Sensei Blogs

Announcing New Book: Influence Marketing, by Sam Fiorella & Danny Brown

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

The hype around social influence has been circling around me like a cyclone for a few years now, online, in-print and in-person. I’ve been open and honest with my views on the challenges with the current methodology being used by marketers and software providers alike until someone asked me to “put your money where your mouth is.”

And so I am.

This spring Que Publishing, a publishing imprint of Pearson, will release Influence Marketing: How to Create, Manage and Measure Brand Influencers in Social Media Marketing coauthored by Danny Brown and me!

Danny and I will move the conversation beyond social influence scoring and give you a start-to-finish blueprint for making influence marketing work in your organization.

Featuring case studies, empirical evidence, digital workshops and much, much more, Influence Marketing is based on successful campaigns that Danny and I have jointly and independently executed in this space. We look forward to sharing more with you in early January!

In the meantime, you can take advantage of the Cyber Monday week-long offers on Amazon.

Reserve Your Copy Today!

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Get Off Your Ass; Identify Your Own Influencers

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 00:00:00 GMT

It’s becoming clear that social influence scoring is not going away anytime soon – or ever – and so the debate over the validity of such scores and the businesses that provide them rage on. I know I’ve contributed my fair share of thoughts, dialogue, and rants on this subject and I have to say I’m rather tired of the same old debate. I’ve yet to read an article that satisfactorily explains how any software-generated score in isolation accurately dictates the real influence of an individual to measurably impact the decision-making of an audience based solely on their activity across a few social networks. Yet the providers of these scores remain in the spotlight; in fact they’re multiplying across business silos and industry verticals.

So what have we learned or accomplished?

Nothing. People are still gaming online engagement to increase their scores, marketers and HR professionals are still basing decisions on these scores and brands are still distributing product samples to those with high scores. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

So maybe it’s time we change the focus?

Can we change the public discourse from what a social influence score is or isn’t and, understanding that this virus is incurable, focus on how to successfully use it to our advantage? What would that look like?

We know, for example, that “social celebrities” who work the digital channels to get a lot of attention for their heavy social chatter and activity are popular – maybe even famous – due to their many thin connections that rank them highly by social influence scoring platforms. So if you define “influence” as the ability to amplify a message across social channels, then I guess you can call them influential and we can close the book on this discussion. However, from experience these amplifiers don’t impact short-term decision-making, which is true influence. Is there something the score can tell us anything that is important?

Can social celebrities have real influence? Of course they can. I consider bloggers who elicit many reactions as witnessed through thoughtful commentary, phone conversations and subscriptions among their audience, real influencers. There’s a dramatic difference between these two. Someone with 50,000 Twitter followers, lots of retweets and blog mentions but with little to no engagement on that blog is less influential than someone with only 5,000 Twitter followers, fewer retweets and blog mentions but consistent and meaningful debate among a targeted community within his or her blog. Most social scoring platforms – as they work today – would elevate the former with a higher score and deem them more “influential.”

Mapping Influence Marketing

What’s missing from the ongoing debate around the value of social influence scoring is the potential value in mapping the many degrees of social connections and relationships. Some are thin and vanity-driven; others are deep and meaningful, as is also the case in the traditional media and offline realms. Understanding the degree of relationship between individuals and groups is key to understanding the nature of the influence they might exert.

For example, I often tune into the Fox News broadcast when travelling though the US or watch it online when out of the US. I tune in enough to be one of the people that they claim to be a “regular viewer” and a data point in the rating statistics they use to sell advertising space. However, while I consider myself a “conservative,” the reason I tune into Fox News is the same reason I sometimes tune into America’s Next Top Model or slow down to gawk at a car wreck. I’m fascinated by the spectacle, the ugliness of humanity. I don’t tune in to educate myself or seek information in my decision-making but to gawk, a sick guilty pleasure. Fox News data crunchers and advertisers consider me someone they influence but do they? Maybe, but certainly not in the manner they intend.

Analyzing the Data

Until factors such as degree of relationship, context of engagement and sentiment of commentary are successfully interpreted and analyzed by software, the onus is on YOU to do the work. Does this make social scoring platforms worthless? No. Can they measure the nuances required? No. As I discovered in an interview with Andrew Grill from Kred.com, progress is being made. In the meantime, get off your ass and do the work.

