A little girl, Ellie, is watching her mom, Christine, prepare a ham for dinner one night.  Ellie noticed that her mom cut off each end of the ham before placing it in the pan.  When Ellie asked her mom why she cut off the ends, her mom paused for a second and replied, “That’s a great question, Ellie.  I hadn’t really thought about it.  I’ve always done it that way because that is how my mom did it.  I assumed it was to make the ham bake better, but why don’t we call Grandma to find out the reason?”

Christine called her mom and asked her the same question her daughter Ellie asked.  Christine was surprised that her mom gave her the same answer she gave Ellie:  “”That’s a great question.  I hadn’t really thought about it.  I’ve always done it that way because that is how my mom did it.  I assumed it was to make the ham bake better.”

So, to satisfy Ellie’s and her curiosity, Christine called her Grandmother and asked her about the ham.  She told her Grandma she assumed she cut off the ends because it’s the secret for a better baked ham.  Her grandma replied, “Oh honey, I wish I had some special secret.  The real reason is that the only pan I had was too small for a whole ham, so I cut off the ends to make the ham fit”.

The New Year is a great time to challenge assumptions and make sure you aren’t doing something just because it’s the way it has always been done.  Are there any situations where you are cutting off the ends of the ham and don’t know why?

In reflecting back on 2011 and developing plans for 2012, I keep thinking about what President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said,

…plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.

While he was talking about war, the sentiment can be applied to pretty much any situation including digital marketing.

The point President Eisenhower was making is that the unexpected will happen – you can’t change that. In fact, as paradoxical as it sounds, the one thing you can can count on is the unexpected occurring.  However, the process of planning is invaluable because, if done properly, it will better prepare you to be able to react to surprises.

You need a plan for 2012 – it’s essential. Based on what you know now, the situation as it exists today, you need to understand what you are going to do to achieve your goals. However, you also have to expect that things won’t go according to plan. Even if your assumptions are spot on, it’s likely that issues outside of your direct control, whether internal or external, will force you to adjust your plans.

Therefore, don’t shortchange your 2012 planning process.  Make sure you understand the ‘why’ and not just the ‘what’ of your plans.  Spend time to discuss what could derail your strategy and how you would react.  Develop contingency plans when necessary. Know your biggest risks even if you can’t do anything to mitigate them right now.  Consider the impact of technologies or platforms emerging or fading more quickly than expected.

All of this can’t stop the unexpected; however, it will make you better prepared to deal with it.

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Recently, Forrester Research released a report that discussed the tremendous ecommerce opportunities that tablets provide.  Forrester noted that tablets offer features and functionality that consumers are embracing and early findings are demonstrating that tablets won’t be relegated to a niche technology.  What I found most interesting and perhaps most telling about the opportunity is the following statement made by Sucharita Mulpuru, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research:

“We have always capped e-commerce at 10 to 15 percent of total retail sales, but this (tablets) potentially has the capability of really expanding e-commerce much beyond that.”

So, if you haven’t starting considering tablets in your plans, what does this mean for you?  First, don’t ignore tablets because only 10% of Americans currently own one (according to Pew Research and Forreter).  Forrester predicts that number to grow to 1/3 of all Adult Americans by 2015, and I believe that is a conservative estimate.   Given that tablets are being adopted at a rate greather than any technology ever and as prices decrease, features increase, and applications continue to amaze and entertain, more and more consumers will purchase one.

Second, you need to understand the role of tablets in the lives of consumers.  These devices are not simply a smaller laptop.  They provide a unique level of engagement, convienence and interactivity that traditional laptops or desktop machines done.  If you haven’t yet, spend a couple of weeks using an iPad or Android tablet and you’ll see.

Third, think specifically about the type of experience you need to provide for your consumers that use tablets.  Like with smartphones, it will likely be a combination of optimizing your website for tablet computers and developing apps that take unique advantage of the device.

Forrester believes most companies are slow to recognize the importance of tablets.  If you haven’t, it’s not too late.  Doing so now will enable you to get out in front and take advantage in a way that many of your competitors aren’t.

For marketers, Facebook provies a robust marketing platform and exciting opportunities.  It offers another way for brands to interact with consumers, foster loyalty, and learn more about the wants and needs of consumers.

However, before pubishing a Facebook Fan Page, there are a number of factors you need to take into consideration.  Thinking about these issues prior launching your presence on Facebook will help ensure success.

