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Gamification, Agile Content, and More: This Week’s Great Reads

February 8th, 2013 | Lisa Hoover | content strategy, Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post, News

As we head into the weekend, let’s take a look back at some of the news, articles, and blog posts that caught our eye over the last few days.

Are You in the 91% or 37%? (Be honest, we won’t tell.)

There was a lot of chatter this week over Oracle’s recently released customer experience report. The takeaway message is that failing to provide a good CX will injure your company’s bottom line. (But you knew that.) The results of this study make it pretty clear that although most businesses (91 percent!) want to provide an optimal customer experience, few actually execute strategies to make that happen. In fact, a surprisingly high number of companies (37 percent!) are only just now getting their acts together to implement a CX plan.

Bran Curran, VP, Customer Experience Strategy for Oracle told CMSwire:

“It’s shocking how many companies said they haven’t gotten formal customer experience programs… A brand should engage when a customer asks about a product. This means companies should do things like monitor product communities and customer commentary on social networks, as well as engage customers when they ask a question on a company’s official website.”

Notice Curran says companies should engage customers when and wherever they’re talking about your product. That “wherever” ought to be primarily arenas you’ve created with amazing authoritative content. Put reliable, useful, easy-to-find documentation out there and customers will come to you first for the information they need. Then you can keep on engaging them ad infintium.That sure beats spending all day combing through obscure forums and Twitter hashtags, right?

You Get a Badge for Reading This Post

Speaking of customer experience, apparently the banking industry is considering ways to incorporate gamification into its user support strategy. The idea hasn’t made a lot of headway in the U.S. yet, but it’s making a big splash in other countries. Banktech’s Jonathan Camhi says:

U.S. banks may have been slower to adopt gamification so far because they have a more cautious attitude toward digital interaction with their customers, says Stessa Cohen, research director at Gartner, an analyst firm. “U.S. banks are a little more reticent. Look at how they use Facebook. They use it to push info; they don’t engage [with customers],” she points out. But Cohen predicts that banks here will have to take a serious look at gamification and how banks in other countries are using games as they try to outdo each other in digital customer experience. “I think we will definitely see more banks incorporating gamification. The focus [U.S.] banks are putting on customer experience will definitely take them there,” she says.

Whether gamification is appropriate for your product depends on several factors, including user demographics, your business objectives, and whether you’re able to provide incentives customers actually want. Think carefully before adopting this strategy because some people really hate it.

Can You Hear Them Now?

Are you talking to your customers, or at them? To be the authoritative voice in your industry means listening to your users and, equally as important, responding to them. A stellar content strategy means being ready to talk to customers about what concerns them right now, not simply telling them what you think they need to know. Sure, users must be able to access fantastic documentation, but they also want a rapport with their product or service provider that let’s them know the company is proactively listening.

Digital agency Firstborn’s Alex Krawitz and Eugene Chung say getting good at agile content development helps you meet this goal.

“Agile means using real-time interactions and behavior monitoring to drive a more agile approach to creating and deploying branded content focused around the consumer. It seems obvious now that any effective approach to content has to put the consumer at the center and must be able to adapt based on cultural trends and consumer insights.”

Are your content creators agile? Can they twist-and-pivot as the customer culture and climate dictate? The article is filled with terrific tips and real-world examples of companies who use this approach with great results. (We’re not entirely convinced that “figital” is a word, though.)

Image: Toms Bauģis

Social Product Help: Building Trust Across the Social Landscape

November 8th, 2012 | Michael Stewart | Customer Experience Strategy, Featured Post

The impact and reach of the social media landscape is forever changing and buyers as well as industry reviewers are relying more and more upon social media to get a fix on the products and services most likely to offer the best experience.

There is no question that Twitter and Facebook have put tremendous power in the hands of consumers, giving everyone a digital soapbox to broadcast their thoughts and feelings to the world at large. In the pre- and contemporary digital age, word of mouth is considered the best advertising and with the vast social media landscape at play, word gets around pretty fast. But consumer behavior is changing as social media continue to grow and mature.

According to the GlobalWebIndex Annual Report for 2011, a dramatic surge is underway in how consumers use social media. Instead of creating unique content, social media users are sharing professionally created content more and more in their social networks, video sharing platforms and blogs. Furthermore, 50% of users worldwide reported an increase in their trust of contacts on social networks. This same group reported a 21% increase in trust for industry expert blog sites.

