Social Media Club North Jersey: 5/25/10 Customer Feedback Event

Have you marked your calendars? Have you purchased your tickets? I'm talking Social Media Club North Jersey on 5/25/10 for an event you do NOT want to miss! It's titled “I love you. I hate you. Customer feedback in a social world.” I'm leading the discussion about the dynamics of engaging with customers via social networks.

Here's a link to the press release: How To Manage Social Reputation.

Here are the nitty gritty details on Customer Feedback In a Social World:

+ Date: Tuesday May 25, 2010
+ Time: 8am to 10am
+ Location: Houlihan's in Secaucus

Most important, here is a link to the EventBrite site so you can register to attend “I love you. I hate you. Customer feedback in a social world.” Click on it! You might even still be eligible for the Early Bird special!

To get you thinking about customer feedback in a social world [and there have been some terrific articles circulating, most recently from AdAge re: Boeing and The Right Way to Make Your Social-Media Mea Culpa -hat tip to Toby Bloomberg], here's a link to How Do I? Deal With Negative Comments...

I bet you have other interesting ones to share that you've either experienced personally or encountered. Some that come to mind include [from BRITE '10] Dave Carroll and United Breaks Guitars and Nestle and, from Coverings '10, The Main House which dealt with negative traveler reviews thanks to a groundswell of fan support - hat tip to Veronika Miller at Modenus.

Will you be there? Click on this link to register.

I can't wait to see you!

Devon Valenti, CoPilot Live North America

Meet Devon Valenti. She is marketing manager for ALK Technologies CoPilot Live North America and manages CoPilot Live North America's social media platforms.

More specifically, the CoPilot Live Blog, the CoPilot Live Facebook fan page and the CoPilot Live US Twitter account.

Yes, Devon keeps busy on the social media marketing front, especially since CoPilot Live fans, followers and readers tend to be quite passionate about the brand.

You see, they really care about this GPS navigation application for iPhones and other mobile devices and feel no compunction about sharing their opinions and suggestions. [To learn more about GPS and smartphones, check out this interview with CoPilot Live's David Quin.]

I invited Devon - with whom I've been working since January 2010 - to share with us perspective on how social media fits in with the CoPilot Live brand.

C.B.: Devon, please tell me about yourself.

I’ve been working in various marketing roles for about 7 years. One of the things I love about being a marketer is it never gets dull. There’s always a new and exciting medium that bursts onto to the scene to keep you on your toes. You need to be ready to take on these new mediums, decide if they’re right for your brand and adapt them into your marketing plans. I’ve always been drawn to the online side of marketing so when social media started becoming more popular I was definitely intrigued.

C.B.: What is your role at CoPilot Live?

As the Marketing Manager for North America my key focus is on growing our customer base here in North America, but I also collaborate with our global teams to integrate our marketing initiatives on a global basis. In North America specifically, CoPilot Live and GPS navigation for smartphones aren't as well known as in some of the other markets so we face some unique challenges.

C.B.: Tell me more about CoPilot Live. What exactly is it? How does it work?

CoPilot Live is an award-winning, full-featured GPS navigation app that runs on the iPhone, Android smartphones and Windows Mobile smartphones. CoPilot Live combines voice-guided, turn-by-turn directions with useful real-time information such as live traffic, live fuel prices and live local search to guide you on your way. All of our detailed street maps are stored on your phone—not downloaded each trip--so users don’t need to worry about getting stranded if they lost network coverage and hit a dead spot. It is a global brand and we’re currently offering version 8 of our product.

C.B.: What role do you see social media playing for CoPilot Live?

Social media has played a huge role in CoPilot Live’s success so far and it’s become a major area of concentration for us in all our plans going forward. Our core social media platforms—a blog, Twitter account and Facebook page— serve as a direct link to our customers and are the main way we communicate with them. One of the great things about joining the CoPilot Live team when I did was all of these social media tools were already started, pretty much everyone was onboard and believed that social media was a vital part of our marketing plans. In my situation I had the tools available; now I just needed to work on fine-tuning them to be effective for our brand. This meant really engaging customers and making sure it wasn’t always a one-sided conversation.

C.B.: What have been your biggest surprises or challenges to date?

I think the biggest surprise for me was to see just how fast the overall tone on our sites could change. All of the sudden all I saw were negative comments & conversations across all our sites and I was worried how this was affecting our overall brand favorability. Not only were current customers unhappy with CoPilot Live, but now when a potential customer looks at our social media sites all they see are unhappy customers, which will affect their buying decision. You quickly realize you don’t control social media!

The challenge for us was to decide how to respond to our customers and address the issues they had. As a team we learned a great deal from this experience and it really pushed us to adopt a set of social media guidelines—both internally and externally. As a team we had to decide how we wanted to respond to the different types of comments, what was a reasonable response time and what was the appropriate level of information to disclose.