First of all, it’s not about how many Facebook fans you can accumulate – it’s about how many truly interested people you can get engaged with your brand.  You could attract millions of fans through a contest offering a new car, but when the contest is done, what have you really accomplished?  How many of those fans are going to interact with your brand one month after the contest is over?  If they aren’t interacting with your brand, they won’t be seeing your posts (read the post on EdgeRank)

1. Listen and Observe. Is your target audience using Facebook?  What are they doing on Facebook?  Are they talking about your brand?  What are your competitors doing?  See how top brands, even if they are not in your space, are effectively engaging consumers on Facebook.
2. Who’s Involved. Who will be involved in the planning and execution of your Facebook presence?  Who will help provide new and interesting content?  Who is responsible for distributing customer insights?  Who will handle customer problems?  Although you need to have one group ultimately driving the process, it needs to be a multi-department effort.
3. Resource Planning. Plan the type of content you would want to provide over the course of the month.  Think about much how much activity your Facebook page will get and what type of commitment you will need to address issues.  Don’t expect that one post a month is going to create a robust presence.  You need to be realistic about what resources are needed to provide value, interest, and service to your audience.
4. Social Media Policy. If you don’t have one, establish a social media policy for the company.   Do you want product managers talking about new products in advance of their release?  Do you want your staff directly responding to comments on your Facebook page or anywhere else?  If you do, do you make it clear they need to transparent in terms of their role at the company (vs. pretending to be Joe Consumer)?  If you need help getting started, SocialMediaGovernance.com has warehoused a number of social media policies from various companies and organizations.
5. Set Expectations. Set realistic expectations. Building a Facebook precense is not like laying sod – it’s more like planting seed.  It takes time to see real results.  You need to spend time to nuture and grow your fan base.
6. Disaster Planning. What are you going to do when you get negative comments?  How are you going to respond?  Getting aggressive or defensive will only create more issues.  See how other brands handle issues.  See how consumers respond after the brand gets involved – does it add fuel to the fire or calm the situation?  Talk through various possible scenarios that may arise and discuss how you would handle them.

There is no substitute for experience and you will continually be surprised with what happens on social network websites like Facebook.  However, the proper consideration prior to the launch will undoubtedly help avoid major problems and increase the chance for success.

By now, almost every marketer has read statistics similar to the following about the ubiquity of Facebook:

• Over 500 million users
• The average user has 130 friends on the site
• 50% of active users login every day
• The typical user sends 8 friend requests per month
• The average user spends 15 hours and 33 minutes on Facebook per month
• The typical user visits the site 40 times per month
• The average user spends 23 minutes during each visit
• More than 30 billion pieces of content are shared each day

As such, marketers are starting to awaken to the promise of Facebook – not only as a social media platform but also as a social marketing tool.  Companies increasingly are setting up Facebook Fan Pages and focusing on getting users to ‘like them’.  However, in order to leverage the power of Facebook as a marketing tool, you need to understand the process that determines whether posts from your Facebook Page will even reach your fans.

For most Facebook users, the news feed is the lifeline to their network – it contains all of the activities of their friends and pages they have liked.  A user has two choices for her news feed:  ‘Top News’ and ‘Most Recent’.  Most Recent is a chronological order of all activity and Top News (the default) shows the content Facebook believes would be most interesting to the user.

One of Facebook’s challenges is continuing to provide a useful and relevant experience for its users as the total number of users increases, each person’s individual network expands, and the number of activities grows.  For the average Facebook user, a news feed with all activities listed can become overwhelming and crowded with uninteresting content.

One way that Facebook is attempting to meet this challenge is by providing the Top News news feed.  The content displayed in Top News is determined by Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm.  While Facebook doesn’t provide specifics, it has shared the components of the formula:

Don’t worry, you don’t need to dust off your old high school or college math text books.  No complex computations are necessary.  A brief overview of each component is all you need to get started on the right path.

Affinity score attempts to show the strength of interaction between the user and another Facebook entity (user, brand, etc.).  If you click on posts from your Mom every day, comment on her wall, like her updates but never interact with the 1st grade teacher you friended, the affinity with your Mom will be much greater than with your 1st grade teacher.  Affinity is a one-way score:  I may have a different affinity score with you than you do with me.

Weight pertains to the type of activity and it is believed that certain activities are assigned more weights than others (e.g. a comment may be worth more than a like).  The more engaged someone has to be to interact, the higher the weight is likely to be.

