Customer Advocacy and community marketing

One of the areas that I work on is customer advocacy. In particular, Metia (the company that I work for) designs, implements and manages customer advocacy programs for a number of high-profile tech companies.

We've recently been working with Bill at the Customer Reference Forum and Jeremiah over at PodTech, talking about customer advocacy 2.0 (that's pretty rich really, cause most people didn't know there was a CA 1.0).

I've long thought that customer advocacy is just one end point of the word of mouth marketing activities that have become so popular today. In particular, customer references are asking to be integrated with social media. If one of your customers is blogging positively about you, then why aren't you aware of it, or asking them if they'll help you in other ways? My gut feeling is that most reference professionals don't know what's being blogged about them. The "community managers" within the company might be keeping on top of the blogs, but I haven't seen much communication going on between the community managers and the reference professionals. Perhaps I'm wrong? I'd love to hear that this is already happening.

Maybe the reference professionals are already hanging out with the community guys? Jeremiah's posted a question on his blog to see if this is true. I'm really interested in the results.

What is customer advocacy?

I've been doing some work with a tech company in silicon valley, helping them to review and improve their customer reference program. I've interviewed a number of people around the organization, and every person that I speak to has a different take on what constitutes a customer reference.

When I'm planning a new system, I use three different terms:

Customer Advocacy: A programmatic approach to using the positive experience of your customers to support your sales and marketing activities through references and evidence. In some programs, Customer Advocacy is also extended to deal with neutral and negative customers – aiming to convert neutrals into promoters, and negatives to neutrals.

Customer Reference: Using a customer's time to discuss the benefits that they gained from the product/service. This may include a visit from a prospective customer, a phone call, press interview, analyst call or conference appearance.

Customer Evidence: This is the recorded material that results from a customer agreeing to be a reference. This may include logo use, quote, case study, video, podcast etc.

Why do I separate them in this way? Mainly because references and evidence are typically managed by different groups of people. References are typically controlled by the sales organization, and evidence is typically owned by marketing (with the blessing of sales).

If you're producing a system to support your customer advocacy efforts you should start by definining which types of advocacy you want to manage.

Organic chocolate ice cream!

I was over at Google's mountain view campus on Friday, and got to experience their legendary food. It lived up to all expectations - even their vegetarian offerings were amazing. I particularly fell in love with their organic chocolate ice cream! I can see why their engineers would never want to go home.

Now this iLike

I've only just discovered this wonderful little plugin for iTunes and Windows Media Player called iLike. It posts your music playing history to a community site that you can then use to find new music, or simply see what your mates are listening to.

 If you're at all interested, my recent plays are all here.

Software as a Service or Software plus Service?

At the risk of contradicting myself, I think Ray Ozzie is onto something with the Software plus Service approach. 

One of the current issues with SaaS for desktop apps is the lack of support for disconnected users. I don't think it's any coincidence that Google apps doesn't have a PowerPoint equivalent yet - how many times have you made last minute changes to your presentation on the plane

"Software plus services" seems to be a sensible choice for desktop applications at this point in time. However, I suspect this will change once we have broadband connections from our aisle seats.

<update> There's an interesting announcement today from Corel, who seem to have already launched a hybrid software plus service application.

Building an intranet through mutual respect and understanding

I'd just like to go on record: Toby Ward talks sense (well most of the time anyway). In a recent post, Toby discusses the language barrier between two groups who frequently get involved in intranet deployments - IT and Internal Comms (Toby actually uses HR as his example). I've had similar experiences with IC and IT, and the relationship between them can make or break a project.

However, I don't think it's enough for the communicators to put themselves in the shoes of the other party. Mutual respect fills in a big part of the communication gap, but there also needs to be recognition of the strengths and weaknesses of each group.

In general I've found that Internal Comms are the visionaries and IT are the pragmatists. The groups can work really well together as long as they play to each other's strengths. I've seen intranet projects go badly off-track when the visionaries are expected to produce GANTT charts or the techies lead the design.

All I would say is that completing an effective intranet without both teams is pretty much impossible. So having everyone involved from the start, and defining roles up-front is the first step towards the perfect intranet.

The other thing that I've found is that most of my clients (IC and IT) aren't prepared for the level of detail that's involved in putting together an intranet, but that's a subject for another post.

Google caught in a hailstorm?

With the launch of Google hosted applications that compete with Microsoft Office, it seems natural to look at the history of hosted apps to see if Google Apps will really threaten Microsoft. Mary Jo Foley  compares Google Apps to Microsoft's 2001 hailstorm service. She has some good points, and anyone launching a hosted service will face the IT department's resistance to letting go of company data. However, I also think that things have changed significantly in the 6 years since hailstorm and I think that Google will get a much better reception in 2007. So why do I think things will be different this time around?

• The need to share information outside of the corporate network is bigger than ever. In order to do business, companies need to communicate quickly and efficiently with their geographically dispersed colleagues, suppliers, partners and customers. We all know that emailing large spreadsheets around is a poor way to manage information and an efficient alternative will be welcomed by information workers.


• SAAS has also become part of the IT manager's scorecard. The use of portals, and application servers means that they are used to working with data that sits outside of their control, so the tight grip on company data is loosening slightly.


• There are clear precedents for outsourced applications (the obvious one being salesforce.com, whose subscribers only really started to take off in 2004/5).


• And finally, I've seen a huge change in the way that IT is adopted by companies. BlackBerries, iPods and RSS all began their life in the hands of the end-user, and IT departments had to adapt to the ever increasing demands of their clients. IT departments are becoming more service oriented (I wonder if this has anything to do with the increased offshoring of IT). And if they're not service oriented, then users are willing to go elsewhere. (I've just got off the phone from a client who was complaining that it took 6 months for their internal IT team to update the fields of one of her databases. She's now looking to outsource it (and host it externally) so that she can get more responsive updates.

That's not to say that Google Apps is going to have it easy. Attitudes towards enterprise outsourcing are changing, as the business benefits become clearer, but there still a long way to go before the default choice is to rent your application over the internet.