photo by http://flickr.com/photos/kmtucker

This is the fifth in a series of posts on Agile Marketing – the working definition of which is to

“Create, communicate and deliver unique value to an always-changing consumer (or business) in an always-changing market with an always-changing product.”

Even if you’re not shipping today (or next week) you have the opportunity to make it easier for your customers to understand what you do – you can do this by the ABC method – Always Build Content. Read the first Agile Marketing post here.

Agile Marking Principle 5: Sustainable marketing requires you to keep a constant pace and pipeline

What does it mean to Always Build Content? For starters, it means that you can produce information that will help your customer learn more about your product and – in the process – grant more room for unexpected “we won’t ship this week” or “remember that thing we told you about? it changed” moments. Content can take a few forms, and ideally should conform to a calendar with daily, weekly, and monthly activities. The quality and pace of these activities is really up to you and to the needs of your business, but consider these tools when you are thinking about the ways you can continue your Agile Marketing activities at the same frenetic pace as your developers.

Reaching out Every Day Builds Ideas for Content

Your customers are talking to you every day – whether on social media, through emails or phone calls, or in person – and you can gain really valuable insight from them just by making sure you have (at least) a few customer contacts every day. This is an excellent way to find out what people don’t know, and to check your knowledge of where they are encountering problems with your existing product. You might have the best information in the world (but they can’t find it.) You might have thought of a great scenario (that they have trouble mapping to the way they use the product.) Or things might just be harder than you thought. So take it upon yourself to talk to and listen to customers as your content-building pipeline.

Do you think of your content as a Curriculum, and your Customers as Students?

If you think of the customer lifecycle as an arc that goes from no knowledge of your product to total knowledge of your product, you should be building content for all points of the product knowledge/experience continuum. A great place to start is at the top of the funnel, by producing a great, easily digestible “get started in 3 minutes” document and video. This is not meant to replace other forms of learning – it’s just the first place your customers will come into contact with your marketing efforts and it should identify a clear reason they should use your product and demonstrate how easy it is to get started. (If it’s not easy, please break the startup steps into something that seems easy.)

As customers become more familiar with your product or service, they will want more demanding topics. Keep a list of these topics and when you hear them more than a few times, create some content to address that issue. And there’s always the “compilation post” where you explain the content you’ve built already and share different ways to use it.

Today’s content may lead to tomorrow’s sale (or loyal customer)

How many Tweets, blog posts, Knowledge Articles, and Customer contacts will you have today? At least some of the items in that content pipeline will generate future business (you just don’t know which ones will provide the most lift yet.) The Long Tail will help in this regard, and so will some luck (it helps to be both lucky and good.)

“Should I make sure that they learn how to do this new thing?” you might ask yourself, while also asking “but what do they really need – and are willing to pay for?“

Avoiding the shiny object conundrum

photo by http://flickr.com/photos/abbylanes

If it’s sparkly, it must be good (no, great). Social log-in, private messages, mobile social local, posting to Facebook while driving in your car (while on a handsfree device of course) could all be useful features in the service of solving the user’s problem. But if the user doesn’t have that problem, you might have a problem.

So how would you know if this is a “bright idea” or a genuinely good one that might lead to sustained usage over time?

Ignore Your Idea the First Time You Have It

Yep, the first time your idea pops up, just ignore it. (Or jot it down on a post-it note if it seems particularly important and you’re worried about losing it to the idea gremlins of the world.) If an idea manifests itself more than once (and especially if you hear your existing customers saying it), it’s probably more than a one-time concern for them as well.

If it isn’t the first time you’ve had the idea, try to generalize it so that it appeals to a broad group (read: broader than you) and make it specific enough in the problem it solves that you can test it out on some people who don’t have any stake in proving that your idea is valuable.

Test Your Idea with a Simple Statement

Remember, when you’re asking people if they would use your idea to solve their problem, you need to ask them in a way that solves a specific problem that they have (not whether they think your idea is cool.)

You might use a template like this: if you’re a ______________ who does ______________ and repeats it _____ times a _______, would your life be easier if you could _______________ by doing ___________ and learning _______________.

This works equally well if your idea is an online or offline idea. Now go and ask 30 people you know (and make a survey to ask 30 people you don’t know.) If you start seeing patterns before these people see prototypes, wireframes, or shiny web apps, you’ve probably thinking about something that can create, communicate, and deliver unique value. And that’s something that will keep people coming back (even when things don’t look so shiny.)

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Agile Marketing – the working definition of which is to “Create, communicate and deliver unique value to an always-changing consumer (or business) in an always-changing market with an always-changing product.” See the original post here. We know that we’re always promising something along the lines of “I think that will be shipping with our next release.” The best way to help your Agile Marketing efforts is to Just Ship It.

