The North Face Tests Geo-Fencing

Posted on by RichardAKent

Fashion brand, The North Face, are to test geo-fencing in an attempt to promote offers and tailored information to opted in customers.

31 of the their stores have been selected for the test which will identify people who have previously opted in to receive these messages via SMS, once they enter a 1.5 mile radius of a selected location. People will effectively check and check out when they enter or leave a location.

As customers will have been profiled by the brand previously, the potential to promote relevant offers directly to people near a store is a tempting thought. Of course opting out is easy – a customer simply has to text ‘STOP’ and they’ll stop receiving these messages.

This seems like a great example of a brand grabbing the bull by the horns and capitalising on the increased usage of Facebook’s Places and Four Square by becoming an early adopter of the technology.

I can imagine a shopping trip in the not too distant future, simply being a case of turning up at the mall, grabbing a coffee at at the shop offering you the best deal on coffee that day and then just waiting for the offers to roll in.

Verizon – Are You Listening?

Posted on by RichardAKent

I’m not letting up on this issue.

For me examples like this are the very reason this blog exists.

Here’s someone, clearly having trouble with Verizon. There’s no judgement here as to whether their complaints are justified or not. But that doesn’t matter. @KatStep2010 clearly does have issues.

So, as she says, are Verizon listening? If so, will they engage?

I’m going to be following this closely and will report back if anything happens in public.

Since starting this, here’s an update already!

KatStep2010
I can’t get thru to anyone they keep sending me bills for an account I canceled in June. @Verizon is there anybody out there?
14 minutes ago
KatStep2010
@Verizon Why have I been on hold for 45 minutes? and why oh why won’t you help me?
30 minutes ago
So it seems Verizon aren’t listening.
Another great truth:

“Customers wouldn’t feel the need to embarrass us en masse, if our customer service channels weren’t so completely broken.” Bob Knorpp, The Beancast

Gap’s About Turn – Strength or Weakness?

Posted on by RichardAKent

Yesterday was a big day for the retailer Gap.

Having announced that they were to change their logo just a week ago, they have now reverted back to their traditional blue box.

And the reason for this change of heart is the huge outcry and anger amongst Gap’s customers that they have expressed through social media.

Here are a couple of quotes from Gap:

“Ok. We’ve heard loud and clear that you don’t like the new logo. We’ve learned a lot from the feedback. We only want what’s best for the brand and our customers. So instead of crowd sourcing, we’re bringing back the Blue Box tonight.”

“We’ve learned a lot in this process. And we are clear that we did not go about this in the right way. We recognize that we missed the opportunity to engage with the online community.”

As someone who has been involved in a rebranding process for two major high street brands, I know that a logo change is an 18 month process – minimum. For Gap, this must have included customer focus groups, test marketing and a whole host of other research activities before, firstly they decided to launch a new logo at all and secondly undertake all the work necessary to ensure a transition on the ground from old to new.

So for this process to have been turned into  a costly waste of time and money inside one week, is astonishing.

I can’t think of another example of ‘people power’ that comes close to this. The Gap logo episdoe will surely become case study worthy for all students of marketing in the future.

And yet the fantastic news for Gap in all of this is that they now know, beyond any doubt, that they have a rich vein of customers who love the brand deeply. Care about it passionatley enough to feel moved to mobilise so quickly and express their feelings. This episode proves Kevin Roberts’ great truth “Lovemarks are owned by the people who love them”.

Of course Facebook and Twitter were the main vehicles for this movement. But the speed at which people were able to organise and mobilise is jaw dropping.

There are now sites selling T-shirts with the words “Logo Fail’ across the chest. This story has become huge.

And if anyone doubted that they can afford to stand by and continue to believe that they don’t have to engage directly with customers, then here is the lesson  – Engage or Die.

Of course Gap could have stuck to their guns. They could have done so in a engaging way – “We hear you, but trust us.”

They chose not to.

Do you think they did the right thing?

iPads in Wal-Mart

Posted on by RichardAKent

This isn’t a comment about the fact that people will apparently soon be able to pick up an iPad at their local Wal-Mart, it’s more to do with how this makes you feel.

How would you feel buying an iPad from the Apple store (on or offline) as opposed to Wal-Mart? In the same way, how do you feel about buying potatoes from a Jewel Osco, or a Co-Op, as opposed to a farmers market or Waitrose.

How important is price for you? How important is service? What about the warm feeling you get from some stores that you don’t from others?

I’m intrigued.

I think Wal-Mart are making big strides in changing their image. Their green scorecard isn’t just lip service, it matters now.

Of course, Apple must be desperate to secure greater saturation before the Playbook and Android tablets start making headway, but by allowing distribution through Wal-Mart and Target, they are surely taking a risk with the Apple reputation?

