Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Image taken from: http://www.knowyourcell.com/features/568563/when_it_comes_to_checkins_ive_checked_out.html

It looks like there’s a new player in the game in the world of mobile location-based services, Uberlife. ‘Great, so what?’ is the first thing that might pop into your mind. These types of services have now been around for years and amidst the jungle of existing applications such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places, or SCVNGR, why should this one suddenly be worth talking about?

The truth is, the ever-evolving fleet of location-based services have been largely constrained by the simple fact that most only let you share where you currently are, which is of limited value to users. Think about it, once you’ve checked in to a place, there is often no longer any opportunity for others to come and meet you, all that’s left to do is for them to ‘like’ it or add a comment. For being a form of social media, the often obnoxious element of ‘hey, look where I am, and you’re not’ has a decidedly anti-social touch to it.

This is exactly where the London-based startup Uberlife comes into play, by offering a refreshing twist. Whilst their iPhone and Web app is built on a similar real-life, location-based framework as existing services, it’s more than just the basic check-in. The key differentiating factor is that you’re now broadcasting where you intend to be in the future, creating new events on the go and inviting your friends to ‘hang out’ in advance. These ‘hangouts’, which can be a quick beer after work, a spontaneous cinema trip, a last-minute coffee run or simply chilling in the park, can be followed on the network by your friends. They are able to check-in, add comments, and share images of the meet-up to create a nice little memorabilia of the event.

One might argue that there are of course existing mechanisms already in place that facilitate getting together, such as over Twitter and Facebook, but more often than not these go under in the fast paced way of life or are quite simply far too formal. Uberlife recognizes that meeting up with friends these days involves a great degree of pre-organization and frustrating messaging back and forth until a plan eventually comes together. In comparison, the app presents us with a spontaneous, simple and mobile means to bring people together that taps into and integrates seamlessly in today’s ‘on-the-go’ lifestyle.

Critically, this manages to address a fundamental need. After all, what use is a check-in if it can’t be spent and shared with friends? As opposed to sharing where you’ve checked in to, you’re now sharing plans about where you and your friends can check-in together. It aims to bridge the gap between the often remote nature of supposedly ‘social’ media platforms and actual real life socializing.

This clearly is far more relevant and interesting to not only users but also businesses and brands who may be willing to experiment with location-based campaigns and programs focusing on check-in rewards. From a business perspective, wouldn’t it make far more sense to send out offers to those intending to be at a certain place at a certain time, rather than once they’ve announced that they’re there? If businesses are aware of what you are intending to do and where you’ll be, relevant offers and promotions can be generated and implemented far more strategically.

Keeping in mind what Starbucks cleverly did with Foursquare and its Mayor specials, the future check-in could offer exciting opportunities for experimenting with novel ways of communicating with consumers. After all, surely businesses would be much more interested in the prospect of a group of people intending to show up, rather than simply knocking $1 off a Frappuccino to the single person that ends up being the Foursquare Mayor.

The real question remaining of course is whether or not these apps are actually able to generate business value, where one of the biggest hurdles to establishing themselves as valuable tools for businesses in the past, has been encouraging people to actually opt-in to geolocation. What is of foremost importance to avoid being another unclicked icon on the iPhone, is how engaging a service is and what value it provides users with. So far, in lacking a fundamental social element and raising the question of ‘so how do these services actually help you?’, the basic ‘check-in’ has failed deliver what can be seen as genuine ‘value’ or reward for users sharing their locations.

Another app that is looking to inject a more social element into the field is last years’ start-up We&Co, that has aimed to leverage the power of a simple ‘thank-you’. The iPhone app is designed to allow users to thank service professionals, like their favourite barista, hair stylist or bartender at places they visit. The focus is therefore no longer on solely the place through the check-in, but on the people, adding a distinctive human element to the service. Employees can respond to the thank you and encourage you to drop by again, where businesses can choose to offer discounts or freebies as incentives to regular and the most gracious thank-you’ers, creating further ways of connecting meaningfully with their customers.

When a quantifiable metric can be attached to positive encounters between a brand and its customers, this acts as direct reinforcement for employees to provide an even better service and for consumers to continue to proactively share their appreciation. In today’s cynical consumer environment, a positive reinforcement cycle that is built around enjoyable exchanges beyond simply places or prices, allows deeper connections and enduring relationships to be formed between businesses and their customers.

