The Truth About Customer Experience
Companies have long emphasized touchpoints-the many critical moments when customers interact with the organization and its offerings on their way to purchase and after. But the narrow focus on maximizing satisfaction at those moments can create a distorted picture, suggesting that customers are happier with the company than they actually are. It also diverts attention from the bigger-and more important-picture: the customer's end-to-end journey.
There are great reasons for why The Stream triumphed. In a world of infinite variety, it's difficult to categorize or even find, especially before a thing has been linked. So time, newness, began to stand in for many other things. And now the Internet's media landscape is like a never-ending store, where everything is free. No matter how hard you sprint for the horizon, it keeps receding. There is always something more.
Nowness also transmits this sense of presence, of other people, that you get in a city when you go to a highway overpass and look down at all the cars at any time of the day or night. Things are happening. I am not alone. Look at all this.
Schonfeld cited Betaworks CEO John Borthwick's thinkpiece, "Distribution Now," which he wrote in April of 2009, just as all this was really getting going. Borthwick concludes his post on the rise of The Stream with two quotes from musician Brian Eno. The old (and better) one begins like this:
"In a blinding flash of inspiration, the other day I realized that 'interactive' anything is the wrong word. Interactive makes you imagine people sitting with their hands on controls, some kind of gamelike thing. The right word is 'unfinished.' Think of cultural products, or art works, or the people who use them even, as being unfinished. Permanently unfinished. "
I am not joking when I say: it is easier to read Ulysses than it is to read the Internet. Because at least Ulysses has an end, an edge. Ulysses can be finished. The Internet is never finished.
Take Netflix's decision to release ALL of House of Cards at once. People were flabbergasted! How could they sacrifice the nowness?!
But they did and people loved it. In contrast to live "appointment viewing," of a weekly show, House of Cards felt different, substantial. It was a weighty object that could be watched however you wanted to.
Or take Snapchat and the Snowden-NSA revelations. They highlight a pernicious aspect of this metaphor: while the stream flows quickly past you, it flows into the vast, searchable reservoirs of companies and intelligence agencies. This stream is archived and data mined! On the Internet stream, you cannot keep up with the stream, but the stream can keep up with you. The NSA took advantage of this.
On the tiniest level, many people (myself included) have been launching little e-mail newsletters. I've been writing into the stream for seven years, and I haven't had this much fun in a long time. My newsletter is finite (always less than 600 words) and it comes once a day. It has edges. You can finish it.
Snapchat says: If we can't disappear completely, let's leave as little of a trace as possible. Let's be water vapor, a passing fog, not the stream.
Lastly, look at the huge viral successes of the year, Upworthy, ViralNova, TwentyTwoWords, FaithIt, and all the rest. They take advantage of the structure of the stream and the psychological problems it makes for people.
These sites traffic in narrative porn. The whole point of their posts is that they are idealized stories with a beginning, middle, and end. They provide closure. They are rocks that you can stand on in the stream, just to catch your breath.
So the simple answer is that there's too much flow and not enough stock. The Internet could rebalance away from the flow (i.e. the stream) and start making more durable things.
Why the spike? A good chunk of it, I assume, has to do with the death of Whitney Houston the day before, and viewers who wanted to see how the biggest stars in music responded to the loss of a peer.
Big, live TV events are big events on Twitter and Facebook, which generate lots of online chatter and drive more eyeballs back to the TV screen, where they inspire even more chatter. Cue virtuous cycle.
. It says it attracted a million visitors to the various sites and iPad/iPhone apps it operated over the three days leading up to the show. It says it attracted a peak of 165,000 concurrent viewers to a livestream of pre-Grammys red carpet coverage Sunday afternoon.
hard, along with Twitter, to get music stars at last night’s show to talk up the event to their own social networks.
“You’ve got to look at the ratings and say that there’s got to be a correlation,” says Marc DeBevoise, who heads up entertainment for CBS Interactive. “We wouldn’t be doing it if we didn’t think it was there.”
Among CEOs of the world’s Fortune 500 companies, a mere 20 have Twitter accounts.
As social media spreads around the globe, one enclave has proven stubbornly resistant: the boardroom.
A new report from McKinsey Global Institute, however, makes the business case for social media a little easier to sell. According to an analysis of 4,200 companies by the business consulting giant, social technologies stand to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value. At the high end, that approaches Australia’s annual GDP. How’s that for a bottom line?
Two-thirds of the value unlocked by social media rests in “improved communications and collaboration within and across enterprises,”
Far from a distraction, in other words, social media proves a surprising boon to productivity.
