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Customer Conversations – An Interview with Mzinga Founder Barry Libert

admin — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 15:47:11 +0000

Barry Libert was just getting back on its feet again after six months in a wheelchair when Paul spoke to him recently. Two back surgeries had rendered the founder of Mzinga nearly helpless to accomplish some everyday tasks, and Libert had learned a lot about the helpfulness of others. Upon regaining his feet, he had bought shoes from Zappos, a company that is legendary for customer service. This was a good jumping off point for a discussion about the importance of customer care and the value of communities.

Libert knows a bit about this. Mzinga manages two billion conversations monthly for 15,000 communities on behalf of 300 well-known companies. Libert believes that customer input is absolutely essential to business success, but he acknowledges that many companies struggle to internalize and act upon honest feedback. In his new book Social Nation, he talks about the essential attributes of customer-driven social media success. In this interview, he talked about the importance of customer support as a differentiator in a globalized world, which companies do it well, his amazing Ducati experience and other topics.

Download the podcast (28:32)

102: Social Media at IBM

admin — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:40:37 +0000

Anyone who was around the computer industry during the 1980s remembers IBM as a buttoned-down, almost paranoid company. In the years following the Justice Department’s antitrust suit, IBM became so tight with information that virtually no one other than designated representatives was allowed to utter a word in public without fear of retribution.

What a difference a couple of decades makes. Today IBM is one of the most prominent adopters of social media. Here are the numbers on usage of different tools by its 400,000 employees:

Internal blogs: 17,000
Members of the Beehive social network: 60,000
Daily page views on IBM’s internal wiki: 1,000,000
Participants in its four Innovation Jams: 500,000
IBMers on Twitter: 3,000
IBMers on Facebook: 52,000
IBMers on LinkedIn: 198,000

Big Blue applies social media both to internal and external communications. Because more than half the employees work outside of a conventional office, media like blogs and podcasts have become essential elements for tying teams together on projects.

Adam Christensen is Social Media Communications Manager at IBM. In that capacity, he helps define policies and best practices for dissemination across IBM’s global workforce. Not surprisingly, he’s also an active blogger, tweeter and member of multiple social networks. He tells David and Paul how IBM’s embrace of social media is opening up the company and making it more efficient.

Audio link (right click to download)

81: Making connections in Columbus

strom — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 01:11:05 +0000

David recently visited Columbus, Ohio and met with several entrepreneurs and IT managers and came away pleasantly surprised. One of the movers and shakers there was Ben Blanquera. By day he is an app dev manager for a healthcare firm, and his alter ego has him involved in a series of social networking, meetups, and startups that involve connecting geeks from the area together in such forms as Ignite Columbus, and Columbus Tech Life. In this week’s podcast, Paul and David talk to Ben and find out how he managed to pull this off with no money and lots of volunteers, including organizing a conference at the last minute to bring into town some very famous computer industry mavens.

Download and listen to the podcast here.

75: Straight talk from Andy Sernovitz’ word of mouth

strom — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:37:52 +0000

This week Paul and David talk to Andy Sernovitz, the king of word of mouth marketing who has written a book by that name along with his ”Damn I Wish I Thought of That” blog at damniwish.com. Our conversation is peppered with lots of suggestions on how you can market your company with little money, effort, and time. The simplest stuff often works, according to him — sending free stuff, being the first to thank someone, putting “Tell a Friend” buttons on your Web site, and turning spare capacity into capturing devoted customers.

Download the podcast here.

71: Mr. LinkedIn

admin — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 05:29:45 +0000

Who says you can’t reinvent yourself after 20 years in the business? Not Chuck Hester. A veteran of technology public relations going back to the days of print, Hester has become a disciple of the business networking service LinkedIn. He uses LinkedIn to organize meetings and group dinners during his frequent travels and to maintain a list of hundreds of business contacts. When he wants to meet someone, he often starts with LinkedIn Answers or a query to his network. The strategy has drawn media attention and made Hester a master connector in tech media. And that’s paying off for his employer, e-mail service firm iContact. Chuck Hester shares some secrets of effective LinkedIn use in this interview.

Download the podcast (15:00)

62: Brogan on Online Living

admin — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:39:02 +0000

Chris Brogan is all about social media. The engineer-turned-marketer has one of the largest Twitter followings, is an active blogger and co-founded the Podcamp series of unconferences, which have been held in more than 40 countries. He currently crafts the content for CrossTech Media’s growing conference series, but he mainly publishes in media of all kinds.

Brogan is a prolific communicator. In addition to his frequently updated blog, he is active in multiple social networks and can usually be counted upon to respond to a Twitter request within a few minutes. His blog posts are full of practical and insightful advice for marketers. In this interview, Chris explains the addictive appeal of Twitter, describes the new conference model that is emerging from social media and updates us on some of his recent promotional projects that leverage online groups and video in innovative ways.

