Brands Worthy of a Weekend | Virginia Miracle

Unleashing Passive Advocacy at SX’18

By virginia.miracle | March 26, 2018

SXSW came and went with a flurry of crazy activations (real life Westworld and Spielberg’s first trip to Austin for Ready Player One being the buzziest), celebrity speakers and meaningful visitors. The last part of this is what keeps me excited for this 10 day marathon every year. This year and unlikely winner in the mindshare clubhouse came from an activation done by the fine folks at Wisconsin Cheese. If you had asked me a few weeks ago whether or not the “World’s Longest Cheese Board” would appeal to a techie/influence crowd looking for breakthrough tech and (perpetually) Elon Musk, I would have given you a lukewarm response at best. Turns out, I had no idea how much people like cheese – they just needed a reason to express it.

Loving you isn’t enough. Advocates need conversational capital and a reason to share their stories.

It is worth noting that this fantastic execution was a production of the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board in conjunction with Brains on Fire. The individuals involved are the ones who gave me the opportunity to work on the Fiskateers many moons ago and have been collaborators in the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (now part of ANA) ever since. With the core idea of creating the World’s Longest Cheeseboard, they executed to inspire the most sharing:

They transformed a “normal” conference room in a Marriott into a visually compelling barn complete with silo and lit up “CHEESE” sign that begged for photography
They filled the board with more than 100 tasty cheeses divided into categories with intentionally accessible, non-snobby names like “Party in the Pasture” or “Curdlandia”
The record itself is conversational capital (70ft vs. previous record of 60ft)
Super cute swag for days including a tiny backpack of Wisconsin cheese to go, cool laptop stickers and the world’s best button reading #CheesyAF.

This activation performed remarkably well, commanding a line for entrance for almost the entire time it was up, sparking sharing on social and making a shocking number of SX wrapup pieces. So in a world of voice control, privacy concerns and VR/AR obsession, why did cheese rise above the clutter? It was real, it was homey, it was nice (without feeling overly produced), it had oh-s0-many AWESOME shots for social baked into the activation – all great.

Most importantly, it gave people a reason to share their largely passive love of cheese. I consume a heavy meat & cheese diet, but don’t really post about or even discuss it very much. There’s no way to digitally ID me. The fine folks in Wisconsin would have no idea that I was a thirsty sponge crying out for a little mixed melt education or a new #SXSWisconsin experience. It took the presence of a compelling stimulus to give me something to learn, experiences and a reason to share. I reveled in seeing how many of my friends are also cheese-driven beings – many of whom came out to see the cheese board! Perhaps the gratest (sic) gift was giving me something to think about afterwards. Check out this video from Pete Blackshaw if you’d like to hear more straight from Suzanne! Bon Appecheese….

A Community Of Practice: Growth at Light Speed

By virginia.miracle | March 5, 2018

My name is Virginia Miracle and I am a Customer Success practitioner (hi, Virginia). This is not what it says in my bio, but I think it just might be the truth.

Last week was a long, revelatory, and inspiring. I spent time in beautiful surroundings and part of two different Communities of Practice – the first was the Gainsight Chief Customer Officer Summit (hosted at the secretive Skywalker Ranch, hence Yoda) and the second was serving as a speaker at a customer’s internal social media summit. Despite the awesome work that Gainsight does on forwarding customer success as a practice, I am not sure that I would have self-identified on a reptilian level as part of the “Customer Success Community” prior to last week. I’ve spent basically all of my career as a marketer, I serve marketers and heck it wasn’t that long ago that I was honored to be part of TopRank Marketing’s 25 Women Who Rocked Digital Marketing in 2017. Walks like a duck…But then there’s this whole Customer Success gig I seem to have. The 6+ years of on the job lessons from building Spredfast’s Customer Success methodology and team appear to have armed me with both much to give and to learn. I found it very inspiring to engaging in debate and sharing with fellow CS leaders who served customers as diverse as procurement and pastors.

