Lis Calandrino

This blog post is from my radio show this past weekend called Red Hot Customer Service on Talk 1300 AM, where I interviewed Chris Bowcutt from blue.0 (scroll to the bottom to listen). If you're unable to listen to my weekly show live at 10am on Sunday mornings, the show is archived on the station's Web site and connected to this blog.

So what was the theme from Sunday's show? Basically, if your customers aren’t with you, you're going to be out of business. I have never forgotten what my father said: Find a customer, get them a product and you’re in business. If you think about your customer first you will get the right products. My business experience leads me to believe that businesses get stuck on their products and try to get their customers to buy them. And then if the customers don’t then it's “their fault”. In actuality if customers don’t buy there’s more than enough blame to go around.

In 2006, the Web changed from published content to user-generated content. With Web 1.0 in 1996, few Web sites published content for 45 million global users; user generated content was barely on the radar. This was the era of what was known as push advertising; businesses put it out there for everyone to see. 10 years later, a shift happened, the Web moved from 1.0 to 2.0, to what I call the ‘conversation.’ Think of 1.0 as one way publishing and 2.0 as including the customer in the equation. In 1996 there were 45 million global users and in 2006 there were one billion plus global users.

What are you doing in your business to accommodate this change of how customers are using and creating information? Have you moved your business to the era of the Social Media Revolution?

Whether you can make this change will provide the answers for the health of your business. Most businesses have been relying on their primary customer — the Boomer — for their business health. The boomers have been marketed to death and the hardest hit over the past two years. As a nation, businesses have lived off the baby boomers, the richest and most privileged generation of the world. Armed with plenty of cash, credit cards, pensions and insatiable appetite for “everything money could buy” , this 78 million strong generation made our economy. In 2000 things changed, tight markets, less money, collapse of banks, automobile dealers and you name it, the American dream was looking dismal for the group who had everything. All of a sudden priorities began to change.
If a business had been paying attention, they would have realized that because of the age of the baby boomer, we were due for an economic slowdown!

If you intend to thrive or survive, your business will have to be acclimated to what this group is now doing. What will they be thinking about? As this age group begins to look at the “winter” of their lives, many will be preoccupied with their health and trying to stay physically fit. Whether they spend money on grandchildren, traveling or vacations will depend on how they have fared through this recession. If you are planning on making money or selling your business over the next 10 years, it will only be valuable if it has customers. Are you investing in recruiting the next generation of customers for your business? If your business is all about ‘stuff’, do you have the right stuff?

How will you communicate with this group? This group may have been slow starters when it comes to technology but don’t discount them online. Sixty nine percent of Boomers do online banking, research, book their vacations and travel online. Boomers are the fastest-growing age segment on social networking sites such as Facebook and many log in at least once a day. How did they get there, by younger family members? In 2007, the percentage of Boomers consumer social media was 46% for younger Boomers (ages 43 to 52) and 39% for older Boomers (ages 53 to 63). By 2008, those numbers increased to 67% and 62%, respectively.

Click here to listen to the show:

Red Hot Customer Service – "Social Media" – April 4, 2010

Next post: Getting to generation X and Y.

Links:

• Baby Boomers
• Baby Boomers, Generations X & Y
• How to Reach Baby Boomers with Social Media

I know there are many of you who do your own marketing and who have been doing so for years now. I grew up in sales and marketing and have spent plenty of time teaching others about it, but it wasn't until recently — maybe 2008 — that I made the leap to Web marketing. I knew that it was brand new territory and never wanting to be one to be left behind, I started discovering more about it. This was also when I was close to finishing the first draft of my book, Red Hot Customer Service. I don't know how many of you have worked on a big writing project, but me — I was going a bit crazy with the content after having focused on it for months. So, I mentioned what I was doing to a friend, who then referred me on to someone they knew who might be able to help me polish my book and oversee the production, the publishing and the marketing. His name was Chris. As it turns out, Chris and I had actually met a few years prior at a training event. Who knew our paths would cross again?

Since we started working together, I've come to learn quite a bit about the Web and Web marketing in particular. Our first project was to launch a blog, which is the one you see now. This later developed into a main Web site that I could use to feature my book, my ebook and my other projects. In fact, I've found that any project I've wanted to get going, whether it was e-mail marketing, podcasting or live internet broadcasting, Chris had an answer on how to do it. And not in terms of who to go to to make it happen, but more important (and financially sensible) — how I could easily learn to do these things myself.

