The Impacts of Social Media on Corporate Customer Reference Programs

Categories: Social Media, Web Marketing, Web Strategy, Web Theory, Word of MouthPosted on January 29th, 2007

Customer Reference Programs to transform due to Social Media
This post is intended as a resource and a start of a discussion for those that manage Corporate Customer Reference Programs, please forward this post to the right person in your company.

[Social media tools enable customers to share with prospects, creating both disruptions and opportunities for customer reference programs]

This is an important intersection that required some light in a recent Customer Reference conference. Social Media (Blogs, forums, podcasts, social networks and other tools) impact nearly every arena of the corporate organization. I’m not part of the Word of Mouth organization, nor part of the Customer Reference industry, but I am a Social Media consultant looking in.

Value of Customer Opinions
Nielsen Buzz Metrics research indicates that consumers trust other consumers above all others. Other research leans towards word of mouth. Prospects value the opinion of a customer over that of the vendor.

About Customer Reference Programs
As a result of the value of network based customer opinions, Customer Reference programs were born to the corporate enterprise.

Having managed or helped to lead four Enterprise Intranets at large corporations over my web career, I know that deliverables from a Customer Reference program is an invaluable to the Sales Cycle.

The Customer Reference Program Manager is responsible to build a library of examples of how customers have deployed their products across different industries or environments. Often, they obtain these references by providing bonus services to customers, beta testing products or other incentives. Sometimes, sales teams are required to obtain customer references before a compensation check is issued to account teams.

These important references are captured, organized, and republished (from PDF, video interview, a phone reference etc). Many corporate websites make excellent use of these references, here’s a few great examples from EMC, IBM customer videos, Microsoft, SAP Webcasts, and Hitachi Data Systems.

It’s possible to quantify the actual return from customer reference programs.

Diagram 1: Traditional flow of Customer Reference information

Social Media Tools lower boundaries for sharing
The examples above are a good indicator of the path of least resistance for a prospect to find a detailed customer reference was from the corporate vendor. It’s widely known that Customer Reference Programs often filter, adjust, and select the content for the benefit of the company.

Now with easy-to-publish web tools such as blogs, forums, rating site, and social networks, individuals can openly and honestly provide opinions, thoughts and engage in discussions. I, and others like me, do this frequently for products we use. The barriers to entry are internet access and basic tool knowledge.

Social Media empowers anyone to publish their voice and to be easily heard, for negative customer feedback this is a disruption and opportunity, for positive customer feedback, this is an opportunity.

Future generations of workers and decision makers primarily rely on their social networks to communicate, known as the tivo generation, digitally native, and myspace generation.

Diagram 2: Social Media Transforms Communication

Disruptions
Customers and talk directly to prospects bypassing a corporations, marketing and customer reference programs.

1) Customer References Content is selective
Content from customer reference programs (like other Marketing materials) gloss the company in a positive light. When a prospect is evaluating an important decision (such as a tool that could impact their career) they are expected to obtain information to make a logical business decision.

2) Customers can easily publish their customer experiences on Social Media tools.
When I was the Community Manager at Hitachi Data Systems, I experienced how customers were talking about our products, (from evaluation, installation, performance and more) and there was nothing I could do to prevent them from publishing their raw opinions. (example of our flagship product review)

3) Google makes finding opinions easy
We live in a Google world, and blogs score high in search results due to their high degree of linking. Blogs tend to have specific niche content (long tail) which indicate a high results score on search results for specific product name. (example: search results, at one time, this blog was higher in the results than the corporate website)

While an overused example, at one point, Jeremy Zawodny’s post complaining about Dell Support was displayed higher on the Google search results than the actual Dell Support page. (it’s now lower on the results page) Be sure to read the many comments of folks that offered their opinion.

Both of these examples are disruptive to how traditional customer references were captured and share, the first being a positive mention, the second being negative.

3) How Prospects can find Customer Opinions
Here’s some examples of how prospects can easily find opinions of customers using Social Media tools, please note, some of these are as old as the Internet.

Social/Network Ratings: CNET is one of the early adopters when it comes to customer ratings and reviews. Also see epinions, yelp, and other sites.

Blog Search Tools:
Tools such as Technorati, TalkDigger, Sphere, and Google Blog Search.