Download the podcast (23:14)

61: We’re Grumpy This Week

admin — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 21:36:59 +0000

Paul’s been on the road, and he recently took a tour of the pressroom at the Los Angeles Times, a newspaper that’s been awash in controversy. Tribune Co. owner Sam Zell has made it clear that he intends to measure journalists increasingly by the volume of their output. David and Paul think this is a bad idea, although they do acknowledge that journalism is still too opaque a profession to the casual outsider. Journalists need to be more transparent.

Paul just returned from the Enterprise 2.0 conference, where corporate interest in social networks was evident. He thinks big businesses are going to glom on to these tools with enthusiasm. If the CIA can do it, anyone can.

David has a jeer for PR pros who use editorial calendars to pitch executives instead of ideas. Paul remarks on the practice of posting huge PDF files on websites as a barrier to sharing meaningful information. They agree that the best kind of pitch is one that saves the reporter time and trouble. Unfortunately, agencies and their clients are still too focused on pushing executives and messages instead of valuable ideas.

Don’t forget to stick around at the end for Dana’s Pick of the Pod!

Download the podcast (17:24)

60: The Struggle to Collaborate

admin — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:37:24 +0000

Following a long series of shows featuring interviews with everyong from CEOs to anonymous bloggers, David and Paul reflect on what they’ve learned from these interactions. Paul is impressed by the fact that people who were once hard to reach have now become so accessible.

David is annoyed by the slow adoption rate of collaboration tools and wonders why people fall back to e-mail when such significant productivity improvements are available. Paul thinks productivity isn’t enough. People tend to fall back to the tools they’ve used for a long time, even if they don’t do a very good job.

In Cheers & Jeers, David tells of an interview he has coming up with someone, but he doesn’t know who. The PR person won’t tell him. Paul says he’s now receiving pitches aimed at bloggers, but they look suspiciously like the mass mailings he used to get when he was an editor.

Be sure to listen for bonus features, including Dana’s Pick of the Pod and some amusing outtakes.

Download the podcast (right-click and save): 19:48

55: Reinventing a Company With Brand Advocates

admin — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:37:14 +0000

Can a nearly 400-year-old company reinvent itself around customer conversations, brand advocates and online enthusiasts? The story of Fiskars proves that it can. Fiskars makes high-quality scissors that are popular with scrapbooking enthusiasts. The problem was that the company’s brand recognition was low. Scrapbookers perceived one scissor as being pretty much like another. Big-box retailers were also beginning to draw down their inventories, meaning that Fiskars needed to reconnect with small, specialty retailers.

Fiskars engaged new media ad agency Brains on Fire to create an innovative promotional initiative around brand ambassadors. The strategy wasn’t just to throw open the doors to a community. Membership in the Fiskateers club was kept intentionally small. Fiskateers were given the tools and training to evangelize the brand and share their love of scrapbooking. The results: same-store sales tripled after a visit from a Fiskateer. In an interview from the New Communications Forum, Brains on Fire’s Geno Church tells how the program worked.

Download the podcast (21:50)

52: Anniversary Party

strom — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 20:21:32 +0000

It’s our birthday! And in recognition of this, our 52nd weekly podcast (okay, so we missed one or two weeks) we convene a roundtable discussion of the new world of business communications.

The stars aligned perfectly: David was in Boston on a speaking tour and some of our best friends and colleagues from our years in media were up for a free meal and discussion. Our friends at Lois Paul & Partners kindly provided the venue (as well as two of our speakers) and our seven participants turned out to encompass a mix of media, marketing and financial disciplines.

The debate got quite spirited at points, with Bob Scheier and Steve Hall famously facing off over the ethics of fact checking. Venture capitalist Bill Frezza had the quote of the evening: “We are in the post-integrity age of journalism.” And Lois Paul and Ted Weismann of LPP recounted with resignation the frustration of convincing clients that it’s about more than just the Wall Street Journal these days.

This podcast runs 56:42, with several minutes of bonus material and the end. This week we launch “Dana’s Pick of the Podcast,” a new weekly feature in which Producer Dana Gillin spotlights the program’s best quote at the end of each episode. For those of you who have always wondered about our theme music, we offer the full version of Meet You In The Heavens by Rebel Soul Band. Enjoy. And post your comments below.

Thanks to our panel:

Lois Paul, President, Lois Paul & Partners

Ted Weismann, senior vice president, LP&P

Bob Scheier, IT/Business Writer

Bill Frezza, General Partner, Adams Capital Management

Steve Hall, Publisher Adrants

Download the podcast (56:42)

Below:

Bill Frezza Bob Scheier

Lois Paul

Steve Hall

Paul Gillin & David Strom