Location check-in, check out?
There is all of this hype about location based check-in’s (post to follow), but I am more curious why there is no focus on checking out. As there is more adoption in this space and people start taking advantage of the growing amount of rebates for mayorships, instant coupons and serving up ‘nearby specials’ in your competitors spaces, it is all about the mighty Check In. The future is full of integration of checkin via LBS, checking in for your flight, a hotel, or even a dinner reservation. I see my friends checking in everywhere, stores, bars, sporting events, you name it… but what about checking out? What if I am nearby and want to “go to there”? Most people check-in to places they are at for short periods of time, so what’s the likelihood of me catching them there?
Convenience: What if I could check out from my hotel room via Foursquare and my receipt was automatically emailed to me? (Apple does this really well when purchasing items at their store).
Making you feel special: What about checking out of a restaurant via Gowalla which triggered your check to your table (we all hate waiting for the check), your coat ready at the door, your valet to bring the car to the front or a taxi called, and an emailed survey allowing you to share your experience.
These are simple examples, but there seems to be just as much value with checking Out as with checking In. Would love to hear some of your ideas… share below.
NikeID, and why it is awesomesauce.
This past weekend I was surprised with a gift, an appointment at the NYC Niketown store with a NikeID specialist. I know what you are thinking… why do you need an appointment to buy sneakers? Well my fine friends, let me explain to you how this appointment changed my view of a ‘customer experience’. Especially since I make many of my purchases online now – but this might bring me back to the inline store purchasing process.
On the top floor of the store, a glass-frosted door and a smiling face welcomed me into the customization factory and into a one-on-one consultation with a NikeID expert. Now, you can experience this yourself on the nike.com website, but there is something to be said about being able to see and feel all of the different fabrics, try on the different sneakers that can be customized, and then see it being built in realtime on huge flatscreens in this fancy room. And, I must admit, I made me some fancy kicks.
This experience totally makes you feel like part of the process. And why wouldn’t it, you just created your own sneakers. Not to mention how when exiting this room, you now walk then entire store looking for gear that matches your new fancy footwear. Brilliant if you ask me… they don’t even have to try and upsell you, you upsell yourself (hello UPT’s) – and you don’t even feel guilty about it.
There are similar experiences I have seen by footwear companies, but this by far was the most exciting of them all. You totally feel like V.I.P the entire time, and there is a lot to be said about that.
Which brings me back to online shopping – yes, I can surf the web, fine great deals, search for coupons on the fly and discount codes… but I will never feel a sense of accomplishment and pride like I did in the Nike store that day and making the shopping experience fun again.
Thank you NIKE for being awesomesauce.
tweeps with benefits
I was recently reading a post by Daryl Pereira (@cagedether) on how Radian6 shows feedback via Twitter on their corporate webpages. First off, let me say that everytime I have ever mentioned Radian6 in any capacity, they are always prompt to respond, even if to just thank me for referencing their name, pretty impressive (look at the first comment on his blog). I like to see companies use their own technology and walk the walk. Additionally, I totally agree with Daryl, how they highlight a post on their homepage to an entire dedicated page to tweeps and tweets is equally as cool.
I think Radian6 sets a good tone here on how their community managers actively monitor their brand and engage at every opportunity. I heard someone once say, “conversations are also opportunities, and if you dont respond, one of your competitors will”. We are seeing more and more that companies are now embedding social feeds into their own corporate websites, and I see this as only continuing as companies start to realize they don’t own the content anymore, the users do, and they want to embrace that.
Message: listen to your brand mentions, and when possible, BIG THEM UP. They are your best advocates.
competitive tactic or spam?
I tend to have a lot of conversations about what things I see companies doing in social environments that to me seem to straddle the line between competitive tactics and spamming. I have heard a lot of arguments from both sides on this, and it all comes back to the saying, “an eye for an eye”, if someone does it to you, you can do it to them. Then question of who does it first also gets just as much attention. Whether that is actually the correct way of doing business or not can also be argued, but thats not what I am trying to determine.
It all started with radio and ad campaigns, competitors calling each other out over quality of products or who does what better, even today I still enjoy the TV commercials of Pepsi and Coke going at it. But now that we live in the world of social conversations, chat rooms and influencers, where does the line get drawn? In the world of Twitter, which is now a viable resource and influential arena for B2B and B2C companies alike, what constitutes a competitive tactic or spam?
So here is my question to you:
Would it be ok if Pepsi used the Coke hashtag (#coke) in their tweets? to help them reach a new audience? to help disrupt Coke’s marketing campaign? to redirect traffic from an event?
Or is this considered spamming?
I would really love to hear your comments on this, as it is very easy to replace Pepsi and Coke with any company’s name and a competitor. Unless of course you think it is ok for B2C, but not for B2B, which then I would love to hear your comment on that as well.
Samsung IS GOING social
This morning Esteban Contreras (@socialnerdia) showed me Samsung’s new homepage and I must say, it was pretty fresh. A fully functioning, social media implementation right there, on their homepage. Not to mention they worked with a pretty awesome crew over at Jess3 (@jess3) to make this happen. I want to highlight two points…
1. Embrace your social initiatives. From the Samsung homage you can tweet (w/ hashtags is a bonus), link to Facebook and “Like” basically everything, click to add photos, see videos, read reviews and click to “Buzz” which is another way to link to external articles (blogs). In other words, almost all of this content lives somewhere else, in social-land. This seems to fall inline with their social media tactics and is a nice play to encourage engagement.