Sentiment Mining Tools
Robert and I had a discussion on using the terms X sucks to find out customer opinions. Also try tools like “Google Fight”, see Intel vs AMD, HDS vs EMC, Google vs Yahoo, Also see Opinmind: An early version of a sentiment mining tool

Opportunities
Fortunately, there are more opportunities to make a customer reference program strong using these tools, here’s some suggestions to get started:

1) Partner up!
In many companies, a “Community Manager” role or “Social or Digital Media Manager” is starting to appear as a result of the customers talking to each other and talking back. As a Customer Reference Manager you should align with them. If your company has yet to recognize the impact of these tools on your company and brand, see this post on Corporate Blog Evangelism.

2) Start to Monitor and Listen to what Customers are Saying
Learn how to use Technorati, Google Alerts, apply them to your company name, specific product name, executives. Teach Product teams and support to do the same. There’s a lot to learn from the Church of the Customer blog.

3) Engage and Harness Customer Feedback
Customers that praise your products from websites and blogs will make natural candidates for your customer reference database. Reach out to them, and ask them if they’d like to participate. Of course, as you tell prospect about their opinion, you’ll want to indicate that they willingly and voluntarily provided this feedback without your coaching or being incented. Give consideration to using negative customers opinions to win a customer for life.

If you reference customers with blogs, they are already public information, so the process in getting customer feedback is that much faster.

4) Reuse these references in other ways
If you’ve already established a corporate blogging program at your company, encourage your bloggers to link to the positive references of your customers, as well as learn to deal with the negative ones.

5) Best Practices as Social Media
Now that you’ve started to understand how to listen, your company will need to figure out how to respond to raw customer opinions. The worst thing to do is to listen and do nothing. (See what happened to Dell) Learn how to turn negative feedback about your company into a positive. There’s been cases where a customer having problems with a product will publicly blog about it, the company will respond and fix it and the customer will become a brand advocate and defender. This art is a bigger discussion, but I suggest starting with the book Naked Conversations.

Anti-Marketing Marketing emerges. At Microsoft, Robert Scoble (now my colleague) was hired as a technical evangelist for Microsoft products. He became a living customer reference program by linking to bloggers who said positive and negative things about Microsoft. By leveraging both the good and bad feedback from real customers he became a trusted source to find customer and market opinions about Microsoft.

6) Customer Reference Programs to use Social Media
There’s some fantastic tools available at your disposal now. You’re not limited to only creating PDFs on your website. With little resources you could create use social media tools to harvest the voice of the customer, and share with prospects, here’s a few ideas:

A) Organize internally
Create an internal blog at your company that references all the instances of customers talking about your products in public forums, blogs, podcasts, social sites etc. I recommend attending a conference by the Blog Business Summit, New Comm Forum, or Word of Mouth Association.

B) Publicly recognize opinions
Create this an external blog and link to all customer references on blogs, forums or in podcasts in your industry. To build the most audience trust, both negative and positive. If you work at a company with a passion community, it’s likely some customers may have already done this. You’ll be able to save yourself some time by referencing public blog posts (perhaps from your own blog) which could reduce the time to getting customer permission. In some cases, public recognition is incentive for these natural references. Here’s an interesting outcome of a small customer getting the CEO of Sun Microsystems to listen and respond.

See what people say negatively about PodTech, and how we responded. Also learn about this panel I spoke on, the theme was “Negative is the new Positive”

C) Capture and encourage those voices
That lets real customers provide their best practice information, real feedback, and rants and raves about your products. Consider involving your practice groups. For many companies this is a safe approach as you can control which passion customers will be selected to attend this session. Here’s some interesting ways to generate buzz for your program, both internally and externally.

D) Video shares human stories
Customer References shouldn’t be limited to PDF or Audio. Video is a great way to convey the human emotion and display a deeper connection.

The Future
Customer Reference Programs will expand in scope or overlap with other corporate programs:

1) Expanded Scope
There will be an overlap between the Customer Reference Program and Community/Social media programs at many corporations over the next year.

2) Listening Toolset
Customer Reference Programs will use Social Media tools to find customer opinions.

3) Authenticity
Effective Customer Reference programs will integrate negative comments and opinions into it’s program for great trust and authenticity with the market.

4) Conversational Toolset to Publish
Customer Reference Programs will use Social Media tools to help tell the stories. Some companies will benefit from the interactive benefits of these tools.