Look for companies like Jugnoo or Kred that provide the raw data around audience engagement and use it as one metric among others you collect, vet and analyze to understand who has true influence over you target audience. I’m talking about the power to influence a purchase by a prospect, not the power to amplify a generic message to a loosely identified group of people.

Mama always told me “if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.” She is one smart lady.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Customer Experience is Influence

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(2 Jeff Wilson) — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Closing out my series on the YinYang of Customer Experience (CX) is a brief argument that your best form of influence on new and existing customers is your business' customer experience. Well designed, relevant and executed with decent timing, you exert tremendous influence over the decision-making cycle of your customers.

The issue most enterprise’s have is that their CX is schizophrenic and fractured; at any time delivering from a terrible experience to a great one at each stage of the lifecycle. The resulting dysfunction leads to poor influence and ultimately a crap shoot for customer business.

So how do we fix this? How do we create an influential experience that drives positive results for the enterprise and the customer?

The bonus here is that a good experience is far more likely to create a customer advocate than anything else.

Well Designed

The biggest challenge to influence within CX is that it is designed tactically, not strategically. How do you design excellent event, web, or social experiences in isolation from each other and from other departments tasked with continuing the experience past marketing into sales, service, and support?

Strategic. Big picture design with tactical experiences woven into it to create seamless CX across enterprise.
Integrated. Integrated not just with other tactics, but with business process and goals embedded to ensure easier management and sustainable results.
Aligned. Alignment with the customer decision-making process rather than forcing them to align with your selling process.
Customer centric. Based on their needs and preferences, not yours.
Flexible. Able to shift and adapt according to changing customer, internal and market situations.

Relevancy is Situational

Last year I wrote about how situations are the most powerful form of influence we have been able to recognize. A situation drives urgency and decisions more so than any other form of influence. The more we can identify and align our CX to situations that are affecting customers, the more likely we are to benefit from them.

Identifying situations early. This means not just keeping a vigilant watch on the market, but also on the world around the customer.
Creating adaptive “canned” situational experiences you can quickly deploy. In my article I refer to them as umbrella, shelter and ark experiences that are designed to answer to specific customer situations.
Scenario building is critical to quick and accurate deployment.
Organizational alignment between customer-facing departments to ensure the customer gets that seamless, positive experience.

Good Timing

Just like comedy, selling something is all about good timing. You have poor timing you risk being too early or late with the punch line and that matters even more than ever now. So how does timing factor in to influence?

Timing is the key to relevance. Execute too late and you’ve wasted your time and resources.
Situations ebb and flow therefore a constant finger on the pulse of a situation enables you time to prepare and understand your role within the customer’s life or business.
Always be prepared. Preparation eliminates confusion and resource allocation issues.
Executive support of a strategic plan ensures you have overcome a key challenge to proper execution.

What Are Your Goals?

If your goals are near term sales and that’s it, then continue business as usual. If however, you have an eye to the longer picture and realize that now, more than ever, customers are the key to long term success, then it’s time to take a hard look at the influence power of your CX.

There is no doubt that a good to great CX creates far more customer advocates than a medium to poor experience. And of course customer advocates create more and better customers.
The great thing is the power to influence them has been in your hands all along. All you need to do is start to action upon it.

The YinYang of Customer Experience

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(2 Jeff Wilson) — Mon, 09 Jul 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Over the centuries, philosophers, scientists and poets alike have tried to capture the definition of an inexplicable force that governs much of our existence.

Via theory, formula, and verse, their attempts to give it some form we could all begin to understand took shape in powerful words that describe a natural force that affects kings and queens as equally as it affects us lowly peasants.

Whether you call it Karma, fortune, fate or Yin Yang – it purpose is to bring natural balance. Its definition is elegant, powerful and simple…

“Yin and Yang are not opposing forces (dualities), but complementary opposites that interact within a greater whole, as part of a dynamic system. Everything has both yin and yang aspects as light cannot exist without darkness and vice-versa, but either of these aspects may manifest more strongly in particular objects, and may ebb or flow over time.” - Source Wikipedia

When we open our minds to the possibility that this force exists, we must also accept the notion that it is part of and affects everything. For the purposes of this article I want to suspend the notion of a moral dimension (good and bad) to Yin Yang and stick to the Taoist definition of natural balance.

Over the past fifteen years I have explored and mapped out this theory into a methodology. During this time I have discovered many sets of balancing forces that ebb and flow through the customer experience.