2. Pull the trigger and GO! Everything is so much about being and doing in “realtime” with social media and Samsung was able to pitch their vision and get this implemented in a 2 week timeframe. THAT is impressive. How fast you implement is almost as important as what you implement sometimes.
You have to be ready to strike while its hot and I think Samsung did a great job at that with this redesign. I am sure we will see more from them in the upcoming months and I look forward to how far they can push things. And I am always looking at the great work Jess3 does.
Also, check out their open application to dev people for app ideas for their TV line. I always hear people bragging about these great iPhone app ideas they have, so here is a chance to get it on TV too.
Getting to the point
I went through my semi-annual review yesterday and got some very good feedback. I need to learn when pitching concepts to executives to get to the point faster. As some of us that work at larger corporations know, it is nearly impossible to get face time with our high level execs. But these are also the people that hold the power to say Yes or No to our ideas, so when we do get that time, we need to nail it. I always find the challenge with social media concepts is that I tend to pitch the backstory before the actual concept, like my setup for a joke. Not because they dont understand, but because I am trying to give more context to why I am pitching is this way. People must understand the challenges and why before we pitch the “How to”.
The analogy used, which I think is a good one was: think of the time you spend pitching to an exec as a cash register, every minute that passes, money is spent (ching-ching), because their time is so limited that every minute is money not being made somewhere else. (or something to that effect, you get the point). I guess for whatever reason I never really thought of it that way. I get the whole “they are tight for time” thing, but I always thought that when you finally got your time, you used it to the max because you dont get second chances to pitch first ideas. But when you work in a sales environment and those execs are the ones helping close deals, I get it.
This had me thinking, how can I self teach myself better to get to the point faster? Less bullets on a slide (pull out the deets)? Talk faster (speed talking is fun)? Go high level and leave the details for later (whats this idea for again)? … OR reward myself for being rewarded? By that I mean, turn that timer around and give the $$ to myself. Now I know, paying myself out of my own pocket for doing my job doesn’t even begin to make sense, but if I can figure out a reward system for myself, this might work.
I have 5 slides. I start off with $25 and start going backwards. Not sure what a good goal is, but am thinking each solid slide should take me 1 minute. For every minute I go over on each slide I lose $5. So 5 slides in under 5 minutes, for every minute saved, I double the dollar amount (4 mins=$50, 3mins=$75) and put it towards a gift for myself. 5 slides in 5 minutes, it is a wash. Now here is the fun part… 5 slides in 6 minutes means I keep $20 and give $5 to my wife. 5 slides in 8 minutes means I keep $10 and $15 goes to my wife. And to top it off, if I hit 10 minutes (double time) on 5 slides, she gets all $25 and I have learned a valuable lesson: “make sure next time I don’t go over my time anymore.” (maybe I need to start with quarters)
Nike soccer spot for World Cup, best ever?
This may be to best Nike spot I have seen them produce. What is even more impressive to me (aside from the spot being pretty awesome) if the fact the Nike is not the global sponsor of the World Cup, their competitor Adidas is.
The way the video shows how historic moments from the World Cup can have worldwide affects is great. Miss a shot, a country groans together, save a goal, you get knighted! And the clip when Ronaldinho does foot tricks transitioning to YouTube, showing view rates skyrocket, people imitating throughout the world, finishing with Kobe after dropping a shot. The power of social media, integrated closely with the worldwide audience.
From what I have read, the Wieden & Kennedy, Amsterdam spot just became available today for viewing. This piece was directed by Alejandro Inarritu (“21 Grams,” “Babel”) and features soccer stars such as Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Landon Donovan and Ronaldinho and Homer Simpson.
What do you think? btw, the video had over 100k views in the time it took me to post this.
Interview with Sandy Carter, VP, IBM
I had the privilege of talking with Sandy Carter, VP, IBM Software Business Partners (@sandy_carter) recently about Social Media at IBM Impact (#ibmimpact) and some of the great things we are doing this year. It is always great to talk with Sandy about social media, not to mention the fact she is a big supporter and active participant.
Read the entire interview post here: http://bit.ly/akiyvq
Thanks to Sandy for the great interview! Maybe I can interview her now for my blog.
Also be sure to check our her latest book, “The new language of marketing 2.0″ – http://www.ibmpressbooks.com/promotions/promotion.asp?promo=136780
Scheduling Tweets can backfire
So I had my first negative experience on scheduling tweets. First off, being able to schedule tweets is a great feature, similar to how scheduling blog posts. But I do caution how far you may want to schedule those tweets out.
I ran into a situation recently where we were promoting something over the course of a couple of weeks, so it was easy to schedule some future tweets with some different teaser text a couple of weeks out. This was not related to an announcement or anything, just one of those fun things/offers you like to share. We were not aware of this, but there was backfire in the community around the topic after those tweets were originally scheduled and even though it did not affect the link itself, it definitely affected how you worded yourself when talking about it. Not knowing, one of our lovely scheduled tweets hits the web the following week and did not go over well.
Lessons learned: 1. even though your tweets are scheduled, peep you head in and check in on them, 2. try and not schedule tweets out further than a week, especially if it is business/industry related at all, you never know what can happen
A Business Agility Menu for Success at #ibmimpact (test)
This is a test post on a new tool I am working on. I will however write a complete post about #ibmimpact and how to stay connected during the event, so stay tuned. 
#ibmimpact