Great businesses are very open to input and feedback. They seek it out through formal and informal mechanisms like:

• Quantitative Market Research (statistics-based customer satisfaction assessment; many respondents, little depth.)
  • Surveys and Questionnaires
• Qualitative Market Research (insight-based customer satisfaction assessment; narrow but deep.)
  • Focus Groups
  • Customer Interviews
• Competitive Analysis

What’s emerging now is the opportunity for companies to use Social Media as an additional customer satisfaction assessment tool, and also a way to inform innovation in products and services.  Social media provides tremendous opportunities for direct interaction between a company and its customers.  Many companies are using it to drive innovation.  For example, Starbucks realizes that  its customers know better than anyone else what they want  - so they created a platform to engage customers at: http://mystarbucksidea.force.com. It’s a great website and shows a true commitment to customers – and the recognition that it’s a cost-effective innovation catalyst.

Here’s a great tool that lets you search internet forums for comments about your business: Boardtracker (link to: www.boardtracker.com). Forums, though they’ve been around forever, represent a huge part of the internet — and are an area that many services, including Google, often do not search. Posts which reference your company can contain insight and information just as valuable as that from focus-groups.

One caveat – social media is a mecca for B2C companies to get feedback – its usefulness for B2B companies is still evolving.  But it will only grow.  How does your company use social media to track customer satisfaction?

I attended Rahaf Harfoush’s presentation at the Canadian Business Leadership Forum in Toronto yesterday. She’s the Canadian who helped guide Barack Obama’s social media strategy last year and authored a book on the subject (Yes We Did: An Inside Look at How Social Media Built the Obama Brand).  She talked about the key steps in a social media strategy and the tactics that were very successful in the Obama campaign.  It was a great talk – inspirational and informative.

The first question she was asked in the Q&A was really telling I thought.  It was, “With all that’s out there in the social media world, how do I get started with Social Media for my organization?”

Here’s what she advised:

a) figure out what you want to do as an organization.  Is it raise awareness, engage with customers, generate leads, or something else?  Social media can be used to many ends, so it’s important to figure out first what end you have in mind.

2) Identify your resources and a realistic work plan.  It’s easy to think, “Hey, let’s launch a blog, a Facebook page and get set up on Twitter. We can have the intern manage it – he’s young and adept at this technology stuff so he can probably do it all in a few hours a week.”   Dead wrong.  Rahaf advised that it’s a good idea to break all the tasks down into hours – how many minutes to write a blog, how many blogs per week; how much time to read and respond to others’ blogs and comments; how much time on Twitter and monitoring other channels.  Then you’ll have a good idea of the right resources you’ll need to execute well.

3) Only do what you can do really really well.  With step 2 in mind, be realistic and set out to do 1 or 2 things really well.  Then you can go from there.

One year after ‘the meltdown’, here are 3 reasons why market intelligence (aka market research plus analysis) matters now.  As companies stop thinking about the downturn and making cuts, and instead start thinking about the growth opportunities that lie ahead, they need to know:

a) how has buyer behaviour changed.  Businesses and consumers (B2B and B2C buyers) have changed their shopping and spending patterns in the last year.  What is the result on how customers and prospects find and make purchase decisions on your products and services?

b) how the competition has changed.  In the last year, many companies have disappeared while others have been launched. Recessions prompt many people to start their own companies, which brings innovative and ambitious new entrants to every industry, and causes other companies to shut their doors.  What impact does the new competitive landscape have on your products and services, and how customers view your offering vs the other guy’s?

c) how the communications landscape has changed. The last year has seen literally millions of people sign up for services like Facebook and Twitter.  There are dozens of new channels for talking with customers.  Where do your customers and prospects go for information, and what do you need to be doing to get their attention?

As companies make their plans for 2010, these are just 3 reasons they need to be starting first with market intelligence before jumping into strategy and implementation.

In a word, because it’s social.  B2B marketing norms are based on professional / commercial interactions – not social interactions.  B2B marketers (I count myself here) have operated on a different basis – our interactions, while they can become personal, are a little more formal and a little less frequent than those in the social realm.

So when you tell a B2B marketer to use social media it’s a little bit like telling them to take their clothes off.

But the evidence that social media works even in B2B is there. Adoption will be slow, but it will happen.

Here’s a quick fact to support the philosophy of increasing your marketing efforts in a recession:  Grape Nuts was the cereal market share leader coming into the Great Depression in 1929. Because they were so strong, they cut back advertising.  At the time, Kelloggs was just an upstart.  But they doubled their ad spend, came up with great tags like “Snap, Crackle, Pop!” and by the time the Great Depression was over, Grape Nuts had losts its leadership position, and never recovered it.

Apple, HP, GE, Disney, Gillette and Hershey’s were all founded in recessions.

As we near the end of the year and are coming out of the recession – what are you doing to grow your business next year?

So many inbound marketing calls are dull.  ‘Hello Lisa, how are you?  I’m calling from XYZ Company and I’d like to meet with you to talk about how we can help you.”  It’s actually not only dull, it’s also presumptuous.  You don’t know me, how can you know what will help me?   Perhaps that recipe used to work for outbound calls - but I’m pretty sure its days are done. 

We find (both when making outbound calls  and when receiving them), that it’s more effective to be provocative.  Start with a compelling insight that is a big pain for your target market.  Try this – “our experience working with the top 25 fast growing tech companies shows that they are dealing with….”  and then follow it up with data on the costs of the problem or how companies are dealing with it.  Be provocative with your opener – as long as you can back it up through experience or expertise – and you’re much more likely to get return calls and initiate useful conversations.