Do your customers trust you? Or do they trust “me”?

Struggling to keep up with how communications technology is changing consumer behaviour? And how this impacts on how you should communicate with your customers? Join the club. What we all know though is that being able to drive cost efficient messages out into this ever fragmenting media landscape is becoming more complex and more expensive. But for consumers the world has got easier to navigate and they’re the ones helping doing the steering. As an unorganised group they work like a digital ant colony, building and adding little pieces to a communications jigsaw free for all to see. Blogs, social networks, video walls, photo sites, forums, websites and now Twitter. All of them reviewing you in detail, giving each other tips on how to use your products and services, helping to show how to short circuit process and looking at every move your brand makes with opinion and commentary. Then through the power of Google this is seamlessly indexed ranked and served online right next to your own corporate marketing. One is a gritty social community “Truth” and the other a glossy beautifully polished version of a corporate “Truth”. Neither probably quite reflecting reality, but one considerably more influential than the other. Hence my question – do your customers trust you? Or do they trust “me” as a fellow consumer? The reality is that the power of consumer “Truth” is something all brands ignore at their peril. As a timely example, take the new Sacha Baron Cohen film, Brüno. In a recent Time Magazine article by Richard Corliss he suggests that despite all the media hype and great reviews driving interest in the film, Twitter may have been the reason that it went from looking like a roaring success on the Thursday night to audiences plummeting by nearly 40% on its second day.

The film managed to upset a whole host of groups and the speed with which this message was “Tweeted” around the world may have had a substantial impact on the box office takings. Of course, in the greater scheme of things Twitter is not that big a channel itself. But it is used by a lot of influential people who have influential followers. It’s also not widely known that Google indexes Twitter and anything said there appears in Google alerts, news and automatically on many blogs. As a result it’s very easy to see a cascade effect with information being pushed to a vast global audience very quickly. Connection is the key. Of course consumers can also support brands when they believe in them and can act as powerful advocates. But if you don’t get the customer experience right, you don’t listen to them or you upset them, then with the ease of a mouse click they can send their stories out and update their six billion “friends” around the world. This, combined with websites and automatic translation tools, means that every search, in any language, can instantly be read by anyone. And, of course, all this is happening against the backdrop of a severe global downturn which is testing the very best of businesses. So what’s the answer? It’s actually what the answer has always been. Know your customers, stay close to them, listen to them. An article in Business Week summed it up perfectly in one sentence: “It’s always important to stay close to consumers but never more so than in an economic downturn.” Of course these days, in a rapidly changing, media fragmented, world, that’s easier said than done. The good news is that most businesses have the customer data that can be the starting point to understanding their customers and their behaviour. And there are now a host of tools available that can unearth consumer insight, track attitudes and behaviours in real time. Coming out of the current crisis the successful brands will be the ones that pay attention to the detail. The ones that listen to what their customers are saying and act upon it, examine their data to see what they are doing and proactively provide better services from what they see. Ultimately it’s a very simple recipe for success. Understand your customers, look after them, be honest and they will tell the world how great you are, become brand ambassadors, twitter about you, digg you, find you del.icio.us.

Filed under: Marketing, Opinion, Russell Marsh, Twitter

Will mobile kill digital radio before it begins?

If video killed the radio star will mobile be the final stake in the heart of radio as tries to go digital?

 

Westminster eForum (a group set up to help inform government policy makers) do run some very interesting sessions although they do feel still a little slow in catching up on how fast the digital world is changing at times and are very reactive which is a shame. I have just come back from an interesting meeting at the House of Commons where the session was to discuss the impact of the digital switch over to Digital Radio and TV. They had some interesting digital radio technology on show like the Pure Senisia (very nice looking technology) which is a DAB radio that is very nice looking and tries to pull together other feeds like Twitter and Facebook into a single unit.

 

Pure Sensia Digital Radio

Simon Mayo (Radio DJ – BBC Radio 5 Live) did an interesting speech where he talked about his 18-year-old son and radio – qualifying that given it was his son it was probably not a representative sample to highlight how he used radio.

 

Simon Mayo

He said that he had asked his him about radio and what stations his friends listened to. After a pause his son said that his friends didn’t have radio. Part of me was quite shocked at that and another part of me not unsurprised. As a kid growing up I remember listening to the radio and recording the top 40 on Sunday nights and the nostalgic memory of how “cool” and exciting that was. It was a whole routine I had and one that I never really thought about how teenagers now engage with radio. At the same time the fact that none of his Son’s friends have radio also did not surprise me. When you have access to the internet with hundreds of online stations from around the world and new music tools like Spotify why do they need a radio? A radio will never have the most up to date bleeding edge bands on them, they come from underground networks or are trying to launch them selves on sites like MySpace. Teenagers of today can now choose exactly what they want to listen to and when, rather than some DJ making the choice and then talking over half of the track. It’s lost its edge. When cool is all about being the first, radio is just too slow. When it comes to slow even online via your desktop computer is now in question. Mobile phones are now used more by the younger age groups to access the internet than desktop computers. Mobile is always on, always connected, is personal and always with me. It’s likely that the next music frontier will be battled over mobile phones why does the next generation ever need a digital radio? Don’t get me wrong I think digital radio is very interesting and has place with some groups but it does feel a little too late to the digital party.

 

There is a danger that by the time it hits mainstream the new youth audiences will be gone leaving digital radio a dying technology before its time.

 

 

Filed under: Gadget, Opinion, Technology, DAB, Digital Radio, House of Commons, Mobile, Pure Sensia, Russell Marsh, Simon Mayo, Technology, Westminster eforum