FreshNetworks Blog

I had to privilege of seeing Craig Newmark of Craigslist taking part in a discussion at Reboot Britain on Monday.

Ostensibly talking about meeting the biggest challenges for public services now that Britain is broke, Newmark spoke about the impact that ‘little nudges’ rather than forceful do-gooding can have on people.

He compared these little acts with the “organisational inertia” that many large organisations and people in power get locked into through fear of doing it wrong.

What really stood out to me, though, were Newmark’s remarks about people and communities. And these remarks come after 14 years of Craigslist, making the Craigslist community one of the most mature across the net.

Craig Newmark’s ‘thing’ is that he calls himself the founder and customer service rep of Craigslist. He is so famous (in nerdy circles anyway) for this claim that I was staggered when an attendee yesterday asked him about this, as if it wasn’t true and in fact he had a huge team of staff. (The same excitable attendee hopped up on to speakers’ table for a photo opportunity with a befuddled Craig at the end).

But after hearing what this customer service involves, I dispute his claim slightly too. Craig Newmark is doing customer service, that’s absolutely true, but he is doing it in the role of a community manager.

He talked about ‘trolls’, and suggested that they sat within a group increasingly talked about in US politics: Noisy idiots. Dealing with this group brings you eyeball to eyeball with…

“…some of the worst of what people will say to get attention”.

And that’s something any community manager reading this will recognise.

Among his various bad jokes, he liked to drop relevant names and quotes, my favourite of which was a paraphrasing of Jon Stewart:

“You hear more from the extremists and crazy people because moderates have too much to do”.

But he kept coming back to a point that it’s very easy to overlook – especially when you’re dealing with noisy idiots – there are “very few bad guys out there”. Far more people are “interested in talking together”.

“Most people,” Newmark observed, “are inclined to do the right thing, they just need a little nudge”.

For me, this perfectly sums up community management at its best, at its most natural. Nudging people to do the right thing, clamping down on noisy idiots but recognising that most people are good and helpful and want to talk.

After having struggled for years to reduce its phone support load, Loftus Photography turned to Oddcast to implement a virtual sales rep, enabled with artificial intelligence, to assist potential customers. The avatar, named Kathleen, was taught to respond to user questions with context-sensitive spoken answers. The results were huge: a 50% increase in sales productivity due to reducing the time needed for an average phone consultation, as well as increased customer satisfaction. Click here to chat with Kathleen and see for yourself.

Last night I was at an event organised by Results International called Winning in Changing Times. One of the speakers was Christopher Satterthwaite, Chief Executive of Chime Communications. He gave an excellent talk about how brands and organisations need to change the way they engage with customers. Key points included:

• From Deference to Reference. We’ve left the age of Deference (where consumers yield to the judgement of a marketing message) and moved into an age of Reference (where we can and do check claims against feedback from others who have already purchased or experienced a service).
• He showed a great slide that demonstrated the importance of “What you DO” over “What you SAY”. I think it was called “Moving Annual Targets” (MAT). For each month he’d picked out the brand/person most talked about in the press. E.g. NorthernRock for Sept’07, Alistair Darling for Nov’07, BA/BAA for Jan’08 and Bradford and Bingley for June’08. Each of these had hit the headlines because of something they had done which directed a lot of (often negative) attention their way. you can see the diagram showing this below.
• This led onto a point about Reputation. Reputation comes from what you say, what you do and what others say about you. This has always been true and continues to be true. The change is the importance ascribed to each of those three drivers. The order of importance has now been reversed: what others say about you is paramount, then what you do etc.

It was great to hear about how this large communications group has developed it’s thinking in response to the way consumers now consume brand and political messages.

Your devoted customers are your most active advocates. Positive experiences in the past have taught them to have high expectations of you – they expect a great experience and they’re devoted to you because they get what they expect. But just as these customers are you most active advocates, they can also be the easiest to disappoint and can quickly turn into detractors.

I like the chart that Andy Hanselman uses to describe this scenario as I think it quite simply helps you to categorise your customers.

Your devoted customers have high expectations and could need just a single poor experience to turn them from ‘devoted’ to ‘disappointed’. I had a similar experience last night. I’ve written before that for air travel I’m a fan of Virgin Atlantic (see post here). I’ve enjoyed their service a number of times and would have always had good experiences. My expectations are high. I’m a devoted customer. And this is true – I genuinely would choose them above other carriers on the same route and always recommend them to others.

Sadly last night I had a poor experience. Nothing too major just a collection of things (my inflight entertainment didn’t work and none of the cabin crew helping to fix it, poor food and not the drinks service I was hoping for…). None of these things in and of themselves is significant. But together they made my experience poor. And as I sat on the plane last night, I felt disappointed. My expectations were high but my experience poor.

So what can companies like Virgin Atlantic do when their devoted customers are disappointed? Well the key is to listen to them and show that they are listening. These customers still want to be positive advocates about the brand, but they need their confidence in the brand to return. This is where a mechanism to engage them constantly and to feedback to them becomes important (both when their experiences are good and bad). Things go wrong and people have bad experiences from time to time – but brands need to make sure they act quickly when they do.