The second part of the week was at a customer’s internal social media event which brought together geographically disparate social teams for 2 days of training and best practice sharing. The way the logistics worked, I was able to attend all day and visibly see the crackle between the attendees in the same way I had felt that myself at Gainsight event. They all walked away feeling closer to colleagues and committed to sharing more on their best practices calls.

3 takeaways from a remarkable week in these 2 special communities:

Prescriptive Practice is not the enemy of Artistry – Embracing playbooks, automation, and other technology tools to deal with the repetitive or high frequency motions frees up your limited human resources to do the things that defy playbooks and repetitive motions. This is true for everything from social care inquiries to troubleshooting docs to thanking promoters. Being prescriptive creates room for grace and learning.

We Can Learn Faster Together – No one and I mean no one at the CCO summit had everything figured out. Given how quickly the space moves, that would be nearly impossible. But I have no doubt that the number of ideas, frameworks and new practitioner colleagues I walked away with will help me optimize solutions far faster than if I was in this alone. The same goes for the large customer team I was with at the end of the week. The comfort of all being in this together, still learning, and that being OK is powerful stuff.

Connecting in Real Life Sparks Meaningful Digital Sharing – Connections that were made in both of these forums that will no doubt be taken forward with gusto and bear meaningful acceleration. And what better time to remember than 4 days before SX kicks off! Building and maintaining meaningful connections to our loose tie Frolleagues (<- see what I did there) is an investment in the braintrust that can grow our smarts ahead of the pace of market change. And is well worth the investment of the upcoming weekend…

Wendy’s & The Audacity of Personality (video)

By virginia.miracle | May 17, 2017

A few weeks ago, I had the chance to interview Wendy’s head of social/digital, advertising and media, Brandon Rhoten live in NYC at the 2017 WOMMA Summit. Brandon was pithy and forthcoming, sharing the story behind the Wendy’s brand personality and how their approach to audience engagement has led to runaway successes like fan/competitor “roasting” and “Nuggs for Carter”. Check out the live counter of Carter’s free nugget retweets vs. Ellen’s Oscar selfie retweets – he overtook Ellen about a week after this interview transpired.

Perhaps most valuably, Brandon shares techniques for watching what is starting to grow organically and how a brand can gently encourage that tinder to catch fire. Brandon also shares the way management built their tolerance for their “charming challenger” personality being able to take risks and tolerate mistakes.

Check out the video here or the Forbes article on the interview here.

WOMMA Summit 2012: Advocacy & Social Evolution

By virginia.miracle | November 16, 2012

Wednesday night, we closed the book on another WOMMA Summit (disclosure: Spredfast is a governing member and I serve on the board). Having now had a few hours to reflect, there were some major themes.

Back to Advocacy – In session after session, we heard a focus from brands on meeting the needs not only of their X million fans, but creating content, experiences, and value for their hard core fans. One of the greatest examples of of approaching this came from Jackie Huba’s preview of her forthcoming 2013 book Monster Business. Lady Gaga’s marketing strategies focus on the 1% of her fans that want to have hyper-engaged relationships with her. The 6 Lessons of Gaga’s loyalty strategy are a fantastic reminder that this advocate strategy needs to drive platform choices instead of the tail wagging the dog.

Big Businesses are Dissolving the Social Pillar –Nestle Digital & Social Global Head (and WOMMA co-founder) Pete Blackshaw,Greg Gerik of 3M, and “Turbo” Todd Watson of IBM all shared the communications pillars of their organizations – none of which include standalone “social”. Instead of being a siloed initiative of a few trained marketers, social has permeated the way the company communicates on all fronts. This is a beautiful thought, but paying off on it requires investment in socially empowering hundreds of brand managers and SMEs, measuring the results of their efforts, and getting engagement and feedback data to the right places in the organization in a way that energizes the organization.

