Take some time to listen...

Conversation. It happens naturally all the time.

The recipe:
2 or more participants, something of common interest to discuss, share or exchange.

The method:
Talk, listen, reflect, respond. Repeat.

If you are not listening it's not a conversation it's a monologue.

We've all been cornered by a bore at a party, more interested in their own voice than allowing us to interject or contribute. It's not fun.

Yet so many brands persist at shouting at us. 

Attempts to question, get answers, make suggestions studiously ignored or quashed by 0870 help lines, and automatic telephone systems. Press # to take you right back to that Mastermind-beating combination of menu choices none of which obviously meet your need or question. Grrrrr.

So fairplay to Eurostar who've had their share of bad press recently over the service disruptions caused  by the cold snowy weather we experienced before and after Christmas, but were being praised by some of my London based French colleagues who were caught up in the chaos as they tried to head home for Christmas. They were telling me that they'd received great service and answers to questions via the Eurostar Facebook page, at a point where they were finding it hard to get useful information via the website, nor via phone.

No prizes, for not having got the web or customer care centre service levels right, but at least being able to get case by case answers via Facebook turned a lot of angry rants into grateful thanks.

Why? Because they listened to the questions and answered them. That's how it should be in a conversation. A dialogue. There's a real mixture of comments  and queries on the page, but worth a look to see how they are using it. The tone is friendly, there's clearly a degree of "the official line is" but also trying to resolve problems as best as possible, or at least manage people's expectations which is clearly being appreciated.

To me, that counts rather more than this rather clumsy execution of a full page print ad that appeared in yesterday's Metro.

It is the thought that should count, but they should have talked to the Facebook team, and delivered a more human message.  The print ad, weeks after all the disruption occurred, feels a bit like an unrepentent child being forced to say sorry.

And where's the link to their Facebook page?  Doh.

Evaluating digital propositions the KPMG way

This KPMG tool designed to help you evaluate the strength of your digital idea's value proposition has been sitting on my "tabs to read" radar for a week or so now but I am glad I finally got around to playing with it.

Useful to have many of the many metrics you should consider stacking your idea up against in one place.
Not all of them will be relevant to every proposition, but it was food for thought I considered worthy of sharing, so here's the link to the working version for you to play with. 

Remember, that as is so often the case with ideas in the digital realm, it's choosing the right combination of ingredients, that are the secret to a successful recipe.  Too many and your offering becomes flavour overloaded, too few it's too bland and dull, too many expensive ingredients and the number of diners who can afford the dish drops.  Sometimes that's a good thing, sometimes it's not, it depends on your objectives.

Digital alchemy is a dark art but ask yourself some sensible questions, and base your answers on your knowledge of who you are trying to engage with and you stand a chance of making the "specials" board and then letting the diners rave to their friends and come back for more.

Nice image I found from Bristol restaurant the Olive Shed via Bing

My first mobile blog post - need driven

Grrrr. I have had no network connection at work for over an hour. No web, no email, no Twitter, no access to documents I was hoping to work on, no Spotify.

Then I remembered my iTouch was in my bag. That solved music, and given the office WiFi network is distinctly patchy near my desk I have had to resort too my trusty Hero for email and Twitter. And now blogging.

Yet strangely,the Android appstore doesn't seem to boast a decent Blogger friendly app. That seems a bit odd as it is a Google platform and the Hero integrates my gmail so seamlessly that I can start writing an email on my Hero, and continue it via gmail on my laptop still with the phone in my other hand. Ace for gmail, d+ for Blogger.

Maybe I can see the point of tablets after all!

In the interim I might just have to relocate to a WiFi enabled coffee shop with my laptop, as keyboards on phones are functional but not practical for fast typing.

Another genius winter -related product idea

Last week I mentioned how glad I was of my snow-chains-for-shoes, YakTracks. The snow started to melt at the weekend, but this morning I woke up to this again, so my YakTracks have been pressed back into service.

This weeks genius product are DotsGloves - toasty gloves with grippy finger tips which get around the fact that my multi-touch phone / devices don't work with gloves on as I posted about frustatedly before Christmas.  The notion of having to have a spare "snow phone" is a bit bonkers. Albeit having to buy special gloves to use your phone is notionally madness too.

My friend Mark, kindly just tweeted me this "how to customise your existing gloves" link too.  Needle and thread time!

Believe in influence / word of mouth and power of social search

I offer you in evidence,  the following screengrab fresh from my Facebook newsfeed:

1) Someone asking his friends (not Google or Bing) for help / cake recipe advice
 
2) 3 responses, the first in just 5 minutes

3) Two of the responses cited / recommended brands (Mrs Beeton & Waitrose)

Think about the importance of that as a consumer behaviour, only likely to be amplified in the future: - No search engine used, no chance as a brand to intervene via paying for "sponsored links" , just the advice of people you know and trust.

That's why the time is now to build relationships between consumers and brands, based on product or service experience that delivers certainly, but far beyond that also allows the brand to nudge in a relevant way, on a regular basis to remain top of mind  (and not always necessarily based on product benefit / ad lead news).

Sure, you won't necessarily be able to control when those pearls of wisdom are passed on, but does that always matter? Have trust in your consumers, they can work out when it's relevant all by themselves.  The brand gets recommended, the sharer gets "friendship brownie points" for helping out / providing trust advice.

Consumer Electronics Show Take Outs & Misc case studies

Busy day, so here's a round up of interesting trends / technologies coming out of last week's CES.

On my other "interesting and useful" things to read today:

Twitter Case Studies

Interesting article from Harvard Business Review on Ford's use of bloggers / social outreach to launch the Fiesta in the USA.

Google "SuperPhone" good but still can't make tea!

The two big tech events of the week are

1) CES (the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas), which is basically one enormous santa's grotto for tech and gadget lovers, full of shiny toys and promises of things to come (more later on that).

2) the launch of the first Google phone, the Nexus One.



There was hefty expectation of what the phone would do, but in reality Google's first move into vertical integration (making and selling handsets direct to the consumers) didn't really deliver anything hugely surprising.  Well at least not to me, most of the leading smart phones, irrespective of the operating system they are based on do the same thing: provide pocket-sized computing services on the go.  And none of them can turn the kettle on yet before I get up /  home. I am sure that is just a matter of time

What does it do better than my HTC Hero?  Well it has a 5 megapixel camera with a flash  so that's an improvement but otherwise.... not much really that I can't do already.  For me the big thing Google / Android need to fix to seriously compete with Apple is to allow you to save apps to external memory (micro SD) +/or significantly increase onboard memory. I can add seemingly limitless numbers of apps to my iTouch/iPhone without affecting performance, but download too many on the Android based phones and they start running out of processor capability pretty fast.

The real "big deal" about this launch is the fact that you have to buy it straight from Google direct:

By cutting out the handset manufacturer that gives them a huge degree of influence / control over what they include as features.

Not to mention how much greater share of insight / data they get on usage behaviour in addition to all the other things the google.com/dashboard reveals they know about your online behaviour already.  I think it's also interesting from a directional point over the entire Android developer community. Developers for Apple iPhone apps are all working to the same handset, whereas by making the Android operating system open source there are already strands developing that fragment towards Motorola Droid / HTC phones and so the presence of a Google phone on the Google owned operating system potentially leads direction amongst the pack. Throw in the increasingly direct and tangible relationship with the consumer via an object that is on hand 24/7, 365 days a year and it makes for interesting times ahead in the battles between [inherently, should be invisible] technology provider and consumer  to brand relationships across multiple touchpoints.

All that notwithstanding I think this is going to be a really year for mobile and the Android platform in particular. We shall see.