Customer Feedback Gets Interactive

Aside from covering conversational marketing tactics by other companies, I to have a day job like most of you. From 9 to 6pm or sometimes 7 or 8, I'm the Chief Marketing Officer of a new technology startup in Solana Beach, CA called Positive Digital Solutions. We're setting out to create some innovative platforms for changing the way companies and customers engage each other as well as some other areas for which I can't discuss yet. So for anyone part of a startup, you know the environment ... everything is a priority and there never seems to be enough time to tweak that last piece of code, move that pixel 5 more centimeters or brainstorm new copy for the homepage; then Techcrunch calls you and says they want to write you up. Everything pauses like time stood still and you take a deep breath and hope you're ready for the traffic.

Launching SuggestionBox.com has been a great experience in understanding what the user truly want AND the best part is ... now they have a place to leave us all of their feedback, suggestions and ideas, in one place. Outside of being a blatant "toot our own horn", I'm going to give the straight forward why SuggestionBox is good for your business. Yes we don't have an API yet, yes people have to sign up, yes you need the email of the company in order to contact them, BUT there's a lot of great features for those Small to Medium-sized businesses that want to get a feedback mechanism setup in a matter of minutes.

SuggestionBox is trying to fill the gaping void of "customer fulfillment" that exists from the online to offline channel. You submit feedback to any big website or put a comment card in a wooden box on the wall, what happens..? Usually nothing. You don't know who got it, if they are going to respond and if it ever gets implemented. This is the core of SuggestionBox.com. You submit an idea or suggestion to a company, they post it to the public and update the status. You receive a notification in your dashboard that it's been updated from New to Under Review, Under Review to Pending Implementation and so on. Finally, you're getting something in return! And that's why you sign up. Every company you wanted to submit suggestions to is in one place. What do you do when you want to pay for something online? Do pull your credit card out everytime or is PayPal an option; simply login and click pay. We know SuggestionBox.com isn't the standard yet, BUT we're positioning it to be something as simple as the name for SMB, Enterprise, Fortune 1000 to 50, etc.

For the marketers out there and being one I know, think about reaching out to your customers and letting them you're listening, willing to "engage" them and then having the ability to re-connect months from when they submit ideas letting them know you've implemented their suggestion. If you know anything about lifetime value, then you can see the value in re-connecting with customers instead of missing an opportunity and losing them to a competitor. If you're not putting the time in with them; you can bet your competitors are.

What about if you're in HR and you're trying to figure out why your front line employees aren't performing or aren't loving their job? You assign employees to various customizable categories. As you categorize incoming suggestions, these employees receive the idea and then can respond to customers directly or leverage the internal scoreboard to weigh in on the Pros and Cons of the idea. Employee Empowerment? Pretty sweet.

Go check out www.SuggestionBox.com and try it out. Leave your feedback in the suggestionbox.suggestionbox.com account and if you don't I'll run into you at the many events we'll be attending.

Work Out Season 3 - SkyLab's Lisa Quick Wit Gets Her Nowhere

So I fell asleep last night at the end of Work Out, but luckily we have DVR! As soon as I walked in the door today, she started on with, "Did you hear what the new manager said about a cancer survivor on Work Out last night?" (pause)

As we are both avid watchers of the show because it's reality tv plagued with drama; this is how a conversation was created between two viewers. Earth to Bravo and Work Out , are you listening? Because we all are!

I won't go into the details, but comments were made about the breasts of a "client" who was training with Brian Peeler. These unprofessional comments were made by Lisa, the new manager. Bravo edited out any comments by Jackie Warner and the confrontation with the client's boyfriend who overheard all of the comments and confronted Jackie and Lisa. Why were they edited out? What was said? So Lisa blogs on Bravo's website here and attempts to cut off the evident onslaught of hate mail and comments by trying to be witty and posting a blog titled, "Open Your Eyes and Shut Your Mouth." Now seriously, maybe Bravo could hook Lisa up with a PR person, Communications Director or even a Marketing Assistant to give her some tips on how to blog and how to start a conversation that includes an apology.