Take the following set of factors which affect how and what we engage with and what we measure within a customer experience.

Emotion and Logic – The most powerful balance of YinYang in any customer experience. As human beings, we are governed by these two factors in every single relationship and every single decision. Ultimately the resulting balance of these two factors dictates whether they become a customer.

Touch – How and when we engage is critical in the overall experience. The balance here is the situation that drives the customer to us and we have enabled them to access us.

Reference – How did they come to find about us is determined by a mix of personal experience and the experience of others; the foundation of Word of Mouth Marketing.

Measurement – How and what we measure is critical to improving the sustainability and potency of our customer experience. While numbers and scoring tell us much, it is only half the story.

While balance may seem easy to comprehend and at times implement, it is the combination of many sets of balancing factors that create a complex, multi-tiered customer experience. Some of the other sets of balancing factors are:

Adding to this complexity is the quotient of each at any given stage in a customer experience. For example, when is it best to invest heavily in emotion or logic within a customer experience? Weighted poorly you can drive a customer away, delay a decision indefinitely or even worse create vocal brand critics.

CX without Balance

So what happens when one of these factors, say a Yin is missing and we only have a Yang? We effectively create a gap in the customer experience, a weakness in the forces that govern the overall experience, determine actions or lack thereof.

Take an experience with no emotional design and high logic; a common occurrence for many B2B companies who believe they are selling to businesses rather than people. Without planned emotional design or the Yin of emotion, you have lost the ability to effectively guide your customer fully through the customer experience. Moreover you risk unplanned or negative emotional responses and the delivery of a poor experience.

Looking Forward

There is much still to discover and share on this methodology. I will be continuing to explore this methodology in a series of articles over the next several months. The next stages of our journey will delve into…

- The YinYang of emotion and logic in the CX and how we can design to promote faster decisions and higher conversion.
- The role of influence within the customer experience, including creating and managing the many influencing factors in and around the customer.
- The value of the employee experience and how it can ruin or create a high quality customer experience.

I hope you will join me as we continue to map out what it takes to create an exceptional and well balanced customer experience; one that can improve both conversion and value of the customer relationship as equally as it can establish the foundations of long term brand advocacy and improved share of wallet.

I look forward to your comments and thoughts.

Thanks for reading.

Jeff – Sensei

Who Creates The Brand Narrative?

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 00:00:00 GMT

During a recent exchange on the growing impact of social customer service, Alan Berkson asked me “who creates the brand narrative”? Interesting question (as is often the case with Mr. Berkson). When I search back through Sensei Inc.’s research and client experiences, there’s really only one conclusion that can be drawn in answering this question.

Business strategists and marketers do not have direct control over the brand narrative any longer and evidence suggests that customers don’t have it either. So who does? To answer the question, we must look at the influence or control each player in the equation exerts.

Businesses control customer experience.
Businesses have the option to establish the touch points their brand has with its audience, benchmark results and improve those experiences by re-engineering the elements of that engagement.

Customers control their reaction to the customer experience.
We all have options when dealing with a brand we love or hate, especially in how we react to our experiences with it. A negative experience for example could be met with a silent complaint in the form of a shift in loyalty (and dollars) to another brand. Alternatively, that same experience might turn into a diatribe on the customer’s blog, topic of a public Twitter conversation or fodder for a viral video shared across other media outlets. The same applies to positive experiences although they are less likely to be shared publicly. In either case, customers control the reaction to that experience.

The amplification customers’ reactions controls the brand narrative.
There’s a duality in reactions to the customer experience: Quiet/Private and Loud/Public. Collectively, they form the brand narrative; as much with what is not said as by what is said.

The key factor of course is the acceleration and impact of either reaction caused by modern social amplification. Consumers are trained to seek validation through colleagues in social networks or through strangers on Google, Yelp and/or other online resources. Those not in the market for your product, and thus not seeking such validation has it imposed on them through social broadcasting. Either way, the amplification of the reaction(s) becomes the story of your brand.

Full Circle. It all comes back to the customer experience. You can’t create the brand narrative so stop trying. Build, measure and improve the customer experience and the market will take care of the rest for you.

Agree? Disagree? Who creates the brand narrative?

