• 19 Jan 2012

          Why case studies aren't working

          Peter Smith

          During the course of 2011 we commissioned a piece of research into what makes case studies effective.

          We did it because we’ve seen an explosion in feature-heavy reviews talking about the ins and outs of the product.

          Having learned back in the days of my early journalistic career that very few people are actually interested in what’s under the hood, but want to know what a car feels like to drive, this approach feels wrong. It’s not how we write them, and we’ve even seen one customer generate over £1.25m of new revenue of the back of a case study, so our experience is that for a case study to engage it needs to give an insight into the the person we’re interviewing and share his journey with the reader.

          But we could be wrong, after all times do change, so we decided to put our money where our mouth is and test the water.

          To keep it fair,  we pulled 3 case studies each from 20 IT vendors’ websites, and asked some of the hundreds of people we’ve interviewed in the last decade to give us their opinion of the content, style and approach.

          We also went through each study and quantified the content by counting how many paragraphs covered each of the key issues identified in the 2011 IDC customer experience survey as being of interest to purchasers of IT.

          Guess what we found ?

          As you can see from the chart there is a massive disconnect between what the vendors are writing about, and what their target customers want to read about.

          Just  one percent of IT buyers want to read about product features at this stage in the buying cycle. Yet that’s what makes up 90% of the content of the case studies published.

          Similarly, IDC found that nearly 30% of IT buyers want to know about how they can use technology to enable business growth. This subject was covered in just 1% of the case study content.

          So perhaps then it’s hardly surprising that our reader panel, which ranged across the buyer spectrum from CIOs to techies, came back with incredibly low scores on almost all the case studies we gave them. The highest rated  got just 4 out of 10.

          Their universal conclusion was that case studies represent a key source of information for them, but hardly any vendors tell them what they way to know.

          That’s a massive, missed opportunity.

          One IT vendor we discussed this with last week said they’re not surprised by the results because, in his words,  ”lots of IT companies have cut back on their budgets and now get the product managers to produce case studies rather than pay for a professional job. The result is lots of technology descriptions with one or two anodyne quotes from the customer.”

          Last year Gartner released a report that stated that 90% of IT purchasing decisions were made following web research. Often this was up to, and including, final vendor selection, without any involvement of the vendors being considered.

          That’s an important point – all the effort going into lead generation, telemarketing, events and so on is wasted if your prospective customer’s first contact isn’t good. Your website is the first place prospective buyers will visit to find out whether or not they should consider doing business with you.

          What you publish there is critical.

          Customer case studies are still widely recognised as one of the most important ways of proving your credentials, but if they focus on technology, rather than how people use it to overcome their business challenges, then they’ll have the same impact on your website visitor as a loud-mouthed sales person who steamrollers their customers and insists on talking about what he wants to tell you.

          And we all know how successful those sales people are.

          Or not.

           

        • 29 Nov 2011

          Salutary Tale - the cost of ignoring Facebook criticism

          Peter Smith

          95% of negative comments on Facebook don’t get any response, so the current approach to negative comments would appear to be to just ignore them.

          Proponents for that tactic argue that no-one reads much beyond a couple of frames, so if you have lots going on then, in theory, the negative post will get lost pretty rapidly.

          We don”t advise you to do that, or even worse, delete them.

          A couple of months ago, one of our clients felt very tee’d off with their car dealer when his wife was pressured into paying out over £1600.00 for service items that her car did not need. He complained on the manufacturer’s
          Facebook wall and found an hour later that his comment had been deleted.

          The same happened when he reposted the complaint – with no response from the manufacturer or the dealer.
          So he blogged about the experience, and reposted to the manufacturers’ wall hourly for the next two days, linking to his blog.

          Each time his post got taken down within an hour.

          What the manufacturer didn’t know was that he drove over 400 people to the blog, of whom around a quarter said they would now drop that manufacturer from their shortlist.

          100 new car sales lost at an average of £40k per sale? I’d say that was a very expensive approach to social media, especially in this market.

          If you are taking social seriously, then you should have 24×7 monitoring and a dedicated, empowered team able to respond to the problem and calm down the unhappy customer.

