citizen Evangelist

In Pyromarketing Greg Stielstra discusses the power metaphors have provided him in the process of trying to understand marketing and what actually takes place in the market. While reading this section, I couldn’t help but think about the number of metaphors I’ve heard used over the years.

The ones that I particularly had trouble relating to this time around were the one’s I’ve heard used for sales people for years. “Hunters & Farmers” In the rare case you haven’t heard this used before, a hunter is the type of sales person who goes out and hunts big game customers. The farmer on the other hand, deals with customers by getting them to graze on new products and services.

A hunter’s job is to kill. A sales person’s job is to close deals. This metaphor gets really close to communicating that a sales person’s job is to kill the customer. I’ve seen plenty of sales incentive plans that were creating an environment of hate…

A farmer’s job is to get the animals fat so they can be milked, sheared, or slaughtered. Again, this does not lend itself to ‘relationship’ oriented images.

What’s particularly interesting to me is the power of images and the words which invoke that imagery. In “What The Bleep Do We Know” we’re exposed to the power certain words have at a metaphysical level. When our sales cultures are oriented to thinking like and acting like hunters and farmers, we’re not creating an environment where customers endear themselves to the organization. We need to look at our customers as citizens within a capitalist community. It is our responsibility to do what it takes for them to elect to do business with us again. Thinking about and treating our customers like animals is just stupid.

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A good citizen is well read. Here’s what I’m consuming today:

Assumptions have a sell by date - Creating Passionate Users
We can’t expect to innovate new products, services, techniques, etc. without challenging our assumptions. Have some of your assumptions “gone off”? How frequently are you checking? In other words, do you have a plan in place for regularly sniffing the milk? I swear that half my battles at Sun were about questioning assumptions… many of which had been around long enough to be science fair projects.

[Citizen Evangelist: What I think is even more challenging are the hidden assumptions that permiate throughout the team. Ever been in one of those situations where it sounded like everyone was talking about the same thing but it was pretty obvious that no one was on the same page??]

Going mobile against T-Mobile - Church of the Customer
A year ago, “Dell Hell” was the rant of an angry Dell customer that eventually spread across the Web. We found out later that “Dell Hell” was a leading indicator of bigger problems at the computer manufacturer, which eventually dedicated $100 million to rebuilding its customer service operation.

[Citizen Evangelist: Its amazing what lenghts folks will go to in order to make you hear something when it is important to them. Silly T-Mobile. If their actions were not perceived as overtly abusive, they wouldn’t receive this type of abuse from their current and former customers.]

Good enough - Seth GodinSo, just about everything that can be improved, is being improved. If you define “improved” to mean more features, more buttons, more choices, more power, more cost.[Citizen Evangelist:Seth, I love your writing, but you gotta give me some context here. There are lots of moving parts here. Let’s take music for a moment. Its features are words, sounds, & rhythm. There are 26 letters in the alphabet. 8 notes in an octive, and really only a few variations in rhythm. Since music has been around throughout civilization, mathematically, we should have created all the music that have ever can be written has been written, right? After all, there are only so many different combinations of those elements. Features and functionality can be good enough as long as the exeperience that one has or associates with those tangibles are new. Even beer has only 4 primary ingredients: water, hops, barley (and specialty grains), and yeast.. but each ingrediant has its own variations. At the end of the day, its the experiences we associate with the beer that makes it special. Especially with the mainstream varieties offered in the US.]

Guy Kawasaki and Unstructured Data- The Post Money ValueI got asked the other day why our firm invested in Nstein. In reading Guy’s post, there was an excellent example of the great unwashed, unstructured data problem out there.What the general feeling about (for example) Dell is a fairly simple exercise. Look for burning laptops, screaming people on tech support hold, and employees crying about the evaporation of their stock. Dell sucks or other such comments get picked up and added to the “Houston, we’ve got a problem” pile when all the Dell corporate types dig through the data about what the world is saying with respect to Dell.

[Citizen Evangelist: I love how we all try to solve problems from the context that is most familiar. NStein defines the problem as a “Search” issue and that through technology we can improve our service to customers (and of course, profitability) by scouring the web with another search engine in order to find and understand unstructured data. Wouldn’t it just make more sense to treat customers better, provide them with an easy channel to provide feedback, and actually act upon that feedback? You don’t have to “search” for data if they are bringing it to you.]