Much of this trend is also borne out in Edelman’s 2011 Trust Barometer which indicates a slight trust decline in non-professional social peers and a significant rise in trust for professional peers and industry experts on social networks.

What does this mean for your company and the ways in which you protect and enhance your brand’s reputation?

Well, trust is no longer a commodity that is acquired, rather a benefit that is bestowed, earned through action, reinforced by integrity, transparency and engagement. Your business has the opportunity to build lasting pillars of trust if you’re willing to commit to a strategy that brings value to your users and invests in their success and happiness with your product. For today’s socially savvy buyer and your trusted industry reviewers, a new level of transparency on capabilities, product documentation and support capabilities is essential to move the ‘trust needle’ forward and inspire entry into your sales process.

Lastly, your strategy must build and maintain reliable channels of engagement with your buyer before and after the sale. Among the keystones of any strategy along these lines is the implementation of socially enabled product help. Solutions, such as those provided by MindTouch, are invaluable not only because they provide the best means of supporting the success of your customers, but they also provide essential transparency into the true value and key benefits of your products and importantly signals your commitment to a great customer experience to potential buyers and industry peer reviewers while also creating multi-channel lanes of engagement with your company for those looking for more quality or functionality than the current product they’re using or for those current customers who need a little help. Engagement bestows trust.

This is how brands like Autodesk, HTC, SuccessFactors, HP Palm, PayPal and many more have become among the most trusted brands in the world.

5 Things You Need to Know to Answer 1 Question: What Makes Your Company Great?

August 28th, 2012 | Michael Stewart | Customer Experience Strategy

Every once in a while, I sit back, push away from my desk and look around at all the amazing things that are happening at MindTouch, and how much we’ve grown over the past few years. It’s true, we have a really great product…but there’s more to it than that, and I thought I’d share what we’ve learned as we’ve grown from a small open-source start-up to a company trusted by thousands of other companies, large and small, around the world:

1) Understand why your buyers or users love working with you

At MindTouch we use our very own customer experience features to gather customer feedback at the conclusion of each and every customer project as well as at key milestones in all parts of an on-going relationship.

Last week our CEO, Aaron Fulkerson sat down with the information from our own feedback system from over the last year or so, to evaluate the remarks pertaining to precisely what customers really love about working with MindTouch. He rather quickly uncovered two things that clients simply love about us – we are always actively thinking about them (we have knowledge of their enterprise, are subject matter experts, supply actionable insights, as well as anticipate likely problem areas) and furthermore we really care (we are exceptionally quick to respond, very flexible and easy to work with, go the extra mile, and place a lot of emphasis on superior quality).

If you happen to be gathering feedback data from your customers, you should carry out the same exercise to expose the fundamentals of what makes you exceptional to the customers who always keep coming back.

2) Recognize who your very best customers are

When businesses begin accumulating user feedback data, the impulse is almost always to focus attention on fixing the negative feedback. Even though this is very important, it shouldn’t come at the expense of focusing on your very best customers. I describe these folks as our Passionate Promoters. For any company, Passionate Promoters are essential to company stability and growth. They really want to work with you, they advocate for your product to colleagues and across social networks, and they cheerfully spend their dollars with you. Always keep these people completely satisfied, and when a problem crops up, deal with it fast.

3) Know who your very best staff members are

Behind each and every loyal customer are extraordinary employees or, as I refer to them, Brand Ambassadors. Have you figured out which of all of your employees are nurturing your best clients? Furthermore, are have you been actively learning from them to help you coach and strengthen the skill-sets of your other employees?

4) Uncover what your very best customers want more of

We find among MindTouch users in every sector that fully engaged customers actually want to spend considerably more money with a business that engages with them proactively. The MindTouch TCS solution incorporates an environment for users to recommend if there is anything more they would wish for, like a feature or improvement. Often times customers aren’t familiar with all of the products and services you sell and incorporating feedback tools will give you an opportunity for you to educate and inform your customers about your total suite of products or services as well as an environment to enable them to share with you a need you may possibly not have previously unearthed. One of our customers recently unveiled a $100,000 opportunity by simply using the customer feedback tools of their MindTouch powered product documentation.

5) Monitor the engines of your success

When evaluating customer engagement it is often possible to obsess over the “Mega Metrics” the big numbers that seem to indicate organizational success. However to do so could very well detract from being focused on the unique elements you can personally identify as present or not present in your company and that either drive engagement for your customers or otherwise kill opportunities.

