Since ketchup is a no-no on the South Beach Diet, and since a certain member of my household is a ketchup junkie, I decided to head over to MyHeinz.com and order a bottle of ketchup with a custom label. I submitted an order for a label that reads, in part, "Loaded with Sugar. Use Sparingly." I wonder if they'll print it, or if they'll pull a Nike on me.
I learned from this site that if you were to start digging a hole in my backyard in Wading River, keep digging through the center of the Earth and straight on through, you'd end up digging not to China, but to an area of the ocean several hundred miles off the western coast of Australia.
Here's the link. I'm flattered Jack covered this, and even more flattered that he chose to come to Hespos.com and quote some of the stuff I posted here about the Ford Bold Moves campaign.
I wanted to expand on something Jack raised in his first paragraph:
A number of companies are suddenly discovering and laying claim to a form of online marketing called "Conversational Marketing," not to be confused with Word-of-Mouth Marketing. Conversational Marketing is an advance on WOM, say industry veterans Tom Troja and Tom Hespos, who have teamed to bring structure and standards to the still wild, wild West business of generating market connections.
One of the ways we're "laying claim" to this new marketing strategy is in preparing our clients appropriately. There is nothing that could damage Conversational Marketing more than having a bunch of major marketers signing on to try it out, and then falling flat because they didn't dedicate the appropriate resources to following up comments and participating meaningfully in the conversation. You'll notice from some of the stuff I linked to yesterday on AccuQuote's blog that they follow up each and every one of their blog comments. They're also going to be posting about how, specifically, customer feedback on their blog led AccuQuote to refine some of its business practices and methods. And that's the difference. We work together with our clients to make sure they're prepared to participate meaningfully.
Another thing raised in the first paragraph - "Conversational Marketing" sounds an awful lot like "Word Of Mouth Marketing," but we ought not to confuse the two. I've railed against the false authenticity of a lot of the campaigns that go on in the WOM universe. I won't belabor it, but I will say that the foundations of Conversational Marketing are transparency, honesty, human communication, and the Golden Rule. I doubt many WOM campaigns can make that same claim.
We're continuing to talk to clients and prospects about how to do this correctly, so that the dialogue is real. It won't be long before we have more campaigns to talk about, and more success to report with AccuQuote and others.
We launched a campaign yesterday designed to get interested people to talk one-on-one with our clients at AccuQuote. The campaign uses ads as conversation-starters, much like the Ford Bold Moves campaign that launched last week. The difference here is that AccuQuote is really committed to the conversation. Prior to the launch of this campaign, AccuQuote e-mailed a bunch of its existing customers, asking them to visit this thread and comment on their customer service experience. Seventy-nine comments later (as of this posting), AccuQuote wrote several incremental policies, mostly by dealing with concerns voiced by their customers.
AccuQuote also plans to tell its customers how they're taking the feedback that they get and change how they do business (for the better). The difference between what AccuQuote is doing and what a lot of other companies are doing in Conversational Marketing is that Accuquote is really listening, and they're backing that up with action. Anecdotally, I can tell you that AccuQuote's Sean Cheyney is taking a lot of the feedback from customers and making changes with respect to how often existing customers are contacted to review coverage. There are a lot of other things AccuQuote is learning - we're going to be posting about this in the coming weeks, so you'll have a lot more detail.
What's important is that in order to do this right, a company has to commit to the conversation, and show their customers that they care rather than simply tell them. I think Sean and his team are doing quite well.
More later...
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