Bonjour!
For those of you interested in meeting me face to face, or getting some word of mouth right from the source, I’ll be speaking at the Marketing to Youth Conference, Aug 13 & 14th at the Meritus Mandarin
Singapore, and August 15 & 16th at the InterCon in Hong Kong.
Hope to see you there!
With all this marketing talk about CRM and ‘knowing your customer,’ one consumer has taken the idea to a new level.
In a very creative and very funny spoof on marketing, this consumer is auctioning off himself on Ebay. The marketing team with the highest bid will be given 30-day email access to the individual, all the personal information they could possibly need to market to him and be given daily feedback about their marketing.
Interested? Bid here.
Emirates Airlines was recently rated as the most popular airline for UK travellers. Did Emirates credit their billions of dollars sponsorship of Arsenal’s stadium as the deciding factor? Nope! Instead, it was word-of-mouth amongst their clients that got the nod.
From Neville Upton, CEO of the The Listening Group, who conducted the survey of passengers:
"For many people, advice from colleagues and friends on destinations and airlines had a big impact on their decisions.
Positive
word of mouth amongst consumers is an essential factor in driving
company growth and even a 1% reduction in negative word of mouth would
lead to millions of additional revenue, he said."
Interesting situation in the UK currently…as we all know, the 2012 Olympics are coming to the Great City of London. The official logo that was recently unveiled, however, was not so great.
But never fear! In this day and age of Web 2.0, it didn’t take long for Britons to take matters into their own hands, and submit their own logos for the Olympics. Then several major newspapers decided to print the user-generated logos, giving the Olympics more publicity than it bargained (or paid) for.
No one has said they’re going to officially change the logo, but now at least they have some options from the public…
Recently, several major corporations undertook a radical task – they started to listen to their customers.
For companies such as Ford, Dell and Microsoft, which are all publicly-listed companies, this idea (which is radical to them) isn’t so radical at all to their customers and stockholders. But for someone at a major corporation, who’s job might be in doubt because of a flaw pointed out by a customer, it was a big deal, this whole listening thing.
All of the corporations decided to use various online social sites as a medium. And then, just when things were starting to go right, everything went wrong.
According to the article ‘What Kills a Social Media Campaign,’ Ford, Wal-Mart, Microsoft, Sony and Dell all decided to have customer blogs and some sort of interaction on their sites; the problem, as it were, was they faked all the customers.
Now how silly is that? A campaign to listen to your customer’s wants and needs and you simply create a customer to say what you want to hear? The beauty of Web 2.0, however, is the conglomerated knowledge of the Internet community quickly pinpoints the offenders, (floggers: fake bloggers) as quickly as you can say ‘share price’ and with much embarrassement to the companies involved.
Credit to two other companies though, NetFlix and Lego. Both are using actual customers to develop newer and more clever systems that will only help their products and engaging their customers at the same time.
Now, isn’t that how it should be done?