Customer Crossroads

Altered planning and goal setting for an energized start to the new year

I love the energy that accompanies the changes of seasons and rituals like New Year, or back-to-school, or first day of spring. It feels like a great time to plan, and I've been working away on goals and plans for the year ahead.

The trouble is, most of what we produce as goals fails to energize, or only scares us when we see the number of projects needed to produce the desired revenue.

Here's an alternative that might help you and your team get charged up and dream a little, instead of just feeling overwhelmed by the official plan. It's called Picture It, and you can do it on your own or as a group.

                      Picture It

What you need:
[1] Some bigg-ish pieces of paper or posterboard. The low-budget approach is to take some file folders and open them up. Everyone needs one. Colored is always better, it helps us be more playful, always a good thing when we want to get some positive energy moving

[2] A bunch of magazines. Go for stuff like business and news magazines, because they have more evocative images than fashion magazines. e.g. Fast Company, Wired, Time

[3] Scissors

[4] Glue stick or tape. Could use a stapler in a pinch

[5]  Garbage bag

[6] Optional: colored markers. I like the ones meant for kids, because they're inexpensive and built to take a lot of abuse

What you do:

Spread all the materials out in a big pile on a table.
Give everyone a piece of cardboard and a magazine to get them started.
Read the instructions, shown below. Don't get stuck on clarification, just get started.

Give people enough time to flounder and then get started on their own. The leader, of course, must also do the exercise. People will likely need at least 20 minutes on this part.

You should have a lot of paper mess on the table once this gets rolling. [That's what the garbage bag is for.]

When everyone is about finished, invite people to hold up their collage and share their ideas. Plan on  3 - 4 minutes for each person. You may be surprised at how much discussion this triggers, so plan for lots of time on the debrief.

As the leader of the group, ensure that the discussion stays positive. This is about wishing and dreaming, not about logistics. You don't have to know how the wishes will be achieved to share them.

Plan to keep the collages. People may want to post them in their own work area, or put them up in a central place together as one giant collage.

Verbal instructions:
Flip through the magazines looking for images or words that capture your ideas about what we could be in the year ahead. Don't overthink it. Just start tearing out images that seem to relate to the year ahead, and your ideas about what we could be or become or achieve. Don't limit yourself to any one area -- you could be thinking about how we work together, how we treat customers, how we innovate, or anything else that seems to fit.

When you have a good pile of images, start cutting and pasting these onto the folder. Add any words or drawings that help to illustrate the thought or bring the idea to life.

Tell people this is not about artistic ability, it's just a way to liberate some creative thinking and ideas about the year ahead.

The results:

When we can clearly picture a goal or a desirable outcome, it's much more likely to happen. You might have encountered this concept as a dream board for personal planning. There are many possible variations.

The worst case? You'll have a high energy meeting to start the year, instead of a deadly dull one.

If you try this, please come back and add your comments to let us know how it worked, what you tweaked, etc.

And happy new year!

Resources:

More on dream boards here on WikiHow and here on EHow

Facebook Polling: a quick tour and a surprising finding

After holding forth about the future business applications of Facebook, I decided I should put my money where my mouth is, and do a quick little research study.
Facebook makes that easy for you with their polling feature.

Here's what I wanted to know -- what kinds of applications for business would interest people who are already on Facebook? So here's the question I asked:

What application for business would you be most likely to use on Facebook?
[a] A way to post RFPs / find suppliers?
[b] A way to bid on RFPs / find projects?
[c] A project team collaboration function / group?
[d] A way to sell content like e-books / e-learning?
[e] I would not use any of these

Facebook polling is so inexpensive, I thought I could afford to get 100 responses, which would cost about $25.00. [I do want to be clear that this is not a scientific poll, it's just a way to take a quick read on something.]

I couldn't select exactly the group I wanted -- freelancers and SMB people. So I went for age as a proxy, and asked for age 35 - 49. I was surprised that the oldest selection was age 49, actually, since surely there are many people using Facebook over the age of 49. I know several well, in fact.

I sat excitedly at my computer waiting for the colorful dashboard to show results. Which it did, looking like the chart above, with several other colorful charts breaking down my poll by age and gender.

Surprising Finding

When I had 49 responses, Facebook shut down the poll.