Social technologies have the potential to free up expertise trapped in departmental silos. High-skill workers can now be tapped company-wide. Managers can find out “which employees have the deepest knowledge in certain subjects, or who last contributed to a project and how to get in touch with them quickly,” says New York Times tech reporter Quentin Hardy.
the report suggest that tools like Yammer are the tip of the iceberg. Right now, only five percent of all communications and content use in the U.S. happens on social networks, mainly in the form of content sharing and online socializing. But McKinsey analysts point out that almost any human interaction in the workplace can be "socialized"--endowed with the speed, scale, and disruptive economics of the Internet.
echoed of late from the most authoritative of places: Wall Street
Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe, and even Ellison’s own Oracle--have spent upward of $2.5 billion snatching up social media tools to add to their enterprise suites. Even Twitter-phobic CEOs may have a hard time ignoring that business case.
A new report from McKinsey Global Institute makes the business case for social media a little easier to sell. According to an analysis of 4,200 companies by the business consulting giant, social technologies stand to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value. At the high end, that approaches Australia's annual GDP. How's that for a bottom line?
Once upon a time, the hush-hush plans and special-access security clearance would have been about some cutting-edge sneaker technology: the discovery of a new kind of foam-blown polyurethane, say, or some other breakthrough in cushioning science. But the employees in this lab aren't making shoes or clothes. They're quietly engineering a revolution in marketing.
Nike Digital Sport, a new division the company launched in 2010.
On one level, it aims to develop devices and technologies that allow users to track their personal statistics in any sport in which they participate. Its best-known product is the Nike+ running sensor, the blockbuster performance-tracking tool developed with Apple (AAPL). Some 5 million runners now log on to Nike (NKE) to check their performance. Last month Digital Sport released its first major follow-up product, a wristband that tracks energy output called the FuelBand.
But Digital Sport is not just about creating must-have sports gadgets. Getting so close to its consumers' data holds exceptional promise for one of the world's greatest marketers: It means it can follow them, build an online community for them, and forge a tighter relationship with them than ever before.
Nike's spending on TV and print advertising in the U.S. has dropped by 40% in just three years, even as its total marketing budget has steadily climbed upward to hit a record $2.4 billion last year. "There's barely any media advertising these days for Nike," says Brian Collins, a brand consultant and longtime Madison Avenue creative executive.
n 2000, Wieden handled all of Nike's estimated $350 million in U.S. billings. Now those campaigns are increasingly split between Wieden and a host of other agencies that specialize in social media and new technologies.
Gone is the reliance on top-down campaigns celebrating a single hit -- whether a star like Tiger Woods, a signature shoe like the Air Force 1, or send-ups like Bo Jackson's 'Bo Knows' commercials from the late '80s that sold the entire brand in one fell Swoosh. In their place is a whole new repertoire of interactive elements that let Nike communicate directly with its consumers, whether it's a performance-tracking wristband, a 30-story billboard in Johannesburg that posts fan headlines from Twitter, or a major commercial shot by an Oscar-nominated director that makes its debut not on primetime television but on Facebook.
It spent nearly $800 million on 'nontraditional' advertising in 2010, according to Advertising Age estimates, a greater percentage of its U.S. advertising budget than any other top 100 U.S. advertiser. (And Nike's latest filings indicate that that figure will grow in 2011.)
Two years ago a group including Stefan Olander, 44, a longtime marketing executive (and Matthew McConaughey look-alike) formally pitched Parker on the idea for Digital Sport, a cross-category division that would take the Nike+ idea -- chip-enabled customer loyalty -- into other sports. Up and running a month later, the Digital Sport division now works across all of Nike's major sports.
The reason for the shift is simple: Nike is going where its customer is.
But as the marketing mix becomes less about hero worship and more about consumer-driven conversation, they say, Nike is insulating itself from an era of athlete endorsements gone wrong. "Everybody's realized there's not the same one-to-one relationship as in the past: When Jordan's hot, his shoes are hot," says a former Nike executive. "I don't know if hero worship is the same as it used to be."
That's not to say everything has been a slam dunk. Nike shut down its Joga network after the last World Cup game in 2006, confusing the million-plus members who'd signed up for it. Its Ballers Network, meanwhile -- launched in 2008 as an app that let basketball players organize street games -- recently had less than 300 users in the U.S.; a recent wall post was a teenager complaining he couldn't get it to work. And critics say products like the FuelBand and Nike+, while dazzling, are more about keeping Nike's retail prices high than innovating.