Agile Marketing Principle #4: Working Software is the Principal Measure of Progress

People only know that you’ve made progress when they can see for themselves how things have changed. Notice that the headline above doesn’t say “finished software,” but instead says “working software.” This is a critical notion that makes some product managers quite nervous because they measure progress by looking backwards after they’ve finished, not by measuring whether users can achieve the tasks and stories the users want to do with the “not-quite-finished” software.

Working software generates progress because people can measure the difference between how they want to use the software and what it actually does. Even though the rounded corners on the UI may not be done, the point at which the software works (or alternately, requires the user to do something that doesn’t make sense to them) is the key turning point that drives user adoption. (Note: you might need to finish your software to the nth degree to make your users ecstatically happy. But I don’t think that rule applies to the 80% of users who only use 20% of your features.)

If we accept that working software is the principal measure of progress, it means that both internal and external users of your software need to know how things are supposed to work for the most common use cases and why they work that way. It also means that fewer, more easily understood features usually trump increased functionality and edge cases (for the 80% “good-enough” user). Finally, when you do deliver “the next version” of the feature, it will feel like incremental, easily understood progress to the user, rather than a brand new set of cases to learn and master.

How then, can you make “the way things work” most consistent, understood, and discoverable? You can increase consistency in your product by having a glossary of terms and actions, describing both the nouns of your product (what is that thing I’m looking at?), the verbs (what should I be trying to do here?), and the overall grammar (now that I understand what it is and what it does, how can I make a new activity with that thing and expect it to turn out in a way that seems familiar?).

You can make the product better understood by asking, speaking with, and listening to your customers. It’s neat that a team can find really great ways to use its own product, but if the customer (because the customer is not you) can’t figure out what they’re supposed to be doing or how to do the things they want to do, your product will never gain wide adoption (which, by the way, might be ok if you price it correctly.) Also, figure out the easiest ways for your customers to get help (it’s usually to call or email you directly.)

Consistency, discoverability, and ways to get help – then you can ship even when it’s working, but not yet finished. And use your customer feedback to take it from working to finished – you’ll know and your customers will know how you are progressing if the software you deliver just works (or is very clearly described so that they can make it work)

I signed up this week for the TinyHabits program from BJ Fogg at Stanford. The program – a way of training yourself to take small steps that will build into specific behaviors – intrigues me because it mirrors a few practices I’ve done over the past two years that have made a huge difference in my life. Keeping a daily and weekly log, trying to answer all of my email promptly, and always asking people how I can help them are three small habits I’ve followed that have delivered big benefits.

What did I do? (Keeping a daily log)

I can’t take too much credit for this one – it’s T.A. McCann who introduced me to it – but simply keeping a list of the major things that you do each day and who you did it for can give you great insight into how you’re spending your time. I don’t get much value from logging every tiny thing that I do – but I try to capture any activity that takes more than 30 minutes of time. Keeping this log (in Evernote) gives me access to what I’m doing today, what I did last week, and keeps that list with me wherever I go. It’s also a great place to plan – just ask yourself 3 things: “what did I do?”, “what am I doing next?”, and  ”where do I need help?”

How can I answer all of my email as fastly and efficiently as I can?

There are plenty of ways to manage email and to be productive, and I don’t claim to have reinvented the wheel on dealing with email. The key thing is to spend less time finding the emails that need action, and then to act on them with deliberate speed. I use a modified GTD approach to manage my email load, identifying each piece of mail to file, forget/delete, or to act upon it immediately. And if there is a quick item that I can send as the action and it will take less than a minute or two, I do it now. Added to this is a quick sweep in the morning and evening of any emails that are lingering in my inbox (yes, I know this is ferboten for some, but I use my inbox (and Gmail’s priority inbox) to let me know how I’m doing.) I never make it inbox zero, but on most good days I’ve maintained the email equilibrium and don’t have more than I had at the beginning of the day. Also, consider using the excellent email filtering tool Sanebox to make it easier to go through all of the bacn that would otherwise clog your inbox.

How can I help you?

This habit has produced the most divergent and interesting answers and opportunities. Simply asking “how can I help you” yields nothing … and everything. It’s really cool to just ask people a question and to see how they respond – it opens up opportunities to really help people. So just make a habit of the question that works for you, ask it to the people in your life, and see how it changes things. Good luck!

I hope that you’re enjoying a pause right now and thinking about the people and things that matter most to you.

A friend shared this article with me about Volkswagen’s effort to limit after-work conversation and it struck a chord with me – that we should all think about ways to improve our communication style and that there are simple, concrete things we can do to improve this communication.

Tell people what you’d like them to do, not how you’d like them to do it

The better you can share what needs to be done and to make it factual, the more likely you’ll be to get the results you want. To that end, keep emails short and to the point – emotional conversations should happen using the phone or in person. There are lots of great resources to help you do this, including the Three Sentences technique.

