SUBSCRIBERS RULE!

The Why and How of SUBSCRIBERS, FANS & FOLLOWERS

ExactTarget launched the “Digital Morning,” the first in a series of six research briefs from our SUBSCRIBERS, FANS & FOLLOWERS project.

This is probably the most aggressive research project I have ever been involved in. It’s also the most exciting. The approach we employed from the start reflects our Subscribers Rule! philosophy—namely that the customer comes first. The key to making your customers happy is to understand what motivates them to do what they do. It’s not enough to know simply WHAT they do, we need to understand WHY.

Most research of this kind starts and ends with a survey. In this case, researchers (such as myself) decide which questions we should ask. We decide what is important. This has the unintended consequence of limiting what we can learn. The questions we ask are the greatest limitation of our knowledge. This project represents an attempt to break free of those limits.

SUBSCRIBERS, FANS & FOLLOWERS started with a simple question, “What are the differences in how consumers use email, Facebook, and Twitter to interact with brands?”

We started with interviews and focus groups. These were conducted in March 2010. We asked why people use email? Why they use Facebook? Why Twitter? What is good about each tool? What are the problems with each tool? We asked how consumers want to interact with brands. What are the differences in how they perceive brands through email, Facebook, and Twitter? Every part of this project stems from those core questions and the detailed and, often, heartfelt responses we heard. These interviews and focus groups gave us more than 400 pages of qualitative content that would inform our survey.

The goal of the survey was simply to quantify the sentiments we heard in the focus groups. There were people who said their email usage dropped sharply as they started using Facebook and Twitter. Others said their email use went up since they had reconnected with old friends. The survey helped us put numbers to these experiences.

Digital Morning addresses a seemingly simple question, “Where’s the first place you go online when you wake up?” As it turns out, this tells us a lot about how people approach the Internet in general. The majority starts their day with email (58%), followed by Search (20%) and Facebook (11%). ‘Email-first’ consumers tend to be more interested in consuming information online. Yes, they participate in social media. They use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, write blogs, upload pictures, etc. but they use these tools differently than people who start their day on Facebook. Facebook-first people are more, well, social in their approach to the Internet. The Internet to them is about interaction first and consuming information second.

Check out the report for yourself to get this first glimpse and stay tuned ‘cause we are just getting started!

Addressing the problem of relevance

According to this short clip from consumer data wiz Andreas Weigend, former Chief Scientist for Amazon, the answer does not lie in smarter algorithms—he believes we have reached the ceiling there. Instead, Weigend believes the answer lies in smart incentives to encourage people to provide information about themselves. That by providing critical information that allows companies to help address questions the consumer has they allow those companies to serve them better. This allows companies to reward the attention of their consumers more richly and disappoint them less.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see how this philosophy has been baked into Amazon’s platform. For those concerned about privacy—this is only an issue when it is used inappropriately. If data collection is transparent and used in clearly relevant ways, then it becomes the basis for customer loyalty. Moreover, the loyalty is not based on rewards systems that cost the company money, it is based on the fact that customer’s are prone to transact more with the companies that serve them best!

Get out and LISTEN!

Innovation comes through listening to your customers. Richard Branson shares that if you get out and talk to your customers “there are lots of free and innovative ideas that will come from them.”

Similarly, BusinessWeek ran an article summarizing a panel titled The Business of Design featuring Jeanne Liedtka from the Darden Graduate School of Business at the University of Virginia. According to BusinessWeek,

“Supremely articulate, she outlined a three year study assessing managers who had been able to grow revenue in a slow market. She described these managers as ’smiling subversives’ who were able to quietly work around an organizational system in order to get stuff done. And she criticized corporate cultures that have made systems out of bad habits. Too often executives only want to hear about ‘big ideas’, she explained, which instantly commits an organization to making reckless bets that are unlikely to pay off. Instead, she said, executives ‘need to unlearn. The first thing a manager should do is leave the building and talk to a customer.’”