The Paid/Owned/Earned (and sometimes Shared) media model is here to stay as a meaningful model. No longer is there questioning about the validity or value of WOM that gets stimulated by ad dollars as the changing dynamics of what it takes for users of social platforms to actually see a connections’ recommendation. What does differ is how people are handling the integration of paid. Whether it is a new skill being picked up by the brand, executed through specialist agency collaboration, etc. – it is a skill set that must be added to your integrated WOMM team’s arsenal molto pronto.

Measurement is becoming more sophisticated and scrutinized. Many of the success metrics shared in sessions were about the “quick win”. This seems to be a result of the continued ROI pressure that social initiatives, along with the entire marketing mix face (backed up by data shared in the IBM CMO study. But elevating social activity to “business value” needs to incorporate the value of both the quick win and the long game for which social is so uniquely designed. Dr. Walter Carl shared some great guidance on how to look at the full value picture of social in a more holistic way – giving social credit for some of the “long game” communications objectives it achieves instead of short term sales, coupon redemptions, etc alone. We need to move beyond activity metrics and the “short game” and start thinking about how to give social credit for the more complex role it plays including soliciting feedback, cultivating offline WOM recommendations, and developing brand advocates who will spark to action in a crisis.

The Legal Socialpocalypse – The Summit closed with some amazing and well-timed reminders from lead legal counsel/cyberlawyers for Coca-Cola, American Express, and USAA. Reminders included the need for a higher level of rigor in terms of sharing rights-protected material to basic security in the way that social accounts are being managed by individuals in the company (personal logins to control corporate Facebook, anyone?). Above all, the guidance was to get legal involved early and often so they become involved in shaping a program instead of the late stage “no” guys.

It’s great to see so many companies that were early pioneers in social continuing to evolve and willing to share their lessons along the way for the benefit of the entire industry! For more details and sharable nuggets, visit WOMMA’s curated tweet and photo highlights the summit sessions: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3. To see more of the WOM that took place at Summit, check out the Summit Social Hub powered by FeedMagnet.

Send “Vajazzle” to a Friend (or 14)

By virginia.miracle | November 28, 2010

Having recently returned from the WOMMA Summit in Las Vegas, I am reminded of some of the quick, head-smacker, “why didn’t I think of that” tips shared by WOMMA co-founder Andy Sernovitz at the very first meeting in Chicago. One of these was to put a “send to a friend” button on every page of your website.

Now, 5 years later and in a mainstream social age, very little inspires me to email something to a friend. I might post something on Twitter to my work peeps or on Facebook to my more personal network of family, friends and colleagues, but very that I receive in my Gmail – largely for promotional e-commerce emails, would inspire me to email.

Austin’s own “Waxing Studio” sent an email a few weeks ago that bucks that trend. The subject line read “Free Longhorn Vajazzle Only Through Saturday!” (I’m sad to say – the deal has expired). There are so many things I love about this. The silliness of that word, the false urgency of the timeline, and the concept of bedazzling lady parts with the University of Texas’ famed logo.

rsz_longhorn

I almost snarfed my coffee. I had to share the joy of this silliness with a few girlfriends. Then with a few UT alums. Then with some other WOM marketers (how inherently WOM-worthy is this?). And goodness knows, it makes business sense as its an add on to their famous 15 minute Brazillian – their highest margin service by far. By the time I was done, I had forwarded an email to 14 people.

Lo and behold, I did end up going to this local business during the time of this fantastic limited time offer and got to ask them about uptake. While they had only had ONE taker to this offer, the sheer remarkability of the offer did spark a lot of long time clients to call and book (more boring) appointments.

This strikes me as akin to the restaurants that offer a $75lb hamburger or David Burke’s famed Lollipop Tower – you aren’t going to get rich selling them, but giving your customers something to talk about – and FORWARD – is priceless.

(Disclosure: Ogilvy is a Governing Member of WOMMA)