front End Developer, San Francisco, CA
• *NEW* Director, User Operations, San Francisco, CA

To see all job openings: http://www.communityguy.com/jobs/

1 New & 3 HOT Community Jobs

Please feel free to post any Community based Job Openings you may have or someone you know.  http://www.communityguy.com/jobs/

• *NEW* Facilitator (Wikipedia Strategic Plan), San Francisco, CA
• *HOT* Community Manager – seeking AGENCY background, Watertown, MA
• *HOT* Community Manager, Truckee, CA
• *HOT* Community Manager for Social Networking Site, El Segundo, CA
• Still open -  Global Digital Communications Manager, Dearborn, MI

To see all job openings: http://www.communityguy.com/jobs/

Apple customer service continues to improve

After another weird iPhone sync, my rented movies disappeared (along with all my other media). Since rented iTunes movies only live in one spot, they were gone. I emailed customer service for the second time in so many weeks to ask them to allow me to re-download them.

In the past, Apple iTunes customer service has been …. not great. Form letters, a near total lack of personality or humanism, and answers that protect the company at all costs. So you can imagine when, for a second time, Apple support gave me the ability to re-download my rented movies at no charge, and in about 12 hour response time (which started at midnight).

Not only that, the support team sent the email below to make sure I was all good. Wow.

Hi Jacob,

This is Destyni, with a courtesy follow-up. I haven’t heard from you and wanted to make sure that your request was handled to your satisfaction. You’ve truly been a remarkable asset to the iTunes Store Family and as such I don’t want to leave you without any type of resolution, so if you do not respond, I will be closing this request. I hope that you continue to enjoy the iTunes Store and would like to thank you for being such a wonderful member of our family. If you find yourself with any other questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to send me an email. Have a great day!

Sincerely,

Destyni
iTunes Store Customer Support

(Disclosure: Apple is a client of my company, Ant’s Eye View)

The Ultimate Question: The Interview

Fred explains The Ultimate Question:

Success by 1000 Paper Cuts

As many of you know, I do quite a bit of public speaking. Most of my engagements focus on social engagement and customer experience, specifically helping business people figure out how to better connect with their customers, fans, and clients.

There are a few questions I can always count on getting during or after the session:

“But what if nobody in the organization is empowered to make the changes you mention? Who’s job is this change you refer to?”

Out of all the frequently asked questions in my sessions, this is that one that gets me the most amped up, ready to pounce. My reaction is normally summed up by a quote overheard in the hallways of SXSW 2009 a few weeks ago:

“If you know something’s wrong…fucking fix it!”

We’ve come to see that fear dictates many of our external facing business decisions, giving rise to massive Terms of Service agreements, NDAs, massive Legal team power, and other protectionist tactics. But it continues to surprise me how afraid we are of our bosses, colleagues, and management teams.

Whose job is it to fix things we recognize as problematic? Ours! It is every employee’s obligation to stand up for their customers, to be on the look out for ways to improve the company.

When I started at LEGO, I was a Senior Web Producer who saw instantly that the Adult Enthusiast community was being completely overlooked. I took on a few extra hours a week to help them. Those few hours turn into an official part of my job, and then my entire job. I didn’t ask for permission, I just started fixing it.

Surprisingly, especially for me, nobody told me to mind my own business or focus on my “real job”. They started seeing results I was producing and asked me to take on more and more and more of those duties.

The trick to making this process work is to use a tactic I call Success by 1000 Paper Cuts. The idea is simple: start with the biggest element of activity that you can do without having to get full blown approvals, budget sign offs, or legal approvals. A single paper cut barely gets notice, but enough of them and you can cut off a limb.

Start small, create success, share results.

The repeat over and over again until you have a collection of successes that represent a landmark. Bundle that landmark up and show it off. Use the landmark to get permission to bigger and radical and perhaps more expensive projects, but only by the new increment.

Start just a bit bigger, create success, share results.

So what are the small things you’re going to do today to impact change and improve your customer experience?

Reason #23,4593 people don’t trust companies

Most people don’t trust most companies. Let’s be honest about that. We’ve been trained for decades to distrust companies because they fail to act like groups of humans rather than lawsuit fearing entities.

Case in point:

Ty, the toy company responsible for the popular Beanie Babies dolls, is now marketing “Sweet Sasha” and “Marvelous Malia” dolls.

The first lady’s office said Friday Ty was out of line. “We feel it is inappropriate to use young private citizens for marketing purposes,” said a spokeswoman for Michelle Obama in a statement.

And how does Ty respond?

A Ty representative told CNN the company generally avoids naming dolls for “any particular living individual,” because doing so might interfere with how kids use their imaginations to play with them. But they wouldn’t reveal the source of their inspiration for the new figures, telling CNN that information relating to the development of the company’s merchandise — including how it comes up with products, product names, and trademarks – is proprietary.

Are you kidding me? Either own it or don’t do it. Anyone with at least one eye and a marginally functional brain can see right through this silly protectionism language. Just take a look and the pictures and tell me these dolls don’t have anything to do with the Obama girls.

And now, as a parent of a two year old who would probably dig these dolls, not only am I not buying, I’m so insulted by their response I’m on the look out for Ty toys to avoid. Genius program there, Ty.