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

When Personal and Corporate Brands Collide

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Sun, 17 Jun 2012 00:00:00 GMT

This past week I was introduced to another case of personal branding colliding with corporate egotism; an increasingly common fender-bender in our over-connected world where the line between personal and corporate personas are becoming thinner and thinner.

Last week Dave Reynolds, an extremely popular DJ at 99.7 The River in Campbell River, British Columbia (a Vista-owned radio station) was nominated and received a “Coastie” award (Campaign of the Year). It was awarded in recognition of Mr. Reynold's personal social media campaign to leverage his social graph to draw attention and donations to his employer's Christmas Food Drive. Now the station has little-to-no social presence and apparently, no social media strategy. His personal efforts drew global support and attention, which aided the campaign to surpass the Food Drive’s goals AND generated an amazing about of earned media for the local radio station.

Win/Win right?

However, on the day of the award ceremony, 99.7 The River’s parent company issued a cease and desist letter to the award committee demanding they change the nomination and award from Mr. Reynold’s name to that of the radio station. Upon his return to work after accepting the re-named award, Mr. Reynolds was terminated “with just cause” and little other information Read more here.

My personal disgust for the corporate egotism displayed aside, this post is really about a question that has been bubbling under the surface of many conversations I’ve had with executives planning “social business infrastructures”: can personal and corporate brands coexist?

The Rise of Personal Brands

From the day of the first business incorporation, “corporate branding” has been a priority for marketing departments and corporate executives. Corporate Branding by its strictest definition is the practice of using a company's name, logo or other visuals as a product brand name. Then there’s Individual Product Branding where each product has a unique brand name and the corporate name is not promoted to the consumer. With each, the general goal is to create an emotional connection through instant recognition of the business or product names and their associated iconography or personel. In some cases, brands hire spokespeople or chose individuals within the company that they elevate to brand spokesperson. Key point: each is in the control of the business.

Modern social media channels and their fervent adoption globally have now given rise to a third brand that businesses are being forced to deal with: the personal brand. But first they must first learn to understand it and more importantly, to not fear it.

Individuals, without the marketing and brand strategists afforded big businesses have seen their personal brands evolve simply by engaging in social communications with their family, friends and colleagues. By design or by accident, personal brands can become bigger than life – and certainly bigger than many of their employer’s brands, which in my opinion was the case with Mr. Reynolds.

The Corporate-Personal Brand Conflict

Through various social streams, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know Dave and, along with his hordes of followers can attest to the unselfish nature of his fame. His popularity has risen as a result of his honest desire to be friendly and engage with others on a personal level unlike many other media celebrities who engage in calculated social conversations for the purposes of elevating their status and persona. Should such honest engagement or even a little self-promotion to be celebrated within a brand when it ultimately drives the exact result that the corporate brand strategy is striving to achieve?

While all the details surrounding the dismissal of Mr. Reynolds from 99.7 may never be released, the one public fact remains: he was fired on his first day back to work after receiving a personal social media award earned for a personal campaign to support a business fundraising effort…an award that his employer forced the awards committee to change from a personal award to one in their name. It begs the question: can a strong personal brand coexist with its employer’s brand? Or is the corporate ego simply too fragile?

If the employer’s brand is weak, can it or should it support strong personal brands from within its ranks? If an employer does not have strong social media awareness or presences, should it support or quash personal social media efforts? Is this an HR issue or Corporare Risk issue?

Question: Can a personal brand coexist within a corporate brand? Should corporate brands actively discourage and punish them, “manage” them to subordinate positions, or actively promote them?

Related: Read part two of this series: Should Corporations Fire Personal Brands?

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

The #bizforum Twitter debate will challenge business leaders to argue the pros and cons of this very issue this Wed Jun 20^th, 2012 between 8 and 9 PM Eastern. Join us by following #bizforum in your Twitter steam or by following www.tweetchat.com/room/bizforum.

The Courage of Passion Brands and Leaders

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

In my last post: Changing the Rules of Engagement, I challenged readers with the notion that business can no longer grow and thrive by simply being the best at their game as they once could. Today, winning requires the ability (and courage) to change the rules of the game completely. Innovation must be so radical that the competition is left scratching their heads.

Understanding the premise and delivering on it are two different things however. Radical innovation and game-changing shifts in how businesses operate requires radical action and game-changing shifts within the organization; action that many leaders, stakeholders and employees simply don’t have the courage to implement.

