Amy’s Baking Company: Social Media Disaster or Pure Marketing Genius?

May 17, 2013 by Leave a comment

So is the old saying true “even bad press is good press”? If you haven’t seen the latest viral social media meltdown from Amy’s Baking Company it is nothing short of entertaining like watching a train wreck. Clearly all the buzz in the #SocMed industry is what not to do when dealing with critics but I have a slightly different point of view. Is this a disaster or pure marketing genius. I don’t know about you but I can’t wait to visit and get insulted and kind of reminds me of the “Seinfeld: Soup Nazi” episode.

Clearly, this is not the way to treat your customers but imagine if this was all on purpose and or staged much like many of the viral videos are now on the intranet. If this is all an act then it is pure marketing genius as they now have more than 86,000 likes on their Facebook page and wouldn’t doubt if their business has increased since this meltdown began last week. Interesting as I just now check they are claiming that their Facebook page was hacked, which is entirely possible but again how convenient to be able to create such a buzz and then deny and remove any posts that supposedly occurred.

Obviously, I don’t advocate for cursing your customers but you have to admit that being a little edgy has it’s appeal. The Dollar Shave Club did this brilliantly without offending any potential or existing customers

I created a series of augmented reality videos that was a spoof on “Nacho Libre” about 5 years ago and some narrow minded pinhead in our company said they were offended and it was shut down by legal after 800 views in 4 hours… I’m tempted to resurrect it out of spite as I think it was pure marketing genius. As it becomes harder to tell what is real and what is staged anymore on the internet it will be interesting to see if this type of colossal disaster becomes normal for social media marketing and then have the convenience of plausible deniability and blame it on the hackers…

what are your thoughts?

Filed under Social Media, Marketing Strategy, B2C Marketing, Viral Marketing, Facebook Tagged with , , , , ,

Alive with #Jive 6.0: Welcome to the New #EMC Community Network

March 4, 2013 by Leave a comment

The New #EMC #Community Network is live and to quote our Vice President Joseph Biden,”This is a big freakin deal”. I like to think that our team continues to lead the industry in community innovation as we were the first to adopt #Badgeville Game Mechanics for increasing member motivation and engagement and now being the first to upgrade to Jive 6.0 and feature the Activity Stream as the home page. For the last 4 months the Community and our IT team has been working long hours and weekends to accelerate the evolution of the EMC Community Network and am very happy to announce that it is LIVE and looking marvelous if I might say. There are many new features which you can learn more about via the community training videos and quick start guides but the one that I am most excited about is the Activity Stream. This provides members the ability to follow people, places and content of items they like and consume the information in a social stream (similar to Facebook or Twitter) rather than having to search and investigate what new discussions have been created.

Go Full Throttle with ECN

Change is never easy and this update is fairly disruptive in how our members consume content but necessary to modernize the user experience, create a better integrated community with our website EMC.COM and lay the foundation for providing Mobile capabilities.

This is the combination of efforts by all the community managers, and project teams and has been the best collaborative experience of my career. So, Thanks to everyone that supported this initiative and look forward to seeing your engagement in the ECN.

Well Done!

Filed under Community Engagement, Community Strategy, Gamification, Marketing Strategy, Web Strategy Tagged with , , , , , ,

Sneak Peek at the New ECN Community

March 1, 2013 by 1 Comment

The moment has come after 4 months of work we are ready to cut over to the new #ECN experience and thought I would share a sneak peek at want to expect very soon. This is that fastest we have ever rolled out an upgrade and in addition to that we decided to include a data center migration and new design experience just for fun. I have the greatest IT team in the world who really helped overcome some challenges to get us ready for go live. So enjoy and stay tuned as there will be a new modern experience for the ECN very soon.

Filed under Community Engagement, Community Strategy, Social Media Tagged with , , ,

Upgrading to Jive 6.0: Another Step in the Social Journey

January 22, 2013 by 1 Comment

About four months ago we were asked what our community teams needed to accelerate our plans to upgrade to the latest version of the Jive Software platform and redesign the experience. The answer basically came back that we needed an “All Hands On Deck” approach from all teams, including vendors. We outlined our plans and began setting up weekly sprints and daily standup meetings to accelerate the design, upgrade and integration customizations to the community to integrate with the website. So while the design team and our agency Razorfish started interviewing the community members to solicit design feedback, the IT team began working closely with Jive Software professional services team to get development environments setup and timeline for integrating the design, single sign on, security and other integrations that are business requirements.

