Small Biz Watch: Preaching about your products
In this week's issue of U.S.News & World Report, I have a story about "customer evangelism," how small businesses and big businesses are trying to turn passionate customers–particularly those on the Web–into a volunteer sales force that will spread the good news about their products or services. During the course of my reporting, I had a chance to chat with Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba, authors of Creating Customer Evangelists. They also write the popular Church of the Customer Blog.
Here are some excerpts from our conversation at their Chicago home:
U.S. News: What is driving companies to embrace customer evangelism?
Huba: There are lots of studies showing that the effectiveness of advertising in being able to reach customers is plummeting. Companies know they have to find another way to get their message across, so they are moving from message management to an open-source collaborative messaging environment where there is a back-and-forth, two-way conversation . . . Customers have always had passion about certain brands or products, but they really haven't had a way to show that passion. But now with the Internet, people can create their own marketing for the company and show that passion.
U.S. News: Give me an example.
Huba: There's the George Masters iPod ad. A schoolteacher created this ad for the Apple iPod, spent months creating it. But he loved Apple so much, and to show off his design skills, he created an ad that went around the world. This is a customer evangelist.
U.S. News: You stress the importance of a company being authentic and not trying to spin its customers. What does any of this matter if a company makes a good product?
Huba: It costs five times more to acquire a customer than to keep a customer, so a lot of people are focused on loyalty and retention. The fact that someone is satisfied with a product is great, but I could switch when something new comes along. So if you go up the loyalty ladder, you will find people who are so loyal that they will recommend the product, so loyal that they will only use that product, so loyal that they will pay more. And at the highest level of the ladder is when there is such a relationship with the company it is like they have some ownership in the company. And that is the pinnacle of where companies need to go.
U.S. News: It seems like big companies have a problem being open and transparent.
McConnell: I think any company can do this regardless of size, but it takes the right philosophy, theology, and belief system in order to make it successful . . . It's been a dramatic turnaround for Microsoft, going from a very closed, secretive culture to a very transparent culture, and that is the whole idea behind their 12 hundred, 13 hundred blogs . . . Apple, though, is still a mysterious, secretive company. They may be one of the only companies that can get away with not revealing its secrets. It is very opaque, and that is part of their juice. But once Steve Jobs goes away, retires, or dies, I don't think Apple will be able to sustain it.
U.S. News: Still, having conversations and dialogue will require a huge shift in corporate culture for many firms.
Huba: The No. 1 concern that we hear from companies is that people will say negative things about them. But wouldn't you rather be in that conversation than watching it from afar, in fear?
U.S. News: Tell me about another company embracing evangelism.
Huba: There is a really good story in our book about O'Reilly Publishing, a technical book publisher. What they did a few years ago was go out and find these folks who loved their books and were evangelizing about them on their blogs. And a woman in their PR department named Simone Paddock started a program called the O'Reilly Evangelist Program, and she contacted them and said, "Thank you so much for telling readers about our books. We would like to invite you into our program, and we want you to help design our program. What do you need?" And the bloggers said they wanted galley copies of the books, early copies, and they wanted to be able to go to the O'Reilly conferences so they could report on them. So Simone designed the evangelism program based on that and even had a special newsletter for them so they were always informed.