Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What kinds of customers do you work with, and what kinds of behavior do you see in your customers in terms of social media marketing adoption? Who’s succeeding? Who’s failing? And why?

Frank Dale: Those are good questions. We work with a broad range of customers. We work with both B2C and B2B customers. Our B2B customers tend to be in the software and technology space. They tend to be early adopters of most digital media strategies. That’s not terribly surprising. We also deal with a lot of consulting companies because, typically, in both cases, software and consulting are intangible products, so [people will] trust your credibility after you’ve provided a lot of information the buyer wants to understand, as much as what the service offering is. What do you like to work with? I’m putting a lot of trust in you that you’re competent.

On the B2C side, interestingly enough, while we work with specialty retail, companies like Bass Pro Shops or Gymboree, we also work with a number of colleges and universities. They’ll typically use us to get either students or alumni to evangelize on their behalf. And then we get a lot of business from the travel and hospitality vertical. Again, an intangible product – people want to know what the experience was like. What’s typically being used there is, again, happy customer stories because those are far more credible than anything you’re going to say on your own. That’s who we work with.

As far as what’s going well and not going well, if you look at them in the marketplace, you’re going to run into a couple of challenges. Transparency tends to be an issue. For any company trying to get into the strategy, there’s always the dance of, how much information is too much to share? Particularly in that B2B space, the challenge you’ll run into is a fear that if they give information away, people will just not hire them and try to do things themselves. Generally, that’s not true. What you’re going to find is that the average buyer is busy. There’s a reason she’s looking for your solution. The reason is she doesn’t have time to do it herself, even if she has the competency. So, just explaining how you do things tends to build a higher level of credibility. The more transparent you are, [the greater] chance you have to run your business. It also tends to make that information more shareable, which means you expand your reach.

A good way to think about social media is that it’s an amplifier. If you have great content, that content is going to be spread and shared. Your cost of acquisition, if you’re a business, goes down the farther that reach extends. On the B2C side, the challenge we would typically see is that companies want to talk too much about themselves. For example, we love this purse. Do you love this purse? That kind of thing. That generally doesn’t work well. What works well if you’re trying to drive engagement is to ask questions that may pertain to what you do, but allow the consumer to be the star. A good example is Gymboree. They have a number of classes, like the play-and-learn class. They’ll send a trigger email through their email service provider, which in this case is ExactTarget. They’ll ask them to talk about their happy experience. The person who receives the email will click on a link that will take him to a form we host and walks the consumer through the experience. We’ll make sure he uploads an image. A pro tip on that is any time that you’re asking for something from a consumer, in particular if you’re asking her to share her story, you will find that you will get as many as six more responses if you give the consumer an option to include an image. It just makes it easier for him to talk about his experience.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium
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