Humanize your business and grow your sales

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via adaptivepath.com

A great talk by Peter Merholz over at Adaptive Path. In the Q&A the discussion comes up about creating customer communities. How do you do this?

  • Trust your employees. Remove rules. Hire great people that have the same ideals as your company. They'll do the right thing. 
  • Trust your customers. Make it easier for them to interact and transact with you. Be transparent. Realize that most people are good and won't con your system. The ones that do will pop up soon enough and you can kick those out of your customer base.

Do build an organization of trust?

TechCrunch and Mashable - The scooping and curating kings.

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via examiner.com I use Feedly. It's great, it lets me insert feeds and tell it what I want. Once in a while it tells me what I like. It's a great tool but it takes me too much time. I am constantly editing sources. And for some reason the stories…

via examiner.com

I use Feedly. It's great, it lets me insert feeds and tell it what I want. Once in a while it tells me what I like. It's a great tool but it takes me too much time. I am constantly editing sources. And for some reason the stories that I want to read do not pop up high enough on the page.

I am giving up, and announcing. Mashable and TechCrunch are better at scooping, reframing, and curating news than I am. They know better what I am interested in than I do myself.

I place more faith in Mashable and TechCrunch as brands than I do my own judgement. This is big. It means that in a field where I have unlimited choice and even the possibility to create my own (information) product. I choose to trust a brand. That is what great brands do.

  • Great brands are transparent. 
  • Great brands have incredible focus. 
  • Great brands know their core consumer and stick to them.

Great brands operate in every industry. People buy Audi because they trust the brands great engineering. People buy at TopShop because they get great value for clothes that suit their style.

Brands are curators for their customers. Who is your customer? Do you curate and select for them? Do you remove their thinking and build their trust?

The Back of The Napkin (Dan Roam)

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via slideshare.net

I bought a book a few months ago and I was never able to open it. Yesterday I did and it is awesome. I only got through a few pages before falling asleep (tired, not boredom) but I learned some valuable things.

The Back of the Napkin is a great book about visual thinking. (see the slides above for an impression though I suggest you buy the book here.) One of the first lessons is of the process of visual thinking.

Look -> See -> Imagine -> Show

Pretty self explanatory.

One of the more striking ideas of this cycle is the concept of finding boundaries or as Dan describes it: "Which was is up". You can use the W's and H as your guidelines. Every visual presentation is one based on the W's and H's: Where, Why, When, Who, What, How (much).

This is a great tool to brainstorm and visualize customer journeys. With a large dataset in front of you try combining different W's and H's. See what the possibilities are and see what stands out. This will make sure that your conclusions and recommendations are based both on a great data set, as well as a solid framework built around the data.

Take a look at the data you have. Take your customer surveys, your social media monitoring, your employee satisfaction and your mystery shopping. Cross the data sets with each other and see what kind of interesting insights come out.

Infographic: Online Retailers’ $44 Billion Customer Experience Problem

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via webdesigncool.com Let's not underestimate the power of the echo chamber here. 31% of all customers who have a bad experience will tell at least one other person.  On average, shoppers will tell four other people about their negative …

via webdesigncool.com

Let's not underestimate the power of the echo chamber here.

  • 31% of all customers who have a bad experience will tell at least one other person. 
  • On average, shoppers will tell four other people about their negative experience. 
  • As negative experiences are retold to others, they are often embellished and can become up to five times as damaging as the original story. 
  • 64% -- more than half -- of all shoppers will never shop at a store again after hearing a friend's negative experience

Via legalmarketing.typepad.com

Now that is scary stuff.