Bill Johnston: Online Community Strategy

I have a confession to make: I love Starbucks. I get no end of shit for this from my coffee snob friends, but when I can’t get to our local coffee shop in Fairfax, and tend to make a beeline to SBX. Call me lame on this particular point. I accept it.

I was particulalry impressed by how the company recently handled a children’s cup recall. In light of the recent spat of recalls becuase of faulty manufacturing and lead paint, this issue really could have mushroomed out of control for Starbcucks, but it didn’t.

We had one of the cups for Melina (the little ladybug), and Sharon (my wife) was the one who discovered the recall and contacted Starbucks. In her own words:

I went to SBX for coffee, and there was a recall sign posted by the cashier about the cups and it said to go to starbucks.com for detailed info.

Went to starbucks.com when I got home and on the home page was a 800# to call. Called and a live person picked up on the first ring. Took my info, said I would be receiving a box to mail back the cup within 1 week and to mail it back and then they would send me a refund for the cup 5.95 + a $5 starbucks card for the inconvenience.

UPS envelope with box and mail label arrived about 4 days later, put the cup in the box, put the label on and mailed it. Refund and starbucks card should be here in a few weeks (I forget how many it said—maybe 4 weeks?)

p.s. I am still waiting for my stuff (on how to return) from the mattel recall months ago—I have heard nothing from them since I filled out their online form.

What is Starbucks doing right here?

• Acknowledging the problem, and taking full responsibility
• Raising awareness in stores and online
• Making it easy to send the affected merchandise back and offering quality service in multiple formats (web, phone, in store)
• Taking care of the problem FAST (& fast follow up)
• A little extra something-something to show that they are sincere ($5 coffee card)

I know it isn’t exactly fair to compare this to the ongoing Mattel crisis, but I will anyway. We still haven’t gotten any of the information that we requested about returning affected merchandise or shippers to send stuff back, and its been close to 3 months.

Takeaway: Mattel created their current cirsis by not fully accepting responsibility, and not following through. Starbucks avoided one by acknowledging the problem and providing a high level of service to address the issue with consumers.

PS: Did I mention the last demographic you probably want to piss off is Moms?

Update: Sharon got her refund check of $5.95 today, plus a $5 starbucks card.

Facebook expands to the toddler demographic

Originally uploaded by redplasticmonkey

ok - I couldn’t resist. We were walking back from dinner on University Ave, and I asked Melina if she wanted to go see facebook.

It’s just a little over a week away from the Marketing & Online Community conference. The conference agenda is almost set, and we have a great list of speakers and topics. I’m pulling together my thoughts for opening remarks, and I thought I would share some thoughts about how marketing techniques and consumer and marketer attitudes are changing.

The marketing equation to date has been something like this:
Corporate marketer engages agency with a specific goal in mind, like sell more widgets the next 2 quarters. Agency comes up with campaign that pounds consumers via available media with call to action to buy more widgets. Single digit “conversion” is deemed successful. Wash, rinse, repeat.

So how are the players in the above equation changing?

Consumers / Community Members
More and more people are flocking to social networking and community sites every day. More social media is being created and consumed every day, as traditional media consumption falls. Consumers have never been so empowered, and have also never been so overwhelmed with options and content. The connected consumer generally trusts her peers more than a c-level exec or slick campaign.

Brands / Companies
Companies are starting to realize that they can’t control the message or the medium. The best are acting as good hosts of their communities, and creating clean, well lit places to host the conversations and experiences their customers want to have. They are also extending their efforts to reach customers and prospects at the other places they work and play online, and to engage them in appropriate and interesting ways. These efforts go well beyond the traditional marketing and PR efforts of the past, with the end goal of creating unmediated relationships with their customers.

Agencies
Agencies have traditionally been paid to achieve campaign-driven results quarter over quarter. Most are struggling to evolve their approach, and to help client companies build meaningful and direct relationships with their customers. Authenticity (becoming part of the community) and transparent intentions (being clear about what you want / are trying to do) are key elements in this evolution.

We have a great group of folks coming to discuss these issues, and much more. We do have a handful of tickets left to the conference, including 2 discounted tickets. If you would like more information, please send me an email.

I’m posting my slides from the “Who Owns Community?” Webinar on Wednesday.

The net-net?

The community “owns” the community (of course)
The community team probably belongs in Marketing, but Marketing doesn’t deserve it yet.

Slides here.

We are lining up the final speaker slots for the Marketing & Online Community conference.

We’ve added three folks this week that I am particularly excited about (ok, I’m also excited by the whole lineup).

David Dunne - Edelman
I’ve been a fan of Edelman since a former Autodesk colleague introduced me to their Trust Barometer a couple of years ago. I’m glad to have their perspective a part of the conference.

Thor Muller - Satisfaction
Satisfaction intends to turn customer support, and by extension, brand ownership on it’s ear. If you aren’t familiar with the site, check it out. It turns out our CEO Chris blogged about them several weeks ago.

Richard Weil - Cartoon Network
Richard is working on a very interesting virtual world project. I’m not sure how much I am free to say at this point… so we will just leave it as that.

It is interesting to watch traditional marketing and advertising agencies confront the power of the connected consumer. I’m very excited to get to New York and to explore this topic with the brands, agencies and communities that are coming.

 I’m doing a webinar with Matthew Lees from the Patricia Seybold Group this Wednesday about how the community team functions and is funded in the corporate environment.

Please join us if you can.