          The important thing is to get the conversation out of the public domain as soon as possible, and make sure that the complaint is seen to have been answered in near-real time.

          24, 48 or 72 hours later is not acceptable.

        • 18 Nov 2011

          Facebook fans don't equal social success

          Peter Smith

          Fan pages aren’t working

          Mega brands like Coke and Starbucks boast Facebook fan numbers in the multimillions, but the level of engagement across the top 300 brands is dropping like a stone.

          In just nine months, their average fan engagement levels have halved from over 1.2 percent to 0.6, despite Facebook membership increasing by over 50% over the same period.

          Which means that the marketing industry’s current approach to social marketing, is actually turning customers off!

          That’s not surprising. Companies that have been around a while tend to fall into a fairly standard, command and control, pyramid structure which lays the dead hand of established practice on any truly innovative idea.

          Within these companies the role of marketing is pretty well defined – to get campaigns out the door and ultimately drive up sales, and there’s a strong pressure to recycle content across all media.

          Which is fine if your fans haven’t already seen the same thing in four or five other places, which the volume of sharing and re-tweeting makes extremely unlikely if the content is at all interesting.

          What is the point of social media?

          Although in time we’ll all get offers throughout mobiles, social isn’t about driving sales. It’s about reputation. It’s about opinion. It’s about opening your company up to customers. It’s about being happy to take criticism and learn from it.

          That’s a lot of attitude change for any company to deal with.

          Last month just 7% of companies polled in a Gartner survey think they have social sorted out, even though over 80% are involved in it.

          In part that’s because of the newness of social, but a lot of the slowness is down to companies trying to work out what the heck they’re going to do – Who’s going to own it? What are the rules? How do we control what’s said? In-house or Outsource?

          In short – what do we do next?

          Are you socially engaging ?

          One of the most interesting points we’ve found is that over 90% of the discussions companies are having about social focus on ‘How do we do this?’ rather than ‘What are we going to offer our fans?’

          The key word that comes up in every conversation we have about social media is ‘engagement.’ But they don’t teach engagement on marketing degrees or CIM courses. In fact most marketers dread the thought of having to deal with customers on a regular basis.

          Over the last couple of decades marketing departments have become ever farther removed from the people they’re trying to influence. An IBM study in October found that over three quarters of CMOs will use research to tell them what people think, yet less than a quarter read their own Facebook pages, where the public express themselves in spades.

          To many marketers the practicalities of content and engagement are an alien language – they’re simply not used to the 24×7 demands of a social website.

          To make social work, marketers need to focus on people not numbers. They need to consider how people will react to what they see, how they are going to make their sites compelling, and how they are going to build communities.

          Facebook isn’t the answer

          99.95% of fans never revisit a brand page they have ‘liked’. Within a couple of weeks Facebook’s Edge Rank filters out news from pages that you don’t visit, so the millions of likes on the top pages are pretty much worthless.

          To build a social community you need to go beyond Facebook and Twitter. Yes they’re a great front door, but the key is to use these sites as bait, as a way to invite fans to take their relationship with you to the next level, and join a dedicated community website with a 24×7 editorial team driving it.

          What you offer when the fan first arrives at the site and how you keep them engaged, will make the difference between them joining your community and becoming a brand advocate, or simply clicking away never to return.

          That’s all about content, which is a significant challenge to marketers, as it requires the skills and creativity of a publisher.

          Get it right and you’ll build a massive and loyal fanbase, but you’ll have to change a lot of established practices along the way, or outsource, which means finding a partner that can bring a range of skills to the table – content, creative, event management, software and data, customer service and empathy for the brand.

          Outsourcing is always a tricky one because the CFO will demand a Return on Investment, and concrete revenue from social is notoriously hard to define.

          Perhaps that’s why so few marketing organizations are prepared to commit the budget to do social properly, even though within the next couple of years an effective social community is going to be the most powerful tool in the marketer’s box.

          The growth of companies like ASOS, Amazon and Zynga, compared to the decline of traditional retailers like Currys and Comet, shows what happens when a new business model lands, and established businesses ignore it.

          Is social going to do the same to your business, or are you going to take the plunge and beat your competitors to the post?