Category Archives: Tech

Ryanair is failing, and I couldn’t be happier

Community, Customer Service, Marketing, Tech

Ryanair CEOThe problem with the balance between marketing and caring for customers is that marketing is often immediate. You can put an ad out and immediately see people visiting and signing up and spending money. You put effort into customer service, community building, or just basic user experience and you don’t see an immediate result. But us community professionals swear that you will see a long-term benefit.

That’s why I’m so pleased to note that Ryanair is seeing its worst annual revenues in five years. I’ve been saying for years that Ryanair’s tactics were going to explode in their face, but people kept saying “they’re selling tickets, so apparently is not an issue”. To me, this is fantastic validation that caring for your customers does make a difference and treating them badly does affect the bottom line.

But really, what would you do if there was no email? Thomas Knoll’s drastic experiment

Tech

We’re building the next generation of companies, and they look nothing like the previous ones. Right? Email is dead? Meetings are stupid? Companies should be flat?

I hear a lot of people talking about these subjects and some trying to implement them, but nobody as drastically and definitively as Thomas Knoll. His writeup on the email-less culture at Primeloop is both terrifying and exciting. Definitely worth a read!

“Community is a discipline”

Community, Tech

“When community is your discipline, the core of your work is focused on understanding and putting into practice the development of communities. You might also understand and apply marketing, support or other practices but they’re traits, not your core discipline.”

David Spinks, as he often does, describes succinctly what I rant about regularly: Community is a discipline, and the more you try to make it a subset of other departments the more it fails. Other departments can adopt community-focused strategies (please!) but it will never make sense to say that the Community team is part of the Marketing team.

Interviews with me

Community, Customer Service, Tech

A few very pleasant folks have interviewed me in the last couple of months, so I figured I’d share those here.

Support-Driven Podcast – Scott Tran interviews me about kicking off a community effort, finding your community niche, and combining customer service & community. Also available on iTunes.

Big Door – I discuss why customer loyalty isn’t marketing, the community management trends I see, and metrics one should look at.

Startup Product Summit – A little bit older, but arguably one of my best and most widely-accessible talks. I cover customer feedback, customer-focused product design, and how to understand when data or customers are misleading you. Slides available here.

Hope you find these helpful, useful, or at least entertaining! 🙂

How do you measure the erosion of your brand?

Community, Tech

“This one promotion seems successful — but they have no idea how much money they are losing because millions of customers stopped opening their direct mail. How many people don’t trust the brand because they’ve been tricked (lied to?) about ‘important information’ five or six times a year? How many bank accounts not opened, mortgages not applied for, car loans taken elsewhere, business accounts moved away?”

From Are your profitable programs destroying your brand?

I think most community managers have struggled with this. I’ve dealt with this at every job I’ve ever had. If the benefit can be measured and the damage cannot, how do you make a solid case for ceasing the activity?

Any ideas?