Community Guy – Jake McKee

The United Breaks Guitars Effect

Last week I wrote about the United Breaks Guitars story and the reaction that because it wasn’t directly responsible for a drop in United stock price, it was still significantly problematic.

So you can imagine my reaction when I saw the photo below last week while standing inline at the American Airlines check-in desk.

I asked the woman who owned this bag if the “I <3 baggage handlers” tag was about the United Breaks Guitars story, and she said that it was and that she is really scared now about traveling with United because of that video.

Like I said last week: literally everything helps and everything hurts a business. If this isn’t proof, I don’t know what is.

Chris Anderson is Free

Chris Anderson, author of Free gives a good interview to NPR.

Journalist Chris Anderson believes that businesses can profit by giving their material away on the Internet. His new book Free: The Future of a Radical Price explains how “free” can become a marketing technique, helping businesses gain credibility in an economy that increasingly values reputation.

Here’s a bonus update: Anderson at the Google.

Innovation is simplicity

I’ve made the case many times that “innovation” can come in multiple forms. In fact, it’s often the seemingly minor things that capture our attention more than massive overhauls. Sure, the launch of the iPhone was amazing, no question about it. But you know what else is amazing? The built-in support for Exchange email servers that’s coming in the new Mac OS, Snow Leopard. I love Apple’s Mail program, but without proper Exchange support, I’ve been unable to use it, forced to switch to the horrendous Microsoft Entourage.

Think about auto-billing, that oh so helpful ability to plug your credit card into a Web site and automatically have the site charge your card each month, rather than having to remember to write a check and mail it by a certain date each month. When you say the word “innovation”, auto-bill probably isn’t the first thing that pops to mind, yet it’s something that truly changes the world around us.

Here’s another innovative idea; highly innovative yet simple to implement:

Realizing that both existing and potential clients might appreciate a chat about a haircut before visiting their stylist, Plan B Salon in Cambridge, Massachusetts launched a new service offering 15-minute video consultations. Prior to their appointment, customers can get an idea of what their options are or how receptive the stylist is to their requests, without wasting time on a journey to the salon. It also lets clients to weigh various possibilities before going in for a cut.

The consultations are set up over Skype. Customers request a date and time using a form on Plan B’s website, which asks for their Skype call-back name/number. The salon offers appointments all day on Mondays—a smart way to fill up those quieter days—but will book consultations on other days of the week if time is available. The service is free, and clients are charged from USD 50 for a cut, style and finish.

I’d challenge you to look at your own business, listen to your customers and find three “innovative” ideas that solve simple issues. Just because the idea doesn’t get you on the cover of BusinessWeek doesn’t mean it’s not fantastic for your business bottom line.

Actually, maybe it is. Zappos just got bought by Amazon. What’s one of the biggest things Zappos has been known for? Solving the “immediacy” problem of online shopping by offering free overnight shipping and liberal return policies. Maybe small solutions can get you on the cover of BusinessWeek after all!

Punishing stupidity

I love it when stupidity is punished!

Lifestyle Lift, which provides quick facelift procedures, was found guilty of publishing positive reviews and comments to trick consumers into believing that satisfied customers were posting their own stories.

The settlement marks a first strike against the growing practice of ‘astroturfing’ in the US, where employees pose as independent consumers to post positive reviews and commentary to websites and internet message boards about their own company.

Awesome.

Attorney General Cuomo, who presided over the case, said: “This company’s attempt to generate business by duping consumers was cynical, manipulative, and illegal. My office has and will continue to be on the forefront in protecting consumers against emerging fraud and deception, including ‘astroturfing,’ on the internet.”

Astroturfers, beware. This is becoming serious enough to have real penalties in place.

And why, exactly, did Lifestyle Lift think that astroturfing was a good idea?

An investigation found that Lifestyle Lift’s president believed that negative internet postings had significantly hurt the company’s reputation and thought the success of the company hinged on controlling messages posted online.

Yeah, because when people think negatively of you, lying and deception is almost always the best solution to turn negative feelings into positive ones.

Genius.

What if you just hired better?

You don’t have to agree with everything Seth Matt says to make following his posts worthwhile. Here’s proof: Actually, HERE is proof… (sorry Matt for attributing your statement to Seth. Copied and pasted wrong then followed up a few days later. Never a good thing, apparently!)

So maybe instead of getting your company on twitter, paying marketers to mention you are on twitter, and paying people to blog about your company, forget all that and just make awesome stuff that gets people excited about your products, hire people that represent the company well, and when your stuff is so awesome that friends share it with other friends, you may not even need “social media marketing” after all.

So simple, so obvious, yet so genius.

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.

—

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.

—

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/