Who Owns Community? - Webinar
Aligning Business Sponsorship and Responsibility with Community Goals
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
11:00 AM Pacific / 2:00 PM Eastern
Free Webinar hosted by Forum One and the Patricia Seybold Group

Online communities and social networks are changing the ways
organizations do business in this customer-empowered, Web 2.0 world.
Different companies have taken different paths in defining the
ownership of community initiatives.

Join Matthew Lees of the Patricia Seybold Group and Bill Johnston,
Director, Community & Research of Forum One Communications, for this
live Webinar in a discussion of these questions and issues:

• Who should be responsible and accountable for it? Who should fund it?
• What problems can arise — both within the company and within the
community — if the “wrong” group owns it?
• Do the answers to these questions depend on the industry, the type
of community, or other things?

Space is limited. Click here to register.

The next Online Community Roundtable is this Thursday, 10/18 at Autodesk in San Francisco.

Please email me if you would like an invite.

Join the Facebook group if you would like to stay updated.

Cross-posted from the OC Report: Following closely on the heels of the Online Community Summit, The Marketing & Online Communities conference is less than a month away.

The Marketing & Online Communities conference is intended to be an in-depth discussion on the current issues and opportunities in marketing to communities. Marketers and brand managers seem to be struggling with effective and appropriate techniques when marketing to the connected consumer. For instance, Edelman, the renowned PR firm that publishes it’s annual Trust Barometer, has had a couple of recent campaigns for Wal-Mart that clearly violate consumer trust. Conversely, online communities seem to be very reluctant to experiment with new and appropriate marketing techniques, and seem to fall back on crude tools like banner ads. Personally, I’m stunned every day at the crass and off-target ads I’m served in Facebook. We can all collectively do better.

In short: the point of the conference is to bring marketing agencies, brand managers and community hosts to the table to talk about how to market more effectively and respectfully.

Our topic list includes:
• Marketing to Communities – The Brand “Us”
• Anatomy of an Integrated Campaign
• Creating Successful Campaigns With Established Communities
• Hosting the premier community for your Brand
• Using Social Media in Your Campaigns
• Measuring The Success of Your Community Campaign
• Children & Tween Communities: Engaging the Future
• Boomer Networks
• The Future of Community-based Marketing

Our session lead list includes:
• Dave Bottoms - Yahoo!
• Betsy Burroughs - Future Catalyst
• Andy Chambers - Digit
• Mary Furlong - Mary Furlong & Associates
• Marcien Jenckes - AOL
• Michael Leifer - guerilla PR, Inc.
• Tim Manners - THE HUB Magazine / Cool News of the Day
• Bree Nguyen - Warner Bros Records
• Jeremy Welt - Warner Bros Records

A partial list of the organizations attending includes:
• AOL
• APC
• David X. Manners Company
• Digit London
• Eastman Kodak
• Fidelity Investments
• Guardian Investment Management
• guerilla PR, Inc.
• Harlequin Enterprises Ltd.
• Lightworks New Media, Inc.
• LiveWorld
• Marketmaker Interactive
• Microsoft
• Omidyar Network
• Strategic Marketing
• The Luxury Institute
• United Nations
• WebEx
• Yahoo

Last but not least, we have added a reception following the event in the ultra hip Sanctum lounge. This is the prefect place for both sides of the community and marketing debate to sip a cocktail, relax, and network after what promises to be a full day of heated discussion.

If you would like to request an invitation to the event, please fill out this short form.

A few speaking and sponsorship opportunities are still available. Please let me know if you would like to discuss. bjohnston@forumone.com.

The sixth Online Community Summit was held last Thursday and Friday, October 4th and 5th in Sonoma, CA. We had a really great group of folks this year (as usual), ranging from small startups and non-profits, to large software, online and media companies.

The size of the Summit is small and feels really intimate. Because we limit the number of attendees, you actually have the opportunity to get to know everyone over the course of the 2 days. The smaller groups size also allows for real conversations during the sessions, as opposed to the traditional “talking head” sessions that make up most conferences.

Peter Cohen of Amazon Mechanical Turk
I found one of the most thought-provoking sessions to be Peter Cohen’s session on crowdsourcing. Peter runs Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service.

Peter started off with a bang by saying “The Internet reduces the cost of getting things done to almost nothing”.

Amazon started the “Mechanical Turk” service because they had / have data-oriented problems that benefit from interaction with large scale human interactions. They quickly decided that they could extend the model to go from “solving Amazon’s problems to everyone’s” Amazon’s belief was that there was power in online communities if you can only bring the people together for a coherent goal.

Amazon is using the service to:
- Cataloging content
- Deduplicate items (defy a machines ability)

Other companies are using the service to:
- Search companies get people to judge relevance. Search gives you results. User must pattern match to get answers
- Geospatial: UK - people drive around and take pictures of infrastructure
- Castingworks: Transcription / editing
- Catalog building
- Media Monitoring: uses MT to determine tone in popular press and social media
- Local shopping sits: product reviews

What’s Next Session
I had the pleasure of assisting David Forrest from The Motley Fool in the closing “What’s Next” session. Josh Ledgard has a really good synopsis of the session on his blog. Kim Bayne captured some of the session on blog tv here.

I’ve also added my slides here.

Other folks blogging about the event:
Joi Podgorny - http://joipodgorny.wordpress.com/2007/10/05/day-2-ocs-2007-notes/
Josh Ledgard’s Blog - http://ledgards.com/blogs/josh/archive/2007/10/05/ocs-2007-now-what.aspx
Dr Fuzzy - http://drfuzzy.wordpress.com/2007/10/04/online-community-summit-2007/

Ocu2007 peter cohen

Originally uploaded by redplasticmonkey

Peter runs Amazon Mechanical Turk, and is discussing crowd sourcing.