[Customer reference programs that integrate unfiltered opinions of customers and use social media tools will increase trust and accelerate the word of mouth network]

Diagram 3: Future Customer Reference Information Flow

About
This post stemmed from a discussion with a PodTech client (see right nav for list of clients) whom I serve as a Social Media consultant. I frequently use this blog as a resource for our customers as well as be a resource to the network. I would be interested in sharing additional information at a Customer Reference conference, you can learn more about me on my profile.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 29th, 2007 at 3:36 am and is filed under Social Media, Web Marketing, Web Strategy, Web Theory, Word of Mouth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Wow Jeremiah this is a lot to cover. This obviously took some time to put together. I have to disagree with the statement that Matt Mullenweg is a small customer. He is associated with Wordpress, the most downloaded social media app on the planet. He is anything but small potatoes.

Posted by Jim Turner on January 29th, 2007 at 9:48 am

Fair enough Jim, I stand corrected. There is quite a difference between Sun and Wordpress as far as size.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 29th, 2007 at 11:09 am

Great article. I have forwarded it to two clients already.
Thank God for high bandwidth.
A video is worth a thousand pdfs.

Posted by Kit on January 29th, 2007 at 3:06 pm

Dude, you know I love ya…but you need to break something like this into several parts so that it can be digested much more readily:-)

I also look at the roles of Community Marketing & Customer Reference to largely be the same roles. I don’t think that they need to be separate entities within any organization…

I do like your suggestion about linking out to negative reviews, something that would probably draw ire in many companies. My personal suggestion would be that the Community Marketing person in your company should be responsible for handling the interaction with a vocal critic.

Posted by Damon Billian on January 29th, 2007 at 5:21 pm

Damon

Your honest feedback is what I always expect, if I can’t get that from my friends, then I’m doomed!

This is the shortest format I could do, (believe me, I tried) I’ve whittled it down quite a bit over the last week of work.

If you want the summary, The text in the large gray brackets pretty much sum it up, there’s two of them.

It’s my hope that the role I wrote this for will read every word, print it out, and study it, as it will enhance their career. Checking today’s web analytics, folks reading this specific URL are spending about 3 times the time than other posts, I think they’re really reading it.

At large companies 5,000 or more, often these are more than different roles, but different groups on different sides of the org chart.

I see a high level of integration with both Community and Reference Manager.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 29th, 2007 at 7:26 pm

Yet another great post that will be archived in my files and forwarded to clients!

On length- readers have specific needs and engage with content differently based on the topic that is being covered and what they are trying to find. One of the most popular filters we offer in our archive service is to allow people to search on word count- and typically users will search for example wc>1500 in order to get to the ‘meaty’ content that is being published.

Just today in the Wall Street Journal an article on companies using Social Networking tools to create ‘Corporate Connections’ that echos some of this post went to ‘print’ with 1679 words this post has 1843.

So i did some quick calculations going across Factiva’s english language article for the last 90 days (all publications; newspapers, newswires, transcripts, trade journals etc). This is not scientific but interesting?

5,514,427 total English articles
177,371 total English articles >1500
1,424,137 total English articles >500-1500 words
3,912,919 1500= 643
about 43% of WSJ articles are under 500 words

so i am not surprised that the blogshere probably provides a similar pattern. wish it was as easy to search against it to pull these types of stats however!

Posted by daniela barbosa on January 29th, 2007 at 10:42 pm

urgh hate that you can’t edit comments! see above these are the right numbers:

5,514,427 total English articles- last 90 days (all publications; newspapers, newswires, transcripts, trade journals etc).

177,371 total English articles >1500
1,424,137 total English articles >500-1500 words
3,912,919 1500= 643
about 43% of WSJ articles are under 500 words

Posted by daniela barbosa on January 29th, 2007 at 10:56 pm

sorry i guess it is because i am pasting from excel or the less then sign- here is another try- please delete last comment if possible!

5,514,427 total English articles last 90 days (all publications; newspapers, newswires, transcripts, trade journals etc).

177,371 total English articles >1500 words
1,424,137 total English articles >500-1500 words 3,912,919 less then 500 words
*70% of articles have less then 500 words

In just the Wall Street Journal:
Total= 7978
less then 500 = 3463
more then 1500= 643
*43% of WSj articles are less then 500

Posted by daniela barbosa on January 29th, 2007 at 11:02 pm

Jeremiah,

This is one of the most effective and succinct primers on the subject I’ve come across. Thanks for being true-blue 2.0 and sharing your thoughts (and work) with us. I will highly recommend this to clients and colleagues.

