Part 3: Comedian, Loni Love on What Companies Can Learn From Comedians, Fans and Customers

Click here to learn more on Loni Love’s wisdom about Twitter, on the importance of fans/customers and that there is nothing more special than showing you care.

This is wisdom that everyone can use!

Loni Love spoke at the 140tc conference, with me, about how marketing, PR, customer service  and comedy/ fans are very similar. Just likes companies need “fans” or customers, she depends on fans to come and see her perform at shows and on TV. Loni uses twitter as a way to reach out to her fans and build that relationship.

Loni Love Uses Twitter As A Megaphone To Show How Much She Appreciates Her Fans

Loni Love Uses Twitter As A Megaphone To Show How Much She Appreciates Her Fans

Loni typically starts the day in Twitter by providing her fans with inspirational quotes/jokes. She then sends out information on her schedule for the day, jokes, as well as links to funny stories. She says that many people find the content fun, uplifting and entertaining and they retweet it! Often fans are inspired by her tweets and they also send out jokes. She sometimes retweets those herself or comments on them.

When did this great comedian start using Twitter? In June of 2009. She currently has over 74,837 followers; at the time of the video in May 2009, she had 8,000 followers. Loving your fans means they grow over time.

TV's doctor, Dr. Drew showing Loni Love the "Luv" For What She Does

TV's doctor, Dr. Drew showing Loni Love the "Luv" For What She Does

How does this comedian’s actions on Twitter relate to Customer Service? Customers want to know they are valued. Loni sees Twitter as the opportunity to do that. Sure Loni is in the entertainment business and you might be in the business of customer service, but there is a common denominator here. And the commonality is this: acknowledging and appreciating fans or customers garners reciprocal appreciation, but in ten-fold. Often times entertainers, like companies, can seem like they are far removed from their fans of customers. Companies have often been categorized as giant, unfeeling monoliths. In part that is because their communication with customers and the public is very stayed, calculated and predicable. It is written, checked and rechecked to the point that it has lost the human touch.

What Loni has experienced by retweeting a fan’s tweet or commenting on a tweet, is that people feel that they have made a special connection with her. She says they are often surprised that she responds and interacts so much! They are delighted and feel cared about when she does something as simple as type something in less than 140 characters.

Loni’s whole purpose in being an entertainer and comedian is to make people laugh. Her goal is to help them forget about their problems for at least a few minutes. Loni loves using Twitter because it is a tool that helps her to spread her passion about helping people to remember to laugh and enjoy life a little more. You may have seen her spreading her humor and love on E! on the Chelsea Lately show.

Loni Love on the E! show, Chelsea Lately

Loni Love on the E! show, Chelsea Lately

Loni  suggests that when you think about the parallels to what she is doing and customer service, she suggests companies remember that customers are always the number one priority. You can reach out to them via Twitter and show your appreciation for them. Loyalty often comes from feeling “a part of something.” Paying attention to fans or customers helps them to feel vested in what you are doing and in what you stand for. And by showing your passion as a company, your employees will catch the appreciation bug also!

You can follow Loni on Twitter at www.twitter.com/lonilove

Loni’s website is: www.LoniLove.com

And information about Chelsea and her show, Chelsea Lately is at: www.eonline.com/on/shows/chelsea/

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Thanks for tuning in!  @DrNatalie

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“I Love You More Than My Dog”

Could it be that easy? Love I mean? The kind of love that you earn when you have nurtured the consciousness and congruence of the heart. Where intention and motivation match. Where you have decided to “be there.” Where you have clarity of purpose. Where you can be real.

You might think I am talking about a romantic relationship. I am. But not the kind that you might think. It’s a kind of love that is rare. That is cherished.

There is an energy that comes from being believed, from being trusted; its like coming home. We all crave it. We all desire it. We want to emulate it. When our intelligence, our creativity, our emotions and humor blend, and is acknowledged by another, we realize our full potential.

Amazing Authors: These are the words of an amazing author, Jeanne Bliss. And the title of this post is the title of her newest book. When I met Jeanne, at the Earth Cafe on Melrose, I met someone who created an indelible mark of kindness and passion that makes people want to be with her. She emulates what she writes about. She is someone you love more than your dog. (Or in my case, my cats!)