Before they did that, here's what I learned:

1. About half would be interested in one of the proposed functions
2. About half indicated no interest in any of them
3. The most popular of the proposed functions was [c], the project team collaboration function. This is the one I want too.

I received an e-mail from Facebook explaining that they had shut down my poll.

Hi, Susan,

Facebook Polls are intended for market research purposes. Facebook Polls created to promote products or services or that are otherwise deemed not appropriate are removed accordingly. Along these lines, Facebook has automatically removed your Facebook Polls (order #Facebook Poll).

To see the final results, go to: link 

Responses Desired: 100

Actual Responses Received: 40

Price per Response: $0.25

Your credit card has been charged an additional $10.00 This completes your order.

The Facebook team

I'm surprised that they thought this was promotion. So maybe it was deemed otherwise inappropriate. Perhaps the only people allowed to do research on Facebook itself are officially authorized. Perhaps using the word Facebook in the poll flagged my little project. As far as I know, they can't stop me from blogging about it.

Anyone have some insight into this?

I was thinking it would be cool to hire some savvy Elance developer to just make me the application I want, but now I'm reassessing.

Holiday notice

I'll be skiing in Banff. If you're there, say hi. I'll be the person doing the face-plant right in front of the lift line, wearing a fuzzy hat with ear flaps [that looks really cute, actually]. So I likely won't have the strength to post after a hard day of skiing. See you in the new year! And thanks for all the reading and the comments, which really make it fun to keep at it.

The future of social networking

I've been experimenting with Facebook. Here's what I've learned so far:

[1] Scrabulous is addictive. This is an asynchronous version of the board game that you can play with Facebook friends around the world. I'm now having to ration myself on it as a treat for getting my work done.

Applications developers are trying to find addictive applications like this. Most applications don't seem to have this quality. They are something you have a look at once, then uninstall. They seem largely designed for youth, who are amusing themselves by sharing music lists, lists of celebrity likes and dislikes, and similar fluff.

[2] Seeing status reports on my friends is interesting. I love their sense of humor, which often comes out in these reports. It makes me feel like I know what's up in their lives, even though it's been months since we've had a coffee. But I've also learned that I can inadvertently send messages out to my network that I didn't really want to send to everyone. [Like how addicted to Scrabulous I am.] Or the fact that my book on Innovation is finally coming out in January. I wasn't really intending to make these announcements in this way, but I did anyway.

[3] It's impossible to manage the circles of relationships effectively right now. My mental map looks like this:

I have an inner circle of friends and colleagues that can have access to pretty much anything there, and already know a lot of it.

Then there's a big second circle that are colleagues or relatives, but not really close. I want to manage the information flow a bit more there. Then there's the big outer circle of people I want to stay in touch with, but are more like acquaintances. Some may be very respected, I may be a big fan, but it would be a stretch to say we are friends. A few on the outer edge are just members of the same organization I am.

And the stripes might separate business from personal.

I suspect others have this issue also, and we need better tools to address this. Right now, the tools lack sophistication. For example, Circle of Friends lets me say how people in my network fit together, but I can only do this publicly. [How rude is that! Guess what, you're in my circle of barely-know-you-and-care-even-less. Bob made my inner circle, but you didn't. Hello!]

[4] Some people want to be friends with everyone. Today I had a request from Marwan, a 20 year old I have nothing in common with, and no friends in common with. He wouldn't qualify for my outer circle. I'd have to study this phenomenon to understand it, but this sort of thing seems to happen a lot.

I've had sales people try to be my friend on Facebook. Seriously.

[5] The groups application is incredibly easy to set up, but has limited utility. I have set up two groups so far, and been an administrator on a third, and found the lack of good tools somewhat frustrating. This application could not serve as a work collaboration tool in it's current form. Although it wouldn't take much to fix it.

Clearly, I'm not the only one with these ideas. Because there has been an explosion of applications designed to bring social networking to business people in a more sophisticated way. Most seem to want to build a completely new network. Personally, I don't think that will work very well except for those with deep pockets and fantastic ideas. For one thing, it's largely been tried in existing online communities dedicated to specific topics.

