Virginia Miracle | Customer Experience Advocate

New Orleans: Soul Is Waterproof

By virginia.miracle | April 13, 2008

I ended the week with a complete change of scenery – flying to New Orleans to spread the word on Word of Mouth Marketing at the New Orleans AMA. I knew that I would enjoy sharing the WOMM stories that inspire me with a new group of people. What I didn’t anticipate was how much inspiration I would find in the Big Easy. Dinner at K-Paul’s with some fabulous hosts, a morning walk through the Quarter and breakfast at Cafe Du Monde, and some fabulous conversation with the resilient marketers of this extraordinary town put new wind in my own sails.

The night before the presentation, as we were walking down a pretty-full-for-a-Wednesday-night Bourbon Street, Malcolm Schwarzenbach told me not to be afraid to discuss “the storm”. Being a lifelong uptight WASP, I had no intention of bringing up any such thing. Malcolm saying that it was OK to acknowledge the elephant in the room changed the next 24 hours for me. I spoke with my hosts about property valuations, tourism, and the unique challenge of recruiting talent to the marketing and advertising companies within the city.

Before I left, Malcolm shared a recruiting card for his company Trumpet Advertising with this image on the front and the Ernest Shackleton challenge on the back: “Men (and women) wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.” It is a unique touchpoint that highlights Trumpet’s attitude and creativity. Based on the amazing New Orleans tourism video that they produced below, it looks like their efforts to recruit talent have been quite successful. I hope it gives you a taste of how I felt after my brief stay. Enjoy the video but be warned, you may want to book tickets to the Big Easy immediately…

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/JMIoDw4LxX0" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

UK McDonald’s Invites Customers To Make Up Their Own Minds

By virginia.miracle | April 12, 2008

Even for someone who is privileged enough to have some pretty remarkable work weeks, this one stands out. I began the week as a panelist at an event featuring a presentation from Jennifer James of GfK Roper and with fellow panelists Gabby Nelson of Select Comfort and Jennifer Sparks of the Society of American Florists. The Roper presentation centered on the changing trends in attitude and behavior of the American consumer. The Roper presentation contained a lot of great information on the 2008 search for leadership in an increasingly uncertain world and the assembled group had lots of great questions following.

One of Jennifer’s examples of brands allowing consumer to educate each other was new to me. McDonald’s in the UK has an innovative site called Make Up Your Own Mind. From the home page: “The site has been set up for you to find out anything you would like to know about McDonald’s food, business, people and practices“. Customers are invited to submit questions (15,000 to date) and then other customers are invited to serve as reporters/quality scouts to share their findings with the world through the site. They report on everything from the cleanliness of the restaurants to conditions at the farms where ingredients are being raised & grown. The image I included above is from a part of the site that directly addresses the Happy Meal. Charlotte, a teacher and “Mum”, is featured in a video where she investigates how chicken McNuggets are made and confirms they are made with the same quality breast meat as what she could find in the supermarket. The site also frankly discussed the nutrition content as compared to other options for children. The questions appear to be completely uncensored and this transparency certainly makes me think about McDonald’s brand a little differently.

The interesting thing to note is that McDonald’s hasn’t actually changed (or doesn’t claim to have changed) anything about its organization, practices or food. It has just proved that they are willing to share what they are doing and be open to examination. French Fries are still bad for you (if you hadn’t gotten the memo), but if McDonald’s lets you in on how they are made and what the comparative nutritional choices on the menu are, then isn’t it your fault for putting on those extra 10 lbs? By inviting customers to experience the inner workings of the brand, have conversations, and building a platform for them to take place, McDonald’s has diffused our ability to criticize the wizard behind the screen by bringing us face to face with him. Maybe this is the type of effort that Starbucks should be looking into now – reminding the world of their extraordinary business practices – instead of asking us to hatch up the next latte drink or granting us Free WiFi about 3 years too late over at My Starbucks Idea.

What’s Your “Deal Factor”?

By virginia.miracle | April 9, 2008

I often talk about my Dell experience when I’m illustrating lessons learned about direct response, “traditional” online advertising and the power of WOM. When it comes to remarkable recruiting, however, everything I know I learned at Trilogy – an enterprise software company in Austin, Texas. Trilogy deservedly got a lot of ink (e.g. Rolling Stone’s “Wooing the Geeks“) in the late 90s for its recruiting practices and I was lucky enough to ride that train myself. Because of the unique benefits and culture, Trilogy had far more applicants than it could manage. One of the major things that we would probe for in our massive recruiting Saturdays was a candidate’s “deal factor”. Would they be able to handle the Trilogy hours, intentional startup-style 3-to-an-office overcrowding, the unpredictable leadership, and the plethora of wacky ideas (yes, I’m talking to you, applianceorder.com)? Would the candidate thrive on the culture or lose it if Trilogy’s founder Joe Liemandt called an impromptu company meeting and proceeded to speak nonstop for 3 solid hours (survival of the biggest bladder)? Would they thrive with few boundaries or exploit the lack of hands on management by goofing off? This was a critical gate to clear.

