BusinessWeek has a short piece entitled Starbuck’s Secret Ingredient. It looks at how you can incorporate coffee chain chairman Howard Schultz’s persuasive communication skills in your workplace.
In summary, here are the top 3 lessons:
Lesson 1: Dig deep to identify what you are truly passionate about (hint: it’s not always the product itself) and convey that message to employees, customers, and colleagues. When you are passionate, you come across as excited, energetic, and enthusiastic — all of the qualities people like to see in others. And if people like you, they’re more likely to do business with you or to back your vision.
Lesson 2: Inspire your colleagues, investors, or employees by painting a picture of a world made better by your service, product, company, or cause.
Lesson 3: To get the most out of people, a leader has to tap into their emotions as well as their minds. People can relate to stories. They can see themselves in other people’s stories. The ability to use stories to get people to buy into one’s vision with their hearts is a powerful leadership capability.
You can read the whole article here. Better yet, grab yourself a copy of Howard’s book and head to your local Starbucks for a little reading.
Add Your Comments“Many businesses find that tracking blogs and online discussion groups yields candid–and crucial–information about their products, services and competitors.”
Read the article at C|Net
What percentage of all our conversations include talk about an organization, brand, product, or service?
Walter Carl figures 17.5%!
You’re job of course is to make sure the good far outweighs the bad!
Don’t sweat about marketing. Focus on building an amazing product. Your customers will take care of the rest.
[Watch the video]
Created by one of Google’s growing legion of evangelists
Listen to your customers!
Admit it when you’ve blown it.
Fix it.
These days you have to.
Wow! Look at how SixApart handled recent service interruptions with their TypePad service:
Extra-ordinary!
According to consulting giant McKinsey, about two-thirds of all economic activity in the US is influenced by shared opinions about a product, brand or service. To help make some sense of that, WOMMA (The Word of Mouth Marketing Association) has partnered with eMarketer to deliver a report examining why so many online marketers are engaging in word of mouth or viral campaigns - and why even more plan to do so in the future.
According to the report, the top ten reasons are:
1. The consumer is in control
2. There is a growing distrust of advertising messages
3. Empowered consumers are not just negative, they are fighting back
4. There is a marked increase in online advertising
5. Media fragmentation is causing marketers are shifting from mass advertising to targeting efforts
6. Email and other interactive platforms make it easy to employ viral programs
7. Word of mouth marketing is relatively free advertising
8. New tools can now track and measure online word of mouth
9. Online word of mouth marketing campaigns have a long shelf life
10. Remarkable offline marketing campaigns can ripple on to the web
The full, paid version of the report is available here. [via Church of the Customer]
I’ve been using Mailblocks.com as my personal email account for a couple years now. In fact, in the early days, I was one of their paying customers. Unfortunately, Mailblocks recently sent me an email informing me that their new owner, AOL, would be shutting the service down.
All Mailblocks customers can transition to the new AIM Mail service immediately, because the Mailblocks email service will be discontinued on November 16, 2005. Per our Terms of Service, we are providing 30-days advance notice. The Mailblocks email service will be discontinued on November 16, 2005 and any future email after that date will be returned to the sender. Once the account is closed, there will be no way to gain access to the account and all the data will be permanently deleted.
Hang on a second! “Any future email after that date will be returned to the sender.” Come on! That has to be a mistake. Surely if I sign up for the new AIM account you can forward my old mail to me? I emailed this very question to the Mailblocks team and all they could come up with was a canned response telling me how “the Mailblocks service is designed to be the ???consolidator??? of all your email accounts.” That’s not much good if the service is being shut down. So…I emailed them again.
Did you even read my previous email? I got an email from you guys a few days ago saying you are canceling my mailblocks account. How can mailblocks act as a “consolidator” if you are shutting the service down? I’ll ask my question again. If I create a AOL email address, can you forward my mailblocks there after the mailblocks service has been shut down.
The response:
As stated in the email, the email servers will be deleted of all data and disassembled after November 16th. Due to this, email service or forwarded emails will not be available after that date.
I see. So…why on God’s green earth would I sign up for AOL mail? First you tell me you’re taking away my email address. Then you tell me that all my personal data is going to be deleted, permanently. And then, you try and muscle me into your new service with no real benefits for my previous loyalty.
Call me crazy, but doesn’t it seem odd that a company would use its shareholders money to buy a promising young company and then tell all of that company’s customers to screw off. Basically, play by our rules or don’t play at all. Still sounds pretty “walled garden” to me. Could you imagine if Yahoo said to all Flickr users - sorry, now that we have purchased Flickr we are going to delete all your photos. But you’re welcome to upload them again at our new Yahoo Photo service!
I don’t know how many Mailblocks subscribers there are, but obviously AOL doesn’t care. Ahhh, who needs customers anyway?
Design Public is a retailer - they sell modern furniture. They also have blog which they use to have a close, two-way relationship with hundreds of potential customers every day.
Building relationships - Design Public gets it. Look what else they’re doing:
We love Flickr. Antoi, our customer service guru and fashion designer, uses it daily and runs about five groups, so she’s been harping on us to start our own.
We just did.
It’s called “Fresh New Spaces“, and we aim to make it a great showcase of modern interiors. Anyone can join, anyone can post anything - as long as it is related to the theme of making an interior space “fresh, new, and modern”. So show off your interior design talents - let’s see what you’ve got!
That’s awesome! Invite your customers to join in and express themselves. And do it all for $0 using a free online photo management and sharing application with a built-in cult-like following. If I had a fab apartment I know I’d join in!
Amazon knows how to do it! Just look at the email below.
Dear Customer,
We are writing to you regarding your order for “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter 6)”.
At Amazon.co.uk, we are always looking for ways to bring value to our customers. We are, therefore, delighted to confirm that we have reduced the price of Harry Potter 6 to just 8.99 (47% off) and that all our customers, muggles and wizards alike, will benefit from this reduction.
Rest assured that the new lower price will be charged automatically when we dispatch your book, and the new price will be magically changed in Your Account. You will see the change in Your Account at the following address:
www.amazon.co.uk/your-account
These changes may not be reflected immediately.
Please note that the book will not fit through a standard letter box, so keep an eye out for our delivery owls.
Thank you for shopping at Amazon.co.uk, and stay alert for You-Know-Who.
Warmest regards,
Customer Service
Amazon.co.uk
This was sent to a friend of mine who had an advance order on a new Harry Potter book. Not only did they offer her a cheaper price then she originally agreed to pay, but the communication with her was fun and oh so clever. It’s too bad they used “dear customer” instead of her name.