Ask for what you want

In each email, make it very obvious what you’re requesting. If you ask for one or two things in each email – detailing who you expect to do the thing, what it should look like when it’s done, and by when it should be completed – you’ll have a task blueprint that should be pretty clear to another person (and not just to you.) There are many frameworks for these goals – one common one is the SMART goal.

Be a Great Copywriter

Finally, imagine that your email (just like your blog post) is competing for attention with everything else someone might be doing in a day. To that end, you really need to write a great headline or subject to your email to make sure it gets read. It’s best if that subject line is actionable – giving a call to action, a hint at the result, and seems bite-sized enough to represent the smallest big thing that someone might decide to do today. To that end, please try to implement these three suggestions in your next email.

I’ve done it. You’ve done it. We’ve all done it. Whether it’s talking like ironic cats that have poor grammar, saying “it’s ok” when it’s really not ok, or just not waiting until your thought is fully formed to start speaking, we all say things we don’t really mean – we just thought they sounded good at the time (inside our heads.)

So next year, I hope that we all say more of what we mean. Mind you, I’m not advocating to say every hurtful thing that pops into your head at the moment that you think it (although erring on the side of saying a few more helpful and good things probably couldn’t hurt). What I’m suggesting is that the way we say things, the content of what we say, and the sound of the actual words is much more telling than we think – so make them matter a little more next year.

Here are three things I hope to do toward this end:

Press Pause Before Speaking

I can definitely wait before speaking my mind a little bit more. I’m too often guilty of the “I really wanted to tell you everything that’s in my head” disease, when often times sitting back and waiting is the best course. So, I’ll take a breath mentally this year before I think I need to say something.

Remember, it’s hard to take words back

Angry words are the hardest to take back. If all of us think – when we’re getting angry – about the motivations and feelings of the other person in the conversation, we’re much more likely to be insightful about what’s actually going on in that person’s head at the moment. And more likely to hold our tongues when we should.

Do and say more kind things, just because you can

When I think of the most unexpected good times this year, they were all related to people going out of their way to do kind things.We can all help a friend or a neighbor either with our everyday experience, because we lend a hand, or just by providing a kind word at the right time. So try it – do more random acts of senseless kindness – and see the benefits among your friends and family. And even if you’re not feeling like it, it’s part of an overall practice of having fewer negative thoughts. (But wait – wasn’t the whole point of this post to say more of what you mean?) Yep, it turns out that researchers have a lot to say on the subject – take a listen below.

Daniel Kahneman’s Ted Talk on Happiness and Experience

This is the third in a series of posts on Agile Marketing – the working definition of which is to

“Create, communicate and deliver unique value to an always-changing consumer (or business) in an always-changing market with an always-changing product.”

When your product or your business is always changing and you ship daily, weekly, or monthly, how can you make sense of that when you share it with customers? (Read the original post here)

Principle 3: Marketing frequently shipped software requires the problems it solves to remain similar

The goal of your software should be to solve a problem that customers have, and to do it elegantly. The goal of marketing that product is to help customers understand how your software or service solves that problem better than anyone else. This is really important when you ship things all the time and run the risk of confusing your customers daily, weekly, or monthly with your updates.

How do you solve this problem? By continually reminding the customer that you are solving the same problem, even if the pieces and parts to solve that problem remain different. Revealing this core purpose allows you to sell a bigger idea (Google can make the world’s information more easily available; Evernote stores notes for you wherever you are; and Amazon makes it easier to buy stuff than you ever though possible). And it also isolates you when a new development update is delayed, confusing, or opaque.

And what does this mean in practice? At Assistly (where I help customers serve their customers) we build amazing customer service software. Our customers need help establishing best practices for making customers successful or help mapping what they do today into our software. Their ultimate goal is not to learn more about our software (well for some of them it is) but rather to get better at providing Wow customer service themselves.

Agile marketing makes the process of selling a frequently-shipped product easier by focusing on the what – what will the customer be able to do today with this improvement; the who – which customer benefits today from the improvement, and the why – why should they care? If you can answer these questions, you’ll remain relevant to the customer even on those days when they are just not sure why your new widget is important.

Do: tell them about a new way to use a feature that makes their life easier (e.g. How to configure a set of business rules to allow automatic off-hours acknowledgement when you’re not working). Don’t: tell them that if they’re not using the newest, coolest feature that they are doing something wrong If your new idea shows them how they can improve their business they will be more likely to want to try it. (And, even better, they will love it if you set up a test site for them that demonstrates this improvement)

Marketing frequently shipped product requires the problems you are solving to remain similar. That way, you can focus on the story – how your customer envisions themselves when they use your product – and less on the nuts and bolts that actually make your product go. I don’t mean to suggest that product updates are not important, and I do mean to suggest that placing these changes in a larger context makes it much easier for the customer to understand how your improvement fits into the larger product idea.