What products will Wal-Mart merchanidse alongside the iPad? Will Apple have the same sanctuary they enjoy in Best Buy?

I’ve just noticed this post is full of questions!

What do you think?

Imagine what John might have made of it all

Posted on by RichardAKent

I had one of those, goose bumps moments just now.

John Lennon would have been 70 today.

What might he have made of the world of engaging possibilities now?

Is it bringing people closer together? What might he have thought about tools that at the same time allow people to talk directly to loved ones across the world, yet also to be so cruel to each other through cyber bullying?

I think he was an optimist who might have been a fanatical tweeter.

How many followers would John Lennon have?

Seconds Out!

Posted on by RichardAKent

I am having a row with someone on a Linkedin group discussion.

It’s brilliant therapy! They are moaning about the fact that new Twitter will remove a brands wallpaper and replace it with video, imagery and threads of a conversation that you can only currently see by leaving the main Twitter page.

One quote from my opponent is this:

“How would you feel if you are making a living making custom Twitter backgrounds and you just found out that your profession was made obsolete overnight?

Angry? Hell yes!”

There are people out there who make a living doing nothing but this? Holy moley!

Here’s another:

“What if you have been building brand recognition for a client with their custom Twitter background being central to their brand strategy? How do you now tell your client that you have to rethink their entire brand strategy?

Angry? HELL YES!”

So, some poor business has been told that their Twitter wallpaper is central to their brand strategy, that now needs entirely rethinking?

Wow!

I’d love an introduction….

Perhaps my adversary is realising that they might actually have to write something interesting for their client now and is coming over all peculiar? After all 140 characters is lot these days isn’t it?

Or am I being facetious?

Don’t Let Your Customer Service Get ‘Buried’!

Posted on by RichardAKent

Last month saw the release of a new thriller/horror movie by Spanish director,  Rodrigo Cortés entitled ‘Buried’.

The premise of the movie is (taken directly from IMDB) “Paul is a U.S. contractor working in Iraq. After an attack by a group of Iraqis he wakes to find he is buried alive inside a coffin. With only a lighter and a cell phone it’s a race against time to escape this claustrophobic death trap.”

The point of this post hinges on you understanding that he has a cell phone, which of course he uses to try and contact the outside world, but that of course, has limited battery life. The movie sounds absolutely gripping, but here is another direct quote from the great Mark Kermode about Buried.

“It’s a film about the horror of being put ‘on hold’. I have yet to see a film that so brilliantly encapsulates the annoyance, the frustration, the terror, the anguish of being ‘on hold’.

Doesn’t that ring true? Excuse the pun.

We’ve all had the opportunity to press 3 by pressing 2 and then being put on hold whilst being told just how valuable we are. So valuable that we can be left in a black hole for 45 minutes – thanks T Mobile!

Customer care is thankfully being redefined. Those amazing CRM systems that were going to rock our world in the nineties and noughties will soon be painful things of the past. All because of the voice that we now have through social media.

I’ve written before about AT&T. They have a terrible reputation in the US. When the iPhone 4 started dropping calls beacuse of the design, who got the complaints – Steve Jobs or AT&T ‘helpdesk”? OK, so Apple took a bad dose of publicity, but on the ground, customers were battering AT&T.

And yet, the great thing about them is that they recognised that the days of leaving people on hold were numbered. They still did it – don’t get me wrong, but by promoting Twitter as a key customer care channel, they have shown that the biggest step in winning on the social web, is accepting the world has changed.

Their strategy for using Twitter to meet their objective is still flawed – nowhere near enough resource and they clock off at 5! Poor Molly, the face of AT&T’s Twitter customer care page seems a lovely lady, with only your best interests at heart, but nevertheless has a thankless task.

If there is a lesson from the last few years experiences surrounding CRM, it’s that peoples expectations are, quite rightly, rising all the time. If your wifi goes down at 3am while working on a presentation, you need help at 3.05.

Customer care can’t take holidays anymore.

Comment on this post and I’ll get right back to you…

Ryder Cup Washout – A Social Disaster and Victory All At Once !

Posted on by RichardAKent

My alarm woke me early this morning. Stupidly early. I was up at 1.45 – why go to bed? The reason was to watch Lee Westwood tee it up at Celtic Manor to try and wrest the Ryder Cup back from the pesky Yanks!

Living in the US gives you a different perspective of these events. Being behind enemy lines makes the event even bigger. Although if things go wrong, (thanks for nothing Robert Green), then it can be twice as painful.

At the time of writing, play has just resumed and the Cup is not likely to be won or lost until Monday!

But the big news of the day, is the rain in Wales. Not just the rain, but the failure of the rainwear chosen by Corey Pavin and the USGA, to keep  the US players dry. Once the news was out that Tiger was soaked to the skin and Phil was dripping wet through, attention turned to the manufacturer of this equipment.