And just as the name of this blog implies, there are many simple things you can do. Make sure to respond to every comment—good or bad. And listen to what they’re saying. They probably use your product more than you so they’re really the experts! In our case, once we started listening and responding to customer feedback, we were able to turn some of our biggest critics into are biggest fans!

C.B.: What do you love most about social media?

I love that it gives our customers the opportunity to interact with each other. And it happens a lot more than you think. If someone posts a question to Facebook on how to use a specific feature within CoPilot Live, most of the time another user is happy to provide an answer as well as a helpful tip on how to use it. A lot of times this leads to a conversation involving multiple users. Not only is it great to see our CoPilot Live community helping each other out, it makes our job easier as we don’t have to respond to every inquiry that comes in!

C.B.: What tools do you recommend for planning or measuring social media campaigns?

I have found www.tweeteffect.com to be helpful in showing how people react to the different tweets we send out. It gives me insight into what tweets gained followers and what tweets lost us followers. Also www.twitalyzer.com is a great tool for measuring your Twitter account across various metrics, such as impact, engagement, influence and clout. You can view various timeframes to identify trends and even integrate the stats with your Google Analytics account.

Thank you, Devon, for sharing your experiences.

I particularly love hearing how you turned your biggest critics into your strongest fans - by responding to every comment and listening to your customers - and look forward to hearing how it all progresses!

The Carpet and Rug Institute Blog: 6 Month Case Study

In honor of the Carpet and Rug Institute Blog reaching the six-month mark, I thought I would share with you a case study documenting what it has achieved in those 6 months.

Situation:
The Carpet and Rug Institute (CRI) is a nonprofit trade association representing the manufacturers of more than 95 percent of all carpet made in the United States, their suppliers and their service providers with the goal to "help increase consumers’ satisfaction with carpet and to show them how carpet creates a better environment."

What is particularly remarkable about the CRI is that it generates a wealth of high quality actionable research about carpet that is available to consumers, writers, specifiers, builders, contractors and retailers. Unfortunately, the information isn't always easily 'findable' within the CRI website and, as a result, doesn't readily connect with relevant searches.

Problem:
How to cost effectively increase the visibility of the Carpet and Rug Institute's research based resources and counter the myths surrounding carpet?

Solution:
A self-publishing blog platform would enable the CRI to address its key carpet-related topics in an accessible and conversational manner while highlighting relevant research and marketplace activities.

On March 26, 2009, I received approval to start on the CRI Blog.

The CRI Blog published its first post on April 7, 2009. It was 'soft' launched on April 13th, introduced to the CRI Market Issues Committee on April 20th and publicly announced on April 27th. Since launch, we have published two stories per week.

[The CRI Market Issues Committee develops annual goals for the Carpet and Rug Institute and establishes the strategic ground plan for accomplishing them. For example, the MIC identifies the issues and audiences to be addressed for the coming year, and indicates how the marketing budget should be allocated.]

Since launch and as of October 31, 2009, 59 stories have been published all relating to the programs with which the Carpet and Rug Institute is involved. As stated on the CRI Blog, "the Carpet and Rug Institute's job is to go well beneath the surface and prove how our environment for living, working, learning and healing is better - thanks to carpet and rugs. Through science-based research, customer advocacy, environmental stewardship, we serve our members and their customers. CRI initiatives help protect carpet's life and beauty and demonstrate its air quality benefit."

The blog speaks to a range of audiences - consumer, professional and industry - wanting more information about carpet related topics of importance. Stories range from carpet and asthma and allergies, carpet and the environment, carpet and its role in education, carpet recycling, carpet care and maintenance, carpet related research, and carpet benefits. All are editorial or public relations oriented and fall into the following categories:

+ General CRI [Welcome, who's who at CRI...]
+ Shows or events the CRI participates in and why
+ Summaries and links to articles and interviews promoting the CRI
+ Summaries and links to articles bylined by the CRI
+ Rebuttals of articles promoting misinformation about carpet
+ CRI programs: asthma study, government affairs, Seal of Approval program, carpet recycling
+ Showcasing best practices: SOA case studies, Kruse Recycling, CRI member programs

Results:

The top traffic-generating content for the April through October, 2009 timeframe includes:
+ NFT: Scientific Facts Dispel Carpet Myths
+ Proposed HIRE Act Would Mean More Jobs In Home Furnishings Industry
+ CRI Survey of Asthma & Allergy Doctors
+ Carpet Works In Basements
+ Meet Kasey Kruse, Kruse Carpet Recycling
+ Carpet and Formaldehyde: Debunking Urban Legends
+ CARE 2009 Annual Conference & Carpet Recycling
+ The Carpet Fact-checker Files
+ Carpet Cleaning Tips For Dummies: Get Yours Now!
+ Contrary to Health Magazine Headline, Carpet Won't Make You Sick...