Posted by Melvin on January 29th, 2007 at 11:09 pm

Hey Buddy,

Love the piece. I would’ve just liked to see it in about three parts…makes it much easier to digest & think about.

Posted by Damon Billian on January 30th, 2007 at 12:30 am

Thanks all.

If the topic in the comments is focused on ‘too much’ information, I’d rather it be that, that ‘too little’ information.

Perhaps if the title said:

“White Paper: The Impacts of Social Media on Corporate Customer Reference Programs” It may have been better.

Shel Israel calls this a Manifesto
“http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2007/01/jeremiahs_custo.html”

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 30th, 2007 at 4:16 am

very thoughtful.

greater transparency and candor regarding customer references is not only a great idea, but also the wave of the future.

Posted by bill lee on January 30th, 2007 at 1:33 pm

. . . at least I hope it is!

Posted by bill lee on January 30th, 2007 at 1:34 pm

hey, do you have an index posted of these great articles by topic?

Posted by Kurayzee on January 30th, 2007 at 2:44 pm

Kurayzee

I’m glad you find this resourceful!

You may find the following three categories (they way I tag and organize my posts) particularly interesting such as Community Marketing, Social Media, and especially “Web Strategy”

When I tag a post “Web Strategy” typically it means it’s a ‘how to’ or an example of a company deploying web tools in a interesting or effective way.

Someday, I’ll build an index of most interesting posts.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 30th, 2007 at 6:01 pm

I’ve noticed that folks are spending nearly 4:50 minutes reading this post according to Google Analytics, it’s also one of the top read items on this blog over the last few days.

Thank you for spending the time to read this post, I hope there was a return in investment for your time.

I look forward to your feedback.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on January 31st, 2007 at 6:26 am

Your insights continue to amaze me. You know I’ll be using this as a cornerstone in my present and future jobs. I look forward to more of your insights.

Posted by Mary Eileen Farley on January 31st, 2007 at 11:57 am

[...] Jeremiah gives us an insightful train of thought capturing the past, present and future of customer references with a generous sprinkling of how social media is going to transform the industry. Couldn’t agree more with J, however I’ve a question… [...]

Posted by Does Social Media work for the Enterprise? « Marketing Nirvana — by Mario Sundar on February 2nd, 2007 at 12:03 am

Hey Jeremiah,

Awesome post! Couldn’t agree more with you on how social media is transforming the tech consumer industry.

However I wonder if the enterprise customer has the time to generate social media? What are your thoughts, buddy?

Posted by Mario Sundar on February 2nd, 2007 at 12:07 am

Ya mean versus creating brochures, press releases, case studies?

Of course, enterprises that don’t have the time should seek a partner. There’s quite a few services firms out there that could help.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on February 2nd, 2007 at 4:28 am

1) Customer references are selective, singular, wholly subjective and often times self-contradictory, and unquantifiable to boot. It means what you want it to mean.

2) Customers can easily publish their customer experiences on Social Media tools. Wheee, so? 10 million blogs and people only read a few, if that. It’s more therapy for the writer than anything else.

3) Google makes finding opinions easy - Blog muck makes SEARCHING impossible half the time. Rendering a philosophy on junky Google cultic algorithms (which can and does change all the time)?

3) How Prospects can find Customer Opinions

Social/Network Ratings - So major media reviews are now ’social’? Land grab.

Blog Search Tools - Really who but the tech cult, SEO Sploggers and Marketing drips, ever uses these? Circular toolset.

Sentiment Mining Tools - Define sentiment, as such is soooo broad of a definition, anything you do could fall under ’sentiment’, reviews, sucks sites, general fishing for information. And anyone that thinks the ’sucks’ sites present a reality-based birds-eye view, needs an brain transplant.

1) Partner up! Minimize risk, spread the infliction. Cults of a feather, flock together.

2) Start to Monitor and Listen to what Customers are Saying - Well duh. Any company that doesn’t do such is dead by default. But what customers? Say 90% of a company customers are Enterprise and like the direct approach, so hand holding some crybaby bloggers hands and going entitlement, might backfire. Really, know your customers. So bloggers can rant, temper-tantrum, and cut in line? That how it works?