I'm grateful for having had Chris's help on many of my projects, and now I want to help him. His book is called '24 Hours to a Powerful Web Presence' and it just became available last week. There's a soft cover version coming out in April, but if you want the information up front and now, and at half the price, you can get the ebook.

Chris can tell you better what readers will get out of this book, but my two cents: I wish I'd read this book earlier! Chris is a great writer with quite the sense of humor. I can't help thinking this book will have an impact.

You can learn more about it here.

I knew it would come to this. Not only has the pay phone gone but so too has the house phone. 

You know, the one attached to the wall.

While helping my friend Mary clean out her mom’s home recently (her mom had recently gone to a nursing home) I noticed an old dial telephone on the shelf.

“Mary," I asked. "Could I have your mom’s phone?" 

Of course she replied "yes," but not until she asked "why?"

I told her it will probably be a collector’s item and besides, I won’t have to worry about losing it.

The longer I looked at the phone, however, the stranger it looked. It really is a relic.

The latest Forrester Research tells us that the number of smart phone users who access the Web daily from their phones is 36%. In addition, 80% of Americans are online which makes you wonder, in addition to Irma, my 94 year old neighbor, who isn’t online?

Another interesting statistic supports that three-quarters of these Americans have broadband, and have not yet added mobile or social network strategies to their marketing mix. I know, many of you that belong to the “I’m not going on Facebook ever” group are gloating. Don’t get too complacent, the latest statistic about Facebook is: if it were a country, it would be the third largest in the world. I never thought I would get myself involved with FarmVille or the Mafia Wars on Facebook, but they really are fun.

I would say it’s just a matter of time until we all move to mobile phones and Facebook. According to Henry Harteveldt, Forrester VP and principal analyst, one in four use their mobile device to research products they will buy either online or offline. For one thing, it’s easier. Forrester predicts that mobile will become the hub of consumer relationships. And it will be all about Apps.

I don’t have an iPhone but I am enamored with their Apps. If you need to know anything, just ask an iPhone user and they have an “App” for it. 

Want to know about the weather? They have an App. 

Want a recipe? They have an App. 

As Yahoo! defines it, an App — or application — is fun or useful software that can enhance your experience on your phone or on the Web.

So how will this affect your business?

• Communication in your business is important, knowing how your customers communicate is even more important. You don’t have to like where communication is going, but know it will affect your business. And by the way, what’s not to like?
• Is information about your business constantly being updated or is it forever carved in stone? Think of your web site as if it were a magazine cover. Would you open a magazine if the cover never changed?
• Embrace new technology; attend workshops on social networking and building your business, determine what do you need to learn and where you start. You may think you’re old school or behind other businesses, but for mainstream it’s fairly new. Don’t get complacent.

One reason to look at online marketing is it’s pretty cheap, and sometimes free. If you know your stuff, you can compete with almost anyone and make a dent in the marketplace.  Do you own a smart phone but still using it as a dumb phone? Take a trip to wherever you bought it and ask for a lesson or two on what it can do. That reminds me; guess I need a trip to Radio Shack for a lesson on my Blackberry.

I wrote last week about Hulu, and wanted to provide some recent stats that you might not be familiar with.

• 55+ age group are most Hulu viewers: 47% in March 2008.
• 130+ Content providers on Hulu. NBC, Fox, Sesame Street, Comedy Central, Sony, MGM, Lionsgate and content produced specifically for the Web.
• 1250+ Titles of free shows and movies offered. Examples, Lost in Translation, all Force One, The Office, Family Guy, 30 rock, House, Arrested Development
• 125 Hulu employees in offices in Los Angeles, New York, Beijing and Chicago.
• 7.8 million site visitors in February — a 55% jump from January likely due to Alec Baldwin Superbowl commercial.

Pretty incredible! The site is clearly giving T.V. a run for its money.

A new report from Nielsen Online suggests that Twitter hasn't yet reached a level of growth that can sustain the service, according to the research firm's mathematical model. Despite the explosive popularity of the messaging service, Nielsen data indicates more than 60 percent of Twitter users that visit the site in a given month do not return the following month.

