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Are You Unknowingly Bribing Your Social Media Fans?

Jeff Sexton — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:00:17 +0000

Could “ethical” bribery be setting your business up for failure?

If your company’s social media interactions revolve around advance announcements of sales, special offers and insider-only promo codes – to the point where receiving these things is the primary motivation for your fans and followers – then you’re essentially bribing customers to stay.

In this case, social media merely provides a pleasant, whitewashed cover for the bribery.

Thus, the very activities you’re hoping will improve your relationship with customers might well be actually hurting your reputation with them, making those customers less likely to pay your full price without balking.

This article will reveal four ways to build customer loyalty without bribery.

The Slippery Slope

How did your efforts get so off-track?

The downward slide started when you confused customer retention tactics with building true customer loyalty.

Here’s Harvard’s resident expert on service excellence, Francis Frei, explaining the difference between the two:

Francis Frei

“When companies pay customers to try out their products and services, it’s part of a customer acquisition program. When companies pay customers to remain customers, it’s part of a customer retention program.

When companies invest in activities that increase customers’ willingness to pay, they have a customer loyalty program. When a loyalty program works, it increases the chance that your customers will choose you over a lower-priced competitor.”

In other words:

Retention programs bribe customers with frequent-flyer miles and “buy 10 get 1 free” cards. They add economic incentives for current customers to return for their next purchase. This is hardly a bad thing, but when done too often, it habituates customers to incentives, which promotes economic considerations over brand preference.
Loyalty programs increase brand participation among high-value customers to forge bonds that trump economic decisions. This can mean getting their input on strategic decisions, providing insider-only access to certain products and privileges, and more. After customers have helped design the next-generation widget, they’re emotionally invested in buying and using it. Even more so if, as a privileged insider, they’re provided with early access to those co-created products, or even exclusive access to special products as a sign of recognition for their efforts and input.

So what does this have to do with social media?

With social media, customers wish to interact with each other at least as much as they do with the business. So to create a real customer loyalty program – and the premium price differential that goes with it – you have to create a customer community.

What’s that you say? You already have a community?

What you likely have are thousands of single customers who have given minimal consent and “opt in” to receive communication from you. That’s not a community. Heck, that style of one-way communication isn’t even a relationship.

Fortunately (and as you might expect), an appropriate social media strategy can transform your email list into an actual community.

Here are the 4 key elements to real communities along with the primary ways social media can foster each of them:

#1: Repeated Interaction

If I go months without seeing or talking or cross-posting or interacting with your company in some way, well, you’re probably a pretty peripheral part of my life. The same goes for your customers.

But a sincere email traded back and forth once or twice a week for a couple of weeks in a row changes all that. You’ve gained top-of-mind awareness as a conversational partner. Your company has gone from an “it” to a “person” (or a “thou” for you Buber fans out there). You could rightfully consider me part of your community.

And yet email is an extremely clumsy and intrusive platform for this kind of exchange. Facebook, Twitter, an online forum, a Wiki or even blog comments all represent far superior methods of fostering this kind of day-to-day interaction.

But take note: what you’re looking for is back-and-forth between members, and between your company’s representatives and members. One-off comments and one-way communication won’t cut it. For a dramatic illustration of the difference, just compare Copyblogger’s comment section to your own blog’s comments.

#2: Interaction Involving Built-up Meaning

If your forum members or blog commenters or Twitter followers don’t have inside jokes, community-specific allusions, and their own slang, you probably don’t have a real community. It’s a harsh standard, but it’s the truth.

Unfortunately, you can’t create these things for your community. You can only create an environment that will foster their creation. And the best way to do that is through engaging in projects that matter, which leads us to principle #3…

#3: Actual Consequences of Community Interactions

Something has to be at stake. For communication to move past chit-chat, social grooming, and opinionated bloviating, there has to be a task or a mission or a conflict.

When people work toward a shared goal – when tomorrow’s discussion builds on today’s and so on – then decisions matter. Prior conversations matter. And that’s when allusions, references, inside jokes, and slang build up as a natural result.

To continue with the Copyblogger theme, the whole “third tribe” meme that started off with a simple blog post and evolved into a separate community and learning site is a perfect example of this. Third Tribers know exactly what is meant by that term, and by allusions to James Chartrand’s Underwear.

So to achieve Real Community Elements 2 & 3, you need to come up with a galvanizing goal – a project that people want to be a part of and would be willing to donate their time, efforts, and skills to. Provide the platform(s) for interaction and the galvanizing goal and you’re off to the races.

Seth Godin routinely does this by providing an impetus and platform for meet-ups, collaborative projects and ways for his fans to help him support his book launches.

#4: Separation of Outsiders from Insiders

Back during the initial flap following the iPhone’s barely-two-months-from-launch price drop, Seth Godin suggested that Apple offer early adopters the following considerations:

“Free exclusive ringtones, commissioned from Bob Dylan and U2, only available to the people who already had a phone. (This is my favorite because it announces to your friends – every time the phone rings – that you got in early).”

“Free pass to get to the head of the line next time a new hot product comes out.”

“Ability to buy a specially colored iPod or an iPod with limited-edition music that no-one else can buy.”

Rather than dealing with price drops by providing discounts or store credit, Apple could have provided increased recognition and therefore increased loyalty and willingness to pay a premium to maintain that loyalty and recognition.

