May 26th, 2009 by Steven Leung

Silence.  The tell-tale sign of a telemarketer.  They called you after all, so the social contract is for them to identify themselves after you say hello.   This is not the way these contractors for the San Francisco Chronicle work.

Like other telemarketers, they let you know in no uncertain terms that you’re just a number to them.  They have a bank of operators and an auto-dialer that makes as many calls as they need to keep all their operators busy.  And if all their operators are busy and no one can answer your hello, so be it; they’ll get you on the next round.  Just consider each call to be a gentle reminder to put your phone number on the National Do Not Call Registry.

There’s exactly one case where I’ve gotten a telemarketing call that I’ve appreciated.  The Acura dealership (or part of their ownership group) calls me every few months to remind me about getting an oil change and let me know what specials they have on that type of service.  What’s the difference between this and the San Francisco Chronicle?

My dealer lets me know what they’d be calling about and asked for my permission.  The value proposition was obvious: they call me around the time I need an oil change with a lower price than I would have gotten if I had to remember myself.

Permission marketing isn’t a new concept.  People have been asking whether they can follow-up on a phone conversation or a correspondence for as long as business has existed.

But this month also marks the tenth anniversary of Seth Godin’s book about Permission Marketing and he summarizes his book as follows, “Don’t be selfish. You’re not in charge. Make promises and keep them. It’s like dating. It’s an asset, it’s expensive and it’s worth it.”

I’m often (pleasantly) surprised at how big of a thank you I get when I follow-up with someone where we didn’t get the opportunity to work together after we first met.  I spend most of my time solving problems for other people so I take copious notes and try to remember something about that person and what I can solve for them.  Simply thinking about others at that level of detail and how you can help them grow their business, or make their lives easier, is often enough to get their permission to contact them again.

What some companies fail to remember is that unless you’re a monopoly or oligopoly provider, you can’t brute force your way to a customer.  That’s not completely true: you can use brute force, but you’ll need to throw money at the problem.

It’s an era where the traditional ad spend and marketing muscle are being augmented and sometimes replaced by more personal connections.  Major brands like Hyundai are basing campaigns today around the social networking referrals they get from Twitter, and even very small businesses like food trucks are creating their own online communities.

Other businesses also want to apply the concepts of permission marketing to building long-term business relationships through drip marketing, which we’ll cover in our next post.

May 25th, 2009 by Steven Leung

We’ve all had those moments and that day was his.  He told me about how he was going over his goals with the CEO and you could hear in his inflection that what he really wanted to say was, “April Fools, right?” But the growth he might have pulled in three extra headcount for in the past is something that became his goal for the upcoming six months.

“So how do you propose we grow our program?” he asked.  Brute force using mass media was out of the question given the budget constraints.  He wanted to leverage the channels they’d built through their blogs and email marketing.

“How is your program currently generating customer referrals?” I asked.  “No cost marketing, I like it and we do get more than a few referrals.”

Most companies get referrals from their existing customers and his was no different.  But he added, “I think there’s more we can do to get customers signing up their friends.  Most of what we do today isn’t formal, we have a great program and they tell their friends.”

The challenge with this approach was: because there’s no call-to-action, his company has left it to chance that the customer will come up with the idea of referring a friend.

“They might not know you’re looking for referrals, or they’re busy, or —” and I paused for a second.

“One of my friends has this knack for picking the worst restaurants.  One time, a place brought all of us a platter of rice that smelled and tasted like kerosene.  We sent back the rice three times before the owner came to our table, hands in the air, protesting that he didn’t smell or taste anything wrong.  We all looked at each other, settled on getting some flat bread instead, and we haven’t let my friend live it down to this day.”

“You’re obviously not saying our program is like kerosene rice…”

“Of course not, here’s the deal: we had to have been to at least a dozen good restaurants my friend’s recommended.  But after a funny story or two, he’s now got a reputation for referring us to bad restaurants.  For you, everyone knows they take a chance when they make a referral.”

“So step one is not making them look bad.”