So, far so good but this is the fastest we have ever rolled out an upgrade not to mention a totally new experience, design and functionality. We are down to the last few weeks and we have hit a few items that tripped us up primarily due to some of our own internal integrations. One was changes to the web services to the Jive 6.0 platform from the 4.5.6 version. We have several other applications that are leveraging community conversations and those changes broke some of the integrations with the upgrade testing. The other item was also primarily our own internal integrations and that was our single sign-on. The good bad and ugly is that we have have successfully grown our community activity month over month by 10-20% and upward of 66% YoY. This is fantastic but it is pushing the limits of our little SSO design and now really need to come up with a better solution that not only supports the community requirements but also deliver a single sign-on registration experience across any digital asset. This way when anonymous visitors come to the website, download a white paper and then want to engage in a discussion on the community or search the tech support knowledge base they don’t need a login for every different platform. That experience should be seamless and we are starting to scope out the backend technology that will allow us to provide the type of experience. The third item that kind of delayed us was just implementing the new design and making it functional. We are still working on that and probably will be right up until we go live.

The cool thing is we have introduced product category landing pages which surface all communities around a particular technology, i.e. backup and recovery, storage, security, virtualization etc… So, members don’t have to go to a different community to get support and another for beta productions, and another for best practice solutions… One community page with all communities should help improve the overall navigation experience and help expose content quicker to the user. What we learned is that we needed graphics to build these pages out. Also, when you browse places in Jive 6.0 (and 5.0 as well I guess) all communities appear in a tile view by default. So, if you don’t want all your communities to look like a single default image you need to create some new icons to create a pleasing viewing experience otherwise it looks incomplete.

One other item that we didn’t realize until we had our testing environment up an running is that any change to the menu navigation you may have made wouldn’t be included in the Jive translated resource files. So, if you are customizing the menu and not going with OOTB (Out of the box) functionality you might want to get a team setup to start looking at the translations to ad to the resource file.

I do have to say that our vendors Jive and Razorfish have been very supportive during this process but when you move quick there is always a greater change of making a mistake or overlooking something that has downstream impact. We put a few patches and fixes in this weekend but there are still many things to accomplish before we can release to the general public. We have a great team though and confident we will get it done.

Filed under Community Engagement, Marketing Strategy, Web Strategy Tagged with , , , ,

Community Members Buy 48% More!

January 17, 2013 by Leave a comment

A bold statement for sure if I wasn’t confident in the results and the exercise our team went through. Getting funding for social business initiatives is never easy and I learned this many years ago that until you can associate revenue to your initiative you will never see an incremental investment to further your programs. So, you need to link your social engagement activity to booked revenue in order to come up with a measurable ROI and justification.

My initial research was based on new community registrants over six months in the first half of 2012. Community members that had registered with the community were associated to their respective company where possible mainly by using their email domain however, you will have to clean up the data to exclude the gmail, Comcast, yahoo accounts. Once that list was compiled then we were able to compare the average purchase price of those companies who had members in the community to those companies who did not. This allowed us to conclude that customers with members in a community had an average purchase price 48% higher than those customers who were not engaged in the community. I have talked a little about the Amazon model before so think about it this way. How do we, as consumers buy?

We, as consumers, typically start with researching a solution to a particular challenge. So, we search the internet for items that we think we need to address that problem. Once we think we have identified a product that fits our needs, we want to validate that the purchasing decision and confirm this is indeed the right choice. So, we look to others or “Peers” who may have already purchased that product and have written a review. I may find out that the product I wanted might have bad support, isn’t reliable or maybe just wrong for my use case. However, other reviews within discussion forums might recommend another solution and advice on how to improve it. For example, if I am looking to buy a camera my research might lead me to selecting a digital SLR with a 50mm zoom lens. But I still may not know what brand is the most reliable so I engage peers for reviews and recommendations. Once I have confirmed my selection, I will likely want accessories to go along with that camera; say, a tripod, lens cleaners, case, batteries or larger memory card. Suddenly, my original camera purchase just became 48% more because community peers and reviews have made me more informed and educated about the particular solution. Because of this engagement  I have established a level of trust with that peer and take their recommendations into consideration.

So, While my research can’t establish exactly why community members purchase 48% more there is enough evidence to conclude that community members are more educated on your company’s products, are engaged with other peers that are collaborating to solve the same challenge and then share best practices on what is needed to help improve on the solution. I think this is typically referred to as “product drag”. Those who may buy one product will look to buy additional support, services, add-ons and accessories to further compliment the solution they have selected. And that they selected because a brand advocate (not a sales/marketing person) helped validate their decision and ultimately shorten the sales cycle. The next exercise I am going to measure is match the length of the buying cycle for those companies who have community members versus those companies who don’t. My assumption is there will be a correlation and enough data to demonstrate the buying cycles are shorter with those who engage with other community peers for solution validation.

Filed under Community Engagement, Content, Executive Leadership, lead automation, Marketing Communication, Marketing Strategy, Measurement, Search Marketing, Social Media, Web Strategy Tagged with , , , ,

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