Oct 22, 2010

Whether you’re a brand or representing yourself at events, there are things you can do pre-conference to get the most bang for your buck. We’ve probably all watched a hashtag to see who is talking about attending an event and gradually jumped in those conversations. Some of us have even planned to meet folks in person that we’ve only chatted with online. So what are some good examples of people or brands doing this? Luckily, a few folks stood out from my recent trip to BlogWorld in Vegas.

Cirque du Soleil and Jess Berlin

Prior to BlogWorld ’10, I had been to Vegas once before. Unfortunately, I didn’t catch any shows when I was there. @JessBerlin manages the @cirque account and I noticed that a few friends were catching shows there. I follow both Twitter accounts and mentioned that I’d love to catch a show while in Vegas if there were any tickets remaining. Jess mentioned that tickets were available to Viva ELVIS and gave me her email address.

I inquired about the price (Vegas shows are usually expensive) to which she replied “$0.00.” The fact that the show was free isn’t really the point, although I’m extremely thankful for that. Jess was aware that bloggers were coming to Vegas and spent some time to reach out to some of them. Turns out… Viva ELVIS was one of the best shows I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen a Cirque show at the DPAC in Durham and my wife has seen some Broadway shows… we both agreed that Viva ELVIS was the best we had seen.

Major thanks to Jess, @jamiehelmick and all the @cirque folks that made this happen. It was an incredible experience. Be sure to catch this next time you find yourself in Vegas!

Omaha Steaks

I like steak. Most people do. I had even bough steak from Omaha Steaks before. Suddenly, out of the blue they were following me on Twitter. Turns out, they were hosting an invite only event on the 43rd floor of Mandalay Bay at a sweet House of Blues Foundation Club. They had all the great @omahasteaks products and tons of things I had no clue they even made. Appetizers, all kinds of sides, steak, drinks, etc. It was a cool little break from all the hustle and bustle of BlogWorld and a great networking opportunity. I had a chance to chat with Todd Simon, Senior VP of Omaha Steaks for a bit and he’ll be joining me for a 5in5 video next week. :)

Thanks to Dave Link for helping to make this happen.

Zappos

Reaching out to bloggers for tours was brilliant. But, you probably knew that already with my last post about five things I learned at Zappos.

Jason Houck

Jason, also known as @Blogluvr29, spent a lot of time prepping for BlogWorld. He was monitoring the hashtag and keeping up with every person he could find that was attending. Jason added all the attendees to a blog post and would notify and reach out to others attending to let them know what he was doing. Check out Jason’s BlogWorld attendee list. That took some time.

I actually recognized Jason as soon as I saw him thanks to this (and to my Rainman like Avatar recognition that I had another chance to demonstrate for @ramon_deleon and @freeandflawed – both awesome by the way). Jason’s initial effort was a great example of paving a path to make plenty of connections before an event.

Do you have any great examples of networking before an event?

5 things I learned by hanging at Zappos HQ that you can apply to your company

Zappos Front Desk

When you hear Zappos… you think service. Delivering happiness is actually the new mantra and there is also NO “customer service” department. There is however, a customer loyalty department tasked with the goal of creating happy customers who will go out and spread the Zappos word to the rest of the world.

Thanks to BlogWorld, the Zappos Insights team (@zapposinsights) and the Zappos Blog team / bus, I had the opportunity of taking a tour of the Zappos HQ in Nevada with several other bloggers (@balanon, @bchesnutt, @wei_yang and others). This isn’t going to be a hip hip hooray post, but I’d like to discuss some things I’ve learned, what I plan to implement when I get back home and some other general thoughts about the company.

1. Companies are run (well or into the ground) by people.

The Zappos Shuttle

I have a little supply chain background and definitely appreciate logistical advantages… which Zappos has. But companies are run by people. If you have bad people, you have a bad company. If you have good people, you could have a good company. One person can make a big difference. Zappos puts a great deal of focus on their people.