What is Jeanne’s book about? She writes about the kind of corporate America we all dream of. Of a place that we ourselves can believe in. Of a place we are seen, heard and respected. Of a place where customers are seen, heard and respected.

Book Reviews: One of the things I wanted to do in this blog is to share the amazing insights from the various authors of books that are creating the shift. So this is one of the first of many posts about amazing authors, their amazing stories and their ability to take words and fashion a story that moves from where we were to where we dream is possible.

Bliss_Jeanne_author_with_dogs

Author Jeanne Bliss and her dogs!!

If you haven’t picked up a copy, you need to. And when you read it, don’t just read it, absorb it. Use it as a way of evaluating how you and your company does business. Ask yourself, “Do my customer’s love us more than they love their pets?” And if not, why?

Follow Jeanne on Twitter: http://twitter.com/JeanneBliss

Happy New YEAR! 2010! Dr. Natalie (follow me on twitter.com/drnatalie)

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Partial List of Companies In Jeanne’s Book:

1. Rackspace

Container Store in Pasadena, California

Image via Wikipedia

2. Griffin Hospital

3. The Container Store

4. W. L. Gore

5. Zane’s Cycles

6.Trader Joe’s

Harley-Davidson

Image via Wikipedia

7. Customer Ink

8. Wegman’s Food Markets

9. Chik-fil-A

10. Harley-Davidson

 

 

Is your company on this list? Or mentioned in Jeanne’s book? If not, why not? And what can you do to begin the shift towards being beloved?

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Five Decisions That Will Change Your Company’s Customer Experience

This is the second post about Jeanne Bliss’s book, “I Love You More Than My Dog.” As I read it over the holidays, I became intrigued with the idea that its in the decisions that companies make that determine what their customer’s experiences will be. As Jeanne puts it, ” Your company’s key decisions expose their true purpose, who you are and what you value.”

What’s important about that? Well customers today want to feel that you care about them. That you value their participation in your business. Customer’s evaluate whether you “care” about them from each and every action and interaction they have with you. They evaluate your company based on the interactions with customer service agents, with your website, with the IVR, with your email responses. They evaluate your company based on the experiences they have with those touchpoints.

And unfortunately most companies, when they deployed these technologies their values were focused on the company’s efficiencies. They were not thinking or even in most cases, considering how the technology deployment would affect their customer’s experiences. To them, that either wasn’t part of the decision process or it sounded too much like “motherhood and touchy-feely stuff” to even consider.

What’s happened is that those decisions, 20 years ago, to deploy technology to make the company more efficient has created a backlash from customers. After 20 years of very poor customer experiences, customer are mad as hell, and they are not going to take it anymore. What we see today is a reaction to the decisions made years ago.

Flash forward and what do we see? The backlash comes at a time when the evolution of the Internet is in its second phase, Web 2.0. Where customers don’t just tell 10 or 20 people when they are upset, they tell millions via a giant megaphone called social media.

customers are mad and they are vocal

Customers are mad and they are vocal!!!

Examples? Dell Hell, United Broke My Guitar and Comcast’s Sleeping Technician videos on youtube.com

If you haven’t seen the videos, here’s some links:

United Breaks Guitars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo

Comcast’s Sleeping Technician: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viw2TVBygBg

So what does this mean to you and your company?

Here’s the five decisions in: I Love You More Than My Dog:

1. Decide to believe

2. Decide with clarity of purpose

3. Decide to be real

4. Decide to be there

5. Decide to say sorry.

The decision is yours.

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An Interview With CEO Jennifer of ScoutLabs.com at Web 2.0 Conference

CEO of ScoutLabs.com Jennifer Zeszut

CEO of ScoutLabs.com Jennifer Zeszut

In many companies, Marketing and PR were the first to pay attention to customers in the cloud.  Jennifer’s interview addresses some of the issues around the various functional departments within an organization and how measuring can help customer service.