The overarching theme that is therefore becoming clear for the successful evolution of location-based services is the crucial need for them to incorporate a genuinely social component into the mix. It is only once you start looking beyond the limitations of the standard ‘check-in’ that these services could really play an intriguing and influential role in creating compelling and relevant consumer engagements through and with the smart phone. More crucially, it opens up the unique opportunity for technology to enable us to actually be truly social again.

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Recently Netflix in the US changed how their business model works, and in the aftermath they have experienced a steady stream of abuse in the media (here, here, here, and you get the idea), and significant losses in share price. The noise is mainly the sucking sound made by tribes of angry subscribers leaving after price hikes and planned changes to the service (including splitting the service into two separate companies).

What’s interesting about all the hullabaloo, is that some very real principles about what customer service has become are starting to be codified, using the company’s missteps as object lessons of what not to do.

1. Get inside your customer’s heads when it comes to value. You have to do your homework to understand how the price-value equation works for your customers.  Just because there is a way for your planned changes to drop the price for one element of your service, doesn’t mean that your customers view your service that way. It’s like the opposite of how bundling works - you can charge more for bundled services as long as the customer sees a discount hiding in there.  By unbundling their products, NF gave their customers the reverse stress of seeing a full-price paid for each service, rather than a deal.

2. Realize that your best customers don’t care about your business model. It may be obvious to you why you’re making changes to your service or structure, but keep in mind that users see you (hopefully) as a solution to a problem that they have, not an enterprise with a long-range plan.  If you simply have to make a change, then be prepared to show the users how it benefits them directly, not just why it’s good for you.

3. Don’t underestimate the need for continuity amongst your users. Understand that if you’ve done your job right, then your customers feel that THEY own your brand, not the other way around.  There are so many great examples of how angry people can get in this regard: Gap’s logo gaffe, recent Facebook changes, and the list goes on and on.  It’s not that you can’t ever change things successfully, but you have to be sensitive to how it impacts your user community.

4. If (or more likely, _when_) you have to apologize, make sure that you sound humble. It can be grating to read an apology that reads defensive and seems to imply that the reader doesn’t ‘get it’.  Try to sound more like you’ve learned something, rather than you’ve been misunderstood.

Have you learned any other painful nuggets of wisdom regarding customer service for your product or service?

Photo: David Armano, on Flickr

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Leveraging the Foursquare API, We First, a company that calls itself “Social Branding Consulting Firm” released an app for the iPhone that allows people to thank service staff found at the places where, previously, you would have just checked in. The idea is very simple and I find it very interesting. Sure, you can just actually say “Thank you!” but for service professionals it’s probably nice to have something “on record.” In fact, it could help employers incentivize their staff. A virtual “Employee of the month” program, if you will.

It begs the question: can it ultimately change how customer service improves? I think it potentially could. Making Thank Yous social may lead to new behaviors, similar to existing recommendation apps, but adding a more human element to the whole thing. After all, when we recommend a venue, do we just recommend, say the food, or also the service? I suppose many times in fact we recommend the service and friendliness and atmosphere created by employees more than the food.

After years of digital technologies just enabling people to be more and more in control of their purchase decisions (before and after), essentially arming them for the conflict and battle with a service or sales person, this kind of idea could create a platform for human interactions that is about valuing experiences, and creating incentives for those whose job it is to create those experiences for customers.

Check it out here.

On another note:Kudos to a firm that calls itself “consulting firm” to actually create a real experience for the social space, as opposed to just analyzing and talking about the social space.

Via Jake Setlak

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I recently had the pleasure of being a panelist at Kellstadt Marketing Group’s 2011 symposium: Click: Emerging Media and the Empowered Consumer. My panel covered Business Intelligence, and how managers can get CRM working in their enterprise. One of the questions the audience put forward was about how to start, and what to expect as you start to bring actionable data in.

In our discussion we compared the stages of the enterprise to the evolution of a new country or civilization - where some brave souls have to enter the wild frontier, and establish outposts to grow from. As cities develop and expand, the industry and economy evolve into new and more powerful forms, eventually becoming information-based.

The first stage is The Frontier - a scary wilderness where the enterprise functions without any structured data at all.  Some businesses have huge areas of activity that don’t collect or manage any data at all. Up until recently, many consumer packaged goods manufacturers were in this phase.  Just like the frontiers of old, this creates vast unknown areas, brimming with opportunity and ready for exploration. And it only takes one brave soul (or a group of them) to get to the next step.