Front line hiring makes sure that the right folks are brought into the interview process and there are plenty of questions that focus around the company’s core values. How each candidate answers those questions is extremely important. We discussed one example of a candidate that had 16 – yes SIXTEEN – interviews before joining the Zappos team. Once you join the team, the folks in your department must all approve of you. In other words, YOU FIT THEIR CULTURE.

But wait! There’s more! Every employee goes through training and is then offered a bribe (my word not theirs) of $2,000. If Zappos isn’t for you, leave with $2,000 in your pocket. For Zappos, this is a small investment to avoid a bad seed working in their company.

A mere 1 to 2% of folks take the $2,000 to leave Zappos.

Now that’s all warm and fuzzy and we all know that joining a company with great core values gives you a burst of energy and enthusiasm, but what happens when that starts to dissipate over time? Each employee has a progression plan to document their horizontal and vertical growth. There are various coaches throughout the company and even a throne (literally) where you can sit and discuss your career progression. If you aren’t doing something you are passionate about, voice it and adjust. If it doesn’t exist, make it. There is even a company goal to have a very large percentage of the leadership team being “home grown” coming through the ranks at Zappos and not always sourced from the outside.

Another cool element… an employee bookshelf with tons of awesome books (Seth Godin, Jim Collins, Chris Brogan, etc) to read to further your personal development. Want one? Just take it with you…

2. Walk the talk and be authentic.

A Typical Zappos Office Space

Making delivering happiness a tagline may get an extra customer or two. Saying it and meaning it is what creates strong customer bonds. Employees are empowered to do anything they can do to create an experience that may deliver happiness. There is even a budget for flowers and several great stories of customers dealing with tough times where Zappos has solved their issue and included flowers to show their appreciation.

A culture book is also compiled each year. Every Zappos employee shares what the company culture is doing for them – good, bad or ugly. The comments are not altered and are only edited for grammar or spelling. This is a direct indicator of what is going on in the company and allows management to read all the comments, pinpoint potential problem areas and try to identify ways to remedy any “unhappy” situations.

There is also a 360 evaluation – manager down and employee up – to get a good pulse of the work environment and additional skip meetings where a supervisor will bypass the manager to meet directly with the team and get feedback. These processes are in place to take care of their employees and to match their core values and value proposition.

3. Lead by example.

Henry poses as Tony Hsieh at his actual desk

Tony Hsieh is a multi-millionaire. He had actually sold Link Exchange before starting Zappos for over $250 million. Now imagine what kind of office he would have. A huge corner suite. Tons of windows. Massive amounts of cool trinkets. Maybe even a putting green. A super expensive comfy office chair. An incredible view of the strip. Something akin to the sweet offices we’ve seen on television and in the movies right? Well Tony sits in a cube. Beside him is another executive. They are in the middle of the floor with everyone else.

When the holiday rush comes and millions of shoes are going out the door… who fields the calls? Every. Single. Employee. Including Tony Hsieh. Everyone has a mandatory four weeks of customer loyalty calls in their “initiation” and each holiday season, everyone is on the phone to keep and make customers happy.

4. Measure what matters or metrics are meaningless.

What are you measuring for your customer support or customer satisfaction success? Call time? Call quantity? Tickets opened? Tickets resolved? Response time? Are your metrics a true indication of customer satisfaction?

Zappos has a net promoter score (NPS) and a personal service level (PSL) for each rep. The goal is to identify if customers will shop again and spread the word and to see what percentage of time is spent with customers. Which with complex deduction (or just the ability to read), we can conclude that talking to customers for a longer amount of time increases your PSL.

We discussed several 7+ hour phone calls with some resulting in no sales. How would you react if one of your direct reports was on the phone for 7 hours and didn’t make a sale? What is the ROI on that? One thing that came up several times was that the most important part of the Zappos business is the unmeasurable. Sure, we need to be market focused and results driven, but creating an added value of great service from happy folks will surely have a positive correlation on the customer experience and their likelihood to spread your company’s gospel.

5. Word of Mouth is king – internally and externally.

Are you doing things to try to create word of mouth? Most folks focus on trying to get customers or potential customers talking (externally focused), but many folks neglect finding ways to get your own employees spreading the word of your company.