SubscribersRule! is the premise that your customers know best how to evolve your brand. Make a commitment to get out of the office this week and gather information from the trenches!

Subscribers Speak: “How would you like marketers to communicate with you?”

In July, we sent a group of 12 ExactTarget to the streets of cities around the midwest to ask them how they wanted marketers to communicate with them. Here’s a video showing some of what we heard:

Interested in more on this topic? Check out the Marketing Preferences Research Bundle featuring Customer Knowledge is Marketer Power, a commissioned study on marketers approach to mulitchannel marketing conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of ExactTarget, and the 2009 Channel Preferences Study, ExactTarget’s proprietary study on the communication preferences of subscribers.

London Consumers Sound Off

The ExactTarget crew hit the streets of London this week to give consumers a voice about how they want to interact with companies online.  Here’s a quick preview of some of the comments they recorded from consumers talking about what they want and don’t want from email marketing.

Subscribers Rule on the Streets of London

ExactTarget’s been in the UK for about a month now, and we’ve heard some great feedback from marketers about how they think consumers across Europe want to interact with companies via email, text messaging and the Web.  But we know that’s only half the story.  So, Tuesday, I announced we are taking to the streets of the UK to give consumers a chance to voice their opinions about email marketing.  Armed with a video camera and questions, Subscribers Rule UK is officially underway!

In the coming weeks, we’ll feature videos of our man on the street interviews here to give consumers (or as we call them subscribers) a chance to share with us what they really want from interactions with companies online.  We’ll also use the opportunity to teach marketers the importance of putting subscribers first by embracing the three tenets of Subscribers Rule –

• Serve the individual
• Honour their unique preferences with regard to communication, content, frequency and channel
• Deliver them timely, relevant content that improves their lives

Check back soon for some of our first interviews from subscribers on the streets of London.

Subcribers Rule! on the Street

Last year we sent a group of ExactTarget employees to the streets of Indianapolis to let Subscribers voice their opinions about email marketing. We are continuing the tradition this year. This morning a group of 12 members of our Catapult program are hitting the streets of cities across the midwest. Armed with better questions and the drive to take this project to new heights, we are expecting great results that should be both entertaining and insightful.

Take a look at some of the videos from last year.

You Know Things are Moving Fast When…

a book is out of date before it hits the shelves.

I saw this book while traveling last week. I was in between the Email Insider conference in Captiva, FL and a meeting with senior students from Ball State Univeristy. Both groups had a lot to say about social media, but they talk about Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. MySpace is included almost as an afterthought.

Marketers report consistently bad results from campaigns launched in MySpace–especially compared to the “new big three.” The college students asked, “Why bother with MySpace?”

Later this year will be the 4 year anniversary of MySpaces heyday when Newscorp paid $580 Million for the site. Today it is on a downhill trajectory. Facebook has doubled it’s lead in just 6 months and Twitter is gaining fast.

So, where will consumers be 4 years from now? Hold on folks, it’s gonna be a bumpy ride!

Jaffe on Twitter “Shiny Object Syndrome”

I’ve been woefully remiss in posting to SR! lately, but the absence hasn’t been so much due to a lack of things to say as it has been a desire for time to think.

Too often in today’s social media saturated world, the multitude of outlets at our disposal — IM, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. — call upon interactive marketers to talk and opine constantly rather than listen and process thoughtfully.  This is problematic because interactive marketing demands strategy, and strategy demands more than knee-jerk emotionality.  It demands experience, analysis, and time to develop great ideas into beneficial actions.

With that in mind, I was pleased to see that Joseph Jaffe focused this week’s edition of JJTV on why the collective hysteria about Twitter might not be a good thing for interactive marketers.  Twitter is, after all, but one tactic among the myriad of internet-based marketing tools that can help companies connect with customers.

Much like email, Twitter’s value depends on the relevance and attentiveness of your followers (i.e., subscribers).  However, as Joseph points out, because of the temporal nature of Twitter posts, he’d be surprised if his followers had read more than 10% of his total tweets.