So how can Twitter benefit your business? A funny thing happened the other day. A woman in my seminar said she was dying to meet Barry Manilow. So I "tweeted" precisely that — meaning I put a message out on the Twitter wire asking about Barry Manilow. Before I knew it, there was a tweet back telling me where Barry was starring! Okay, so Barry isn’t your thing and you don’t care where he is, but suppose you had a problem and you wanted to get some information, where would you do? I now know I would go to Twitter.

How to use Twitter?

Start thinking of Twitter as an educational resource. Get into the habit of asking people for email addresses, their Facebook page and their Twitter page. Now you have it. So it feels strange because you still don’t know why you’re asking. A store owner of note told me the other day after three months of haphazardly going to Facebook, he knows has a sense of its value. Why, because he is asking all of his customers to "be his friend" — a statement he still finds rather silly, but he has lots of lots of friends. You know, friends and friends of friends. I know for many of you it seems like a secret society, but I guarantee if you think about how it can help your business your thinking will change. Follow people and get them to follow you.

Twitter is a way to network. I received an email from someone I am following and they thanked me for my reply to their Tweet. (A short update of 140 characters or less). How can it be bad? Start following and leaving Tweets. The pluses are:

• It's a good way to keep in touch with clients and friends. A very quick way.
• You can get notified of events, deals, specials. Information from companies that might be useful to you.
• Setting up an account is simple; start by following me, www.twitter.com/Lizzc, leave me comments and ideas.

And now, a little terminology lesson to help you navigate the ins and outs of Twitter:

• Hashtag: Discloses the topic of your tweet by prefixing a word with a hash symbol, (i.e. #nbaplayoffs or #nfdraft.) Helps users find updates on specific subjects.
• Nudge: A notification sent to a user’s phone asking them to tweet.
• RT:Short for re-tweets. Users add RT in a tweet if they are reposting from another’s tweet.
• Twackle: Websites with sports-related Twitter updates and organizes the tweets by events.
• Tweetup: When Twitter users meet face-to-face
• TwitPic: Allows user to post photos to Twitter.
• Twitterati: Term used by the A-listers on Twitter.

Still not sure what it all means? You’re not the only one. I hope when Microsoft does a spell-check update they put in Twitter terms!

Resources

• Gissur Simonarson Online
• The Times Online: Technology
• BusinessWeek: Feedroom

I watched an interesting interview recently with Jason Kilar, the CEO of  Hulu. For those of you who "don’t Hulu," the Web site was launched in March 2008 for viewing in the United States. Basically, it’s a service that broadcasts previously-shown T.V. shows and movies and has become quite the competitor with television. Hulu — which comes from a Chinese proverb which means "the holder of precious things" — began its advertising campaign during NBC's Super Bowl XLIII with an ad starring Alec Baldwin. Now, there are more than 200 advertisers.

Here's how the Economist describes the rise of Hulu:

Hulu provides a combination of content and convention which ultimately attracts customers.  What does it mean to you? Mainly that television participation is shrinking. The day following its Super Bowl ad, Hulu attracted 1,082 brand mentions online (a 259% increase). According to Nielsen’s BlogPulse, Hulu also generated  448 shared links after it's first ad — i.e. bloggers who passed along a link to the site.  Socialmedia.com even crowned Hulu as the winner of the "TweetBowl".

This is an example of viral marketing at its best. It isn’t like the Swine flu and there are no shots for it. Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

So let’s say you are looking for your favorite Saturday Night Live programs. Go to Hulu and you will find plenty of shows to watch. So now you know what your customers are watching and why they aren’t watching your commercials. If you can watch your "favorites" maybe you don’t need to pay for cable?

"The world has turned completely upside down," Kilar told the Economist.  "I find that very inspiring. Others might be scared out of their wits. But to me, this is the way media always should have been."

What does it mean to those of you advertising?

It just further supports the notion that advertising is changing. Many of you are commenting on how TV viewing is down. As you can see, there are lots of reasons for this. Most of it is connected to non-traditional ways of viewing, namely video. It is essential that you start asking your customers for their email addresses. You might phrase it as such: "We would like your emails so we can notify you of special offers or events that we are hosting." Collect emails from your Chamber of Commerce attendees, your Kiwanis members or any other place you hang out.