When Zappos asks “how did you hear about us?” – the biggest response is friends and family.
70-78% of their business is repeat customer business.

How are you changing the game? What is your purple cow? Are you innately trying to create an experience people will rave about? If not, I fear we have some meetings we need to schedule where we all work. I love what we do with Phonebooth and I think we are on the right track, but hanging out at Zappos was the shot in the arm I needed to try to make things even better.

As my friend Scott Stratten says, “people don’t spread meh.”

Let’s stop being so ordinary and corporate. Deal?

Update: We have some new information. :)
@EpicSkin Shannon Smith

@cnmoody Hi Chris… I went to @Zappos last week too. Enjoyed your post! BTW, they offer the “on the fence” employees $3K now! Woot!

Bonus Points

Zappos has a wall of fame for folks that accidentally hit reply-to-all on their emails… a joy that I also hold near and dear to my heart.

: The Reply-to-all Wall of Fame

What I learned at the NC State MBA Blogging Panel

As mentioned previously, I was fortunate enough to moderate a panel with the following folks:

Ginny Skalski – @ginnyskal
Damond Nollan – @damondnollan
Dan London – @danlondon
Patrick O’Keefe – @ifroggy

As always, I learned a ton. First off, thanks to everyone who was there… especially the panelists and Claudia Kimbrough. It was an awesome topic and a fun and informative night.

Tell stories.

Anyone can repost a popular article and add a bit of commentary… and this isn’t a bad thing. However, to take your blog and readership to the next level, you need to tell stories. Stories help us relate to others and are a better means of communication than regurgitating content.

Be yourself and be consistent.

I have several soapbox posts about being passionate about what you write, but too often we find ourselves straying from who we really are. Don’t do that. If you want a smarter person telling you that, read what Amber Naslund wrote about it and how her presentations were impacted. Consistency is also extremely important, both in your delivery and in your process.

More is better, but less is too.

This seems counter-intuitive, but stay with me. More posts will yield more traffic, so keep grinding and get content out there. However, niche is better. If you’re passionate about something specific… be the expert at that. A good example is my main man Greg Ng. Freezerburns.com is the leading frozen food review site, but if Greg had chosen to do food reviews… it might be a different story and would definitely take more time to become the leading expert in a more generic and competitive space. This is similar to SEO and long-tail keywords.

Brain crack kills.

If you’ve worked with me, you’ve heard me say “analysis by paralysis” and I probably advocated to go ahead and get something out there. Patrick led me to a wonderful video by Ze Frank about how sometimes it is best to put ideas into play rather than trying to make them absolutely perfect.

Check out the slides I put together to guide our discussion below.

Blogging – A panel with Patrick O’Keefe, Ginny Skalski, Dan London, Damond Nollan and Chris Moody at NC State University for the MBA Program

View more presentations from Chris Moody.

A sweet blogging panel at NC State for the MBA program

I’m excited to be a part of an awesome panel assembling tonight at 6pm to discuss all things blogging. I’ll be moderating some insanely smart people (note: insanely smart != insane).

Ginny Skalski – @ginnyskal
Damond Nollan – @damondnollan
Dan London – @danlondon
Patrick O’Keefe – @ifroggy

Rumor has it that the event will be live-streamed or recorded (maybe both). I’ll be sure to add those details as I get them and will post a recap and some slides later this week. Watch the live stream at 6pm EST.

Props to NC State for understanding the importance of social media and incorporating that into their MBA program.

5in5 Episode 3 with Steve Johnson (@sjohnson717)

Five questions. Five minutes or less.

5in5 is a new video interview series to ask smart people five questions in less than five minutes. It gives me the opportunity to learn about them and get answers to tough questions in a short amount of time.

Why the name 5in5?

Simple. Five questions. Five minutes or less.

What did you ask Steve?

1. What can marketers learn from product management?
2. What one word defines product management?
3. How has social media changed the way you do business?
4. What is the most important thing you do to prepare for leading a presentation or training?
5. What did you want to be when you grew up?

Pragmatic Marketing rocks if you don’t know about them. Steve led my training a few years ago and it has been extremely helpful in my career. They know their stuff.