Category Archives: Marketing

In order to understand how to incentivize mavens, it is very important to understand how they are different from your spokesperson, brand ambassador and sales person. A spokesperson, brand ambassador or sales person is someone who works for a company. It’s their job. They say awesome things about a brand or they recommend people to use a company’s product primarily because they are paid to do that. Mavens on the other hand are the trusted experts in a field who seeks to pass knowledge on to others. These are the people who are contacted by others to find information in a field they command expertise. They do it just because they want to do this and are passionate about this.

The best incentives for mavens anywhere is recognition. One of the pioneers in this field is Microsoft. A big reason behind Microsoft’s success as a platform is the big array of applications on it. The applications are developed by a community of developers. Microsoft incentivize developers using the Microsoft MVP program. Microsoft Most Valuable Professional program gives special recognition to the developers who are active in the Microsoft developers communities and forums answering questions, making suggestions and contributing to the product. Microsoft invites them special developers conferences, gives them gift coupons to buy Microsoft software and a special tag next to their name on Microsoft communities.

Another good example is Coca-Cola. As Facebook became a big deal and companies started to look at it as a marketing platform, Coca-Cola discovered that their fan page was already there. A couple of Coca-Cola fans created the Facebook fan page and actively managed it. These individuals were real soft drink mavens who vouched for Coca-cola and took the initiative to help Coca-Cola fans engage with each other. Cola-Cola recognized that and instead of taking over the fan page encouraged these people to maintain it and provided them resources to do so. Over the years, unlike many Facebook fan pages, majority of content on Coca-Cola fan page is still generated by fans.

The most important thing to recognize while dealing with mavens is that you cannot manage them. What you can do is listen to them, engage with them and appreciate them so that they have the incentive to be part of your community and be the volunteers who act as your spokesperson, brand ambassador and sales person.

I wrote this post for Management Innovation Exchange. It is posted at MIX.

It’s awesome, it’s cool, I love it…these were some of the common phrases students attach to a couple of Microsoft product. But to top it off, these cool, awesome and great Microsoft products are not some glamorous gadgets, but the must have software known as Microsoft Office Excel and PowerPoint!

Spending last two year at a business school campus, I saw folks carrying all kinds of cool electronic gadgets from laptops to smartphones. Some people love their Macs, others love their ThinkPads. People swear by their iPhones and Blackberrys. The funny thing is that everyone has got their reasoning to prefer one over the other, and they are of course right from their perspectives, but if there’s only one product which holds up to true (Microsoft) monopoly status, it’s Microsoft Office.

I believe Microsoft Office is the coolest product Microsoft has got in its arsenal at this time. Replacing Excel and PowerPoint is not an option for anyone anytime soon (some might defer, but I believe realistically it won’t be that easy to get rid of them). The best thing for company to do is use these products to the fullest extent to show Microsoft’s coolness to the future generation.

The point here is for the company to build up on the already proven products which people love and build an ecosystem around them. Excel and PowerPoint should be linked to every productivity tool there possibly is ranging from email to instant messenger. Microsoft should take the lead and proactively market the fully featured office collaborative tools focusing on these two products (the keywords here being “fully featured”). Not doing that is pushing people to use competitive products for collaboration.

All these technologies are already there in the expensive version of the software where you can use Office Live Communicator and SharePoint. But these are not the tools a normal college going person use on a daily basis. They use the ones which are more commonly available and can be used for both work and fun. The only way to captivate their attention is to go where they are.

Talking in terms of numbers, let’s look at the cost of acquisition and map it to the Life Time Value of the customer (very stripped down, simplistic back of the envelope calculations). Consider a business school student who’s going to be there for two years. If Microsoft gives away a fully featured version of Microsoft Office with communicator, SharePoint and what not, it will be equivalent to giving away $500 worth of software per student. Microsoft releases a new version of Office every four years. A b-school graduate will be working in the real world for about 30 years on an average. That’s about seven releases of Microsoft Office software if it keeps up the current pace. If the investment made on the customer during two years at b-school makes him or her a loyal customer, with a 40% loyalty retention, the company can expect a return of $2000 per individual for whom this customer is making a software buying decision.

Microsoft: think of it more as a customer acquisition and retention opportunity than an additional software sale opportunity…it will work because you are earning mind share of the audience that is going to make the buying decision tomorrow!

Social networks have become the number one place for people to spend time. With more and more people spending time over there, it has become the place to be for businesses. The growing overcrowding on social media has made it very easy for anyone to get lost. The natural reaction here for businesses is to try and take ownership of their social worlds. But is it even possible?

Let’s first define the social world for your business. Is it your Facebook fan page and twitter handle? Or is it your microsite where you have all sort of cool games for people to learn about your products and the forum that you maintain to provide customer support? Well its all this and much more. The reason being, nine out of ten times, the communication is not happening on your turf. If people like your product, they share it with their friends in their tweets. They write about a horrible experience with your customer service on their blog. They provide recommendations and share experiences where they find it comfortable. So this defines your social world as the world out there, with no boundaries and no limits.

The point is, your social world is forming out there. It is continuously evolving. You cannot own your social world and you should not even try to do that. What you can do is be an active part of it. Stir the pot. Answer questions that the customers pose. Take feedback from your customers. Identify the mavens–passionate users and the opinion makers–and engage with them and let them be your advocates. That’s the best way you can leverage your social world.