The fact that it was produced by a company called ‘Sun Mountain’, should perhaps have given Pavin a clue that these guys weren’t experts in wet weather clothing! The fact that the team then had to purchase new equipment in Wales, that wouldn’t have been designed beforehand, from a company called Proquip, meant that these two brands were suddenly all over the social web having quite different days!

Here it is happening before our eyes! Everything I’ve written about here before now is coming to pass!

Sun Mountain are suffering the worst possible PR disaster, whilst Proquip are basking in glory. And it’s being played out on social media.

Here are a couple of tweets:

“Probably the end of that company. Certainly the USPGA will never use any of their products again. #sunmountain“

“Let’s get some Proquip”

And it spreads wider – Goretex are forced to make a statement that they ended their relationship with Sun Mountain in 2006! Right now Sun Mountain are toxic!

Google news results for Sun Mountain right now and you can see what’s happening. As I’ve said before, “you are what Google says you are” and “you can’t take piss out of a swimming pool”!

If Sun Mountain employ social media listening tools, they will hopefully be on this, working throughout the night and the rest of the weekend to try and address things positively – quite how they do this, I can’t think right now!

Proquip on the other hand may also be listening in and their positive sentiment report will bulging at the the seams! Lots’ of ‘thanks guys’ and if you’re a retailer carrying the Proquip range, ‘here’s a voucher for online store with 10% off Proquip merchandise if you buy before….”, you get the idea!

Anyway, the players are back out – come on Europe!

Yahoo! – The Death of a Search Engine

Posted on by RichardAKent

I heard the news today – Oh Boy!

It seems that west coast the fault lines running through Yahoo! are opening up once more. The news today is that three more top executives are due to resign.

Reading this, I’d forgotten about the failed takeover by Microsoft a few years ago, but it seems that Carol Bartz, the CEO who replaced Jerry Yang, to ‘clean up’ and restore  Yahoo! to greatness, after that failed attempt, is now presiding over a sinking ship.

I recall a great article I read a month or so ago by Paul Graham who detailed meeting founder Jerry Yang to discuss a new model for online advertising. The model they discussed was essentially the PPC model we know today, but at the time of the meeting, online ad revenues were being generated by banners and CPM deals. Advertisers were still living in the twentieth century and impressions were king. As this new model looked like giving advertisers much more visibility of the power of their ad dollars, Yang ran for the hills, preferring instead to sit on his throne of banners and skyscrapers.

Of course we all know who eventually saw the potential of the new model and now who cleans up!

Does anyone use Yahoo!? It’s a serious question. I know they went on an acquisition trail, picking up Flickr, Kelkoo and Delicious, so yes we probably use Yahoo! to access these services – but do you use Yahoo! for email, or even (sshhhh) search?

Paul Graham talks of there being no ‘hacker’ culture at Yahoo! Which was in complete contrast to the other silicon valley companies at the time. Instead, Yahoo! had an old fashioned approach towards its employees. Clock in, clock out.

Back in the day, there was Compuserve, Alta Vista, Yahoo! and then a odd one called Google. Whilst others have gone by the wayside, it’s a shame to hear of Yahoo’s seemingly imminent demise. But you reap what you sow I suppose.

The Social Egosystem

Posted on by RichardAKent

This article by Brian Solis, paints a fascinating picture.

He echos much of what I have written about here previously in relation to our ‘me’ brands and the narcissism of today’s consumers.

What’s clear is the need for brands to identify their biggest potential influencers. It’s summed up best by this quote “Brands seeking reach, presence, and connectivity must look beyond popularity and focus on aligning with the influential beacons who serve as the hubs for contextual networks or nicheworks.”
But what really permeates throughout this article is the firm belief, which I share, that actions by brands, via social tools, can indeed be measured and deliver an ROI that brands will expect in the future.

I know from my own experience, when an agency sits and squirms at the suggestion that their funky viral project should carry an element of measurement, it’s the first sign you should run away. And when they say that a calculation of  ROI cannot even be attempted, show them the door.

The refinement of Twitter will, allowing better profiling based on keywords, history and other variables means that this microblog could well become the dominant force of the social web. The launch of new Twitter indicates that they are developing more ways to keep users on the Twitter site itself and away from various third paty ‘clients’. Combine this with their growing ability to analyse user data and in turn what that means they can offer advertisers and you can see where this is going.

I’ve read recently more and more complaints about Facebook and its user interface. The constant changes are becoming an annoyance. When people become more familiar with new Twitter’s ability to show images, video and sound, the reasons we have for spending time on Facebook may decline

In the week that “The Social Network” is released, Zuckerberg surely needs to get his team to raise their game back at the ranch and avoid the red carpet?

What do you think?