Time decay depicts that new content is going to be given preferential treatment over older content.  Typically, as a post ages, it becomes less relevant and so it will lose EdgeRank.  As with most social media, people want new and fresh content.

From a marketing perspective, the key takeaway is a simple ‘post it and hope they will read it’ approach won’t work. You have be more planned than that.  As with any other marketing tool, it’s all about engagement.  It’s thinking about what type of content will most likely generate a positive reaction – which content will your audience find interesting.  Which content will generate the type of response that keeps you in someone’s Top News news feed?

Understanding how EdgeRank impacts your ability to stay connected with your fans is the first step to effectively using Facebook as a critical marketing tool for your organization.

Source of Facebook data referenced: facebook.com & pingdom.com

Today’s To Do List:

1. Design landing pages for email campaign
2. Implement paid search ads
3. Deploy transactional emails
4. Publish blog posts
5. Start drip campaigns
6. Optimize key pages
7. Plan sales promotions
8. Develop creative for display advertising
9. Post on Facebook fan page
10. Design merchandise up-sells

The to-do list of what you need to do to manage your online presence is virtually never-ending. You have so many tools in your toolbox, and you never feel like you have the adequate time and resources to be doing everything you really want to do. It is so easy to get buried in the day-to-day activities of managing your Internet operations.

However, as important as those tactics are to your success, you can’t forget to dedicate time to step back and take a 30,000 foot view of your business and consider your opportunities.

Real game changing ideas come by thinking big. That type of thinking can’t be crammed in between analyzing your conversion funnel and adding new products to your online store. You need to find the time to really allow your mind to clear itself of the day-to-day minutia so that you can think strategically.

This is not the once-a-year strategic planning that other groups in your organization may be able to do. Given the rapid pace of innovation in our space, you need to be doing this much more frequently – for example, monthly. You need to get out of your office, turn off your phone, leave your laptop in your bag and let your mind explore the possibilities.

What implications do Foursquare, Quora, QR codes, NFC, a double-dip recession, tablets, electronic wallets, cloud computing, smarthphones, federal spending cuts, Groupon, unrest in the Middle East, etc. have on your business? What’s the next big thing? What are your competitors doing? Where is the venture capital money going? What are the real visionaries talking about? Is there innovation in seemingly unrelated industries that you may be able to leverage? What do your customers really need, and is there a way to provide them with a better experience? What assumptions are you making that you need to challenge? What does all of this mean in terms of risks and opportunities?

Are you ready for your trip to 30,000 feet? Are you ready to see the forest through the trees?

‘Sorry’.  It’s such a simple word, but it can have such a tremendous  impact.  It can diffuse even the most tense of situations.  It can be a game changer.

By telling a customer that you are sorry when she has a negative experience with your product or service, you are showing her that you care, you sympathize with their situation, you aren’t blaming her, and you are willing to take responsibility.  Maybe most importantly, you can significantly change the tone of the conversation so that you can have a meaningful discussion in trying to find a resolution to her problem.  

However, ‘sorry’ is more than a word – it’s an attitude.  It’s a mindset.  It’s introspective.  It’s thinking first about what your company could have done to prevent the problem or what it can do now to resolve issue.

Elton John sang, ‘Sorry seems to be the hardest word.’ Is that the situation for your organization?

I recently saw The Social Network, a movie about the founding of Facebook, and there is a line that has really resonated. Toward the end of a meeting between Sean Parker, Napster co-founder, and Mark Zuckerberg, Parker says something to the effect of:

You know what’s cooler than a million dollars? A billion dollars.

His point was to think big.  Redefine what success is.

Photo By Suzan Marie

That’s one of the common traits of successful entrepreneurs – they think big. They think in terms of ‘game-changers’, revolutionary ideas. They think outside of the box.

Not everyone can come-up with the next idea for Facebook, YouTube, or iPhone or how to send a human into outer space (and get him back), but we all can force ourselves to take a step back and think about how we can innovate in our jobs. Challenge ourselves to look at our opportunities and challenges in new ways. Question assumptions. Ensure that we aren’t just doing something because that is the way it has always been done. Learn from industries and businesses that don’t seem to have a direct relationship to ours. Always strive to improve.

Very few are going to have the success of a Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, or even Henry Ford, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from those types of successes to help us generate evolutionary, if not revolutionary, ideas.