Creating truly engaging customer experiences doesn’t require that your organization gets lopsided but it does require an investment in creating exceptional experiences and gaining the ability to tune into your customers’ sense of product and support fulfillment. Doing so means that you, your employees, your clients, and your prospects will know exactly what it is that makes your company great.

The Content Repository is the Key to Customer Experience Management

August 16th, 2012 | Barb Mosher | Content in Context, Guest Blogger

There is a lot of discussion around the role of the web content management system in customer experience management (CXM). Some say it’s the core, others say it’s an element, but not a driver. I say they are both right.

Let`s be very specific here, because it is important. If we were just talking purely about the online customer experience, then I would agree that the web content management system (WCM) is the core to designing and support CXM strategies. Pretty much every supporting CXM technology: marketing automation, social media monitoring, customer relationship management, analytics, personalization, social software, etc…needs to integrate with the WCM. Why? Because it stores all the content you need to manage the experience. We use to call this Web Engagement (or Experience ) Management.

But customer experience management is about more than the online channels. And not all WCM platforms provide support to the offline experience. Support channels, print-based marketing, internal knowledge work activities — these things are typically done using other tools. And the content used to support these activities is, typically, stored in these other tools.

What I think brings both these views together is not the WCM itself, but the WCM repository. Or to be more generic, the content repository. I think to be successful managing the customer experience, you need to be able to quickly access and relate all elements of a customer interaction with all the internal knowledge your employees have about not only the customer, but the processes used to work with a customer. You can do that if you have a single content repository to work with.

Many content management systems today are designed to store content not as html pages, but as individual components of content that can be easily reused across different web pages, mobile sites and apps, social networks and more. Managing a single version of that content is important to ensure you are always saying the same thing to your customers. These repositories can also be leveraged by other systems to provide content as well. For example, this content repository could be used by your call center support team to help customers with issues.

Now it’s important to point out that I don’t believe you can only have one single content repository where all information needs to permanently live. I believe that content integration is the key to a well-managed content repository. So you can keep your content in the other systems you work with, but find a way to integrate your content repository with those others systems.

By doing that, you can have a single location to mine for information about your customer and their interactions with you, and to use to design and build new applications or online/offline experiences. A central content repository also allows you to develop support applications that have access to customer information easily, including any information from CRM systems, traffic information, etc…

Today’s content is not only the material you use to develop your CXM strategies, it’s also the interactions customers and prospective customers have with you. Having it all accessible in a centralized content repository will help you identify, design and refine your CXM strategies quickly. If you are required to move from system to system to gather all the intelligence and information you need, you are going to spend far more time hunting and gathering, than actually doing something.

Barb Mosher is a guest columnist for MindTouch and Managing Editor for CMSWire.com. You can follow Barb on Twitter @bmosherzinck

3 Ways to Optimize Your Content Strategy

July 23rd, 2012 | Barb Mosher | Content in Context, content strategy, Tech Comm

Gerry McGovern says we shouldn’t talk about content strategy, because it’s not the content that should be the primary focus but the task a user is trying to do. The content, he says, supports the task, so we need to frame it in that context.

I like how he looks at it and I do agree that we should focus our work on understanding the reasons why a user comes to a website and what tasks they are trying to achieve. But I also understand that within that task identification evolves a solid content strategy. And I understand that a solid content strategy must include how we are going to reach out across social media and search to get people to find us and come to our site to complete their task.

Krista LaRiviere, of GShiftLabs calls this an optimized content strategy, which she defines as follows:

Optimized Content Marketing is the art of understanding exactly what your prospects and customers need to know and deliberately producing optimized content based on keyword phrases that are driving organic search traffic and conversions. Then delivering that optimized content to them in a relevant and compelling way to grow your business by socializing the content through your organization’s social networks.”

So how can you write optimized content? Here are three suggestions:

1. Analyze the content that people are reading & keywords people are searching on and clean/write more content to meet those needs

This is not a new idea. It’s been around for a while now, but many organizations are still living with the “write it and forget it” mindset. Content needs to be fresh and continually updated. But not all of it. Some of it is crap and needs to be treated as such (crumpled up and thrown in the proverbial garbage can).

So how do you know what’s working, what needs to be better and what’s missing altogether? Analyze your website traffic stats. What are people looking at now, how much time are they spending on that page? What are they searching for? What pages are sending them away?

