Tag Archives: multichannel
Today, we have a video blog post from an old friend of mine, Aaron Goldman, sharing one of the “Googley Lessons” from his new book. Lesson #5: Be Where Your Audience Is…
I hearken back to when Aaron was an intern for me at a traditional media agency. If I had known he could rap like that, well, he still would have been an intern.
But get past the terrible rhythm and sideways visor and listen to the message. Great experiences happen anywhere and in order for brands to enable consumer interaction those experiences have to be easy to find. Isn’t that the most important lesson Google teaches? If the greatest piece of content in the world is never seen or shared, is it still the greatest piece of content in the world? Google built a model that ensures it can be found. A model, by the way, that means they are the gateway to the Internet regardless of how people enter. As such, they are friend to brand and consumer alike as they match content with consumer.
Chris Wells | Critical Mass Chicago
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Consumers have a myriad of choices in today’s rapidly changing digital environment. As a result, digital marketers have to work harder to deliver extraordinary experiences that resonate with customers. Why is this important? Because it’s the extraordinary experiences we create for customers that allow us to build lasting and meaningful relationships with them.
In order to meet this challenge, it can be a worthwhile exercise to take stock of the terrific brand experiences we’ve recently encountered. To gain some outside perspective on capturing customer loyalty in the new digital social age, I asked a few friends to share their recent experiences with brands.
One friend recounted a recent direct mail piece he received from Southwest airlines and how it produced a significant and lasting positive brand effect for him. He explained that after coming home from a long workday, he opened his mailbox to find a birthday card from Southwest. It was personalized with his name and arrived a few days before his actual birthday. It was a simple birthday card that included a discount on an upcoming flight and a drink coupon. The message was also very simple and direct and included a statement to the effect of “Happy Birthday! Have a drink on us!” According to my friend, this simple gesture went a long way towards building a lasting relationship between he and the airline. Now he always checks for flights on Southwest before any other carrier.
Upon asking another friend, she recalled a recent experience with ProFlowers, an online flower delivery company. She received an email reminder about 2-weeks before her mother’s birthday. The subject line of the email was personalized with her mother’s name, saying, “Remember, Evelyn’s birthday is coming up soon!” Again, not a very complicated message, but a valuable one that made an impact with my friend and helped to ensure she’ll always think of ProFlowers each time she orders flowers for her mom’s—or anyone else’s–birthday.
Both of these are examples of simple but great customer experiences. The mere fact that my friends were able to remember the messaging, timing and impact of these interactions suggests they are the kind of brand experiences most marketers strive to achieve with their customers.
What do these two customer experiences have in common?
- They delivered VALUE and/or convenience.
- They were RELEVANT.
- They were PERSONAL.
We could all take these insights as lessons learned and call it a day. However, as digital marketers we are continuously challenged with how to take these kinds of customer experiences from “great” to “extraordinary” in order to build deeper customer relationships and brand loyalty. Forrester Research wholeheartedly supports this notion. Their 2010 Customer Experience Index indicated that favorable customer experience correlates highly to loyalty — especially when it comes to consumers’ plans for making additional purchases.
Read more about how to take these experiences from Good to Extraordinary
Adam Bracegirdle | Critical Mass Calgary
This year marked my second at the SXSW interactive festival and it’s escalation was palpable. As one firmly rooted in the cerebral, esoteric environs of the creative department, I was expected by many to attend those “creative” sessions in which my peers debate, among other things, the value of the word press theme, or typography on the web. Although important work, I found conversations on the future of my medium to be a far more tantalizing proposition this time around. With that in mind I siphoned a rather crowded schedule down to a multitude of unfamiliar topics ranging from scaled multi-touch platforms to the economics of high quality content creation online. Much to my delight I found something compelling in nearly every one short of a distant few (some were vain attempts at self marketing rather then an argument of any substance. I haven’t the appetite for that.). After a short while, in fact from the very first of my lectures, I began to notice a pervading thought in nearly every talk I attended.
Convergence seemed to be on the minds of every eminent social guru and internet famous CEO at the conference. Wary as I am of the dreaded interactive meme, I could not help but feel that convergence wasn’t just another passing interweb buzzword. It seemed to permeate every lecture regardless of bent. Hardware discussions would invariably turn to talk of real-time repositories that could be accessed from anywhere; hardware as we know it becoming usurped by its more powerful, cloud-based counterpart. And although I suppose one could say that it’s an obvious (and dated) example of where convergence is headed, the example becomes substantive when watching a mob of displeased technophiles assault Mark Cuban, chairman of HDNet, demanding access to a`la carte content at a whim, from anywhere.
Talk of convergence extended well out of the traditional confines of platform and hardware though. Point in case, “social” was a virtual non-event this year as it has become almost totally ubiquitous; no longer considered a back channel for passive content. The emergence of the front channel was happening before us at SXSW as Twitter blew up during the keynotes with a frenzy of discussion, valuable or not, and location based services like Gowalla begin to provide tangible value in finding anything from Migas for breakfast 
to the best dive bar in Texas. I found myself at one point wondering if I was the only one in my lecture becoming confused by the direction of the conversation, only to find that several others were tweeting from within the room and getting informed responses from the moderator, in real-time. The convergence of channels is happening rapidly in these circles as the term “multi-channel” exits the lexicon and is replaced simply by “interaction”.
