Modern Insider – Online Marketing Blog

I think it’s safe to say we all enjoy getting away from the office at least sometimes but for many companies, social stops when the clock strikes 5 (or maybe 6). While there’s a lot of logic behind this in the eyes of those doing the posting it doesn’t reflect the reality of the channel – customers don’t stop knocking. The notion of responding 24×7 or close to it isn’t new, many companies have customer service on 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, potentially every day of the year, but with so much of social being handled by more “senior” staff this philosophy is often forgotten.

When companies go away from their channels two important things happen – first the questions stack up which is an annoying experience for the customer who is waiting and the employee who must wade through tweets all of Monday but more importantly an opportunity is lost.

Think about it for a second – a few years ago your web traffic was probably minimal on the weekend and big during the week. Weekdays may still be bigger than weekends but it’s a digital world and people are online all days of the week, from the office, from the home, even the mall on their cell phone.
Think about it some more – issues happen 24×7 and in a connected world no one waits to hear back on Monday. By the time you respond to provide the insight your customer needs, they already bought or that new nasty video with an incorrect fact is already out there.

The solution is of course an unpleasant one for anyone reading this but it is reality. You need to be on more than from the office. Whether it’s a customer service rep taking an hourly glance at automated reports or your staff actually getting into the weeds the biggest gains happen when no one expects it. Respond at 9pm on a Sunday and you’ll wow a few power users. Get product announcement clarified and you’ll avoid the confusion from that one blog. It’s not like you aren’t already on checking your own accounts anyways…

We’ve all read the case studies about Comcast, Dell, Jetblue and a handful of other companies who have changed their business (or at least changed what the media said about their business) by engaging in social. But while it’s exciting to talk about getting your own strategy going and how to “blow up” your business social always come down to one simple question, whose going to respond and when?

On one hand you have your customer service team, a group accustom to working with customers, tasked with fixing problems and [hopefully] knowledgeable about your product, policies and other particulars.

On the other hand you’ve got marketing which is probably the group driving social and has the most access to specials, new campaign information and the juicy details the customer wants.

The problem with delegating out to customer service is that, unless you create new roles and train new staff, you’re responding 1 to 1 on a platform that’s seen by 1 to many. This may seem like a minor issue but when your response ends up on the front of a major blog it’s anything but. Marketing on the other hand is often out of touch with the details of the customer experience (and I’m saying this as a marketer) so getting into support requires learning those find points. Neither side is perfect.

The solution that I’ve always found to work best is the one that gets the customer what they want – the right answer, in the right format fastest. Whether this comes from marketing or customer service isn’t a matter of black or white, it’s a matter of who can do it and who can commit the time to checking Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube, Flickr, Your Blog, The Other Blog, the new video site, the old video site, the second twitter account and that one last blog all the time. If your entire customer service team is hourly it’s not going to be them. If your marketing team isn’t willing to get into the trenches they should stick to strategy.

Either way you slice it the best idea is always to carve out that person. This can be a new resource if budget allows or an existing repurposed one. New clearly has the advantage of being able to get trained and focus on nothing else but sometimes that long time employee who is looking for a new change of pace already has the insights to know how to answer the product questions.

What’s most important, the detail you can’t forget ever is that people who contact you through social are doing so because it’s the channel they chose to use. If your resource doesn’t check it frequently, doesn’t respond well or just ends up pushing them to other channels there’s no use in having them there so whoever you pick, they need to have the permission and backing of the company to go out, give answers and perhaps use a little different tone or brand than may be the status quo – after all, this is social media.

Having worked in the weight loss industry I understand what it’s like to be regulated in everything you do, with every page you create and even every banner you publish. But now the entire marketing world gets to share in that fun thanks to an update to the FTC’s Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials.

The last time the FTC revised this document (Guides Governing Endorsements, Testimonials) the web was a distant idea and many of the people now tasked with addressing the change were not even walking. While the overhaul may have been a long time coming the impact is not mitigated by the time that has lapsed. And now thanks to decades of free reign, marketers have moved so far away from thinking about disclosure that moving to adopt it will be a painful, complicated effort.

“the revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that ‘material connections’ (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other ‘word-of-mouth’ marketers.”