We tend to love the status quo. The status quo can be as comforting and reassuring as a child’s blanket or favorite stuffed animal. Alternatively, change can be intimidating, nerve-racking, and uncertain. The danger, however, is that love for the status quo can lull us into a false sense of security and blind us to both risks and opportunities.

The pace of technology, business, and even life means that everything is changing at a more rapid pace. Entire business segments are both created and made obsolete more quickly than any other time in history. Competitors come from seemingly nowhere and opportunities can be taken advantage of in a way not experienced before.

Image: Tambako the Jaguar

As such, we can’t be hypnotized by the status quo. It’s so easy to continue to do the same thing and too often organizations create or permit cultures where people become more concerned with protecting their turf than growing the business.

You don’t have to look any farther than Blockbuster to find a company where the status quo was doing quite well but they neglected to recognize the winds of change. As a result (and the excellent execution of Netflix), the company is in serious trouble.

The best way to avoid the danger of the status quo is to create a culture were the norms are challenged, creative thinking is encouraged and risks and opportunities are continually being evaluated. Departments needs to coordinate and collaborate, and leaders need to be required to look not just at what’s right in front of them but also what could be coming further down the road.

You can’t be certain what change is coming, but you can be assured that some type of change will arrive.

How would you respond if you called a company’s customer service department and the agent told you to send an email to another customer service group and someone should be able to help you out?  Pretty frustrated, right?  Well, you see that type of response frequently by companies on their social networking sites.

It happens because sites like Facebook and Twitter are often under the domain of an organization’s marketing or public relations department and there isn’t sufficient coordination with the customer support group.  The problem is that your customers have and will increasingly turn to websites like Twitter or Facebook to air grievances and seek resolution.

Your customers don’t care which department is responsible for “social media oversight” or your organizational structure.  When they tweet you or post a comment on your Facebook page, they expect the same type of results (if not better and faster) as if they picked-up the phone and dialed your phone center (or emailed or contacted you via online chat).

Given the public nature of social websites, prompt and effective customer service on Facebook, Twitter and the like is extremely important.  Not only should you want to take care of your customer, but because your response is seen by prospects, other customers, vendors, and partners, it also impacts your brand.

Here are a few tips to help provide excellent customer support on social websites like Twitter and Facebook:

1. Understand that even if you don’t have a Twitter profile or Facebook fan page for your company, your customers will still voice complaints about your organization on those sites and you need to be prepared to react.
2. Develop a process to handle customer service issues that are communicated via sites like Facebook and Twitter.  Include all relevant groups within your organization and make sure that you treat the posted complaint like an email, phone call, or chat – in others words, be proactive in contacting the person who originated the issue and be ready to help them.
3. Have social monitoring in place so that you can respond quickly to issues.  If you are still developing your process, you can use social monitoring to get a sense of how many issues you might encounter on a daily or weekly basis.
4. Don’t forget that social media time (especially Twitter time) elapses at a much quicker pace.  Just like 1 human year equals 7 dog years, 1 real world hour equals something more like 7 twitter hours.  Responding in 48 hours isn’t seen as being prompt in the social media realm.
5. Be strategic about when you communicate publicly and privately.  Not all communication with the customer needs to happen via public comments.  The initial contact should be public so that others are seeing you are being responsive but often the follow-up (getting specifics, etc.) is better done via email, phone calls, or direct messaging.
6. Even though we live in a digital world, sometimes the best way to diffuse a situation is by talking the disgruntled customer over the phone.  The extra effort can go a long way and is usually appreciated by the customer.
7. Make sure there is some process to provide a summary report of complaints and issues back through the organization. The best way to handle customer problems is to prevent them in the first place and complaints and reported issues should be valuable feedback to sales, marketing, engineering, research and development and product development.
8. Be transparent!  Don’t, and I mean never, try to diffuse a situation or defend your company through a response where you pretend or give the allusion that you are just another customer or unbiased community member.
9. Don’t think that only ‘big’ companies need to worry about customer support on the social media sites.  People use the web do research on all types of companies (big and small, national and local).
10. Obviously, don’t forget that anything you post publicly can be viewed by everyone.  Think about how your response will be perceived by others – don’t be dismissive or defensive.

Is there anything that I missed?  What suggestions do you have for companies to be successful in addressing customer service issues via websites Twitter and Facebook?