This is the first in a new series of posts that will set forth challenges for businesses looking to change the rules of the game in their industries. However, before any discussion of tactical changes in business functions can be had, we must look at changing an underlying business philosophy; one so critical to the process that if you cannot muster the courage to change it, you might as well forget the rest.

Stop focusing on profit

Yes, you read that right. Stop focusing on profit. A singular focus on profit generation, the underlying practice in most enterprises today (heck, since the beginning of time really), creates a myopic view of the playing field, thus making it impossible to truly change.

Those of you who have heard my rants about “profit not being a four-letter word” in social media marketing know I’m a firm believer in the concept of profit, so why the apparent turnaround? Well, it’s not really a contradiction but a rethinking of the path to achieving it.

Profit is – and will always be – the main reason for a business however, in practice achieving it can be less linear. Social and technological changes, as well as increasing competition from a shrinking global marketplace have made innovation almost a commodity. Product innovation is not enough anymore.

Focus on the generation of profit leads leaders to work within industry standards, leverage past experiences, use formulaic relationship management practices. In short, very logical, one-plus-one=two thinking. Rules are logical so changing the rules of a game inherently requires non-logical thinking. Non-logical thinking requires a business to think with its heart and not its mind.

Become a Passion Brand

It’s about transforming your brand from a product or service provider to a brand of passion. Change the “why” in why people choose your product. Do you choose clothing to keep warm or to make a statement about your mood, your style or your personality? Clothing certain ly has utilitarian (logical) functions (such as the need to keep warm) but you have choices in the items you choose to keep you warm. Your choice – consciously or subconsciously - then becomes about your emotional needs.

A passion brand is one that transcends the utilitarian use of its product(s) and becomes part of the customers’ lifestyle. Emotionally, your brand must become synonymous with how the public perceives their personality…how they wish to enjoy their lives. It must appeal to all their senses, not just their logical needs.

The Smells, Sights and Sounds...of a Bank?

One of the best case studies I’ve come across is Umpqua Bank, based in Portland Oregon. A regional bank, it sought to change its fortunes by transforming itself into a passion brand like Apple or Starbucks. So it asked itself: what does a bank smell like? What should it sound like? What taste should it have? Clearly, non-logical questions to ask of a bank yet required thinking for those wishing to change the rules of the game. And in so doing, it went on to completely transform what a bank means to a community.

Art directors have created mini-museums in each bank to showcase and sell artwork from local artisans.
Umpqua’s Music Director curates local indie-artist’s music through the banks public speakers and gives their customers the chance pick their favorite music at in-branch kiosks (top vote-getters become part of the bank’s year end compilation CD)
Each teller is equipped with a personal cappuccino machine featuring Costa Rica, fair trade sourced Umpqua-branded coffee
Employees hand each customer a box of Umpqua chocolates after each transaction add to the complete sensory experience of banking.
Each night, the bank reopens for a few hours to serve as a community center for book clubs, civic groups, etc.

Smell, Sound, Touch, Taste. It’s not banking, it’s personal.

Each tactic is an expense to the business; contrary to focus-on-profit thinking, which creates a “where do we cut costs” mentality instead of a “how do we improve the customer experience” mentality. In choosing a non-logical path to profit, they reinvent the banking rules.

Umpqua Bank changed the public’s perception of what a bank is. It made the bank a part of the customers’ lifestyles not just their bill payments.

Being directed by customer experience instead of profits made them a profitable bank. The once regional bank has actively expanded its market to include Vancouver, Washington, Seattle, San Francisco and many other cities across North America.

Becoming a passion brand requires the courage to risk profit in order focus on the customer experience and change the rules of engagement. Do you have that courage?

Let me know your thoughts on this concept. Is passion fleeting? Are such cases exceptions or the new reality of business success?

Sam Fiorella - Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Customer Experience – The New [Again] Definition of Business Success

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 00:00:00 GMT

Call it the Trust Economy, the Social Economy, Social Business or other, much has been speculated, theorized and debated when considering what it takes for a business to grow and thrive in whatever this “new economy” is.

The reality is that we don’t really know what this new economy is. Social Business is the trending paradigm-du-jour but wait 6 months and there we'll probably see another great revelation about what’s next in corporate strategy. With each passing year the frequency of paradigm-shifts - real, invented or perceived – seems to increase.

Is it a new operating archetype created by the increased power of the consumer through social channels?