3) Engage and Harness Customer Feedback - Engage and Harness? Buzzword soup. You mean analyze data? Ummm sure ok.

4) Reuse these references in other ways - Recycle the marketing, one-size-fits-all. Make them conform to you.

5) Best Practices as Social Media - Best Practices of course, used mainly as a competitive blunt tool. Leaders don’t like upstarts, not following the “rules”.

6) Customer Reference Programs to use Social Media - Stop the world…

A) Organize internally - Shower and shave before you go out. Umm ok.

B) Publicly recognize opinions - Not all opinions are of equal weight.

C) Capture and encourage those voices - Again, all opinions are of equal weight. And if the voices are good enough, well hire them.

D) Video shares human stories - What? Leave out the robots? Some exec yabbering informericalish on video is now social media and defined as ‘human stories’? As that’s all I see in “social media”. Real media calls it what it is, a commercial. Human stories are best captured in well-written TV/Film and Novel form, not some ego-fed Exec blabbering on thinking he’s all “social media”. If it’s “history” it becomes a documentary.

Expanded Scope, Listening Toolset, Authenticity, Conversational Toolset to Publish - Help I’ve fallen and can’t get up. Blah blah blah. Buzzwords that need real world definitions. Listening Toolset, oh dear me.

Posted by Christopher Coulter on February 3rd, 2007 at 12:32 pm

Very creative Christopher, and I’m glad you spent the time reading this.

I should have invited you to help me write this, point and counterpoint.

Buzzwords aside, your first sentence in your rant is the most important:

“Customer references are selective, singular, wholly subjective and often times self-contradictory, and unquantifiable to boot. It means what you want it to mean.”

Interesting points about the ‘crier bloggers’.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on February 3rd, 2007 at 1:03 pm

Value of Customer Opinions? It’s a wash. Wisdom of the crowds is not always wise (see Digg or YouTube comments, Slashdot filters out and manages much better). And what someone else’s needs be, might not fit you. People are different, impossible to quantify human behavior, Wall Street tries all the time, and always fails. And most customers, are not much in a position to be an effective judge, grain of salt. Which is why it leans towards the experts, like Consumer Reports or professional reviewers. And customers will be protective, insisting it works, as they make that choice, when the exact opposite is true. A million differing motives here. Surveys always conjur up the ‘customer is always right’ mantra, but reality is differing. Customers are fickle, contradictory and can be a royal pain, expecting the product to do things it wasn’t meant to do.

Customer Reference Programs? No direct relationship with customer reference programs, as availability, price, emotional appeal, status symbol, ease of use, meeting the task at hand, go farrrr longer than some Play-Doh social-marketing spazz out. It’s a scam, as during times of plenty it gets credit, and during times of famine, it gets credit as what can provide the rescue out of the valleys.

Social Media Tools lower boundaries for sharing - So? Higher boundaries have a thousand times more marketshare. 10 million blogs made, maybe 10 digested. And a majority of the sites, eventually morph fan-based. Lower boundaries directly translates into lower quality.

Posted by Christopher Coulter on February 3rd, 2007 at 1:05 pm

[...] Update: Well Chris Coulter has certainly ’spiced up’ my post with his counterpoints on Customer Reference programs and Social Media. Well at least he read the whole thing in detail. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Reading Sampler: Interesting Conversations on February 3rd, 2007 at 1:12 pm

Oh dear. I’m no “A-lister” but companies that have products that I’ve used have been listening to me. And guess what, some of them brought me in (and we brought some friends) to build better products.

Oh, and I absolutely agree with you that many open community systems are broken, digg, the wiki you created etc.

But to your point, if things start to niche out like we suspect they will, then 10 blogs in any specific segment become that ‘high barrier’.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on February 3rd, 2007 at 1:16 pm

Good news!