So what does this mean for marketing and the web? It’s not clear what this change will mean for every instance of blog or word of mouth marketing but what is clear is that marketers and publishers must now state their affiliations when a product is exchange or payment is made on any social media from a simple review up to a full commentary piece. The nature of the relationship should also be disclosed clearly.

Just how to disclose an affiliation is not spelled out but again, it seems reasonable to assume something visible should be included on the endorsing page. In the weight loss industry the term “results not typical” has been used (although the revised rules now state that it is not strong enough). On blogs something like “The product in this review was provided by ABC, Inc. for review and was kept by the author.” makes sense and fully explains the relationship and that the product was kept. Of course not all mediums have the luxury of such long formats and other alternative means of disclosure must be found. In these cases I would imagine most companies will model after the weight loss industry adopting short phrases – short or long the changes the FTC made to endorsements in the weight loss industry illustrate the need for clear disclosures.

A few suggestions that come to mind for Twitter, Blogs and other limited formats (be sure to run these by your lawyer):

• #IVR (I Received a Product) – Twitter
• #PD (Paid Endorsement) – Twitter
• #PAR (Paid Advertising Relationship) – Twitter
• Sample Provided for Review.
• Payment provided for comment.
• Company is a paid advertiser.

And these changes aren’t limited to publishing sites. Advertisers may also need to disclose if a comment comes from a paid study or endorsement.

Brands should also be sure to educate the publishers and endorsers they work with to insure compliance. Relying solely on these individuals to define the relationship is directly discussed.

“Example 7 states more clearly that although the blogger has primary responsibility for disclosing that he received the video game system for free, the manufacturer has an obligation to advise the blogger at the time it provides the gaming system that he should make the disclosure in any positive reviews of the system”

There’s no telling just how well enforced this will be or how deep it goes. Forum posts, blog comments, tweets all fall into the bucket of word of mouth marketing, which is now regulated.

But there are some limits in what is considered endorsement and what is not.

“The Commission does not believe that all uses of new consumer-generated media to discuss product attributes or consumer experiences should be deemed “endorsements” within the meaning of the Guides… In other words, in disseminating positive statements about a product or service, is the speaker: (1) acting solely independently, in which case there is no endorsement, or (2) acting on behalf of the advertiser or its agent, such that the speaker’s statement is an “endorsement” that is part of an overall marketing campaign? The facts and circumstances that will determine the answer to this question are extremely varied and cannot be fully enumerated here, but would include: whether the speaker is compensated by the advertiser or its agent; whether the product or service in question was provided for free by the advertiser; the terms of any agreement; the length of the relationship; the previous receipt of products or services from the same or similar advertisers, or the likelihood of future receipt of such products or services; and the value of the items or services received. An advertiser’s lack of control over the specific statement made via these new forms of consumer-generated media would not automatically disqualify that statement from being deemed an “endorsement” within the meaning of the Guides. Again, the issue is whether the consumer-generated statement can be considered ‘sponsored’”

I suspect it will take a long time to see these changes permutated across all levels of the social and press world online and with so many old articles it’s almost certain much of the content we consume will remain unmarked for a long time to come. Still, disclosure can be seen as a good thing in educating the consumer openly – it’s transparent and that’s an important word these days.

Most interesting to me will be seeing the affiliations some companies have made over the years. It’s certain that relationships will change quickly. Publishers taking payments for positive remarks will have to find different models or face public scolding. Quotes on brand sites will come with little stars and the whole world and the marketing world as we know it has changed forever. Or at least until the next revisions.

Read the full details and examples at http://ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm

And please check with your attorney to fully understand these rules and how they impact your business. I am merely a marketer provided my own commentary, without endorsement from the FTC or anyone on this post [hopefully that's a big enough disclosure].

While Online Reviews for products are overwhelmingly positive the same should not be said for reviews found in other areas. Take a look at the list of apartment communities in the SF/ Bay Area below and you’ll see that none passes the 3.5 star mark – a low ranking by any standard.

The reason for this is not however bad apartments (though there certainly are some). The culprit is in fact something much simpler to remedy – a lack of information. It goes without saying that if you don’t know to do something, you won’t and apartment ratings are one thing few people know about until they chose to review a new home. What if instead of waiting for people to find their way to reviews apartment companies put a sheet in with their lease renewal and termination packages that offered a $25 gift card or rent discount for leaving a comment on their site, apartment ratings or another platform? What if rather than doing door tags every month about referring friends they directed people to a facebook-connect powered page asking to talk about where they live.

