Dear Marriott: Some free service advice after a bad night
The ceiling above my hotel bed leaked all night long, onto the mattress, the end table and the rug below. Had to sleep on the floor as a result.
OK, so maybe it’s not your fault that my hotel room ceiling leaked all night long. Though the fact that there was already a stain in the same corner of the room suggests you should have known about it. But what doesn’t really work for me is the response that I got when I called in the middle of the night. It went something like this:
“We’re sorry, the hotel is totally booked there’s nothing we can do.”
Really? Nothing you can do? How about a real apology? How about an offer of five free nights at any Marriott in the system? How about setting up a bed in a conference room? They’re not full in the middle of the night. Or perhaps it doesn’t really matter to you. After all, you’re full. Business is good. What do you care if you lose one customer or have an occasionally unhappy guest?
Well I think you should care. Because not caring is the beginning of the end. And whether you believe it or not, no business these days is indispensable.
My suggestion is this. Develop a customer bill of rights if you don’t have one already. Post it at the front desk. Place it in the rooms. Train your employees in what says and what it means.
Start with:
1. We guarantee your satisfaction.
2. We guarantee your room will be clean and that everything works: the clock, TV, lamps, bathroom.
3. If for any reason your stay with us was unsatisfactory we will make it up with comparable accommodations on us.
4. We will take any complaint and suggestion seriously and respond as quickly as humanly possible.
5. We encourage you to Tweet, blog, and post images and video of anything you find below standards or unresolved.
The last point is to me the most important. It acknowledges that Marriott recognizes it lives in an age of social media and expects to be held to even higher standards as a result.
What do you think? Do brands have to be even more responsive when all of its customers can create, share and disseminate opinions and reactions?
Marketing lessons from the Grateful Dead
Brian Halligan's and David Meerman Scott's new book, announced today and available in August this year
We’ve heard the concept from Chris Anderson, in his book Free. If you want to ultimately make more money and win more fans you first have to give away a lot of stuff. That’s right, give it away. Like we all do in the social media space.
Anderson made a reference to the Grateful Dead, one of the only bands that allowed fans to record concerts and make their own bootlegged tapes. In fact they practically encouraged it. Why? It was simply a way to deliver greater service to the only constituency that mattered to the Dead. Who cared if it cut into album sales? It won the hearts of millions, generated greater attendance at live performances and a produced a community of self-proclaimed Dead Heads.
Other influential sources, including the Atlantic, have referred to the Dead’s “management secrets.” In an article published just this March, Joshua Green wrote, “The Dead’s influence on the business world may turn out to be a significant part of its legacy. Without intending to—while intending, in fact, to do just the opposite—the band pioneered ideas and practices that were subsequently embraced by corporate America.” Here, too, Green refers to the Dead’s novel idea of focusing on its most loyal fans.”
Well, it may not be a new story, but it’s finally a new book. Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. Leave it to my two friends Brian Halligan and David Meerman Scott, pioneers of inbound marketing, to take the case a step further and remind us that it was this legendary band that helped invent modern marketing and social media. A press release issued this morning states that, “For years the band broke almost every rule in the music industry book and profited as a result.”
In fact the band used the very techniques we are all learning to master now in order to differentiate itself from the all those other bands that emphasized record sales instead of fan satisfaction.
In the book’s foreward, the ultimate Dead Head of all time, former basketball great Bill Walton asks, “Who would have ever thought that it would be the Dead’s business and marketing models that would today be the envy of the culture they all fought so hard to change.”
I’ve seen the authors’ deck on the subject and read a previous blog post, but my advance copy won’t be here for another week. So whether the topic merits an entire book is a question I can’t answer. But as Brian says in the press release, “it’s a concept that really resonates with people.” How can it not?
If the book is half as cool as the cover, it will be the next social media classic. Congrats Brian and David on getting it done.
Note: Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead will be available in August, 2010.
Amazon, Barnes and Noble, are you paying attention to #booksthatchangedmyworld?
The first "changed my life" book I read. I think I was 12.
I missed it when if first appeared, but #booksthatchangedmyworld, a hashtag created by New Yorker writer Susan Orlean has been getting a fair amount of buzz on Twitter and on blogs over the last week. The rather long hashtag started as a way for Orlean to catalog her own favorite reads, but as happens on Twitter, the community joins in when it wants, deciding whether or not a topic or subject deserves attention and buzz.