It’s been a week since I launched this post, and I’ve received quite a bit of positive feedback. As stated in the post, I’d be pleased if there was an opportunity for me to present some of this information at a customer reference conference.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on February 5th, 2007 at 8:42 am

[...] For many corporations who’re not fully aware of all the tools available, deploying all web resources only to your corporate websites and search engine marketing will not be effective.. The Many Forms of Web Marketing: 1) Corporate Domain This has been a standard since the late 90s, nearly every company, mom and pop boutique now has a web presence. The primary purpose of this is to provide the public with information about your company, it’s products, and anything else they may need. Corporate websites often compose of several features that are listed below. A) Corporate Site Little explanation is required here, today’s standard requires for every company to have a home on the web. The methods and tools are highly discussed in a variety of locations, books and conferences, but do remember that some tools are creating an impact on their relevance and marketing in general. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » The Many Forms of Web Marketing for the 2007 Web Strategist on February 5th, 2007 at 6:38 pm

[...] Posting has been light lately, and it will likely stay light. I’ve not had time to focus on some real analytical pieces like web marketing, customer reference, online data storage, white label social network apps, and others. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » 105 Miles Per Hour on February 27th, 2007 at 4:11 pm

[...] It’s no mystery that I write this website for Corporate Marketers who use the web (that is my background for 7 years, this is my first time at a small startup), there’s a real need for sharing and learning as a single community. A few weeks ago, I wrote a very lengthy post, it was really a white paper of sorts, where I discussed the Impacts of Social Media on Customer Reference Programs. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Customer Reference Forum April 23-25th in Berkeley on February 28th, 2007 at 8:11 am

[...] As you can see from the above definition, the deliverables in all the above cases is text, audio and events. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! However, social media and user-generated content is definitely the wave of the future, when it comes to customer references. Here’s my friend Jeremiah’s blog post on the “Impact of Social Media on Customer References“ [...]

Posted by Customer References | The 5 New Rules « Marketing Nirvana — by Mario Sundar on March 1st, 2007 at 1:25 am

Hi, Jeremiah. I agree with your post that prospects want unfiltered dialogue with existing customers–and the tools of social media should be able to give that to them.

But they don’t. Customer opinions about IT products, for instance, are difficult to find. I just tried Googling customer reviews of Symantec Backup Exec, for example. I found just reviews by the pros, and one customer review:
http://www.windowsmarketplace.com/details.aspx?view=info&itemid=833002

I don’t think people in IT have the time or patience to find useful reviews from other customers via the Web. I did find some product review dialogue searching Google Groups for reviews on Backup Exec.
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?q=Reviews+Backup+Exec&start=0&scoring=d&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&
IT pros are using newsgroups to exchange opinions.

But again, I searched Technorati on “Backup Exec” to see what people are blogging about it, and found almost nothing useful.
http://groups.google.com/groups/search?q=Reviews+Backup+Exec&start=0&scoring=d&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&

Your concept about the power of social media in this area is intuitively correct. But apparently it’s ahead of its time–because there doesn’t seem to be a fast, easy way to find valid reviews by product users, at least of enterprise IT products.

Posted by Alan Drummer on March 2nd, 2007 at 6:55 pm

Alan

Great to hear from you my friend, you’re missing one key point that matters. Communities are forming on the web, and they are subscribing and linking and connecting to each other.

I (someone who is well connected to my peers and people like me) can obtain opinions about products using my blog, (asking a question) asking a user group (peers in a google group) post a question on twitter, or search my bloglines rss feeds.

I will ask folks I trust for their recommendations –all withOUT google.

I don’t have any hard data, but this could also be the case for some social networks such as myspace and facebook.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on March 2nd, 2007 at 7:37 pm

I did a bit more thinking and poking around:

I did a google search for “Symantec Backup Exec Sucks” and got this:

http://www.msexchange.org/software/Backup-&-Recovery/Symantec-Backup-Exec-for-Exchange/Comments/

Of course, it’s hard to tell who these folks are, as well as their authority.

Also, have you seen the Data Storage Industry Wiki? While at Hitachi Data Systems, I created this wiki that joined the whole voice of the customer and vendors onto one page. Believe me, customer reviews of our products mattered, and we responded. In one case, the product name was higher on the search results for a blog than our corporate site. (I mentioned that above…that’s disruptive)
http://storagebloggers.pbwiki.com/

I’m also going to ping an “A-lister” blogger in the security space, Martin McKeay to chime in. He may know how actual security professionals communicate and discuss products.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on March 2nd, 2007 at 8:40 pm

I’m not going to comment on the entirety of your article, there’s just too much there for me to address in a comment. However, I will tell you a little bit about how StillSecure is addressing our user community and opening up the development of Cobia (http://cobia.stillsecure.com) to our users.