My take:

If you are thinking about building a better hot dog stand -- and it seems that many people are -- I would advise you to put your hot-dog stand where there are already a lot of people looking for hot-dogs, instead of trying to get them to walk a few blocks to a new place.

It's a lot easier. It's often cheaper. You won't have to build a completely new platform, you can piggy-back on an existing one.

Consider the challenges faced by competitors to people like Yellow Pages, who are trying to get massive numbers of people over to a different location. This is the challenge you are facing in building completely new networks. If you can be where lots of people already are (just mixing my metaphors a bit), you improve your odds a lot.

Things are pretty fragmented and early stage on the networks thing. But we will see a tremendous amount of development here. It's a good time to be a networker.

Resources:

I subsequently found a good thought piece on this topic from Suw Charman on the Strange Attractor blog here. Here's one of her thoughts that caught my interest:

My worry is that exposing these hidden networks to the harsh light of the explicit hierarchy could kill them, or vital parts of them. In old-style command-and-control companies, the very fact that you know someone rather senior in another department may rankle with your boss in such a way that they start to work against you, and that would undermine the very fabric of the company. After all, a company isn't a single entity at all, it is a group of people who have social relationships and who need some of those relationships to remain hidden.

Don't give up too soon: keep tweaking a good idea

Almost three years ago, I bought an orchid. It was beautiful, but after the first flowers faded, that was it. I thought I was caring for it properly, having listened carefully to the salesperson, read the brochure, the fertilizer label and several online articles. After more than a year of frustration, I couldn't figure out what was wrong.

Then I spoke to my friend Andrea who has many beautiful orchids. She helped me sort out correct watering. I was letting toxins build up in the soil because I wasn't soaking the plant.

I repotted, trimmed off the dead roots, used cinnamon to protect the cut spots from fungus and diligently watered using Andrea's method. The plant loved it, but still no flowers.

Then I tried changing fertilizers. Several weeks ago, I decided to give it a rest for the winter, and cut back on the fertilizer. Things would either happen in the spring, or they wouldn't.

Finally, incredibly, there is now the beginning of a flower spike. It's probably the wrong time of year, but I don't care. I feel so vindicated for my efforts to learn, and my testing of different approaches.

In business, we often give up on our orchids too soon.

We blame the idea instead of looking for the tweaks that would make the idea work. [That orchid won't bloom. Too bad. Nice idea, but it's time to move on. Apple is having great success with dendrobiums. Google is all over azaleas. Gartner says the future is in geraniums. Time to get with the program.]

We think the program is implemented just because we announced it. [You told me we'd have flowers. Where are the flowers? What happened to all that fertilizer we invested in? If we're not getting flowers this quarter, we need to seriously rethink our investment here.]

We focus on new sales and forget to keep tending the customers we already have. [You shouldn't be spending so much time on that plant. Forget it and move on. There's hundreds of them at Home Depot.]

To really move things forward where people are concerned, you need to invest real time. Customers take time to forgive you for the mistakes of the past. Your staff won't think you're committed unless you hang in with a program for at least a year. Hiring and training don't happen overnight. Launching a new brand or fixing an existing one is a multi-year mission.

Don't give up on your orchids.

How creative takes a key driver and works it

Fabulous article here by Joseph Carrabis, called Men and Women in General. He's talking about how to sell to couples. But it is also a lovely illustration of how you take an insight and translate it into compelling communication. 

This is often a challenge for clients, because enormous subtlety is involved. You can't just take the insight and translate literally.

Couples and jewelry

In this article, Mr. Carrabis give us some insights about couples: couples are comfortable and relaxed when they are touching.

"All humans -- regardless of language, culture, education, vocation and avocation -- carry with them a sense of personal space.

"People touch when they're comfortable with each other, and the degree of comfort is shown in shared body postures, shared eye focus, shared facial expressions and so on."

He gives us a second bit of insight, related to the jewelry category; a gift of expensive jewelry signifies possession more than our modern concept of love.  It relates to the ability to provide abundance for another person.

Then he suggests how to translate these insights into compelling creative.

You visually show the touching, the circle of closeness between two people, their emotional connection. And you show the jewelry right beside those touching hands. The jewelry is part of the emotional closeness. He has three images that illustrate the idea.