Is it the democratization of information enabled by the growing list of mobile and social technologies?

Is it the realities of a new post-recession world-order where foreign countries have become economic superiors?

Back to Basics [Again]

My advice to business leaders: monitor trends but never lose sight of personalized customer experiences if you wish to weather future strategy tempests. The one rule that will not change, regardless of what the future has in store for us, is that a business’ success will be measured by its ability to act as if it was the customer.

Back in the “wild-west” days, the General Store owner knew each of his customers by name, who their families were, what they did for a living. He didn’t stock his store based on trends, predictions or his own brilliant ideas but on what he knew his each of his customers would need. This basic yet profound rule is missing from many of the blogs and whitepapers issued today that try to capitalize on the latest technologies and trends to predict “what’s next” for businesses.

Many have called this a "customer centric" approach but it goes beyond simply thinking about your customer's needs and wants; it's about becoming your customer and making decisions as if you were them. It's a fine line but an important distinction.

Case in point: Amazon. Arguably one of the most unsung success stories in our economy. Their revenue (and profit) diversification is inspiring and can be credited to their ability to run a business as if they are their own customers.

Invent For Your Customer, Not Your Business

Lisa Utzschneider, global vice president of digital advertising sales at Amazon referenced their customer-first strategy at an ad:tech conference recently. When Amazon thinks about its customers, the company thinks about three things:

the product that it wants to develop
the ability to innovate on behalf of the company’s customers
how to anticipate their needs

As a seller of books (among other things), when that filter was applied, the unlikely and even illogical business strategy of moving into the tablet & hardware business becomes logical. “Who could have imagined that we would get in businesses like Prime or Kindle? Who would have thought we would get into the hardware business and start building hardware?” Ms. Utzschneider said.

Don’t Disrupt the Customer Experience

When Amazon started its advertising program, they understood that advertising on web sites, apps and networks were very disruptive to the user experience. With their core philosophy in mind (remember, Amazon invented the one-click purchase), it planned how to enhance the customer’s online shopping experience through the placement of advertising.

“When we think about advertising, it’s about personalization,” Ms. Utzschneider said. “The personalization and recommendation engine is the backbone of our company.”

The adoption and click thru rates of this basic strategy is reaping rewards for Amazon, their advertisers and customers. For example, a recent partnership with Universal Studios to promote the Lorax movie, resulted in a 25 percent increase in unaided awareness and a 50 percent increase in likelihood of parents wanting to take their children to see the film, surpassing all of Amazon and Universal’s sweeps, video streams and social activation benchmarks.

Reduce Friction

In a study of top-ranked applications across iOS, Amazon and Android, Flurry Analytics found that the Kindle Fire manufacturer delivers more than three times the revenue in its app store compared to what Google generates for developers.

While the report lists Apple still reigns supreme, Amazon is not far behind. Google/Android, however, does lag behind the other two by some margin.

“The issue comes down to commerce friction,” said Flurry Analytics' VP Peter Farago. “Amazon has all consumers payment-enabled, manages a curated store and has deep merchandising understanding." Google has built a great app market but on the back of a leading search and advertising technology. Good for them, but for the customer – not so much.

Whichever division, strategy or tactic you look at, what has made Amazon’s so successful is their placement of the customer experience at the center of other business strategies.

So plan for social media, m-commerce, gamification, social business or whatever other business strategy you’re considering, but never forget that a basic customer experience strategy must remain at the core of each new paradigm shift you explore for your business.

Sam Fiorella – Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

Is Niche the new Big in Social Networks?

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 00:00:00 GMT

How big is too big for a social network before it loses its value to the community?

Clearly investors and maybe even advertisers will argue that it can never be too big. Certainly the valuation of social media behemoth: Facebook supports this argument. But wasn’t that what was said of MySpace before Facebook? At some point a network becomes too big to provide a valuable customer experience, thus setting itself up for other smaller networks to step in and glamour members into switching?

There are lessons that can be learned by considering parallels in other areas of our lives. Cities, for example become too big, too noisy and too crowded, eventually pushing residents and businesses out to the suburbs in search of a better quality of life. Initially a city grows out of necessity and opportunity which quickly turns to greed at which point consideration for the resident’s experience in living and working there becomes a secondary priority.

