This challenge is about getting your customers to love you and on the final day, selling to them. But what then?
I love this challenge. It’s a pool of untapped potential. Seriously. I get paid to find the awesome stuff, and I use this community as one of my hunting grounds for raw talent.
You guys are in a great position. You’re able to leverage the community to learn more and bounce ideas off each other. I’ve seen the stuff that has come out of the previous challenges, and it’s awesome. It’s awe inspiring, and it makes me want to get off my arse and do more.
There is a main flaw.
The pool of sheer Win is pretty much confined to the people within the challenge. People hear about it, as they should, but they don’t necessarily talk about it. This is because the main principals of word of mouth are being ignored.
I’m already being social, I hear you protest. I’m already encouraging conversation!
You’re right.
Yet, you’re kinda wrong. In most cases, some people like it and recommend you to others. That isn’t word of mouth. That’s referral marketing.
True word of mouth is “giving people a reason to talk about your stuff, and making it easier for that conversation to take place.” That definition is given by Andy Sernovitz in Word of Mouth Marketing, and it’s the main quote I use to describe it.
Customerlove is something worth talking about. You are creating stuff that is worth sharing with the world. The main problem is that it’s hard for the conversation to take place.
I get that you aren’t as much of a marketing geek as I am, so I’ll make it easy. Just download this pdf. This simple worksheet tells you everything you need to know.
The Five T’s
Basically, there are five T’s that form part of any ‘campaign.’ We don’t need a campaign. We could just use this as a basic template and tweak it as our businesses evolve. These 5 T’s are:
- Talkers: Who will tell their friends about you?
- Topics: What will they talk about?
- Tools: How can you help the message travel?
- Taking Part: When should you join the conversation?
- Tracking: What are people saying about you?
I’m not going to talk about taking part or tracking. You’re smart and know how to do that. The area that trips up most people are the first three.
Talkers:
Talkers are the type of people who will talk about you. Most of the people within this community fit into a various type of talker profile. I’ve identified five:
- Curator: Someone who goes through large amounts of information and collates the best of it
- Gatekeeper: The person who filters information for the authorities
- Connector: A person who connects people to other people or to products
- Filter: A person who goes through a large amount of information to find the hidden gems.
- Cheerleader: Someone who gets really excited when they find something they like and talks about it a lot
From my experience, these are the type of people that can help kickstart a conversation. I talked about the concept more on By Bloggers.
We have many talkers taking part in the challenge. Look at Birdy Diamond. She is a natural curator and one who should be encouraged.
Topics:
The topic is the reason someone talks about you. Within the community, the challenge itself is a good enough reason. What about those outside of the challenge?
There is a whole lotta hype and BS floating around the blogosphere. It can be genuinely hard to find the hook for the conversation. I find that creating something that empowers people spreads the furthest.
My personal preference is a list post, but that is mostly because I’ve had such good success with them. However, these can be, at best, used once a year.
The Customerlove for Japan promotion was a great conversation generator and something that benefited the community. Those who donated products will experience the benefits for a long while.
I recommend that you work with your peers to develop a solid hook. And here’s the kicker: by working together to promote the challenge, you are ultimately promoting yourself.
Tools:
You guys are smart cookies. You know the basic tools to encourage conversation. Here are a few useful ones you may not know about:
- Cloudflood by Viperchill: The barrier of asking for a tweet may annoy some, but it’ll definitely generate social proof
- Tiny Letter: An alternate to letter.ly. Ebookling is also coming out with a paid solution
Putting it all together:
This is the hard part. You have to get the topic in front of the talkers, and provide the tools to encourage and extend the conversation.
The good thing is that all of this is simple. If you create something that is truly brilliant then the marketing will take care of itself. You only really need to worry about the 5 T’s to get the initial conversation flowing.
Focus on rocking people’s polka-dotted socks off and you’ll be fine. Alternately, you can read Word of Mouth Marketing and Referral Engine if you want to understand more about the stuff I’ve mentioned. These are my two favorite books.
Over to you
You can never have enough customer love. Are you looking to use word of mouth techniques for your service or product? Let me know if you have questions and I’ll answer as many as I can. xx
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Hi Jade –
Nice to meet you. Thanks for the worksheet, it’s always good to get things down on paper. I think the act of listing assets is a way to spend your time and it often sparks other thoughts and ideas that might not have otherwise seen the light of day.
Hey Jade!
“I get that you aren’t as much of a marketing geek as I am”
And I get that by ‘marketing geek’ you meant “relationship marketing” geek : )
How about business marketing strategies? (In the context where marketing is a whole buch of disciplines.)