While the work environments I have been in since have been quite different – and yes, I do miss the free Dove bars and company speed boats of the dot com days – the only thing constant is change. Because of the speed of innovation, deal factor continues to be something I think about every time I meet a candidate. The challenge is that it is very tough to test for. So how do you make sure you are bringing someone on board who is going to bring up your team’s average deal factor?

I usually craft some squishy questions about being able to impact organizational change, deal with a difficult manager, etc, but I would love ideas on best methodology for figuring this out. You can not ask “How do you deal with change?” head on, because it is oh so easy to say that you are inspired by constant change and oh so hard for it to be true.

The graphic above is based on some personality types I have personally encountered. I think I am at the “Lemonade Larry” waterline and continuing to aspire to the type of enlightenment and evolution that will empower me to be a true driver of change.

Let’s Take It Offline – BlogHer & Blogger Social

By virginia.miracle | April 8, 2008

I wrapped up my week last week in New York at 2 amazing in-person events for active online social media creators: BlogHer Business and Blogger Social ’08. I walked away with more robust connections with people I already knew online and a list of new blogs that I should be reading. It is difficult to wrap up 72 amazing hours, but I’ll try.

BlogHer Business was an eye opening event. Major standouts to me were results of Compass Partners research on women in the blogosphere, hearing about Kodak & DC Goodwill‘s blogging efforts. On the blogger engagement front, Method, Graco & GM shared the results of their respective approaches of working with bloggers – sharing the stage with bloggers when they presented the case study. For any PR person who has ever considered blasting a press release to bloggers hoping it will stick, they would thing again after hearing some of the horror stories of bad influencer outreach told along the way. My favorite comments from bloggers:

Typing my name after “dear” is not a personalized approach.

You wouldn’t knock on my door and ask to put a billboard for a product I have never seen or touched in my front yard – why would you think I would post a jpeg for a product I’ve never seen or touched on something as personal as my blog?

Just an hour after BlogHer Business wrapped, I was off to Blogger Social. The concept for the event was simple – get a bunch of bloggers together to hang out and have fun. That’s it. No powerpoints, no projects, no pitches – social. One of the highlights for me was being able to put a face to The Viral Garden. Mack Collier was one of the first bloggers to pick up and write about the Fiskateers crafting ambassador movement on which I had the pleasure to work during my time at Brains on Fire. Being able to spend time talking to him in person took us from the mutual admiration society to real friends and I look forward to our next meeting.

Overall lesson from the 3 days? Twitter is real – get to know it.

Many, many, many thanks for the event planning/hosting duties of CK and Drew and the friendly welcome from my new BS08 friends (listed below). How many days until BS09?

Susan Bird Tim Brunelle Katie Chatfield Matt Dickman Luc Debaisieux Gianandrea Facchini Mark Goren Gavin Heaton Sean Howard CK Valeria Maltoni Drew McLellan Doug Meacham Marilyn Pratt Steve Roesler Greg Verdino CB Whittemore Steve Woodruff Paul McEnany Ann Handley David Reich Tangerine Toad Kristin Gorski Mack Collier David Armano Ryan Barrett Lori Magno Tim McHale Gene DeWitt Mario Vellandi Arun Rajagopal Joseph Jaffe Rohit Bhargava Anna Farmery Marianne Richmond Thomas Clifford Lewis Green Geoff Livingston Kris Hoet Connie Reece CeCe Lee Toby Bloomberg Seni Thomas Darryl Ohrt Joe Kutchera Paul Dunay Marshall Sponder Chris Kieff Tara Anderson Jason Falls Paul Soldera Roberta Rosenberg Saul Colt Todd Andrlik Nathan Snell Ryan Karpeles Mike Sansone Jennifer Laycock Neil Vineberg Cam Beck Mike Arauz Matthew Bailey Heather Gorringe John Rosen Cathleen Rittereiser Tamar Weinberg Rita Perea Linda Sherman Matthew McDonald Kaitlyn Wilkins Terry Starbucker
Jennifer Berk Jane Quigley John Wall Scott Monty Kevin Horne Virginia Miracle Amanda Gravel Susan Reynolds David Polinchock Shashi Bellamkonda David Berkowitz Vahe Habeshian

BlogHer Business Coverage

By virginia.miracle | April 4, 2008

I am in the belly of BlogHer Business and loving it.

Bandwidth permitting (200 women live twittering, blogging and vlogging at the same time is hell on a server), my team is live blogging coverage here.

And I am live twittering here.

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