Click here to hear Jennifer’s interview: CEO Jennifer Zeszut, of ScoutLabs at Web 2.0 NYC

You can follow Jennifer and scoutlabs.com on twitter:@jenniferland and @scoutlabs

And you can follow all the fabulous speakers at http://www.web2expo.com/webexny2009/

Learn. Share. Grow.

Follow me on twitter at www.twitter.com/drnatalie

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An Interview with Tony Nemelka On The Future of Business as They Deploy Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 Technologies

In this interview, I spoke to Tony about his thoughts on where we are and the future of Social CRM.

Tony Nemelka, Social CRM Expert

Tony Nemelka, Social CRM Expert

Tony started his career at IBM in mainframe sales, then went to watch the PC, client server revolution.

And today he is seeing a new kind of revolution:

  • First is the transformation of business to a more social business where customers and employees are thought of as “partners.”  This change in strategy and its accompanying technologies results in changes in business processes introduced by the internet.
  • And second is revolution is around the “cloud” or others might refer to it as SaaS.

He sees companies looking to deploy things that are going to offer them competitive advantages. And the questions they will be asking themselves are:

  • “Where is the innovation going to come from?”
  • “Where is it going to be built? On premise or in the “cloud?” and
  • “What tools/ applications will can we use?”

He talked about his experience with the VC (venture capital) world. He does not seem them focusing on funding on-premise technologies or applications. Which sounds like the innovations will be centered around the “cloud.”

Click here to hear how Tony sees the future shaping up:

You can follow Tony on Twitter at: http://twitter.com/tnemelka

p.s. Tony’s lanyard was via http://www.zebra.com/

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To participate in more conversations on Social CRM, follow me on twitter: drnatalie and use the Twitter hash tags: #SCRM #CustomerService #VSCRM #SocialMedia

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Exclusive Interview with Esteban Kolsky on Social CRM Analytics

In this interview with Esteban, we look the necessity of analytics on social CRM. Pretty much you get what you measure.

Esteban Kolsky, Social CRM Expert

Esteban Kolsky, Social CRM Expert

Esteban told me that his opinion on whether companies will truly become “social” depends upon their ability to collect, analyze and implement social feedback- from both employees and customers.

Most of the feedback in the social cloud is unstructured. So then the question becomes how does a company make sense of this unstructured data cloud?

Esteban gives his thoughts on:

  • Enterprise feedback management – the old way and the new way- via social CRM
  • The need for real-time responses to customer social interactions
  • The differences between monitoring customer feedback interactions and creating actionable insight: sentiment, cost, the affect and the next steps of the company based based on the feedback and comments in the cloud
  • The voice of the customer, customer experience and executive oversight of integrating these into business
  • The business value of adding social customer interaction feedback to your company.

Click to hear Esteban’s thoughts on measuring the value of Social CRM: (the video is ~6 minutes long- so it takes a minute to load… but be patient… its worth the wait…)


Esteban Kolsky on Measuring the Value of Social CRM

You can follow Esteban on twitter: he is at http://www.twitter.com/ekolsky

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To participate in more conversations on Social CRM, follow me on twitter: drnatalie and use the Twitter hash tags: #SCRM #CustomerService #VSCRM #SocialMedia

Learn. Grow. Share.

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How Los Angeles Radio Station, KCRW is Using Social Media to Interact and Serve Listeners

Anil Dewan, Director of New Media, KCRW

Anil Dewan, Director of New Media, KCRW

While at the 140tc  Conference in Los Angeles, I had the honor to interview KCRW’s Anil Dewan, Director of New Media and learn how they are using social media to attract fans,  interact with them and serve them better!

You can follow him on Twitter at @AnilDewan and you can follow KCRW on Twitter @KCRW.

Here’s the interview with Anil…

Here’s a snapshot of KCRW’s website page on “how to interact with us using social media sites like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook.”

KRCW's social networking website page

KRCW's social networking website page

This gives those that are not familiar with social media clear information on how to become a social interaction fan of KCRW.

How to Connect With KCRW's Facebook Page

How to Connect With KCRW on Facebook

KCRW's instructions on how to connect with them on MySpace

KCRW's instructions on how to connect with them on MySpace

KCRW's Twitter Page

KCRW's Twitter Page

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