And you don’t need a lease to get people writing reviews. Product inserts, thank you notes for loyal customers, links on your email footers, website or any other communication piece is an opportunity to tell people that you’d like them to leave a review and give them a reason too.

Most customers but good experience and good experiences are not what people think about sharing. We’ve all heard adages like 10 bad comments for every 1 good and whether or not this is the exact number the sentiment is true. People gripe when there is a reason to and far fewer jump in when they don’t have something to vent.  There’s nothing bad about asking people to lead a review and if done right, nothing underhanded either.   Compensating everyone for a review is a fair statement. Positive, negative, it’s all a review and all gets the same treatment. No one can fault you for that.

And this issue isn’t limited to apartments – all sorts of niche businesses face a similar challenge from Vacation Homes to local Bakeries. If customers don’t know they can leave a review the odds are they won’t. Unless of course they have an experience so bad they can’t stop themselves from talking about it.

Why don’t they have a better website? It’s a common question that we’ve all said or perhaps heard about our own sites. While theory says no obstacle should ever stop us from optimizing, improving and delivering an appropriate customer experience, unless you are a CEO with a massive cash surplus, theory is only good on paper. Reality on the other hand dictates that we do the best job we can with finite resources, competing proprieties and a whole host of obstacles.

Even though we can’t get it all done and few of us are lucky enough to have a team of analysts, UX experts and support staff sitting by to tell us what to improve first there’s a lot that can be done. The idea is to approach everything as if you were going to do it right – even if what is done is ultimately quicker, dirtier and more constrained than you would like. The right approach makes for changes that matter rather than just throwing mud at the wall in the back conference room.

Analytics drive the best changes. In a constrained environment or it becomes easy to listen to what the executive team thinks is important or what we feel is the first priority but this defies the simple truth – we are not the customer. The best way to approach and prioritize site changes is by looking at the numbers and seeing what people are actually doing or not doing. For example, while adding a slick one-page checkout system may seem like a great way to pick up extra holiday sales, when analytics show that conversion rates are solid and email response is falling off the priority should clearly not be on the “best practice” first. Similarly if users are abandoning landing pages left and right, building new acquisition campaigns is definitely not the first place to focus.

Numbers are important for another reason – they validate the expenses associated with work effort. It doesn’t matter what a site’s goal is lead gen, ecommerce, exposure, or whatever it may be, there are always ROI metrics both hard and soft that must be identified and monitored against all projects. ROI isn’t just a function of acquisition or customer growth either – impact can be to long term retention, engagement, decreased customer service calls, and a host of other factors. Establishing return benchmarks sets the platform to grow the team over time and values the website to the organization allowing for an accurate discussion of larger initiatives down the road.

And ROI isn’t just about media or agency costs against sales. To effectively manage a limited team and finite resources a cost has to be put against in-house resources both in time expended and opportunity loss. For examples, user reviews are a seemingly straight forward tool that most e-commerce sites have or is on their short term roadmap. Because the feature is basic it’s tempting to build rather than buy but in reality this is almost always a terrible idea. Setting up a new system may only cost a few thousand dollars in initial resources but those same resources are pulled off of work that could not likely be outsourced, like better product pages, updates to transactional emails and other tasks that get swept under the radar. Over the long term the ROI case is incredibly simple – how many man hours are going to be put into building a feature which may start as simple but which will require perpetual upgrades and attention instead of expending a few dollars to keep those resources focused on growth areas.

As sites become older and grow it becomes tempting to just do something – a refresh, a quick couple of features… something. This is a dangerous tactic as redesign projects are the very definition of scope creep and the less planned, the more it grows. Spending big dollars on new designs, feature additions and campaigns is far more difficult to justify than simply reassigning a few resources but a year later when the work is still going, hindsight hurts. Instead of looking at the short term for a site it is essential to balance between functional changes that the business demands, like new product launches, campaigns and other programs while at the same time defining those long term upgrades.

While it’s easy to dismiss process as overly burdensome [there’s plenty of truth to that], process is a necessary evil to make accomplishments. Looking at the realities of the customer needs, the existing site and the actual resources at our disposal allows for prioritization that actually makes sense.