IF anyone would like to continue the conversation or educate Skylab's new manager on etiquette, here is their contact information:

Sky Sport Spa & SkyLab
8500 Wilshire Boulevard
Beverly Hills, CA 90211

Tele: 310.652.7721
Fax: 310.652.2616

info@skysportspa.com

Hours of Operation:
6:00am - 9:00pm, Monday thru Saturday (Sunday Closed)
BY APPOINTMENT ONLY

How Throwing Out Your Private Documents Into The Dumpster Is Like The Current State Of The Inernet

I know I usually cover Conversational Marketing and how companies are creating value-added conversations with their customers, but one of my great ideas was brought to the forefront when I read David Whitney's post on web 3.0 and an Open Identity Platform. Everyday we search for the next web app that can bring some more efficiency into our lives; something that both combines multiple features into one interface and makes some mundane process entertaining at the same time. Why? At the end of the day, we're all trying to save time doing the mundane stuff so we have more for the fun stuff. You take your 9-5 and add in going to the gym, walking the dog, going grocery shopping, spending time with the kids, watching the game, competing in sports, playing an instrument and so on; you get a full packed day. So what if you could go to the gym, watch the game on your iPod and spend time with the kids? Sounds nice right? Figuring out how to maximize time is everyone's goal.

How does this relate to throwing your private documents into the dumpster?

Just like throwing out documentation containing personal information, we all upload photos, post videos, blog about our work, connect with new friends, IM, email and some micro-blog. All of this information is available to EVERYONE. Just a reminder. And all of this personal information needs to be added whenever we signup for some new website. We grow tired of having to do the mundane like upload more photos, add more friends, track various news, type in more personal information and so on. Why can't I just have one profile that is portable? Let me store all my info with one provider or in my own server like Whitney states and then I'll tell you when information you can have access to. I"m tired of spewing the same information into the dumpsters of the web and not remembering which ones I put my information into and which I didn't.

Like any smart entrepreneur, I've got an idea along with a fellow entrepreneur. Stay posted, a solution is coming.

Late Night Links For The Owls

So it's 11pm PST and I'm not usually on Twitter and other sites, but they are churning tonight and I wanted to share some of the things that conversations are being created around:

1. Ultimate Social Media Resources List - great list Jordan


2. Google allows trademark bidding in the UK - thanks Gooruze news item


3. Could PayPerTweet be a viable business model? - source: Gooruze.com


4. Techcrunch50 vs. DEMO - Who will survive?


5. Survey Industry Doomed! - $27B in Survey Industry and 30% of surveys are bogus


6. Link Building Fundamentals - great starter list, filter through the stuff you can skip


7. San Diego Web Standards Group Launches


8. Twubble - Do you know who you should be following on Twitter?

We're Hiring! Marketing Role ...

If you love the young company environment, an office across the street from the beach, a group of creative/passionate people and marketing is what helps you get by everyday ... we've got an open role for you. Email me for more info ... bj at positivedigitalsolutions.com

Must love:

* Analytics - data junkie, reporting Excel, Google Analytics, HBX or Omniture or fave tool, Crazy Egg, etc.
* Conversation - connecting to real people with authentic ideas via blogging, Twitter, social networks
* Promotion - SEO, PPC, Link Building, Forum chat, Email
* Traveling - local/national events, managing booth, passing out items, talking to people about app
* Tech - love apps, have lots of accounts, BETAs, widgets, badges, chiclets, RSS, mobile, etc.
* Self-Managed - start projects on your own, execute them, give me the why, when, how, who + measurable goals

still interested? Shoot me an email to bj at positivedigitalsolutions.com

Chrysler Starts Listening

Chrysler LLC with help from its digital marketing agency Organic has integrated an online suggestion box into its corporate website that also features its blog, environmental practices, community initiatives and more. The new section is actually available at www.ChryslerListens.com, where they are asking people for their insights on how to improve their products and company.

"Submit ideas for future products, make current product suggestions or just tell us what would make us a better company."

Seems pretty simple and all you need to do is enter a zipcode and let them know if you already own a Chrysler. Seems to be a little market research going on there, but the process remains very simple to submit.

There are a lot of companies taking the leap into trying to engage their customers better and find ways to drive the conversation using various online tactics. My hat off to Chrysler for trying to get into the game and find ways to improve their relationship with their customer base and maybe even snag a few loiters from other competitors.

Did Google’s Secondary Search Create Some Waves?

To this day my mom loves to remind me about her experience with greed: “Any time I have gotten just a little tiny bit greedy, it always backfires on me in the end.” Her point is that she has never and will never profit from greed, and neither will I. Maybe Google should have had a conversation with my Mom before rolling out their latest feature.

Recently Google introduced a new feature to their search results page called the “Secondary Search Box”. When you do a search on a trademark term for sites that have a large presence (i.e. New York Times, Best Buy, YouTube, National Geographic, etc.) you will notice that a “secondary” search box appears underneath the website’s organic listing which encourages you to enter another keyword to help narrow your search.