Larger businesses who establish market dominance and/or monopolies of sorts eventually become slaves to profit generation rather than customer experience and customer value building – the strategies that initially drove their success.

They rest on their laurels and downplay the threat from smaller competitors and bank on the established loyalty of its customers. We need look no further than the recent fall of Research in Motion (RIM), which once owned the smart phone market and enjoyed fierce loyalty from its users, to understand this universal truism.

So is bigger really better when it comes to social networks?

MySpace, which once enjoyed the “behemoth social media” label that is now owned by Facebook, has been left for dead by the side of the road. While the business of MySpace continues, when compared to the reigning king of social networks it might as well be dead. Or is it?

MySpace may once again prove to be a case study and leader in the social networking space. Under its new ownership, the original “big social network” is reinventing what it invented so many years ago: a focused community of like-minded people connecting with each others who share their interests. It claims to now be a music and entertainment hub, streaming music and video and providing artist pages and radio stations. A hub? Isn’t that simply a new word for social network? A rose by any other name…

MySpace once again re-inventing the model?

Regardless, reverting to its original niche focus has seen MySpace’s fortunes change. There are now 40 million users visiting the site monthly in the US alone; a far cry from Facebook’s numbers but enough to sustain a valuable service to its committed community and a profitable enterprise for its owners.

I argue that behemoth social networks will eventually implode under their own weight and, like MySpace’s refocus on their original niche customer experience , a multitude of smaller, more focused networks will rise in their wake. Simply look at the growing popularity of niche networks such as Twitter, Twitpic, LinkedIn and Pinterest. They’re growing – and thriving – despite the growth of Facebook. In fact, I believe they are growing in popularity because of Facebook. People are overwhelmed with the information, media and entertainment overload that Facebook has become and are gravitating to narrower communities.

Marketers must be cognisant of the trend currents in this space. There are no sacred cows in social media and Facebook is certainly not an irreplaceable deity (sorry Zuch). The point being that social networks, like cities and big businesses before them must not lose sight of the customer experience in their never-ending quest for lower costs, bigger margins and greater profits.

What do you think? Is niche the new big in social networks?

Sam Fiorella - Sensei
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego

The 7 Deadly Sins of Market Leaders.

sam_fiorella@hotmail.com(1 Sam Fiorella) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 GMT

I responded to the recent news of the resignation of RIM’s Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis with mixed emotions. As a Blackberry user and fan, it signals a possible change in direction to what I saw as an arrogant disregard for my patronage and loyalty. On the other hand, after reading some of the comments from the newly appointed CEO, Mr. Thorsten Heins I am saddened because it seems my love affair with this Canadian institution may just come to an end. Mr. Heins' sentiment that he will mostly follow the path set by his predecessors is disheartening and does not give me confidence in the future of this once global market leader.

I don’t believe you have to hold an International MBA in business to understand that for an incoming CEO to follow his predecessors when they were semi-forced to resign from their positions is a flawed strategy. Mr. Heins, have you not been paying attention? RIM, credited for inventing the smart phone industry, was once the most valuable company in Canada and essentially owned the world’s smart phone market share. Today RIM is losing market share (down to approx. 10%), losing value quickly (89% since 2008) and been plagued with system outages, delayed product launches, terrible customer service, horrible PR and marketing and a complete and utter lack of innovation.

Even its original and most loyal customer base: businessmen and bankers are feeling neglected and let down. In a note to investors the BlackBerry was called “a secular loser to Apple and Android devices,” by Ittai Kidron, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. in New York.

Doing more of the same yields, well, more of the same. And given RIM’s shameful loss of market share and stock value, the “same” is not something the new CEO should be striving for. Be Warned. RIM and your predecessors are guilty of committing the 7 Deadly Sins of Market Leaders.

1. Greed

We all want success. And we love winners. It’s the famed “American Way”. And in my opinion there’s nothing wrong with that. However, market leaders can make strategic missteps when they try to overreach their success.

After dominating the North American smart phone market, RIM turned its sights to the international market where their networks were well suited for the Blackberry. On the surface this was a smart move; however, while the company’s resources were being funnelled to growth in those markets, the US market migrated to high-end mobile computing on the 4G platform and RIMs products were simply not ready for it. In their global domination efforts, they lost sight of what was happening at home and with their core market…and fell behind.