Privacy is the center piece of a lot of jitters in the integrated web experience today. Whether its Google showing you contextual advertisements or Facebook Open Graph compliant sites giving you a tailored experience, you are putting your privacy on line. What’s the point? It’s to get personalization. Personalization has become a necessity in the world today. With content overflow in the world around us, the only way to stay on the top of your areas of interest and expertise is by getting a personalized experience.

There is an interesting trade-off between personalization and privacy. While on one hand privacy is important to protect your identity from the increasingly vulnerable web, personalization can make you more efficient and presentable than anything else. So the important question here is, where to draw the line? In order to define that, it is critical to understand how much personal information is needed to provide a personalized experience. There are degrees of personalization and quite expectedly, different degrees of personalization requires different levels of information invading privacy at different levels.

One of the most common forms of personalization (beyond contextual advertising) is behavioral targeting where browsing behavior of an individual is used to personalize the experience online. This is the most simple form of behavioral targeting, where the advertisers and content providers do not use any personally identifiable  information about an individual and provides contextual relevance just based on the browsing history. In this case, the privacy is marginally compromised and the degree of personalization you get can make your browsing experience very optimal.

The next step in providing deeper personalization is to integrate an individual’s profile information with the browsing behavior. You experience this kind of profile based behavioral targeting at online stores like Amazon. Amazon knows a lot about the customer’s profile which includes their shopping pattern, their wish list, their preferences and much more. Combining this information with the browsing behavior of a customer, both on the online store and elsewhere on the world wide web helps the online store provide you with personalized shopping recommendations. Another arena where this type of personalization is experienced is at social networking sites like Facebook. Facebook collects a lot of information about the customers through their profiles, their status updates, their friends, their groups and so on. It uses this information combined with the behavioral traits of the customers to provide personalized advertising and promotions. Now let’s throw privacy in the discussion. In case of personalization at these domains, the content providers are using the information the customer has explicitly provided them. In other words, the customers can control their privacy invasion by controlling the amount of information they share with these domains. The trade-off is in terms of personalization, but as far as privacy is concerned, it’s completely under control of the customer and the trade-off is very explicit.

Move it a step further and we come to personalization on the network using an individual’s behavior and their profile information available with the network creator. Think of it as expansion of the previous scenario where the single domain has now diluted to contain several websites and online properties that agree to share the profile information of the customer to provide richer personalized experience. At one end this network based targeting provides a great personalized experience to the customers but on the other hand has raised the privacy concerns more than in any other case. In the defense of the networks, they are doing nothing without taking customers’ consent, but more often than not the customers are clueless about the consent they are providing the content providers. So how can privacy issues be addressed here? I believe the best way to do this is by educating the customer about what they are doing and by explaining them what they are gaining and what’s the cost. By doing that, it will be up to every individual to decide what cost in terms of privacy they are willing to pay for gains in terms of personalization!

Recommendation engines are the software applications that take customers’ shopping behavior and recommends them what other products they should consider buying. Recommendation engine plays two critical roles. First, it helps in personalizing customer experience on the web and in-turn makes online shopping a better experience. Second, it helps drive revenue for online stores by making sensible and relevant product suggestions to the customers. Amazon.com, the online retail giant, has spearheaded the innovation in this space. Everything from search results to the Amazon.com home page to emails sent out to customers are personalized for every customer with relevant recommendations based on the customer’s shopping pattern.

Amazon recommendation engine does wonders for the online bookstore. It understands a customer’s reading pattern from their search and buying history and recommends the customer similar books. The engine takes into consideration the book genre, author, buying pattern of the customer, buying pattern of other customers who bought similar books and a bunch of other criteria to display relevant recommendations. Over the years, Amazon has been able to sell millions of additional books and tap into its long tail with the help of the recommendation engine.

Now let’s talk about the scenario beyond books. Over the years, Amazon has expanded its retail footprint by selling products in more than three dozen categories. It sells everything from home appliances to jewelry. As expected, Amazon has adopted the recommendation engine for its other product categories as well. In many cases like movies, video games and music the adoption was very straightforward from books. With the help of relevant recommendations, Amazon is able to provide customers with a richer shopping experience in these categories.

Though in some other cases like home appliances, cellphones and gardening products, there’s a critical difference which makes the recommendations shown to the customers irrelevant. In categories like these, the online mega-store does not take into consideration the fact that if the customer has already bought the product from them, they won’t buy it again for sometime. I experience this when I bought a vacuum cleaner from Amazon last week. Even after buying the vacuum cleaner, my Amazon.com homepage has recommendations of vacuum cleaner and I am receiving email newsletter with attractive offers on vacuum cleaners. This would have made a lot of sense if I bought a marketing book and received recommendations for other marketing books, but when translated to a vacuum cleaner, this becomes an annoying experience. How can it be made better? Maybe by considering broader area of home appliances or cleaning products for recommendations than the narrow category of vacuum cleaners.

In all, the recommendation engine is a great innovation to enhance online shopping experience. But when applied to newer territories, there are lots of opportunities to make them smarter and more efficient.