If the customer doesn’t have an email, aim to get their mailing address.

Remember, there’s a huge difference in price—direct mail vs direct email. Post your video on Facebook and your blog and you’ve moved way up!

How about creating your own video email campaign to send to your customers? Are there other non traditional advertising channels are available to you?

How many of you out there are "Huluing?" What do you think?

Need some help with viral marketing? Give me a call and let’s brainstorm.

Resources

• Watch feature films free of charge at Hulu.com | The Cheapskate …
• Nielsen
  Online» » Hulu – One to Watch in 2009
• Here
  Comes The YouTube-Hulu-Cable
  Collision Course
• The Six
  Simple Principles of Viral Marketing

I tell people that prior to the elections I received at least one e-mail a day from Obama asking for something. Would I attend a rally, send some dollars, talk to a friend or attend a barbecue? The barbecue sounded interesting, so I made the phone call and asked where it was to be held. I was told Lexington Avenue in the city of Albany, my home town. I said to the caller, do you know where Lexington Avenue is? I guess he thought I needed directions so he proceeds to read me the mapquest directions from my home. No, I said I know where it is, it’s definitely the wrong side of town and certainly not a place where I should go alone at night. He proceeded to tell me that one of my neighbors was going (who I knew) and that she would be happy to pick me up. It would be a great time and he could assure me I would meet some great people who were supporting Obama. Wow, I thought, the power of networking and these tireless folks.

So, about the barbecue, it was splendid. The people were gracious and I left my $25.00. It was a college student who had called me, someone from the new "generation O.”

The 18-29 year olds came out in droves to support Obama and the numbers are staggering, between 22-23 million, according to the Center for Information and Research of Civic Learning and Engagement. This is the group that managed Obama’s Facebook page, raised over $125 million dollars online and who sent me a text on Election Day asking me to vote for Obama. When it came to the electronic media, Obama had it all tied up. Following the election, Obama posted pictures of election night on flickr and introduced a new Web site, change.gov, on Thursday. Tell me what you think it said, be part of the change.

There were the Obama Girls — the YouTube bunch that tied up the electronic media 24 hours a day, manned and femaled the Facebook, posting daily and answering the phone calls and emails. The tireless bunch who knew that they could make a difference because of what they knew and that Barack was in their corner. To them he was Barack, a friend with the same values, who didn’t mind them knowing him personally.

This is the bunch that read the book, drank the Kool Aid and wanted to live their dreams. According to a New York Times article written by Damien Cave on November 9, 2008, “A government under Mr. Obama, they believed, would value personal disclosure and transparency in the mode of social networking sites. Teamwork would be in fashion, along with a strict meritocracy.” This is the group that doesn’t mind if you know who they are, are forever blogging and MySpacing and value informality. They scare some of us too. How could they be pouring their hearts out for anyone to see? How frightening and look at those tattoos!

This was the group that opened remote offices all over the country; tied together by values and a culture of change. In addition, they understand the value of teamwork. Lazy you say? Not if they believe in what they are doing. With their social networking skills they can find you and bombard you with data. Obama himself is 47 years old and part of the post-boomer era.

The group believes in social networking and complete disclosure. The rest of us are trying to hide from social networking and can’t believe that someone can not only find out where I live and who I am, but can get an aerial view of my house!

I had a good chuckle as I listened to CNN and they talked about the old Jewish ladies living in Florida and how important their vote was. No problem, Generation O organized “Jew for Obama,” hit the streets and the nursing homes in Florida to bring out the vote.

So, what does this mean for your business?

In 5-10 years the O generation will be shopping in your store, looking for jobs and they'll know more about the electronic media than you care to know. But you will need them.

Learn to embrace change. Research how technology can grow your business, get someone to teach you. I got a great email from a 60 year old plus retailer the other day with an invitation to visit his Facebook. I said, you sign up for my blog and I'll join your Facebook!

Listen, be open with an eye for the future. It will always be the future; all of us are just passing through.

Boy I hope my new spell check will have some new words: blog, Facebook, MySpace as well as Obama in it. Oops, I have an email asking me to make a donation to help get the Democratic National Committee out of debt; for $30.00 or more I can get a limited edition 2008 Victory t-shirt.

It came from my very close friend David, whom I’ve never met.