Couples and travel

I wanted to see how this insight might translate to another category. So I looked for other products that target couples. Sandals, the couples resort, seemed a likely candidate. And just look at these clips. The circle  of intimacy is very clear. Even in the group shot, the couples are closer together.

I loved the way the ads suggest physical intimacy without saying a word, and without crossing the line of good taste.

Couples and homebuilding

A building supplies site gives us this uninspiring photo on their 'build your own home' page. If ever there were a project that would make you nervous about your relationship, building your own home together would surely take the prize. But we don't have a couple lovingly planning their home, we have a harsh image of a sledge hammer slamming into foundation molds.

I wasn't able to find a better example in this category, actually. The home-building industry seems to be all about 'the stuff', not the people. Except I bet that's not totally true.

The difference in emotional impact between these two images is quite striking.

Web-Cast on testing communications using qualitative methods

The Qualitative Research Consultant's Association has a series of web-casts (they call them Q-Casts) that are free and available to anyone. The next one relates to a topic that may be near and dear to your heart: how to test communications, including advertising, packaging, concepts, media content, and other communications. The organization's guidelines restrict 'pitching', so the presentations usually have solid information, and you can ask questions via the chat room.

Here are the details:

The 4 Cs of Truth in Communications

Thursday, December 6, 2007
12:00 p.m. ET (GMT -4; BST -5)
Speakers: Isabelle Albanese and Eileen O'Malley

For more information and to register for the free online Qcast click HERE.

The 4Cs of Truth in Communications™, a fool-proof framework for researchers to objectively evaluate consumer response to qualitative communication stimuli. No matter what the stimuli – from traditional advertising, to package graphics, concepts, logos, menu boards, media content, applying the 4Cs will help identify if it really rocks or if it’s likely to sink like one! This method is immediately actionable – it can be used in your very next consumer communication project.

The 4Cs model is also an effective way to get disparate constituents (brand clients, consumer insights, ad agencies, etc.) on the same page relative to evaluating consumer feedback – something that can always be a challenge in any communications environment. It’s a great back-room tool for focus group research as well. Observers follow consumer feedback easily by instantly assessing how the stimulus performs on each of the “Cs”. When it comes time for the de-brief, everyone has a consistent format for structuring feedback – which makes the de-brief flow very smoothly.

Productivity tools, marketing tips, hacks, etc. for customer experience people

With the crazy-busy season now upon us all, it seemed like a good time to talk about how to do things well without destroying your personal productivity [it seems like a laughable concept many days].

Rich McIver sent me this list of top 100 customer service hacks for web entrepreneurs.
Some of my faves...

#9  Send out handwritten notes whenever you can. Yup -- things that take real time to do reflect greater investment in the communication. It would be a relief to see this among the direct mail, wouldn't it?

#15  MOO. Love their business cards. I had some made just for the blog, and they never fail to charm those that receive them. I didn't know they made postcards, too.

#17 - 30  This list of organizing tools looks great. As soon as I get out from under this e-mail, I'm definitely going to look into this further :-0

#68  LinkedIn. This is where I look first when I want to contact someone but can't find their contact info. It's the new phone book, and everyone should be on it.

Susan's additions:

#101  I just discovered that I can save locations in Google Maps. So I'm starting to build maps of some things that I use a lot, but can never remember where they are. For me, this is the locations and details of focus group facilities. I can never remember which one has the movable camera, which one has the popcorn machine in the lobby. If I have time, I might start one for restaurants I like to take clients to. [Very cool productivity tool, and I think we'll see a lot more commercial use of this soon.]

#102  I get a lot of e-mail that I don't want to ignore, but I also can't help. Examples: people who want to do their co-op at my company; people who are looking for permanent employment; people who want to be in my focus groups (I outsource recruiting).  I now have several signatures in Outlook that are customized "form letters" that I use to respond. These are the short notes I would individually type if I took the time, now available for quick replies.

#103  AOL Instant Messenger Pro can be used to securely send large files. Like the huge digital audio files I use on a lot of projects that are way too big for e-mail. Same thing for that graphic-intensive PowerPoint. Brilliant addition to the tool for the business user. [have you noticed how business is colonizing all the stuff that's supposed to be for teens?]

What are some of yours?