2. Distraction

After achieving market dominance, when the money and fame starts rolling in it’s not uncommon for an owner/CEO to take advantage and play out their fantasies. You can hardly blame them after all, they’ve earned it. However, history is proving that every product and business has a lifecycle and the corporation cannot maintain a market leader roll without constant re-invention. And this requires a singular focus. The late Mr. Jobs and Apple are the poster children for this rule and the resulting benefits. If you cannot live this rule, step aside and let someone else do it before you’ve lost too much ground.

During the last few years, most of the news reported here at home about RIM’s Mr. Balsille was his battle to win a NHL hockey franchise when maybe he should have been focusing more on where market and consumer demand was evolving and innovating new products to meet those demands?

3. Pride

When a business becomes about the executive’s ego and not the company, market leading businesses quickly lose their position. Today, even a publicly traded business must be seen to be more about its customers’ wants and needs than those of its executives.

The contributions of Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis to RIM’s initial success are unquestionable but their efforts to hold on to their titles (and presumably: pays, perks and notoriety) blinded them to what was going on around them. They rarely left their ivory towers to engage their loyal customers and the results speak for themselves. Ego will not only cost you market share, it will kill the business completely.

4. Arrogance

The social world we live in has made every person – customer or not – as impactful to the business’ bottom line as the people who work for the company itself. Through social media, the power of the pen is so much more powerful than ever before and so no executive of a market-leading company can rest on their laurels and become aloof to the trials & tribulation of their customers. Keeping customers and even non-customers happy and engaged with your brand is critical.

The fall of RIM is as much about arrogance as it is about its lack of innovation. A series of critical outages to RIM’s formerly well-regarded network was met with practical silence from the company’s executives: little in the way of updates and little in the way of heartfelt apologies. Adding insult to injury was a feeble attempt to offer old, ill-working apps at no charge, which were received with distain from loyal customers. In the absence of personal, well-intended communication we were made to feel that we should be lucky that RIM allows us the privilege of owning a Blackberry and so we should stop complaining.

5. Becoming Boring

Today a product and its business must be more than product’s quality and utility. It must have personality. In the era of social media, reality TV and instant-celebrity, people are more interested leaders who are comfortable being themselves and having a clear and definable message. Case in point: Richard Branson or Steve Jobs.

Can anyone tell me what RIM’s Jim Balsillie or Mike Lazaridis look like? Stand for? What they preach? What their vision is? Exactly.

6. Losing Sight of a Vision

It’s possible for a market-leading business to have multiple products in multiple markets but it must always communicate a central principle and vision. Further, it must demonstrate that in every action they take, not just in the communications they push out through PR firms. Consider companies like Coke, Starbucks or 3M as an example.

At RIM, the company's leaders have been notoriously inconsistent and confusing about their vision and future plans. When asked what makes RIM unique, Mr. Balsillie told Bloomberg BusinessWeek: "We've taken two fundamentally different approaches in their casualness. It's a causal difference, not just nuance." What?!

Founder Mr. Laziridis is even more famous for his incoherency about the business. Reactions to his presentations at industry conferences are usually quite comical with phrases like: "Sorry, can't follow what he's saying" and "He isn't making any sense at all. Quite literally, we don't know what Mike is talking about right now."

7. Believing your own hype

A business executive can spin so much hype that it becomes ingrained into his psyche, which prevents him from seeing what the trend currents are predicting: what the public’s perception is and how their needs are changing. The public is fickle and their loyalty is even more fickle. A market leader can never believe its own hype.

Case in point: RIM built an industry around a smart phone for business, which could also help personal communication and productivity. It was lauded for this innovation and it played on this premise so much that it didn’t see what was coming.

Apple (and more recently Google, Android and now even Microsoft) understood that the public would rather see the smart phone as a personal device on which they could also conduct business needs. They understood that the smart phone was becoming integral with our daily lives; almost another human appendage. Plus, there are more people out there than Blackberry’s beloved CIOs for whom RIM has relied on to build a business.

Eventually, the lack of personal apps, speed and ease of use – and dare I say: sexiness – of the Blackberry in the face of Apple and Google’s products rallied enough workers to push their CIOs to reconsider their allegiance.

If RIM’s new CEO follows in the path of his predecessors and continues to commit these 7 deadly sins of market leaders, he will be writing the business’ epitaph. Do you agree that these deadly sins were committed by Blackberry’s leadership during their rein as market leaders?

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego
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