Like every new feature Google rolls out, the secondary search box was supposedly introduced to enhance the search experience and generate a more relevant search result for the searcher. In the past I have always felt that most new features that Google has introduced have delivered on that promise of enhancing the search experience, and therefore improving the experience for the advertiser as well. Lately, though, the features that have been rolled out have caused me to sense a very slight hint of desperation or maybe some greed from our friends at Google. On their Blog, Google provided the following explanation for the roll out of the Secondary Search Box:

"Through experimentation, we found that presenting users with a search box as part of the result increases their likelihood of finding the exact page they are looking for. So over the past few days we have been testing, and today we have fully rolled out, a search box that appears within some of the search results themselves. This feature will now occur when we detect a high probability that a user wants more refined search results within a specific site. Like the rest of our snippets, the sites that display the site search box are chosen algorithmically based on metrics that measure how useful the search box is to users."

Okay, sure, I could have been on board with this initial explanation. This new feature could have the potential to help narrow a searcher’s results which may lead to a better organic conversion rate. But, all of these benefits were quickly minimized by the fact that the secondary search resulted in a whole selection of paid ads associated with the secondary search term, diverting the searcher from the organic listing or the single paid listing owned by the brand.

So, let’s say you searched on New York Times because you were looking for real estate listings. The secondary search box appears so you enter the keyword “real estate”. Earlier this week if you had done this search, you would see organic results for the query “real estate site:nytimes.com”, as well as paid listings generated by the general term “real estate”. This was horrible news for sites that had these secondary search boxes associated with their trademarked terms. Before that secondary search box was introduced, the searcher was probably going to do one of two things when they searched a trademark term - click on the organic listing, or click on the one paid ad which was probably the ad of the trademark owner. But now, with the secondary search in play, the searcher is presented with a whole array of paid ads which are very likely to distract the searcher from clicking through to the site associated with that original trademark search.

Anyone who manages a PPC campaign knows how profitable those trademark terms are; especially for large, well-known brands. That’s one of the reasons why we go through the effort of submitting trademark letters - to prevent competitors from bidding on our trademarked terms. If you do a search on any trademark term owned by these large sites, you will probably only see at most two paid ads – the ad owned by the brand, and occasionally an affiliate. This is because these large brands have a trademark letter in place with Google. But the secondary search box was encouraging users to perform an additional search so that the trademark letter could essentially be bypassed, providing a chance for the searcher to click through on an ad associated with a more generic, higher cost keyword. Most likely a competitor’s ad. It seems to me that Google was utilizing the massive search volume associated with these “big brand” keywords, then converting those searches into more “general” searches, therefore driving clicks to higher CPC ads.

So, just today as I was doing some research together for my blog posting/rant about Google “using” the popularity of these huge brands to make money, I noticed something very interesting. All of the paid ads that used to show up as a result of that secondary search, are now gone. Now the secondary search only results in organic listings for the site associated with the searched trademark.


Another interesting thing I noticed – The Secondary Search Box associated with the trademark term “WalMart” is now gone! I am 100% sure it was there earlier this week.

So, the question is, did Google recognize their subtle greediness and “do the right thing” on their own, or could there have been a behind the scenes uprising from the big brands that forced them to make the change?

Post written by: Alison Ganz, Director of Marketing at Hawkeye Search - PPC Experts

How Target Is Teaching Us To Be Green - 10 Ways To Reuse Your Bag

From the looks of my Mint.com account, it seems as if we spend a lot of time at Target or as some say Tar-shay. We enjoy our little trips to this big retail store; everything is always in the same place, it features great affordable designer brands like Method and you never leave without spending at least $100. The thing I never noticed was that Target was continuing the conversation with me in my home on my dinner table. Something caught my eye ... 10 Ways To Reuse Your Target Bag. You've all got that little stockpile of plastic bags stuffed into a plastic holder, in the shelf in a closet or maybe strewn about the floor because the cats love to play in them. Well, I bet you didn't notice the little top 10 list provided by Target on some of them. So here it is:

1. Tiny Trash Can Liner
2. Doggy Duty
3. Water Balloon
4. Road Trip Rubbish
5. Soggy Laundry
6. Ice Pack
7. Toiletry Tote
8. Kitty Litter Liner
9. Tomorrow's Lunch Bag
10. Care Package Padding

So then I thought about what else could you use that bag for and here's BJ's Top 10 Ways To Reuse Plastic Bags:

1. Makeshift Rain Hat
2. Convertible Car Window in the Summer
3. Storing Ex-Lovers Belongings
4. Socks
5. Fishing Tool When Stranded On Island
6. Gym Bag
7. Grease Collector
8. Multi-Plastic Bag Holder (string it through multiple handles)
9. Stuffing A Scarecrow
10. Diapers when you don't get on Ellen's Mother's Day Show

So if you have some creative ways to use those old bags, post them in comments here.