Colonization - the stage where companies start to use data to make suggestions to users, or personalize experiences.  Companies in this stage are testing the waters, so just like the first colonies, there are only a few outposts - not a real support network. They are looking to provide a solid case before investing any real infrastructure money. That said, if you’re in this situation, then make sure that your operation is properly set up to prove ROI, because your ’supply ships’ will stop coming if you can’t prove that using data is a winning proposition. Many services companies get caught in this phase, with their management waiting to see proof that it makes sense to invest in anything more than a basic customer database. Once a case is made and accepted by management, then expansion into the next phase is possible.

Industrial Revolution - the stage where things start getting automated at scale. More and more of the company becomes dedicated to getting customer personal and behavioral data pulled into the stream, and infrastructure gets built on a massive scale to expand the reach of data both in the company and out to users. Some banks are good examples of this kind of enterprise - with each product group in the company depending on their customer data to excel, but tending to work in silos, without a centralized view of the customer. Just like in the actual industrial revolution, there are stories of both winners and losers. Some companies will not adjust fast enough. Some areas of the company will hang onto ‘how things were done in the past’.  Winners get to move to the next step, which is also a revolution.

Information Revolution - this is where data becomes so central to how the business operates, that the company can say that information drives the business forward.  In this economy, if you’re out of the data stream, you’re out of the picture. Due to technology advances in handling large structured and unstructured data sets, massive amounts of internal and external data get joined together to predict behavior, needs and barriers. Models are built to ensure correct customer handling, even with imperfect data, and the enterprise continues to search for what new metadata could be added to make better decisions and offers. Things change quickly in this economy (five years ago who would have predicted that social media would need to be tracked in consumer databases?), and companies like Amazon and Netflix are good examples of leaders that know that continual reinvention and innovation is crucial in order to stay ahead.

With this path to sophistication in mind, we can recommend some steps to get you from where you are to the next level in these Evolutionary Stages:

1. Know where you are. You have to be honest about ‘Where you stand Evolutionarily’.  And there are likely to be multiple, conflicting opinions in the company about how data is used. Talk to stakeholders, and avoid proclamations too early in the process. It will take time and persistence to develop a clear picture that everyone can accept.

2. Start at the top. Does your CEO know where the company stands? Does he or she agree that data can help the company evolve?  Educate through examples - showing how adding data into company operations can avoid costly mistakes, angry customers, and ineffective campaigns.

3. Make the case to evolve. Investment in infrastructure and process change must be earned. If tests and pilots are not planned to give evidence of ROI, then all the logic in the world won’t convince management to take action on data, so keep the end in mind when agreeing to how experiments will be structured, run, and measured.

4. Think big, but start small. Develop a vision of how your company could be operating if you had perfect knowledge of your consumer, and use this to guide an long-range plan. But since you know you can’t get there overnight, keep the steps in the plan small and manageable. Many successful companies value failures for what you can learn, but it’s also true that a CEO’s favorite ‘learning’ project is small, fails quickly, and delivers information that lasts.

So, are you an Information Revolution company? How are you planning to get there (or stay there)?

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Cool stuff being discussed at SXSW in Austin this weekend.  Check out this short video from Mashable showing panelists discussing how people are using social media, specifically Twitter, to interact with TV content.

Panelists included Chloe Sladden of Twitter and Gavin Purcell from Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.  Some television shows have already explicitly included social media mechanics, but many content providers seem to be unprepared for how to structure or approach conversations around their programs.  It seems like their biggest concern is control of the conversation.

Still, none of this should be a surprise.  If you watch Twitter streams during broadcasts, don’t you always see conversations about the content? I know I have to actually ‘unplug’ to avoid spoilers if I’m taping (what a quaint word) a show nowadays.

Via Mashable

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Pepsi is teaming up with Instagram to crowdsource new limited-edition can designs for their Brisk brand. By tagging pictures with #briskpic in their Instagram app, users will enter their image into the contest and be featured on BriskPic.com.

The can design winner will be announced at South by Southwest 2011 in Austin, Texas in March.  Frank Gruber over at Tech Cocktail interviewed PepsiCo’s Jamal Henderson in NYC at the Brisk25 Summit (I know, how did we miss that?) for the inside scoop:

I think it’s a good execution - giving users a chance to be a part of the brand is nice, but attaching it to a popular platform that people are already playing on and expressing themselves is what raises the level of participation for me.

Via Tech Cocktail Via Marina Molenda

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Collaboration is human. We like to take part in shared experiences and then talk about them. Debate/dissect them. Remix them. Come to shared agreement about them. These are core elements of how we share experiences.

