Eveconomics

One of the things which can make or break a company is communication. Back in 2005, industry analyst Onalytica claimed that Jeff Javis, famous blogger and author of "What would google do?", had more influence over people’s perception than Dell had. Why, you might ask? The answer might seem obvious. Yet people do not seem to realize the implications that it has.

Influence is power

Jeff Javis had bought a laptop from Dell. Mr. Javis was not very happy with his new laptop. He went as far as calling it a lemon! (I had no idea that was an insult), which should underline how serious this was. But at any rate, Mr. Javis went ahead and voiced his opinion on his blog. Mind you this is 4 years ago, and blogging seems to be something that people take for granted.

Very quickly a movement of people started to rally against Dell. The stories goes that as a result of the the blog-post being indexed very highly by google, people quickly started reading about Mr. Javis bad experience with Dell. And supposedly even the customer satisfaction overall dropped, as a result of this. This left Dell’s stock in ruins (Oh well, the economic crisis was going to cut into their stock price anyways).

That’s the tale of Jeff Javis, and how he exercised influence over people’s perception by using tools, which people take for granted, now 4 years later.

Your worst customer is now your best customer

The morale of the story isn’t really that with great "powers" comes great responsibility. My outlook on that is that people will screw up this "power" either way, be it through misconception, misunderstanding or just plain being ********. However, treating customers with respect is the best tool in the new paradigm, which everything online ought to take seriously.

Under the old paradigm, your best way was to use affiliation programs, referral bonuses, getting people to tell all their friends about your product. And that certainly has its place. But with the increased usage of social media like facebook and twitter, people create relationships where these sorts of tools aren’t suitable anymore.

What is for certain with these kinds of things is that people will kick, whine and scream if they have a problem with your product. This became apparent to Dell. They will also tell all their friends, which given the new cultural norm in regards to people friends networks, is a large number of people. In this way, pissing off one customer can propagate itself throughout the customers’ large network.

Dell changed its way and has now communicates to a large degree over things like twitter, facebook, blogs and the like. Their customer satisfaction is now extremely high, and they were no. 1 in customer satisfaction in 2009 Q1, according to Technology business research surveys.

When people experience a problem and finds that it’s easy to interact and solve a problem with the producer, while it might create bad press at first, positive PR it creates when the customer then solves it’s problems is of greater value than just having a dissatisfied customer in the long term.

And this has started to become standard practices in the IT industry. The list over companies that uses just twitter is gigantic. The key to success is to communicate to a large degree, but also giving power to the user

With power comes responsibility

As the generation who was brought up with free access to the internet on their own computer grows up, it becomes more apparent how there’s a need to putting power in the hands of the consumer. The new generation is used to being able to control everything on their computers. But as it turns out, some things aren’t directly controllable. When people try to come to grips with this, you’ll find that they are more likely to give a company grief very easily. When you can’t blame yourself, it’s easy to blame somebody else.

Giving users control is extremely hard. And in most cases, it’s simply not viable in a direct way. The Council Of Stellar Management is in a way an attempt at this. And I think it works well for the minority. The CSM has yet to perfect the creation of a sense of democracy which we see in the real world, where people really care for elections and law-making for the most part.

However when reaching out to a larger audience, you need to make people feel like they matter. You can do buddy programs and offer free fanfest tickets all you want. But under the current paradigm, that makes very little sense.

Enter the new reality

Reaching out to customers is hard. Having given a lot of thought about how to reach out to a large audience with the CSM, I realize that it’s probably never possible. However engaging the people in activities which reaches out on a larger scale is where you reach the sweet spot for interaction with your crowd.

One such activity might be blogging. Like Jeff Javis, a blog-post can really take off big-time and get indexed well in google. It might get thrown around a lot between friends. It might even cause dialogue between people who never heard about each other, broadening people’s horizons.

Blogging contests are not really widely used yet, but give a good bang for the buck. Crazy Kinux has had a fair shot at this. However, it needs to be done on a much larger scale.

The idea is simple. Offer some nice prices in exchange for well-written blog posts about a certain topic. They might be:

· How would you change sov. Mechanics?

· What was the worst and best thing about fanfest?

· What was your worst experience with EVE?

What all these have in common is that they engage people in discussing something that eventually has an emotional aspect to it: Their experience with things surrounding EVE. At the same time, you get useful feedback.

Using twitter, it’s not unheard of that customer representatives actively engage in using it to reach out to people who have problems with the product they bought. I’m not sure about the viability of this for EVE Online. But it’s certainly an interesting idea.

On the other hand it’s entirely reasonable to do a twitter-drawing. Simple have people use the #EVEOnline hash tag and draw a random person for a prize. The idea is that people who watch the players’ stream of messages will see the #EVEOnline hash tag and wonder what it’s all about. Or you could do what CCP Nozh does on the forum once in a while, with creating a monster thread asking what people want changed. Using twitter and the hash tag, you limit how much people can rant and only get the essence. And it’s easily index able. Run that for a week as a competition and draw 3 winners for some mugs and the like and you are golden.

Overall, engaging in the new media is crucial when meeting the new generation of customers. Engaging in things like buddy programs and affiliate programs is by no means dead. But it’s a small market compared to that of the social media.

Stay tuned for next week. I’m currently drafting part 2, entitled “How communication isn’t a biyearly thing, unlike your showering”. Ok, I’m not sure if I’m going with that title yet. We shall see.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 23rd, 2009 at 1:34 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.