First of all, they hired me to be the Product Evangelist. My job is to listen to the community, provide feedback to the development team and grow the community, in that order. We started with a forum, we’re ramping up the blog, and shortly before release, we’re going to have a podcast with the lead developer of the project to explain our vision for the product. None of these are cutting edge social media projects, but it’s more than most security companies are doing.

One of the main reasons I was hired for this position is my own standing in the security and social media world. I’m a prolific writer, blogger, podcaster and now video blogger. Not all of that is directly at the disposal of StillSecure, but it lends credence to what I do on the companies behalf.

Anyone can read our forums. I make my contact information readily available to users, both my email address and my cell phone number. I haven’t gotten around to posting my IM information, but that’s in the works. My job is less to be a company spokesperson to the outside and more to be a customer advocate inside the company.

Looking at Jeremiah’s drawing, my role is to be the arrow between customers/prospects and the company. If I can help facilitate the communication between customers and prospects, that’s even better. I’ll use whatever tools are appropriate to provide that communication channel.

Personally, I’m constantly using a dozen different social media tools to keep in touch with other security professionals around the country, from IM to IRC, to blogs and now Twitter. It’s distracting a lot of the time, but it keeps me entertained.

Providing my $.02 worth,

Martin

Posted by Martin McKeay on March 9th, 2007 at 9:12 am

Hi, Jeremiah. I think you’re making good points. It’s ironic that a successful search for consumer opinions for a given (Product) comes from the term “(Product) sucks” and not “(Product) reviews” but I guess “sucks” is the motivator that gets customers writing.

I now have a new search technique when evaluating products

I didn’t know about twitter, or http://storagebloggers.pbwiki.com/
but I see their power and utility. I also see the value of making a customer advocate available to customers via the social media, a role Martin is playing.

The future of these concepts depends upon the speed of adoption. That takes a while–I had to dig down to the Twitter FAQ before I had a better sense of what the service is all about.

But the connections you’re working to bring about will serve people better than the current models–so more power to you (and all of us).

Posted by Alan Drummer on March 12th, 2007 at 4:07 pm

Product + Sucks is actually a valid and used methodlogoy by marketers and consumers for consumer ratings to determine pain points.

This is actually used by companies that use tools like opinionlab and track the usage of the term “suck” in natural language
http://jeremiahthewebprophet.blogspot.com/2005/09/measuring-online-user-opinion-during.html

The term is a universal indicator of negativity and can’t be mistaken for something positive.

Colleague Robert Scoble and I have discussed this, and there are mine-applications that do “google battles” on the term.

http://scobleizer.com/2006/09/28/dreamhost-getting-sucky-pr-out-on-blogs/

A company should do this to determine what companies think of their product.

Bringing this back to Customer Ref:
If you do a search for “Podtech+sucks” you’ll see we’ve already found some folks that are not happy with our product, engaged them, and are now fixing our products based upon their feedback. It’s my hopes they will see this and then blog in return.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on March 14th, 2007 at 5:38 am

[...] Bill Lee of the Customer Reference forum saw my blog post entitled “The Impacts of Social Media on Customer Reference Programs“. Shortly after I published the post, Bill contacted me, and has now asked me to speak at his conference on Customer References. Fantastic! as now I can share my passion with over 100 Senior Marketers at this premiere event, talk about returns from a single blog post! [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Customer Reference Thought and Practice Leaders on March 14th, 2007 at 1:49 pm

[...] As I wrote yesterday Customer Loyalty, Satisfaction and Profitability are linked to each other in a cyclic manner. But as I read another article today highlighting The Impacts of Social Media on Corporate Customer Reference Programs it stuck me that they way and manner in which customer loyalty is defined and controlled is taking a whole different meaning. [...]

Posted by Random Bytes » Blog Archive » Impact of Social Media on Customer - Enterprise Relationships on March 15th, 2007 at 4:29 am

[...] One area we are deeply involved in is how to automate some of processes and collaborations that are necessary for marketing and PR efforts, such as a customer reference program. Social media tools can be both disruptive and useful in the scenario of customer relations (see “The Impacts of Social Media on Corporate Customer Reference Programs” by Jeremiah Owyang). We believe that these tools can be even more useful internally, to help teams organize projects and programs, and even to open up the process to selected people outside the team to spread information… tacitly. [...]

