Marketing Roadmaps

Customers

Roadmaps Round-up

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Adrants on the promotion campaign for the John Twelve Hawks’ book The Traveler.  Program includes a character blog, and as I said in my comments on Adrants, I’ve long believed that fans of books/tv/film will embrace well written character blogs. This is slightly different, as it is promo for a new book, not a build-on to an existing franchise, but it will be very interesting to watch this play out. From my quick glance, the program looks very well done, and there is certainly no subterfuge.

Amy Gahran over at Contentious has a great idea for a unique gift: the gift of conversation.

From Creating Passionate Users, Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak  Main takeaway: give the right features and make them usable as well as useful. Don’t provide a feature just because you can. Make sure it is something that your user actually wants.

Finally, from Jim Logan, some thoughts about CRM — CRM is an attitude and a set of processes, not a piece of software   Main takeaway: Focus on doing active customer relationship management, using whatever software tools you want, versus on a piece of software as savior.

More customer blogs

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Let’s start with the Vespa blogs. Reported in many places including Steve Rubel’s blog (CooperKatz is doing the blogs and PR for Vespa).

I am looking forward to these blogs, as I believe the customer evangelist blog has real potential as a marketing tool for certain types of companies:

  • Companies in markets where a strong sense of community develops offline and online;
  • Products or issues that elicit passion;
  • Topics and issues that are at the intersection of company and customer interests. No one wants to read a blog, written by customers or not, that JUST talks about the product;
  • If corporate-sponsored (versus a customer evangelist doing it on his own — more on that later), a sponsor that is willing to let the blog happen. The good and the bad.

As I wrote last week, I have been building this type of blog for a client for the past two months, and I am really pleased to see others embracing this model.

Others places I read about the Vespa blogs: blogspotting (with an amusing jab at the Technorati 100), BlogBusiness Summit, NevOn (who reminds us that blogs are part of an overall marketing/communications strategy, not an end in themselves), the Social Customer Manifesto.

Another company doing a unique company-sponsored blog is Nokia. It owns TheFeature, but takes a hands-off approach. As described in the About section on the site:

"TheFeature aims to be nothing less than a voice – an opinionated, independent voice for the mobility community. It is the mobile Internet industry’s premiere thinking space – designed to help you manage the flow of information in a sector where the flood of data is increasing as fast as its growth, scattered throughout multiple channels, frequently obtuse in nature, and devoid of context…."

"Although TheFeature is owned by Nokia, the Espoo, Finland-based manufacturer of technologies for mobile communications, the opinions expressed herein are solely those of its writers and content providers, and are not official statements by Nokia or any of its business partners or affiliates. The TheFeature staff and its content partners are committed to editorial independence and to the openness of its forums."

Thanks to blogthenticity for pointing me to this site.

The other type of customer evangelist blog is the customer who is so passionate that he or she creates a blog about the product. This blog is not sponsored by the company. Halley Suitt, in a post on the Tom Peters blog and an article in Worthwhile magazine, calls these corporate fan blogs and highlights some of the issues companies have to face when they have passionate fans who blog.

Issues notwithstanding, I believe that companies that are willing to either give voice to the community through a company sponsored site, like Vespa, Nokia and my client Software Secure, or can strike the proper balance with independent fan blogs, will reap tremendous benefits by engaging with their customers in this online conversation. 

Multiple Choice Part Two: Why we did a blog

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My client Software Secure has a small but very satisfied client base of educators and educational technology specialists at schools and universities across North America that have adopted campus-wide laptop programs or made a significant investment in ed-tech, often in a CMS like WebCT or Blackboard.

The company wanted to find a way to give voice to these happy customers – let them share their experiences with others, and in the process, get the word out about Software Secure. More brand awareness combined with a great product equals more customers, more revenue.

In the “old days,” our marketing strategy probably would have been to develop case studies for the Web, collateral and PR, and try to obtain speaking engagements for our client evangelists.

Well, we will still do all that, but as we were doing our marketing research, we discovered that there weren’t many online resources that focus specifically on developing a secure learning and testing environment. There were lots of big general sites, with lots and lots of information. Sometimes too much information.

We also found lots of blogs by educators — from superintendents of schools to professors to instructional technology managers – that were already creating vibrant conversations in the educational community.