“Right.  The next step is getting them to overcome both their inertia and the risk they take, no matter how small.”  So we went through a few of the most popular types of referral programs.

We talked about a typical affiliate referral system where a customer gets a reward or percentage for referring another person or business.  Usually this is done with a referral code embedded in a link, from a website, blog or email campaign.  That code identifies the referrer and lets your system know that a referral needs to be credited.

“The best practice here is to give both the referrer and the referral some sort of reward.  If you only reward the referrer, then it looks like that person is trying to make a sale.  If you only reward the referral, then the referrer doesn’t have a personal incentive to refer you.”  I’ve summarized the basics; there are more nuances from this word-of-mouth communication study.

The reward doesn’t always have to be monetary, though.  “You have a program where people can show how successful they’ve been using your methodology.  Many folks would be proud to share how successful they’ve been with others as part of a community, not just people they know but others who ask about your program.  It’s similar to what I’ve done for a number of software companies that want to reward people who extend their platforms.”

“The key is to lower the barriers to entry.  Make it easy.”

A referral program can spread like wildfire if the offer is strong and easy to communicate.   “So we can leverage what we’ve done on the blog and email marketing?”  It’s not difficult to automatically generate links from a blog, web publisher, or its landing pages that pass the referral code needed for this type of program.

And email marketing systems often give you the ability to embed a specific code for each person who receives your email; that code would be the referral link needed to credit both the referrer and referral.

The technology provides automation to make getting referrals easier and more scalable.  The same technology can be used to create stronger and more profitable relationships with the customers who will be providing you referrals, and influence your prospects to move from ‘maybe’ to ‘yes’.

January 29th, 2009 by Steven Leung

If you read just the headlines, you might get confused into accidentally breaking the law on your corporate website.  The Superme Court of the United States refused to hear an appeal on the lower court ruling that the Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA) is unconstitutional.

According to the PBS article by attorney and law professor Jeffrey Neuberger, COPA was created because Congress feared “the prospect of children obtaining access to obscene and indecent material on the Internet”.  This 1998 law was a follow up to the Communication Decency Act of 1996 which had been previously ruled unconstitutional.

Unfortunately, his article is titled U.S. Supreme Court (Finally) Kills Online Age Verification Law.  Frequently, the authors don’t write their article titles — editors do.  So there is no blame being assigned here.  But the fact is that a casual reader could easily confuse COPA with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which does require age verification and was also enacted in 1998.

A 2007 FTC press release goes on to note that “there is potential for age falsification on general audience websites, as well as liability under COPPA, should these sites obtain actual knowledge that they are collecting, using, or disclosing personal information from children online.”

The FTC also publishes a COPPA FAQ which has information about specific scenarios corporate website and social media operators should be aware of.

December 12th, 2008 by Steven Leung

In this article:

• Creating a community of evangelists
• Integrating online and offline community activities
• What every business can learn from a Christmas toy drive

Let’s not call them “virtual” communities anymore.  The people interact, they speak with passion, many create friendships, and their strength together can create action both offline and online.

Virtual communities are real communities built online.

And in a time when many more people are in need, online communities are calling people to action in the real world in ways that are faster and more effective than just traditional word-of-mouth, speaking engagements and mailers.

Case in point, the vibrant online community at Willow Glen 2.0, which is made up of over 500 residents of this San Jose suburb (total population 46,782) has called its supporters to action for the local Toys for Tots drive at the Garden Theatre in downtown Willow Glen.

This community has done what many businesses that have opened online communities haven’t been able to do: succeed.  The fact is, according to Deloitte’s Ed Moran as published in the Wall Street Journal, most online communities fail.  And the main reason cited is that “businesses are focusing on the value an online community can provide to themselves, not the community.”

For Oracle, in the early part of this century, I started one of their first online communities and signed up members from over 5,000 companies around the world without an extensive budget in marketing or technology.

I’ll talk about some of the approaches we used and the lessons we learned that contributed to our success — and how all businesses can learn a thing or two from the integrated marketing done by in Willow Glen 2.0.

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