If you are focused on the task(s) a user comes to your website to do, then your content needs to be written in such a way as to help them achieve that task. The more (and better) content you write that focuses on key areas visited and key search terms, the better chance you have of helping that user achieve their goal.

If you have implemented any social features, like Tweet This, Like This, Comments, etc.. you can also use that information to help you understand what content is most helpful to people. Build more of that. Or improve the stuff that’s not if it’s critical to the task at hand.

2. Track trending topics/keywords in Google for your product/service and make sure you are including them in your content.

Not only should be you analyzing the traffic and social popularity on your own website, but you should also be tracking on the web overall. Google Trends is great for identifying popular keywords and phrases on the web right now. If you track the terms you think are popular, you’ll get a good feel if you are right. You can also track terms used by competitors and through Google search overall.

If a competitor is constantly coming before you in the Google Search results, find out why. Work to understand what they might be doing better to make them more popular in search. But before you make changes to your own content to reflect the popularity of a competitor, decide if it’s the right thing to do based on the tasks your visitors might be trying to achieve. Maybe you’ve been focused in the wrong area all along and need to refine your content.

3. Incorporate Google+ into your sharing options

Easy enough to understand that Google Search would pay close attention to content being recognized via the +1 button. And although there has been much discussion about whether it’s fair or not, the reality is Google+ is becoming an important place to be. So while you are ensuring that you have that Tweet This Button and Like This Button (Facebook), make sure you also have that Google+ button available.

You might also want to spend some time in your Google+ account discussing the content the you have written and also searching out what others have written on the same topic to see how well their content is received.

Closing Comments

These are just three ways to improve your content and get it into the hands of the people who need it. The key is that the content must support a task a user is trying to do, and it needs to be fresh and relevant, not just stacked with keywords. If a person comes to your website and is able to complete their task successfully, your work is done right.

4 Tips to Make your Customers Brand Advocates

March 6th, 2012 | Barb Mosher | Content in Context, content strategy, Guest Blogger

Everyone has customers, or they wouldn’t have a business. But not every customer you have is ready and willing to sing your praises. Yet you need as many of these customers as possible to do just that. So how can you turn a customer into a brand advocate?

Give Them a Voice

Maybe that sounds a bit obvious, because to be a brand advocate they kind of have to be saying things, but you need to do more than simply let them talk about your brand on their own personal social networks. A Brand Advocate does more than let others know how great your product/service is. Brand Advocates can also provide keen insights and suggestions to improve those products and services.

Here are four ways to encourage your customers to not only talk positively about you, but also offer you valuable information to do better.

#1: Build a Branded Community

A branded community is a great way to bring all your customers together to engage with not only you, but other customers. People can share opinions, give advice, discuss issues and more with each other. You, as the owner of the community should be doing several things: listening to what is being said, responding and engaging appropriately (and we aren’t talking marketing speak here) and rewarding those who are most active and provide useful information for others. Done right, a branded community will encourage customers to go outside of the community and continue to say good things about you across their social networks.

#2: Listen, Learn, Reward

Customers want to be heard, and not only that, they want to know that you Read more…

Thoughtboard | Collaborative Networking: How It’s Different

September 25th, 2009 | Aaron Fulkerson | Editorial, Video

MindTouch has been pioneering the concept of Collaborative Networking as a superior alternative to enterprise Social Networking, Social Business Software and traditional enterprise collaboration (portal frameworks). I wrote initially about this in a high level article explaining Collaborative Networks at Ostatic. In this article I compared Social and Collaborative Networks thusly:

Social Networks’ Characteristics	Collaborative Networks’ Characteristics
One to one	Group to group
Social interaction centered	Objective and content centered
Achieving personal objectives	Achieving group objectives
Individual enrichment	Operational excellence
Results immeasurable	Results measurable

Social Networks Solve	Collaborative Networks Solve
Who wants to meet at the club?	Who can give me access to financials, market reports and customer profiling?
What’s your favorite Mexican restaurant?	What are the expectations of this project?
Why did they unfollow me?	Why did we see a drop in Q3 revenue?
Dude, where is the company picnic?	I thought we already did this work, where are those documents?
How was “Casablanca”?	How do we cut costs and increase revenue?