One one hand, there’s not much more to this than the fact that lots of people (anyone who reads, for that matter) have been influenced by books and that in an age of social media people like to share.
What’s a little amusing is that it with all the attention that The Shallows, Nicholas Carr’s new book, is getting, the New York Times actually referred to the hashtag in a post suggesting that perhaps Internet addicts aren’t getting stupid as quickly as Nicholas Carr suggests. They actually read books. Or at least they can remember the titles of books they should have read.
Within a day, someone paying attention scoffed up the URL booksthatchangedmyworld.com, recognizing, if not a monetizable idea, at least a subject worth developing further.
But the only folks who should be jumping on this bandwagon – booksellers Barnes and Noble and Amazon – seem conspicuously absent. Search for their Twitter handles and the hashtag, and as you can see, nothing, At least when this was written.
Are they completely unaware of the greatest book and publisher marketing program of all time? Courtesy of Edward L. Bernays. (They sell his books, so you’d think they’d know something about him.)
For the uninitiated, in 1930 Bernays was retained by a consortium of book publishers. His charge was simple: sell more books. Bernays solution: build more bookshelves. Knowing that man hates a void, he figured if he could get architects and builders to include more bookshelves in homes and apartments, they’d fill up with books.
How did he do it? Bernays asked respectable public figures – CEOs, senators, lawyers, doctors – to name the books that influenced and inspired them. He released the findings to the press with a spin: “accomplished people have all been influenced by books.” He then marketed the significant press coverage to home builders with the recommendation that if they wanted to sell to a more desirable clientele, they needed to install built-in bookcases. Ever notice how all homes built in the late 30s, 40s and beyond have built-ins? Needless to say, the sale of books increased significantly.
Barnes and Noble and Amazon were just handed a similar opportunity. The chance to get behind a social media initiative that celebrates books, their impact on people’s lives and the fact that even the Twitterati, those allegedly least inclined to read (according to Carr), willingly share the books that mattered to them is an easy marketing idea waiting to happen.
From the looks of it neither Barnes and Noble nor Amazon bought the URL inspired by Orlean. But they should have.
It’s not too late for them to get more active on Twitter, pick up on discussions like this and turn them into ideas that help sell more books. Whether it’s simply to engage with the community already commenting or to take the idea and turn it into something even bigger.
What do you think? Don’t you wish your brand were handed opportunities like this?
Boston’s FutureM: Will it be the next big event?
There are an awful lot of great digital and social gatherings. SxSWi. PSFK. Internet Week. But I’m pretty excited that this year Boston is about to try something new with the launch of FutureM.
Thanks to the inspiration of a bunch of really smart people including folks like Brian Halligan, David Meerman Scott, and the leadership of MITX (one of the country’s premiere Internet business and marketing associations), Boston will host an event that has the potential to define “what’s new and what’s next” as FutureM gathers leading thinkers in marketing, media and technology for five days in October.
There will be keynotes, panels, workshops, tweet-ups and, of course, parties. Plans are still in the early stages but what’s pretty cool is the collaboration and excitement already being generated.
Chris Brogan’s Inbound Marketing Summit at Gillette Stadium is part of the event. Hubspot’s user conference takes place the same week. MIT’s Technology Review will showcase its future view of media. And a lot of other people, including Mike Volpe are working on ideas, panels and presentations as you read this.
I’m thrilled to be a small part of it. I just started collaborating with the super smart Mike Troiano on a panel about change, transformation, and how to specifically overcome obstacles in order to get more digital and social. We’re hoping to avoid the tired old conversation of what’s not working and put some real specific recommendations on the table for both agencies and brands.
Kiki Mills, the executive director of MITX, has asked me to organize a TNGG (nextgreatgeneration.com) session where we get some really bright, social savvy Gen Y marketers to talk about how companies will have to engage with their generation in the future and how they predict marketing tactics and programs will evolve to align with their behavior.
It would be great to bring in people like Michelle Lauto to get a first hand POV about how this generation looks at media as its own tool for connection and change.
And finally, I’m hoping to moderate, or at least help recruit, a panel of the most forward thinking brands around. What makes them different? How do they get management sign off on ambitious and untested ideas? Do they use a different set of metrics and evaluation criteria? Are their lawyers more open-minded?
