how to manage your brand when customers control the message

One of the highlights of the Marketing to Online Communities 2007 conference is the session by Thor Muller on "How to Manage Your Brand When Customers Control the Message."

Thor is the CEO of Satisfaction, a startup delivering "people-powered customer service for absolutely everything."

He cited some great examples of episodes on the web that illustrate where a company was forced to deal with customers controlling the message (when the companies' fortress mentality was strained to respond):

"the Streisand effect": the JL Kirk & Associates blog post that kicked up a storm when JLK&A sent a cease-and-desist in response to the negative review of the poster's interaction with JLK&A. Is old news by now, but worth the repeat visit as a reminder of what not to do in this blog-enabled world.

YouTube videos illustrating good and bad ways to react to customer control of the message

• Disney (good): Dr Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker
• JetBlue CEO Neeleman's (good) Our Promise to You
• Dell (not-so-good): customer service call

Brilliant observation by Thor: "every company has a community, they're just trapped, bound and gagged, in the trouble ticket system."

How many companies are you trapped in?

AOL's approach to marketing to communities

Presented by Marcien Jenckes, VP community brands at AOL

Things critical to deliver to a community:

1. Communities belong to their participants (not to publishers or advertisers). As hosts, you own the right to facilitate interaction, but the community belongs to the people inside
2. Help with concept of identity: knowing who the participants are and giving them the ability to manage their identities online
3. Ability to build/manage social graph: building a list of all the people important to you, who are relevant to the topics and interests to you
4. creating facilitation platforms: communities are exchanges, facilitating liquidity between people to assist with the exchange of ideas (at AOL: via chat, blogs, discussion forums, etc)

AOL's Advice to Marketers
A. Know what you want to achieve in business terms first
B. Three buckets where can take advantage of commty

1. Get over yourselves, tap into the rest of the world -- use community to get leverage, organize around your brand/ideas important to you
2. Organize people around causes that they and (most importantly) you care about, and commit to it
3. Leverage the talkers and the multiplier effect: get into the viral effects of community by tapping into the power of the natural leaders/communicators within the community

Blogged with Flock

measuring marketing success

Watching David Dunne of Edelman PR present at the Marketing to Online Communities 2007 audience and he noted that the pent up desire for people to communicate is finally getting matched by the capabilities of technology and we're seeing the resultant explosive growth.

However, technology is now giving consumers the opportunity to avoid marketers' messages as never before.

So, what should marketers do to reach their audience?

• watch, listen and engage
• become great storytellers
• become great story gatherers
• activate the evangelists (your biggest fans)
  

And, an innovative digital strategy requires an innovative approach to measurement:

Traditional measurements:

• impressions
• awareness
• video views
• media impressions

Today's measurements:

• site traffic
• time spent,
• pages viewed,
• repeat visits,
• open rates (email),
• click through rates,
• registrations,
• search engine visibility,
• downloads

Future measurements:

• share of conversations, 
• frequency of mentions, 
• participation of brand in forums,
• ratings and reviews of products,
• sentiment,
• return on involvement