Thoughtboard | Collaborative Networking: How It’s Different

September 25th, 2009 | Aaron Fulkerson | Editorial, Video

Social Networks’ Characteristics	Collaborative Networks’ Characteristics
One to one	Group to group
Social interaction centered	Objective and content centered
Achieving personal objectives	Achieving group objectives
Individual enrichment	Operational excellence
Results immeasurable	Results measurable

Social Networks Solve	Collaborative Networks Solve
Who wants to meet at the club?	Who can give me access to financials, market reports and customer profiling?
What’s your favorite Mexican restaurant?	What are the expectations of this project?
Why did they unfollow me?	Why did we see a drop in Q3 revenue?
Dude, where is the company picnic?	I thought we already did this work, where are those documents?
How was “Casablanca”?	How do we cut costs and increase revenue?

MindTouch Launches Attack on Stagnant Corporate Intranets (vid link doesn’t work)

June 23rd, 2009 | TomF | Press Release

MindTouch Collaborative Intranet is First of Three Collaborative Network Solutions to Roll-out in 2009
Family of Collaborative Network Solutions to Turn Enterprise Portals “Inside-Out”

SAN DIEGO, June 23, 2009 — MindTouch, developer of one of the top open source projects in the world, today announced the immediate availability of the first of three turnkey collaborative network solutions the company intends to launch over the next six months. MindTouch Collaborative Intranet, built on the company’s popular MindTouch 2009 open source collaboration platform, addresses the failure of current corporate portals and enterprise social networks to deliver value to business users, while simultaneously transforming a company’s IT staff into an army of application developers.

By deploying MindTouch Collaborative Intranet, companies can federate content from across the data and application silos their employees use each day — ERP, CRM, file servers, email, databases, web-services infrastructures, social networks — to create a vibrant real time information fabric. MindTouch Collaborative Intranet connects the legacy business systems companies use every day and pulls data from each individual silo into a single, common and unified Web interface. Unlike more traditional approaches to data federation — such as static portals or plug-in-dependent wikis — MindTouch Collaborative Intranet presents the data in a format that is interactive, collaborative and scalable. And with operational excellence near the top of every manager’s performance objectives this year, MindTouch Collaborative Intranet becomes a highly-valuable tool to drive greater visibility and transparency across an organization’s business.

“Collaborative networks not only reshape how software is developed, they completely reinvent the connection between existing enterprise applications and today’s consumer-based social networks,” said Aaron Fulkerson, CEO, MindTouch. “What we’ve done with MindTouch Collaborative Intranet is take what we’ve learned through hundreds of enterprise engagements over the last two years and combined it with independent research conducted among the Fortune 1000, to define and develop what may rightly be seen as the intranet of the future.”

[For more, see Fulkerson’s groundbreaking post on collaborative networks here.]

Throughout the past decade, companies spent millions of dollars and man-hours building in-house intranets on portal frameworks designed to increase the flow of information and collaboration among employees. However, because these intranets were designed by engineers and HR departments — not by the employees who would use them — many today sit static, serving as vast dumping grounds for departmental files rather than the collaborative platforms they were intended to be.

The explosion of social networks further exacerbated the stale reality of many intranets as employees quickly began to adopt social networks, social bookmarking, forums, blogs, video and microblogging as their primary means of collaboration. Traditional enterprise software vendors responded by wrapping individual, consumer-based social tools in an enterprise message and tacking them on as features to their proprietary, closed-source software suites.

MindTouch Collaborative Intranets address the limitations of today’s intranet solutions with a more modern approach to collaboration. Built with a Web-Oriented Architecture (WOA), MindTouch Collaborative Intranets take the traditional service-oriented architecture approach to application development — prevalent for roughly a decade in the enterprise — and applies Web-based fundamentals to developing more robust, collaborative intranets. By building on WOA, MindTouch fixes the limitations currently hamstringing enterprise collaboration by injecting life back into enterprise IT.

“With MindTouch we had the perfect framework to federate our varied disparate enterprise tools and systems to build a collaborative intranet that spans our entire corporation. The WOA foundation provided us with unprecedented agility to develop and deploy applications rapidly giving us much higher ROI from our IT investments” said Troy Saxton-Getty, VP of Engineering at Bill Me Later. “This kind of collaborative Intranet is so valuable I expect every corporation and organization will soon be using MindTouch. MindTouch has solved the problem of data access, sharing and edting that I have struggled to overcome for the last twenty years.”