And yet - many digital experiences seem to be more like echos - call and response, but mostly asynchronous, especially if you’re looking for a real person, instead of a script. And when you think about where you spend your ‘connected’ time is it mostly in isolation? It seems we spend most of our time online doing something alone, or reaching out for information, but not getting live feedback from a person, or groups of people.

Image by ChrisL_AK on Flickr

Why is this?  Is it purely that no groups of people are ever in the same place on the internet at the same time?  Is it the fact that most computers only ’seat’ one?  Why are their so few places for live digital interaction outside of instant messaging/chat and texting (which, while relevant for younger audiences, are not typically a mass behavior). Is it a new preference we’re only understanding now because of the new tolls we use to communicate?  Are people actually afraid to have a ‘live’ experience online?

As Web 2.0 took hold, the expectation grew that Brands should offer the chance for feedback from users, but very little of it is in real-time.  Or really even close to real-time.  And having groups able to give feedback and discuss or even manipulate something together is almost unheard of, outside of alternate reality worlds like SecondLife (which are, shall we say, not as relevant as one would like to a mass audience).

Think about the tools you use for work - like Word, Powerpoint and Excel.  Until the latest Office release with Sharepoint built in, there were few ways to work collaboratively on these documents without emailing them around.   Google and Xoho Docs gave us this power from the start, but are not as widely used. Some others are listed here.  But these are really all about productivity.  Where are real collaboration tools for consumers?

We have seen several recent campaigns where timeliness of response is a central part of their appeal, like the Old Spice Guy, or Wheat Thins’ Crunch Is Calling commercials with their van deliveries or Edge Shave Zone’s Anti-Irritation campaign.  The fact that the response comes quickly (ok - sort of quickly) is what makes them cool.  But still these examples are not about collaborating, as much as responding.  Think about what a difference in quality there is between those campaigns and the experience you have watching the SuperBowl and talking with your friends while you see the ads.

So what to do?  Well, the answer lies in another trend.  In some recent research about DVR viewing, it was uncovered that DVR viewership was down in some younger segments, and it was determined that it was because of that group needing to experience the event/show live, in order to participate live with their friends and avoid any spoilers.  So both the time-aspect and popularity of the content changed their behavior from what it might otherwise be - delayed viewing - to live viewing so they could use social networks and text messaging as an immediate channel for collaboration and connection.  This finding creates an insight that drives how we design content and experiences for great community collaboration: the centrality of having a well-known Time, Place, and Reward.

Time: clear deadlines/happy hours/times to tune in

Place: obvious platforms where all/most of the people who share the passion will be

Reward/Goal: a shared community value (social currency) attached to the participation

By creating engaging Acts that include a powerful mix of Time, Place and Reward drivers we can encourage engaging experiences in a variety of ways:

1. Facebook - Since almost everyone is already on there anyway - why not there?  The sheer number of things you can do on Facebook continues to grow (including chat), and it may well be the SecondLife of the moment.  Their recent roll out of their partnership with LiveStream allows for multiples of interactions at the same time, although true dialog has not yet really taken hold there.  Why not add a platform that enables real-time community discussion for a Brand?  Or crowd-creation of content that connects the people together while they are creating it?
2. Online worlds - We shouldn’t count them out just yet.  Don’t forget that Farmville still lets you go ‘live’ a friend’s farm, or down to the local i-pub.  The key here is to match the Brand’s purpose to the community’s task when they enter the alternate world, which can get pretty murky outside of gaming worlds, which we’ll get to in a minute.
3. Tablets/kiosks/media tables - One possible vision for Microsoft Surface could have been to allow for more than one ’seat’ at the computer.  IPads and other tablets are still mostly used as one-person devices, but their very portability does encourage some level of ’show and tell’.  As retail stores find new ways to allow for more engagement, they will be looking for ways to encourage shoppers to share and build experiences in-store that deliver value, and although a majority will be available on their mobile phones, there are still opportunities to allow for shared experiences that can impact sales.
4. Gaming platforms - Wii, Xbox and now Kinect are great examples of being able to place ourselves in a world with others, easily and with a maximum of impact.  Again, all that is needed is a clear purpose for participation that aligns with the Reward/Goal the gamers have.
5. Hosted ‘projects’ - Prezi, the zooming presentation software, is an interesting example of a digital experience that not only allows collaboration, but gives it a personality with little avatars zooming around the page for each collaborator.  Yeah - it’s kind of second-lifey, but the cool thing there is that it’s really _about_ the collaboration on something - a presentation in their case.  This idea about interaction should be examined further.
6. Interactive toys - When we think of how digitally wired many toys are these days, we should remember that Mom may be there with her kid at the same time, and finding something for them to do together could be an emotionally-charged moment.
7. The family car - same premise as #6, but this time with a few possible other players.  It’s great that the car of the future can read you your tweets, but why can’t it do something more for the whole family than just one person?
8. Your site - With Facebook reportedly preparing a commenting function to be rolled out across 3rd party websites, could this (or other products like Convore) bring more dialog and collaboration to your site?  If not, you can always examine where most of the conversation will be happening, and plan how to engage there.