Posted by Tacit Telegraph » Heard It Through the Grapevine on April 19th, 2007 at 7:03 pm

[...] Tomorrow, I’ll be speaking at the Customer Reference Forum, focusing on the Impacts of Social Media on Customer Reference programs (read the post that started it all). I’ve a neat presentation that will be a lot of fun. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Speaking at Ad Tech and at Customer Reference Forum, will live stream, tune in! on April 24th, 2007 at 3:05 am

[...] What’s a Customer Reference Program? Many corporations are realizing that word of mouth from a customer to a prospect is important. As a reaction, they create collateral that records positive customer opinions, and then they distribute to sales teams. In my Powerpoint presentation PPT, (which I’m making public) I said all that was going to evolve, now as customers use social media to share both positive and negative experiences. I wrote a blog post a few months ago that started it all, the preso is a rough cut of it. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Customer Reference Programs to adopt Social Media on April 27th, 2007 at 4:58 am

[...] In a web 2.0 world all of this changes. Jeremiah’s written a lot on the subject of social media and reference programs, and I think that it all boils down to the fact that reference programs should be conversations with your customer, and they should be embedded deeply into your organization. Sure, if a customer says something great about you then it should be fed out to PR, advertising and sales. But equally if your customers have a problem with your product then the product team should know about it, and you need to be able to respond in a sensible way. In other words, you need to listen, as well as talk. [...]

Posted by How would Google build a customer reference program? « marketing and technology on May 11th, 2007 at 10:13 am

As a writer I am working with a reference manager at a large software company. I am looking to contact other organizations and work as a managing-editor-for-hire or writer/editor. What is the best way to get into Reference Managers rolodex? Or is the blog and wiki making what i do irrelevant?

Posted by ian on May 21st, 2007 at 10:14 am

I think there’s a customer reference user group you can join, try that. Start with customerreferenceforum started by Bill Lee.

Posted by jeremiah_owyang on May 21st, 2007 at 10:30 am

[...] If you don’t have time to dive into the all day virtual conference, you can check out the post that started it all; “The impacts of social media to customer reference programs“. [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Customer Reference Industry Resources on June 12th, 2007 at 1:30 am

[...] discussed in a variety of locations, books and conferences, but do remember that some tools are creating an impact on their relevance and marketing in [...]

Posted by Trivial Pursuits » Blog Archive » The Many Forms of Web Marketing on July 18th, 2007 at 12:48 pm

[...] Resources The impacts of social media on customer references programs The support site is no longer on your extranet Web Strategy: The Air Traffic Tower Marketing is not [...]

Posted by Web Strategy by Jeremiah » Who owns Customer References and Support in the World Wide Web? on August 6th, 2007 at 7:10 am

[...] Impacts of the Social Media on the Customer Reference Program [...]

Posted by Social Media Strategy « on August 15th, 2007 at 9:58 am

[...] it was the most disruptive. Corporate marketers quickly followed suit, and now it’s even impacting other areas of corporate [...]

Posted by Social Media impacts much more than Marketing on August 16th, 2007 at 8:00 am

[...] Owyang explains the concepts and value of social networks from a marketing perspective in an easily digestible manner. What Owyang [...]

Posted by Trust influencers in social network marketing — Real Estate Relativity on August 17th, 2007 at 5:53 pm

[...] and web marketing (and support) has spread off your domain and google results. You also know that prospects trust the opinions of existing customers (who are ‘like them’) far more than marketers, as these communities of practice [...]

Posted by Web Strategy (Advanced): Applying a Social Computing Strategy to the entire Product Lifecycle on September 12th, 2007 at 6:01 am

Posted by Web Strategy (Advanced): How to Serve your Entire Industry (Case Study: Data Storage Industry Wiki) on October 8th, 2007 at 3:17 am

[...] The Impacts of Social Media on Corporate Customer Reference Programs (tags: social media marketing management) [...]

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Posted by jennifer rose on May 8th, 2008 at 11:08 pm

[...] suporte) web se espalhou para fora do seu domínio e resultados do Google. Você também sabe que clientes potenciais confiam na opinião de quem já é consumidor (e que é “como eles”) muito mais do que em marqueteiros, e o Facebook deixa essas [...]

Posted by Manual do empata foda, pt. 1 on September 15th, 2008 at 6:01 am