Yet despite being one of the clearest paths to high profit margins, most companies fail to do these kinds of things at all, let alone do them through the very platforms and technologies most suited to them. Instead they misuse social media and abuse their brand equity through ill-advised retention strategies.

What Loyalty Programs Does Your Organization Have?

How have you transformed your company’s email list or “group” into a real community? What galvanizing goals have you used to inspire community involvement and crowdsourcing? What special recognition do you give to your brand insiders?

Let us know your thoughts and ideas in the box below.

5 Tips for Finding Time for Social Media

Chris Garrett — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:00:51 +0000

One of the major objections I hear about social media is about time.

Do any of these sound familiar? “Who has time?” “You expect me to do all this on top of my normal duties?” “How do you fit everything in?” … and so on.

I am not going to lie to you. Social media does take time. In fact, time is going to be one of your major hidden costs of doing business on the Internet. And for some of us, that time could be wasted if we are not careful.

You need to watch where your time goes to ensure you’re spending it efficiently and with the desired impact. Here are five tips to help you.

#1: Spend Your Time Intentionally

It’s all too easy to just chit chat, browse and surf, get distracted or feel like we are making progress when really we are avoiding work and using social media “engagement and interaction” as an excuse to procrastinate. There are good conversations and wasteful conversations and you need to decide which is which.

Consider a face-to-face networking event. Do you spend all of your time speaking to one person at that event about the weather, or do you spread yourself around a bit and find new and interesting people to connect with? Are you just hanging out or do you direct your efforts toward a precise tactical aim or specific goal?

You need to know what you are doing and how you are going to measure your success.

How does this help you find time? Well, most businesses and individuals already allocate time for marketing, networking and research. If you know that your social media activities come in under one of those headings, and your efforts in social media are going to achieve equal or better results to other things you could do under those headings, then you are equipped to carve out time to try social media instead.

#2: Carve Out Time Where Social Media Is More Efficient

Because of my social media efforts, I no longer have to pitch, write proposals or go to sales meetings. I have never had to cold-call for my own business, and I do not write competitive bids.

How much time could you save if you didn’t have to do this kind of sales lead generation or closing?

In my previous job, I would have to spend more than six hours in a car just so I could go to one 30-minute sales presentation competing with several other companies with very little differentiation between us. Not only was it soul-destroying and a colossal waste of time, it was actually very ineffective.

I am not saying you will be able to 100% replace your old way of doing things with social media right away, and I would not suggest that is wise even if you could. But you should be able to take an hour or two out of a week to test social media and see how the results look. In fact, combining approaches usually works best, as each technique and medium compounds the results of the others. Reaching prospects through a multi-channel approach is normally much better than the sum of the parts.

The great thing about social media is you can pretty much get involved anywhere and any time.

#3: Use “Dead” Time

How much time do you spend just waiting? I was recently at a conference in Las Vegas and because of the long-haul nature of the travel and the fact that I would be alone much of the time, I did a lot of hanging around and waiting, which I filled with social media. Just think of your average business trip… What do you spend a lot of time doing?

Flights
Taxis
Queues
Departure lounges
Restaurants
Meetings
Hotels
…?

If, however, you have an Internet-connected laptop or smart phone, you can at least use some of this time to stay connected, engage with people, write some content or otherwise go from “hanging around” to being semi-productive. If nothing else, you will feel like you are not all alone in the world!

How long does it take to check your messages and send out a tweet, status update, check out a link, or answer a question? Seconds? Minutes at most?

How many times during the day do you get the odd 10 minutes where you are simply waiting?

Even at my desk I have to sit and wait, watching progress bars as something calculates, prints, renders or uploads. Those are prime “check what is happening in social media” times!

What if you find you have more than a few minutes to spare?

#4: Escape, Bulk-Produce, Store Up and Schedule

On those occasions when you have a good chunk of time, make the best possible use of that time and get a power hour of content produced.

Outline and write a set of blog posts to go out later when you are too busy
Brainstorm and create ideas, mind map your thoughts and generate headlines
Plan for the future, write up an editorial calendar, “most like to meet” list or line up meetings with people with whom you have lost contact
Get organized and make your week more efficient with tasks, to-dos, filing and an empty inbox
Write out some interesting tweets to go out over the next week so you only have to check in and reply each day

One of my friends “escapes” to the coffee shop a couple of times a week and does all his content creation and planning for that week in those few concentrated hours. Being out of the office with zero interruptions (other than the constant stream of fresh latte) means he can bang out several quality items and his brain cooperates, rather than fights against his productivity with distractions and… Ooh, shiny!

#5: Just Relax

My last point is that this is not meant to be a chore. Nobody is testing you, tracking your use of time or holding you to any grading system. It should be useful and it should be fun!

Aim to build a reputation for being helpful and providing value, and most of all being a real human being. Then people will be much more forgiving and understanding. You do not need to be perfect.

If you do not post an article this week, so what? Your Twitter followers might be concerned if you do not appear for a few days, but they are not going to start saying bad things about you if you are too busy to tweet!

For me, social media is primarily social. It is my coffee break. Yes, I do find it a very effective set of tools for my business, but I also deeply appreciate the people who are at the other end of those avatars and tools. If you keep relationships foremost in your mind and do not treat social media as something you have to do or else, you will have much greater success at it!

What do you think? Have you struggled to find time? How do you find time for social media? Please share your comments below…