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A four-letter word typically refers to the obscene and the taboo. In our personal lives, if we were to treat love as a four-letter word, we would be viewed as an oddity. But, have you noticed how our business attitudes are so different?

Let’s look at just two examples:

• “I love you!” — Human Resources taboo (relationships at work, sexual harrassment, stalking)
• “I love this team!” — management taboo (overly emotional employees, touchy-feely)

I just finished reading two books from Steve Farber: Radical Leap & Radical Edge (both were published on April Fool’s day??) and was re-inspired with the power of love in business and the work place. I knew that Southwest Airlines was a big proponent of “LUV” and had remembered reading that Love is the Killer App. But, for what ever reason, it didn’t touch me as deeply.

The Golden Rule is the foundational belief that you should act or do as you want others to act or do. Why is it so hard for us to love our customers? Why is it so hard for us to pursue relationships with our customers in the same way we pursue intimate relationships in our personal lives?

Imagine the power that would unleashed from your customer base if you were passionately pursuing a relationship with them.

The Customer Evangelists provided a Mark Cuban quote in their book that is, for now at least, my favorite quote.

“A good business is like a good lover. First you ask your partner what you want. Then you give it to them. Then you ask them if they liked it. If they did, you give it to them again.”

I’ve probably misquoted in some way… as I’m trying to do this from memory, but it should get the point across. It is so rare in today’s world that we enter into our business relationships with the same honesty, vulnerability, and affection that is required for a passionate long term relationship in our personal lives. If we if we can’t take the steps necessary to start that process in business, how can we ever expect to experience the full potential that our customers bring to the table?

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On my way in to the office this morning, Sirius Channel 22: First Wave was playing an old song from Love and Rockets “No new tale to tell” and it got me to thinking about my past, present and future. There really is no new tale to tell. We’ve seen it all…. and done it all…. nothing really is new.

“Our little lives get complicated
It’s a simple thing
Simple as a flower
And that’s a complicated thing”

Or is it? Everything, and I do mean everything, is nuanced and complicated and much deeper than we typically give credit. Take this for example: Techfoolery references a Washington Post article about musicians playing virtual concerts. Musicians playing music. That’s not new. Playing a virtual concert for virtual fans? That’s a little different.

Or, what about the latest patent application from Amazon? That certainly raises the stakes of personal data a few levels. Won’t be too long before we need to go to the three clearinghouses to checkup on the safety of our personal data. We’ll be able to look so many more places

“My world is your world
People like to hear their names
I’m no exception
Please call my name
Call my name”

Sure… its mostly the same old things… no new story, but one powerful & fundamental truth. It all comes down to the people. It can get complicated at times, and the answers aren’t always fun.

At the end of the day, we are all people with our dreams, families, obligations, and day to day needs. We want to feel important. We want to be inspired. We want to belong. We are, after all, social creatures of habit.

“When you’re down
It’s a long way up
When you’re up
It’s a long way down”

Isn’t it great when we find a vendor that understands our humanity? Doesn’t it feel wonderful when we feel someone truly cares?

Why is it that so many companies spend so much time and energy figuring out how to squeeze costs out of their processes instead of letting humanity back in?

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In Crossing the Chasm , Geoffrey Moore teaches us that a marketplace is made up of a group of consumers with similar needs who are self-referencing.

While most marketing practitioners have not been able to put Moore’s ’self-referencing’ framework into practice, the Internet has gone a long way in helping. Technology has allowed us to reduce the costs associated with measuring a person’s personal network and deriving the level of influence that individuals posess. These technological improvements have only made it easier for everyone to increase the reach and the velocity in which a person can reach into their network and request or share information about a product. Google, in particular, has done more to help users of similar interests and needs reference each other than any other tool available.

This access to information has driven the need for another mechanism which was not as critical previously: filtration systems. Ironically, the combination of referencing, reputation and filtration, a new information access paradigm was born. Users could proactively seek out Buzz products, determine the ratings based upon the crowd, and in some cases, their personal network, and receive recommendations through interactions with certain sites such as Amazon .

These tools have since enabled a plethora of individuals to transcend their previous activities and organize into smartMobs, get paid for their opinions, and garner bragging rights as amateurs. I’m particularly interested in the experiment taking place at BazaarVoice. Despite the presence of these examples within the consumer product sector, isn’t it strange that no one has any form of practical implementation of these tools and techniques with the context of the software industry?

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