In that timeframe, the CRI Blog has generated strong momentum in attracting subscribers: 228 as of 10/31/09 [vs. 25 at the end of April]. Whereas early subscribers came primarily from the immediate industry, new email subscribers come from a wider audience base [e.g., government, floor inspectors,...]. The rate of growth has reached a more sustainable level of 5-7% per month.

Visits to the CRI Blog continue to increase. This is both a function of publishing more content each month and producing high quality content relevant to search queries. The total for the period from April 7 through October 31, 2009 is 5,187 visits. Page views total 7,709 [per Google Analytics].

Per Sitemeter data, the average number of visits per day has increased from 40 in August, to 43 in September and 46 in October. Similarly, page views have increased from 1.4 to 1.6 over the same three months and time spent per visit engaging with CRI content has increased from 1.3 minutes to 2.13 minutes.

At the end of April, the CRI Blog was generating only 10% of its traffic from search engines. That has increased to 64% as of October 31st. The traffic source breakdown for the entire six month period is as follows:

+ 10% direct traffic
+ 39% referring sites
+ 51% search engines

This is significant because it means that a new audience, beyond industry insiders and those already familiar with the Carpet and Rug Institute, is becoming aware of the CRI and its information about carpet. The CRI Blog is successfully increasing the visibility of valuable CRI research based resources.

ROI Calculation:
In August 2008, in my submission to the Forrester Groundswell Awards, I included an ROI analysis for the Carpetology Blog [which I updated in Carpetology Blog Case Study]. Applying similar logic to the Carpet and Rug Institute Blog, I came up with the following:

From Sitemeter, stats as of 10/31/09 indicate:
+ Total visits since launch = 5,637 averaging 2.13 minutes
+ Total page views since launch = 8,873 [1.6 pages average per visit]

[Note: Sitemeter and Google Analytics data do not exactly match up.]

From Google Analytics, 97 legitimate sources referred traffic to the CRI Blog.*

ROI Calculation
- The costs associated with the CRI Blog consist primarily of Simple Marketing Now fees for strategy, editorial support and data analysis. The blogging platform - Blogger - is free. We purchased several domain names. Bethany Richmond and James Beach, the primary content creators, have assumed responsibility for the blog as part of their CRI job accountabilities.

-->Total blog related costs for 6 months are under $20,000.

- Benefits include, based on conservative value assumptions:
+ Advertising value: 8,873 daily page views * $2.50/thousand = $22.18
+ PR value: 44 stories specifically promoting CRI programs & members * $500 = $22,000
+ Editorial value: 15 stories with interviews or specific article references * $500 each = $7,500
+ Word-0f-mouth value: 97 traffic sources * $100 each = $9,700
+ Research value: assume feedback from search terms/site referrals and conversations generated as a result of the blog is the equivalent of 1 focus group worth $8,000

-->Total blog related benefits for 6 months = $47,222.18

[or $47,219.27 if using Google Analytics page view numbers]

Total ROI for 6 months: significantly positive!

* Note: unfortunately Technorati no longer tracks blog reactions. I have substituted Google Analytics data instead.

This ROI calculation does not include quantification for the Noteworthy Successes described below.

From a practical perspective, the CRI Blog has successfully countered misrepresentation from Health Magazine, a traditional shelter publication. As Bethany Richmond, CRI Communications manager, reported in CRI Communciations Manager Bethany Richmond Interviewed on TalkFloor.com. More specifically "in these two blog posts about how carpet was treated unfairly in an article that appeared in Health magazine, the blog posts developed a higher ranking on Google than the original article: Contrary to Health Magazine Headline, Carpet Won't Make You Sick and Carpet Fact-checker Files."

The Carpet and Rug Institute Blog has kept digitally visible a critical article by Werner Braun, chairman of CRI, titled "Scientific Facts Dispel Carpet & Asthma Myths" published in the April 2009 issue of National Floor Trends magazine [see NFT: Scientific Facts Dispel Carpet & Asthma Myths]. Without the blogpost, the original article would have faded from view.

The CRI Blog gives permanent digital life to all of the articles, ideas and research reports that the CRI submits to outside resources and that would otherwise become inaccessible. As a result, the blog remains a 24/7 digital deterrent to misinformation and disinformation about carpet and the benefits it offers.