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At first glance, it seems like any other beach scene you’ve ever noticed. And then – right when you’re not expecting it - there is a strange and wonderful pattern in the water right in front of you. You only see it when you’ve unfocused a bit, and it’s only there for a minute – and then it’s gone.

What do you get when you breathe?

Alex Bard, one of the founders of Assistly, talks about the importance of taking time off from work as key to his success at finding the parts of his business that provide the most value, and of his success in maintaining his family. Whether your definition of success is building a successful company or simply finding marvelous, unexpected images like the one above, what are you doing to pause, wait, and see what happens?

It’s Ok, Work Will Be There When You Return

It’s easy to think that the world will fall down if you’re not there to do your job. And it’s true that if that happens when people are expecting you to excel, you might not succeed. But you can’t succeed without also taking more than a few moments (on a regular basis) to unplug, look around you, and see what you’ve got.

This photo is a good metaphor for that ability that Alex describes to identify and capture great moments – the current was the result of a number of forces coming together (only for a moment) and I happened to be lucky enough to be there at that moment and skilled and practiced enough to take a shot that turned out like I wanted it to resolve. There’s one in a row.

Former U.S. Army General McChrystal on Crisis

Building customer service at scale requires process, chiefly the establishment of roles, responsibilities, and an plan to activate in times of crisis. What do you do when there’s a problem with your product or service and how will you communicate with your customers to let them know what’s going on?

This doesn’t have to be a phone book of IS09000 process, but it should include the following ideas:

• Process – what’s a “back of the napkin” idea for the way information flows within your system? How do customers contact you? What do you do when they contact you? And how do they know that an issue is finished?
• Roles – for each person in your process, what role do they play and do they understand that role? Is the role primarily internally or externally facing during the regular functioning of your business, and does it change during a crisis?
• Responsibilities – for each role that a person plays, are the key responsibilities spelled out in plain english (e.g. “communicate to our customers every 30 minutes on a particular communication channel having this basic message and format”)?
• and finally, what’s the plan – how will you know that a crisis is happening; what’s your definition of the types of problems you might occur, and how will you communicate “Commander’s intent” – what’s going on, what are the goals, why do we think it’s important, and what are the basic guardrails to getting there?

This video with former U.S. Army General Stanley McChrystal shares his philosophy of communicating in crisis, and is an excellent first step to understanding what your own crisis communications might look like (and maybe some of your every day communications as well.)

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(picture by http://www.flickr.com/photos/citizenhelder/5710716480/)

Every business has customers. Well, at least every successful business. If someone walked into your store to ask you a question, would you tell them that you just didn’t have time to talk to them?

If you want to provide great customer service, the first thing that you should know is that it’s no longer good enough to answer questions in conventional channels (email and phone, or in person) or at conventional times (during work hours, perhaps on weekends.) Twitter in particular is a channel for customer response that’s changed the expectations of customer service most dramatically, and forever. Your customers talk to you on Twitter because they feel it’s an immediate connection to the people in your company who can solve their problem.

Fine. What does that mean? First of all, it means that the expectations for the timeliness and breadth of your customer service have become headline driven. Can you answer the customer, respond in the appropriate tone, and/or redirect the issue with valuable content in under 140 characters? That’s what your customer expects.

Yet customers who contact you on Twitter don’t always want to have a public conversation about their entire account. This shift demonstrates another way that customer expectations have changed in our always-on world. Customers use Twitter because it’s fast, easy, and mobile. It’s also extremely easy for them to share their experience when things go right (or, when they go wrong.) And they contacted you because they want your business to learn the “right” way to contact them – which is a very personal requirement and might even change communication channels during a single issue – and for you to remember that preference.

The second main item to note about the change in customer experience is that customers can now easily compare your brand or service to the most responsive and service-centric brands in the world. Should you be worried? No way! You now have a direct method to learn from @VirginAmerica, @StarwoodBuzz, and @ComcastCares, and other companies that do a fantastic job extending their service culture onto Twitter.

You might think that all of this online activity means that you need to be “always-on” and “always available.” It’s certain that being accessible to customers is one way to respond to customer needs and you should definitely consider this as an option … if you’re ready to respond on a 24/7/365 schedule. You should also respond even if you’re not going to be around all of the time – and you should ensure that your hours of operation in that channel are very clear to your customers.

Finally, you should know one thing that hasn’t changed about customer service in general even as the ways customers contact you has changed: that treating people well matters. If you create, communicate, and deliver unique value through service, your customers will respond. And in the age of Twitter and other social tools, they’ll tell their friends too.

(cross-posted at http://www.impactlearning.com/customer-experience-expectations-have-changed-in-our-always-connected-world/)