Monthly Archives: January 2013

January 18, 2013 · 9:33 am

Leading By Keeping Quiet

If you’ve been reading the screed for any period of time you know that I’m a huge fan of Top Chef.

Top Chef Middle East

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This week’s episode provides us with the raw ingredients for our Foodie Friday Fun.  It was “restaurant wars” week, in which two chefs each conceive of and open a restaurant in 48 hours.  The chef selects other contestants as team members to serve as their staff and it’s not unusual for the losing head chef to go home.  What happened this week made great television, but it also demonstrated a fantastic business point for anyone who wants to lead a team.

One of the team captains selected a contestant who probably should have gone home several weeks ago.  It’s obvious that her talent and work ethic are not up to the standards of the other remaining contestants, much less up to those of the woman who chose her for her team (and no, she wasn’t a top pick).  Over the course of the prep day and the service day, the slacker chef delayed preparing a critical part of a dish which resulted in the dish not matching the head chef’s vision for it.  At judges’ table, the head chef did not complain about the other chef’s refusal to work as instructed. The judges had no way to know what had caused the offending dish to come up short.  All they knew is that the head chef said she was responsible, both for the dish and for the overall meal.  She went home.

The business lesson is critical   The leader’s taking responsibility and refusing to complain about her subordinate when she could have done so in order to save herself shows the type of character that makes a great leader. More importantly, it show that she understands that real leadership means assuming accountability to go along with your organizational authority.

That’s not to say she demonstrated perfect leadership skills.  As things weren’t going her way she got very frustrated.  Like many perfectionists she was  hard on herself and she shut down to a certain extent when she should have been more assertive. Things often don’t go the way we envision in business (in life to, come to think of it) and we  need to face the situation, adapt, and be flexible.  If we’re not confident we can’t possibly instill confidence in our teams.

The web is filled with the comments of outraged fans of the show screaming how the “wrong” chef was sent home.  Maybe the verdict was misplaced but the leadership lesson certainly wasn’t.

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January 17, 2013 · 11:30 am

The Most Effective Marketing Words

Since I seem to be emptying my “possible posts” research folder this week, here is something recent that comes to us from the good folks at Weber Shandwick.

English: Good customer service requires high p...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

It’s a study called “Buy It, Try It, Rate It” and you can read the study here.  While this may fall into the “duh” category of research, the study found that consumer reviewers trump professional reviewers as the key purchase influencers and further shows that 65 percent of potential consumer electronics purchasers are inspired by a consumer review to select a brand that had not been in their original consideration set.  It turns out that the average buyer consults 11 consumer reviews as they get ready to purchase.   A few other key findings:

  • Consumers report that they pay more attention to consumer reviews (77 percent) than professional critic reviews (23 percent). The gap between consumer and professional reviews closes noticeably, but not entirely, for more advanced technologies like tablets and computers.
  • The most influential reviews include certain elements. In consumer reviews, the most helpful ones are those that seem fair and reasonable (32 percent), are well-written (27 percent) and contain statistics, specifications and technical data (25 percent).
  • Shoppers trust consumer reviews on Amazon.com (84 percent) and BestBuy.com (75 percent) the most, topping Consumer Reports (72 percent). Consumers show no apparent discomfort in getting their research from a seller of the products they’re considering.

This gets to the notion of authenticity.  I’ve remarked to some people that the next review I find in a golf magazine which gives a bad review to a piece of equipment will be the first.  It’s pretty obvious that without golf manufacturers advertising in the books most of the publications would be in deep financial trouble.  Professionally generated content about electronics, cars, and other goods can have the same skew, or at least raise the issue in consumers‘ minds as the study shows.  What can you do as a brand?

First, be transparent.  This means, among other things, don’t do everything you can to have negative reviews pulled down and certainly don’t censor them on your own site.  Second, as the study suggests,

companies need dedicated resources to manage social network communities for purposes that go beyond branded content. An online community manager should be encouraging customers to review products, disseminating positive customer and professional reviews through social channels, and working in tandem with customer service to respond to customer feedback or issues quickly.

Third, be authentic.  Don’t use marketing speak – write as if you are a consumer.  Finally, don’t be afraid to engage on other sites – Amazon, for example – which have become so influential in the process.  Do so openly though.

The most effective marketing words are those coming out of consumers’  mouths.  While we as marketers can’t put them there, we can listen carefully and respond honestly   That can help make sure those words are positive.  You agree?

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January 16, 2013 · 11:49 am

A Social Marketing Study

I’ve been meaning to write about the Chief Marketer 2012 Social Marketing Study for a little while now.  Even though it came out a couple of months back, what it found is pretty relevant and I think you might find some of those findings relevant to what might be on your marketing mind.  At least I hope so!

As one might infer from the name, the topic is brands’ use of social media for marketing purposes.  You can get the study by clicking this link (registration required) but here are some of the key findings:

  • 76% of overall respondents to the survey said their brands were conducting some level of marketing within social media, and a further 16% reported plans to begin do so by the end of this year, making for a potential social marketing contingent of 92%.
  • More than half of respondents cite the difficulty of calculating an accurate return on their social marketing outlays as a prime frustration with the channels. That difficulty in turn grows out of their second most often expressed complaint in this year’s survey: the difficulty of accurately tracking sales to social campaigns. Those response rates held true for both B2C and B2B marketers.
  • Marketers are also troubled by issues of content: specifically, by the amount of time their staffers spend curating social media and by the need to keep social media supplied with a constant stream of new, fresh, engaging content.

Other not so surprising data points are that the primary purpose marketers have for using social is to drive web traffic and that most of their efforts are on the big three social sites: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  What all of this said to me was not so much about how quickly marketers adopted social as a channel but how their efforts are really just sort of fumbling along.  Not every brand should be on Facebook yet all seem to be.  While I’m a firm believer in having measurable outcomes to help with ROI calculations, it seems from the study as if the standard to which social investments as being held are out of whack with both how social is being deployed as well as with the standards applied to other channels.  Finally, the emphasis on creating new content is a good one but it sounds to me as if that content is being used in the context of social media as a megaphone – yet another broadcast medium.  I could not disagree more with that approach.

Does your company use social media for marketing?  Are the study’s findings in line with your experience?  Am I missing anything?

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