How would your Brand participate in this kind of collaboration? And what could you do if everyone could be in the experience at the same time?

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Can you imagine that title to be true for your business?  Well, get ready.

With the launch of Places Deals today at their mobile summit, Facebook is jumping into the waters of ecommerce deeper than ever - and it’s fresh on the heels of Facebook Vendor and many other examples (check out here an excellent post from TheNextWeb for several more) of smart marketers leveraging Facebook as the place to be for shopper marketing.

Deals is not the most original - having basically the same functionality as Foursquare already offered - but the scale of opportunity is immense.

Facebook has been said to be becoming “the Internet” for many people - where they meet, where they share, where they get their news, where they email, and where they play.  Why wouldn’t we offer a marketplace on this digital version of the old town square?  Why wouldn’t you want to sell there?

Via: Facebook Blog and Mobile Announcement Gathering

Addendum - their announcement of the availability of the Facebook Write API may not get as much news as Deals, but it may have even more importance for marketers in the long term.  More on that later.

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Check out the great piece over on the Strategic Marketing blog on the Berry network about Decoding the Consumer.  There, Alan See outlines how marketers need to reflect the consumer’s dizzy journey from awareness to purchase and beyond.

It’s a great post - with a version of what I have been repeating for a few months now: a sort of mantra that helps my clients consider how we’re integrating the experience across some specific areas that customers are really into right now.  It’s a mantra because it always contains about the same elements, but naturally gets reconfigured and recreated as needed based upon the Brand purpose I’m working against.  Alan talks about the ‘primary combination key’ for decoding customers as having Search, Social, and Mobile components.  These are all areas that do require serious consideration, given the world we live in, and are also powerful trends that continue to shape it.

I would only add, however, that Site and Retail/Place might belong on our decoder ring - expanding it to be Site, Search, Social, Mobile, and Retail/Place.

Site and Search need to work together to provide quality content to land on for the user who’s looking for you - and that’s true whether you have a Brand.com or not. For example, if the Brand has a great partnership then the search needs to support people who are looking for that partnership information.  And some Brands use their Facebok page as their landing place.  The point is that there has to be a place where the Brand expresses the purpose that gives it meaning and a reason for being.

Retail/Place is all about making sure that there is a continuous consideration of the customer journey all the way to the location where they buy or experience the brand first-hand - which often times can be supplied by mobile, but there can be a role for in-store as well, so I like to consider it separately.

Do you have a mantra?  What do you use to decode the world?

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According to a recent Fink & Fuchs study, more than half of all German organizations use social media, although there are deficiencies seen in their use and execution.

It also reports that about half have used social only for a year or less, which means there are a LOT of folks out there who are probably learning as they go.  Everytime I read a stat that references fear of ‘loss of control’ I immediately translate it in my head into lack of confidence.  Simply because the self-generated nature of the Social Web we live with now ensures that control as it was once known has been lost forever.  So a loss of control really means that ‘we have no confidence that we will be able to act when/if someone complains or attacks us’. And you can see this lack of confidence as well in how lowly they rate their competence in social media.

While confidence is a journey to develop, a lack of competence in social can be addressed by putting solid planning, governance and guidelines in place.  And written guidelines are essential.  It’s not just about documentation - it’s about putting down in black and white:

• What you believe
• What your purpose is for social
• What you expect, and
• How you’ll behave

In working with our clients to set up strategies, objectives and operations for social media, we find that the time spent gaining this strategic alignment on the front end of our planning process makes implementation much easier.  And the team becomes more confident and ready to enter the space with purpose.

Can anyone share a story from one of these recent German forays into social?  How did or can you inspire  confidence in the organization?

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