Since we knew that our customers had great stories to tell, which could start a great online conversation about the issues of online learning and testing, we decided to fill this information gap with a collaborative weblog written by our customers and other educational experts. 

The people who really know the scoop are the ones on the front lines. Their experiences and stories are far more valuable, and interesting, to other educators than anything we could write. And preaching to the choir here on the Roadmap, but we chose the form of a blog because it offers two-way communication, which makes it a meeting place for educators tackling security issues, versus a static resource page.

Educators speaking directly to educators. About issues faced by educators when integrating technology in the learning and testing environment – technology evaluations, practical advice on holding faculty workshops, information about new tools that might be useful etc. etc. Not just information about Software Secure.

And so you have Multiple Choice:

Multiple Choice brings together educators who are leading the way in building secure online learning and testing environments at schools and universities across North America

Our sponsor is Software Secure, developer of technology that secures the computing environment from cheating and digital distractions.

The sponsorship is clear, the bloggers will be posting directly to the blog (no company review) and they can write about whatever they like within the topic of secure online testing and learning. I certainly hope they will mention the company once in a while but even if the educators NEVER DO, it will be fine.

The company will post from time to time, mostly news roundups and company news, and just by being there, more people will learn about Software Secure and its products.

Once I get the word out, that is. Which is the stage we are at now. Our contributors will all be starting next week, all the infrastructure stuff is done (for now), so there’s nothing left but to get the word out about Multiple Choice.

Like in this post J  I do hope my Roadmaps readers will check it out and let me know what they think. And of course, please do tell your friends and family in the educational community all about it!

Introducing Multiple Choice, a collaborative weblog

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Part One

As I have mentioned here a few times, I believe that collaborative weblogs are an excellent choice for a corporate blog. Multiple voices means no one person has to post everyday; it is much easier to manage the workload, and there is the vibrancy of conversation among the posts as well as in the comments.

I am an even bigger proponent of collaborative weblogs that speak the voice of the customer, not just the company. For the past two months, I have been working on a collaborative weblog to be written by a company’s customers as well as company reps. We are now in what you might call a public beta – the blog is live and there are posts, but we won’t be officially launching until early May.

But, we are slowly getting the word out, so it seemed the time was ripe to tell my Roadmaps readers all about it.

The client is Software Secure, a software company that develops security software for computer-based and online testing. In a nutshell, its products prevent students from cheating on exams. The weblog is called Multiple Choice and it will be written by our customers and other educational experts. We have three clients signed up to blog and are continuing to recruit regular contributors. If you know any educators or educational technology experts who might be interested in blogging with us, please let me know (sgetgood@getgood.com) They do not have to be a Software Secure client. We want articulate people who are actively engaged in the issues. It is a volunteer position. We want folks who want to help their peers.

I am very excited about the potential of creating spaces for customers to speak directly with each other as well as with the company about topics that are at the intersection of their mutual interests. Resources such as this perform a valuable service for the community while also serving the company’s interests. It is “doing good by doing good,” and what could be better than that?

I welcome feedback from Roadmaps readers about the Multiple Choice blog, but I would ask that you leave feedback about the blog as a marketing tool, here on Marketing Roadmaps or in private e-mail to me at sgetgood@getgood.com

If you do stop by Multiple Choice, of course feel free to leave comments on any of the posts, but I would appreciate it if my Roadmaps readers would respect that this is a client project. Comments about secure online testing, education, learning technology, Software Secure, are all fair game for Multiple Choice, a blog about secure online testing and learning. Marketing feedback belongs here on the Roadmap. Thanks!

Next: I will post some of the background thinking that went into the decision to do a blog.

Roadmaps Round-up

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Just a bunch of good stuff. Have a great weekend!

Fusion Brand: Great post on Brand vs. Customer Architecture: Which is More Effective?

How to Blog for Fun and Profit has a short post about a Cnet comparison  of Typepad and Blogger 

Quite some time ago, Steve Rubel (and others) blogged about InfoWorld’s special report on blogs and wikis. I have been intending to include it in a link round-up for weeks, so here is the link to Steve’s post. 

Another great resource post that I have been sitting on is from NevOn: Tips for successful media relations  This post Introduced me to David Tebbut’s Teblog.

Yahoo is offering free 5-page websites to small US businesses, to be hosted in Yahoo! Local. Thanks to Nick W at Threadwatch for the info.