The CRI Blog has made possible an evergreen digital brochure listing CRI Seal of Approval success stories. Not only have the success stories generated goodwill and increased awareness for an aspect of the carpet owning process that truly benefits from fully understanding and appreciation how best to care for and maintain carpet, but it has also led to signigificant cost savings. Imagine the cost of creating a traditional brochure listing those case studies. Not to mention that the minute a new case study opportunity arises, the brochure becomes out-of-date and that most of us prefer to refer to relevant information digitally. Paper copies have become wasteful from more than one perspective.

It has also led to the creation of a CRI YouTube Channel to better communicate via video the benefits associated with carpet cleaning best practices. Those videos are being used in the CRI Blog [e.g., see Jet Stream Grill CRI SOA Success Story On Video].

Last point: in a Google search for 'carpet blog,' the CRI Blog comes up on page one of search results.

Final Thoughts:
In six months' time, the Carpet and Rug Institute Blog has demonstrated its worth as a cost effective self-publishing platform for raising the visibility of the CRI's research based resources. It is a natural marketing and communications tool for broadening the reach of the CRI's messages.

Given the consistent and positive growth trends, the strong positive ROI and the effectiveness of the CRI Blog in counteracting carpet's urban myths, imagine what the next 6 months have in store assuming continued commitment to consistently publishing high-quality and relevant content.

Congratulations James, Bethany, and the entire Carpet and Rug Institute on reaching the six month mark! I can't wait to report on the CRI Blog's one year anniversary!

If you have any questions, just let me know.


Related Post on the CRI Blog: Whittemore Discusses CRI Blog on FloorDaily.net from 6/10/09

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Whittemore Discusses CRI Blog on FloorDaily.net

Are you hearing more about blogs and social media? Do you want to learn more? Perhaps the interview I did last week with Kemp Harr on FloorDaily.net will answer some of your questions. You see, Kemp asked that I help his listeners understand what social media is about - a subject I'm only too happy to discuss! Not only did he ask about blogs in general, but he gave me an opportunity to discuss the CRI Blog -- remember CRI and Simple Marketing Now launch Carpet and Rug Institute Blog? -- more specifically.

The interview is 9 minutes long.

I discuss what are blogs: self-publishing web-based platforms that allow individuals and organizations to post articles and stories that are relevant to a reader base on a regular basis.

The value of blogs: blogs allow you to take part in the conversations happening around your brand, company, industry or hot topics. If you take part in the conversation [remember, markets are conversations], you can learn from the interaction and help shape the discussion. If you don't, you abdicate participation in both the talk and any kind of resulting action.

For the CRI - and chief blog contributors Bethany Richmond and James Beach - the CRI blog means being able to highlight carpet related research and resources [i.e., that combat myths around carpet and allergies or explain how carpet improves learning in schools] that are otherwise difficult to find, and also to translate the information into something meaningful and relevant to readers.

Bethany posted a terrific writeup [see CRI Blog Consultant Christine Whittemore Interviewed on Floor Daily and says nice things about me, too. Thank you, Bethany!] with links to the Health Magazine example I refer to in the interview.

Kemp asked how to find blogs: start with Google blog search and consider looking at Technorati, a blog search engine which identifies a blog's authority or credibility [a result of regular posting or publishing, relevance and links from other sources]. Another is Alltop which organizes blogs into related topics - it's a very cool site.

If you'd like more information, you might check out a previous post, "Blogs are now mainstream media.", which includes the slides from a recent social media 101 presentation.

Jim Gould from the Floor Covering Institute emailed me saying that he "thought [the interview with Kemp] was outstanding. Not only did I learn a lot but I think I am starting to understand this stuff." Yeah and thank you, Jim!

As it relates to the CRI blog, I'm very pleased with its progress. The first post went live on April 7th, 2009. Since then, Bethany and James, who have done a terrific job embracing the medium, have published 19 blogposts. All help tell the Carpet and Rug Institute story and increase its visibility and relevance to anyone in the marketplace interested in learning more about carpet and the environment, carpet and allergies, carpet and learning environments, and generally how carpet truly enhances the living environment.

To highlight the blog's progress, here is the status report I presented on June 1st on the CRI Blog's first two months.

May09CRIblogUpdate

Uploaded on authorSTREAM by cbwhit | Upload your own presentation

As of yesterday, the blog had 106 subscribers! Very cool.

It's still very early in this blog's life, but I'm looking forward to witnessing how it develops, discovering which stories particularly resonate with readers, and hearing the resulting conversation.

If you haven't already, you might visit the Carpet and Rug Institute Blog. If you like what you see, or have ideas for topics you don't see, do let Bethany and James know. They'd love to hear from you.

Congratulations to the CRI Blog and Bethany and James! And, thank you Kemp Harr at FloorDaily for the opportunity to discuss a subject I greatly enjoy!

If you have more questions, please don't hesitate to ask...

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