If that’s the case, Joseph wonders, aren’t we all putting a disproportionate amount of emphasis on Twitter’s importance — especially when most of us have yet to fully optimize the performance of channels such as email and search?

Here are Joseph’s thoughts — feel free to share yours via the comments link above and to the right.

The Twouble with Twitters

Current TV’s “SuperNews!” just did the definitive animated send up of the Twitter-sphere.

Yes, there are two sides to every story.  But this side is the funniest and the most likely to bring a smile to my SR! blogging co-hort’s face.

And yes, Morgan Stewart, this one’s for you.  Enjoy!

The Twouble with Twitters

The Spam Logic of @GuyKawasaki

Guy Kawasaki. Twitter Evangelist or Social Media Spammer?

As I write this, I am perhaps as disturbed as I have ever been as an interactive marketer thanks to Guy Kawasaki’s keynote at Search Engine Strategies NYC.  If you’re not familiar with Guy, give his Wikipedia bio a quick read for background.

Let me begin by saying that Guy is always an engaging speaker–and for the speaking fee he commands, he should be.  It is amazing what he has accomplished at Apple, through his various ventures (including Alltop), and on Twitter (building 91K+ followers is no small feat).  However, today’s address to the SES NYC (#sesnyc) attendees was less of a keynote than it was a classroom session on how to spam a new channel — Twitter.  My favorite, oft-recycled Guy quote trotted out yet again today:

“If I do it, it’s clever marketing. If it’s done to me, it’s spam.”

I don’t care if we’re talking email, search marketing or social media — such self-serving logic is what has clogged our inboxes with junk mail, filled the Google results with irrelevant MFA (Made for Adwords) sites, and frankly, what will soon cause Twitter to collapse under its own weight.

Guy can get away with such statements because he is an extremely likeable (ahem) guy.  But the reality is that the strategy that he is espousing to gain Twitter dominance is nearly identical to that of a common email spammer or black hat SEO — the ends justify the means.  His use of services that search Twitter for relevant phrases and then pimp (”Twimp”?) Alltop’s content in direct replies is spam, plain and simple.  The recipient didn’t ask for the content and yes, while a small percentage of recipients may appreciate the Alltop link, the vast majority find it to be noise.

Isn’t that the very definition of spam or are we too blinded by the social media buzz to get that?

Guy seems unphased because his strategy has propelled him to a level of Twitter celebrity the likes of which few know (which makes his claim that there are no A-listers on Twitter pretty laughable).  But what if EVERYONE followed his advice?  What if EVERYONE auto-followed, bot-tweeted, and republished tweets through 3rd party accounts?

The answer is that Twitter will become a calamitous cacophony of noise — and the noise-to-signal ratio would genuinuely threaten its usefulness as a mass communication, one-to-one communication or search tool.  Just ask Google’s search spam guru Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) . The black hat marketers will find & exploit Twitter’s every crack & cranny, and Guy Kawasaki is giving them a roadmap to do so.

At the end of the day, Guy is right.  Subscribers do rule even on Twitter.  You and I have the right to follow or unfollow anyone we want.  After today’s session, I’ve decided to unfollow @guykawasaki because frankly, his is not the type of marketing philosophy that I want to support — let alone follow.

Subscribers Rule site experience too!

This video was created by Baynote for a presentation at eTail earlier this week. It puts a little humor to how we often treat our customers online.

This carries over directly to how we structure registration processes. Just because a subscriber was interested in one thing in the past does not mean we should always talk to them about the same thing for eternity. In general, I am not in favor of detailed preference centers that ask for a long list of interests for the reasons highlighted in this video. Subscribers’ interests change over time–incorporate behavioral information.

Just be careful not to go to the other extreme. Using some basic demographic data (like gender) should keep you from sending Chip pumps, or “Ballerina Flats.”