It’s still too early to share specifics. And suffice it to say I’m both excited and anxious about it being great. But as I’ve learned from hanging with the digital and social crowd, this community works together. It’s collaborative. And it helps each other experiment, learn and ultimately succeed. It’s why I’ve volunteered to help.
So join us. Plan to attend. Submit events. Comment on this post. Leave suggestions for who and what you’d like to see and hear. And if you have ideas for any of the above panels, please let me know.
The consumer will see you now
Recently Forrester reported that 67 percent of all consumers think there’s way too much advertising. A staggering 95 percent of them say that most advertising fails to be “honest and authentic.” Not surprising when you consider the majority of advertising is pretty bad.
Yet at the same time nearly half of the 450 million users on Facebook and a similar percentage of those on Twitter willingly “follow,” “fan” or “like” brands that engage on those social networks. Contradiction? Not necessarily. It simply means that our customers and prospects want brand interaction on their terms, not ours.
Of course even in these venues a buyer doesn’t actually get to determine the frequency or relevance of the messages that appear in their streams. Instead, they can only hope that enlightened brands figure out how to stay relevant through the kind of engagement, trial and error and analytics that lead to effective conversation strategy.
Introducing the consumer-generated RFI
But what if the consumer had all the control? What if she could essentially issue digital RFI’s or RFP’s and it became a brand’s responsibility to respond?
Well, we’re probably not too far away from that happening.
Last week I met with a young company called Sendza. If you’re a marketer, Sendza claims that it “pairs high value messaging services with a clear channel for delivering advertising through voice, SMS, email, and Facebook mediums.” Marketing speak.
But if you’re a consumer, Sendza lets you issue the equivalent of an RFI, allowing you to opt-in to a brand’s messages, contents or updates simply by texting to that brand’s Sendza ID. A user can then choose what she wants to receive – text, audio, video — and when.
Desire only messages about sales and specials? That’s what you’ll get. Want notices about sales only when they’re for a specific category of products? No problem. Prefer updates for a specific category of products but limited to those times when you’re within 100 yards of the store? Supposedly, the service can do that, too. According to the company, a marketer can customize limitless ways for a consumer to self-select the kind of messages she wants to receive.
Consider what huge grocery chains, with thousands of repeat customers, could do. Today those retailers still depend on Sunday circulars. Instead, with a platform like this, it could allow any customers with a cell phone to tell the store what day of the week she wants circular content, what product categories she wants them for, and (thanks to a Foursquare-like check in feature) even request that the grocer sends her reminders when she’s in the store. That would be a win-win situation for both parties. The shopper gets to limit and control the flow of content and advertising; the brand spends time and money only behind messages it knows will get heeded.
And the consumer-generated RFP
In the last week I also started doing business with a company called Springpad. (disclosure: Springpad is a Mullen social media client and I’ve recently interviewed to join the company’s board.) The company’s iPhone app is emerging as great way to save and organize virtually anything (recipes, books, products, ideas), simply by scanning a barcode, entering a location, snapping a photo, or filing by category. From your computer it also lets you “clip” a URLs, so you can collect just about anything.
Right now, Springpad lets you filter content and capture stuff you’re interested in. (In an age of too much information, we all need better filtering systems.) But its eventual potential could be revealed as it develops into a shopping app. Save something you’re interested in – flat screen TV, camera, exercise equipment – and Springpad will send you the best prices available anywhere, alert you to deals or discounts, and deliver relevant coupons to you electronically. It’s like having a personal shopper. Or, if Sendza is like issuing an RFI, Springpad is the RFP. You announce a product you’re interested in buying, then sit back and wait for the best offers to come in.
Yet another step toward ending the long reign of interruption based marketing.
What interests me about stuff like this isn’t so much the technologies or the platforms, but the fact that both of these services represent the continued transfer of media power from the brand to the consumer. Almost daily consumers gain more of say in every brand engagement they have. From shutting those engagements off all together, to deciding if, when and on what terms they’ll occur.
For marketers, of course, the ramifications are even more significant. It means we have to continually experiment with these new technologies. Even more importantly it calls for us to re-frame our thinking and realize that anything we do has to offer value to a consumer according to that consumer’s definition of value. The message, the device, the interaction, and the utility built into them all end up making a statement about our brand, our respect and appreciation for our customers, and our willingness to play according to the new rules.
It remains to be seen how big either Sendza or Sringpad will become. But one thing is certain. The impact of consumer control continues to loom large.
Photo by: quinn.anya