I think the Customerlove phenomenon is just at it’s very first steps, too new steps to talk about any possible flaws without defining a very clear problematic, in other words, it should be really very helpful to define those possible flaws ONLY in a very clearly framed context.
To me, there is much more to Marketing than just advertising/information processing: there are other strategic components to consider, they are yet to be explored and discussed, LaVonne needs some time; as you could see by yourself, she is already dispatching some ‘roles,’ consciously AND unconsciously.
I think that those roles are not limited, to me there is way more flexibility to it.
I am looking at Customerlove from it’s inside. I think I’ll just “be” in the CL for now, suggest my help individually if I can, and at the same time I suggest my ideas but by trying to let those ideas build themselves by a team work, and not especially through individual work.
Karim, I think Jade’s advice can be applied both for Customerlove as a whole and for each of us in our own businesses. Her point is something I’ve been pondering for a while now: how to expand Customerlove’s reach beyond our little Twitter/blog community?
If we don’t succeed at that, this challenge won’t be sustainable as a business for me, and it won’t be more than marginally helpful for the challengers.
Hi Lavonne, Jade, Karim.
Great conversation-starter!
Dare I say that this post is getting word-of-mouthy? 🙂
As a new entrant to the CustomerLove phenomenon, I’ve been amazed at the concept, and the community. I HEART CustomerLove! 😛
Some suggestions on how to help it get more word of mouth include:
– Have each CustomerLove Challenger do a daily CL post on their site, and include the hashtag #customerlove in the subject
– Have each CustomerLove Challenger explain to their audience what they are doing!
* That could be pretty powerful – to let our audiences know that we are consciously going out of our way to “love” them for 28 days, and then we will wrap it all up (the crescendo, if you will) with the creation of a labor of love that will further enable them to thrive.
– Maybe bring each of our constituents back to the central CustomerLove site, by suggesting that all CL challengers will be voted on, to see who had the greatest customer love!
– Have each challenger link back to the daily CL posts on MakeCustomersLoveYou.com, on their own CL-related posts.
all those back links will boost MakeCustomersLoveYou’s traffic immensely.
– Have a “CustomerLove Tools” section, in which we list
– Incorporate video posts (we have lots of diversity with personalities – video would paint that in full color. )
– Many of our audiences will be entrepreneurs… and as such would be interested in possibly participating in the NEXT CL challenge. By my blogging about CL every day for a month, how could they NOT be won over? LOL!
Lots of ideas. Let me know which 2 or 3 you like, and I’ll run with something.
I’m pretty good at video – so that could be a place to start.
Bolaji.
Sorry for the incomplete thought –
Have a CustomerLove tools section, in which we list free resources that help people love their customers more. They could be curated by the CL challengers.
Bolaji.
That’d be awesome – and something worth spreading. Lists and resources are great evergreen content.
It’s not my place to comment on your ideas – I’m just the observer – but you’re a smart cookie 🙂
Thanks for commenting, dude. Excelsior
Wow Bolaji,
So much good love techniques, don’t stop :p
The challenge has been going around for a while, along with many of our sites, and we forgot to think about word of mouth. Lavonne is doing everything right but, as we’ve discussed privately and publicly, the awesomeness is confined to the community.
By writing this post I was hoping to show the potential of word of mouth on a much larger scale and encourage people to work together on getting the challenge out there. Then, people could take the lessons back to their own blog.
Karim – I actually pitched a few topics to Lavonne and she chose word of mouth 🙂 It’s by no means a criticism, the challenge is now at the stage where it should be shared further so new people can find it and contribute.
Jade!
I wrote a looong comment, very interesting in itself, but decided to cut it to just one single filtering:
High Quality Content! Where the buzz is just a natural result VS “word of mouth” that’s just the observable effect and not the deeper cause of sudden fame!
Oh! Now you started a song in my head: “Fame! I wanna liiiive foreeehever!”
“Remember! Remember! Remember! Remember *KSSS!* FAAAAAAAME! *Major Badabadum*” :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adWAr0fgn1k
OH MY GOD! That’s CUSTOMERLOVE!!!!
Last minute reframing: instead of the very generic “highest quality content production” think specifically: “best added value to any offline/online discipline” Let’s innovate!
Such subjects need to be discussed in a meeting, it’s really worth it, and I believe in teamwork, simply because I love to be in a team, and customerlove seems just to offer to me 4th opportunity to “be” in a team.
Last minute reframing: instead of the very generic “highest quality content production” think specifically: “best added value to any offline/online discipline” Let’s innovate!
Such subjects need to be discussed in a meeting, it’s really worth it, and I believe in teamwork, simply because I love to be in a team, and customerlove seems just to offer to me a 4th opportunity to “be” in a team.