5 Classic Ways Companies Should Communicate With Their Customers

A company's success hinges on how it communicates, both internally and externally. Too much emphasis on interpersonal relationships can have a dire effect on outside interaction. Obviously, such a breakdown in communication between the company and its customers will greatly impact customer satisfaction and overall sales.

Businesses that regularly speak with their customers, whether it's directly or indirectly, will flourish. The advent of the Internet has obviously changed customer interaction for the better. However, one mustn't overlook some classic ways to touch base with customers, as some of them have certainly stood the test of time.

Below are the top five ways a company should communicate with their customers:

1. Telephone – No, I'm not referring to cold calls during dinnertime. I'm speaking of old-fashioned, remote customer service. When a customer has a question or concern, they will often want to personally connect with the company (and rightfully so). Whether this results in an inbound call from the customer or a friendly follow-up from the company, this keeps customer dissatisfaction to a minimum when executed properly.
2. Live Chat – Many people are glued to their computers these days, preferring digital communication to personal phone calls. A live chat option with a customer service representative is both practical and welcome in today's society, particularly if a company receives many inbound calls. No one likes to hang around "on hold," after all.
3. Newsletters – Newsletters are an excellent ways to keep customers abreast of new developments and, obviously, new products/services. Print newsletters aren't as common as they used to be, but they are still quite effective for small businesses. The electronic newsletter, however, is flourishing right now and helping many businesses to improve their customer relations. However, companies should make any kind of newsletter an opt-in service, lest it be viewed as "spam."
4. Company Blog – One of the newest successes in the realm of customer communication is the company blog. Often written by higher-ups within the company, it can make even the biggest corporations feel as if it's one with the people. Like a newsletter, it serves as a news service. However, it also encourages highly valuable customer feedback in the form of comments.
5. Customer Surveys – How will a company know what its customers want if it doesn't ask? Customers should be surveyed on a regular basis. However, companies should make this feel like a painless process for the public. Offering prizes to random participants is one of the most effective ways to garner a widespread partaking in a survey.


Companies should never stop experimenting with new technology, such as social networking sites and applications. However, the communication methods above are tried and true ways to keep communication flowing between a company and the widest audience possible. Perhaps older methods like the telephone really will become obsolete one day, but some of them are still quite effective.

By-line:
Heather Johnson is a freelance business, finance and economics writer, as well as a regular contributor at Business Credit Cards, a site for business credit card and best business credit card offers. Heather welcomes comments and freelancing job inquiries at her email address
heatherjohnson2323@gmail.com.

Conversations Around Twitter

Wow, I think I've been abusing my subscribers on here lately by not posting anything new or of value. Well, that's about to change. I'm working through a sinus infection right now, on Day 5, hopefully it will be over soon. I wanted to post a few interesting tweets I noticed today that are very relevant to this blog's purpose and audience. If you care about conversational marketing then you'll enjoy these and I'd love to get your feedback on what you think or some other great quotes about this topic.

"Communities don't build themselves nor do they get built. There are always catalysts and champions, but no directors." MissRogue

"I hope Flickr never adds video, sometimes communities are just fine having only one cool object" Blueace

"I'm not into Second Life, but I hope people who live their online personnas in forums and communities will discover SL and move there." Randulo

"SmugMug's employees are simply nicer to people. So are Zooomr's. Which is why both have fanatical communities." Scobleizer

"Communities work like clubs and are closed to many outsiders" - I guess this is why they work at all" NewConversation

"Publics are the communities themselves, I like that idea. especially because it brings it back to value systems" Brunoamaral

These are posts from Twitter.com that I found via MissRogue's tweet and searched in Buzztter.com. These are the very expectations that we have as users and that companies need to be aware of when engaging us with their push marketing tactics. What all of these conversations reveal is that communities that are value-based and have a simple set of features will continue to grow with the help of super-connectors, passionate members who feel the need to spread the community to their own network. You can't control a community, forecast its growth, tell members to spread the word; it just happens. You just better be ready for it.