Blu Maya Digital Marketing Agency

Are you listening to your customers?

A week ago I mentioned how when times change you also need to change how you do business. Well the New Jersey Nets of the NBA have taken one step in changing their brand experience to fit the times.

In a bid to sell more courtside seats, for $25,000, the Nets are offering four courtside tickets for 10 games, parking, access to a private lounge at the Izod Center with free food and beverages and something more — a one-hour appearance by a Nets player of your choice at your home, office, school or party.

Fans want to interact with players outside the court on their own time. This is not new!

This is interesting because the idea originated from a need:

Yormark said the idea for the courtside plan developed because he had an inventory of courtside seats that he wanted to sell and he frequently gets calls from season-ticket holders and fans about having a player attend an event.

As teams are pushed to try new things, listening to their customers needs becomes even more important. Your customers provide you with the most potent source of innovation, look for unmet needs and find ways to fulfill them.

Brand experiences change too, what are you doing about it?

"I tell people if you are doing business the same way you did a year ago, you have to stop it because that’s not the world we live in today," Yormark said. "A lot of people say it, but it’s really true in the world we live in today. You have to do things differently. Things have to be more special and different than before and that’s our goal."

Now’s a good time to start obsessing about your customers because your ability to deliver a better brand experience depends on how you solve your customers needs.

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One question we get asked often is: how do I get my PageRank higher? and provide tactics and examples of how we’ve achieved a higher PageRank for a client. I always cringe when I hear this because we don’t set out with the goal of going from PageRank 2 to 6. And if the prospect still doesn’t get me I’ll do my best to direct him to a link building company who’s pure focus is that.

Don’t get me wrong, PageRank is important…as a variable to consider in the grand scheme of things. Not a goal!

And to prove my point, last week Google dropped PageRank from Webmaster Tools because they keep telling webmasters “that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much” and they think it’s silly that they do.

What they’re saying isn’t that PageRank has become irrelevant, it’s just not a goal businesses should strive for. What we should strive for instead is to make sure we create content that people ‘want’ to share.

Social media is becoming more important than search and in the not so distant future we won’t use search to find products or services, instead they will find us through our peers.

If you’re a business who drinks the PageRank kool-aid, adopt the behavior of doing things that are interesting for your customers, make it easy for them to share it and they will help you connect with interested prospects.

What do you think? Does this sound too good to be true?

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This weeks must read story Zia Yusuf, executive vice president for SAP’s global ecosystem & partner group, tells Forbes Magazine how his company has helped it’s clients connect with their customers with the use of social media tools. It’s a very insightful interview with valuable lessons for businesses of all sizes.

• Social Media Marketing Lowers Acquisition Costs 39 Percent for TakeLessons.com (Social Media Examiner)
  

• Top 5 Things to Remember When Doing a Social Media Campaign (Open Forum)
  

• How to understand your users with personas (Carsonified)
  

• How to apply social-media tools and strategies in companies (Forbes)
  

• The fundamentals of a great word of mouth topic (GasPedal)
  

• How To Promote Good Content (Outspoken Media)

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Steffan Antonas brought up a great Twitter topic today…Focus on providing value.

Value and social media go hand in hand, as a society we’ve never had it easier to be able to influence a community. Tools like Facebook and Twitter provide us with a one-to-many connection but the very things that make us human such as building relationships are put in second place in favor of this new found capability of broadcasting!

Guy Kawasaki says that whoever doesn’t care about his number of followers is lying, I don’t completely agree with this but ok that’s how most people work. As recent reports state, Twitter is a self-promoters paradise. 80% of our followers will end up being self-promoters!

Do all of these followers really care about you? Not really sure. Michael Jackson has millions of fans around the world and I bet you each and every one of them cares!

Of course we want to get traffic from our followers, but do you know what the #FF (follow friday) means? It means someone is recommending you because you’re useful, not because you’re self-promoting your 140 characters off!

Why not focus on getting a whole bunch of times on people’s #FF list and the upcoming Twitter lists? That’s a sing of influence!

I find it way more important to post useful stuff and promote others, we can be retweeted and added to #FF and that’s a signal of influence. If some of those followers end up clicking-through to our website to see what we’re all about and like it, then we’ve done our job. That means they’re listening and paying attention.

To take a page from Steffan’s post: If Twitter were to disappear tomorrow, how many of your followers would follow you elsewhere? Or to put it more bluntly, if you were to disappear tomorrow who would care?

Here’s to some happy listening!

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This is a somewhat old story but it’s worth the mention.

It’s no secret music artists are finding new ways to monetize their brand and they’re doing things that might seem crazy to others for example:

Taking a page from Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails’ recent forays into tiered and pay-as-you-wish pricing strategies for albums, former NIN drummer Josh Freese has developed a wacky but potentially smart pricing system for his new album.

At the first levels you can purchase the CD/DVD, or digital version of the album. Next is the $50 version where you get a t-shirt and a 5 minute thank-you phone call from Freese. $500 will get 15 people a signed CD, t-shirt, cymbal, diner with Freese and a session in a sensory deprivation tank. And it goes upwards in price, with the strange and wonderful bonuses getting stacked ever higher.

You might not be an artist but this is still relevant to your brand because what matters to your users/customers is how you deliver what they want. You can create more value by changing how they experience your brand, it’s what makes a lasting impression and what they’ll be talking about for awhile.

Ask yourself: In what other ways can my customers experience my offering?

Key takeaway: your brand experience also includes how the value exchange between you and your audience takes place. Discover better ways of delivering your brand experience.

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