“Making love to customers is not a campaign, but a lifestyle,” says Saul in his talk. What does he mean? “Making love to your customers is not something that you can do for a certain amount of time–it is a company commitment. You can’t run this like an ad campaign–customers will sense when it is over and leave you. Over-exceeding expectations means treating your customers better than any other company relationship your customer has ever had.” This is something the Nordstrom executive or a manager at the Four Seasons would smile knowingly and nod at.
Saul’s company, Freshbooks.com, where he’s Chief of Magic, spends time, effort, people, and resources on creating relationships with customers. The central assumption in these relationships is that Freshbooks employees love their customers–even if the customers have something bad to say. Saul considers this a great opportunity to turn a detractor into someone who realizes how much Freshbooks loves him or her.
Month: August 2008
As an Interium Advisory Group member for Social Media Club, I’ve chosen to work on the Media Literacy Project as described below.
4 Missions, 4 Projects: Social Media Club Gets to Work | Social Media Club
Media Literacy
Michael Brito is leading an effort to find and organize all the best Introduction to Social Media presentations, classes, discussions, cartoons, videos, blog posts etc… There are a lot of ‘here is what you need to know about social media‘ lists out there as well – where are they, which ones are the best. If you have some materials to submit, or if you run across some good material, can you please join this project by submitting your introduction to Social Media materials on the Social Media Club wiki.
I think this is a critical issue for children as well as customers of any company. We say “don’t believe everything you see online.” But how do we evaluate different content, research sources, and teach people how to be discriminating. Not only am I going to be involved in this effort at Social Media Club, but I’ve proposed this topic as a panel at the South By SouthWest Interactive Festival in Austin in 2009 (SXSW). If you support this idea, please consider voting for my panel. You’ll have to create a free account.
If you know someone who’d benefit from learning about Social Networks and other forms of New Media in a Not-For-Profit context, I’ll be teaching a class at NYU SCPS this fall on the subject. At $400 for 4 sessions, it is an excellent value (IMHO) and a great way to get an overview and some practical advice on using blogs, social networks, and other forms of media to recruit and retain volunteers and for fundraising, outreach, and publicity. Please pass it on.
Course Details | New York University – SCPS
Using Social Networks and New Media Technologies in Your Nonprofit
X39.9211 / Continuing Education / $400
FALL 2008Donors, volunteers and staff are using technologies, from Facebook to Weblogs, to connect, communicate, learn and inform. What are these new social media tools, and how can your organization use them most effectively? How can you leverage social networks to build community, photo and video sharing to promote your cause, or blogging to keep your constituents informed? The course gives practical examples, and features guests including Tom Watson, author of the forthcoming Causewired and co-founder of Changing Our World.
And
UPDATE: Nice wrapup of Social Media Camp by Mogulette in the making Carmina Perez.
Facebook Whales
Have you noticed Facebook is throwing errors almost as much as Twitter has, lately?
I got frustrated after trying to invite about 75 people to an event, and gave them the Whale they deserved.