Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: From a best practice point of view, how often can you trigger this kind of intrusion? You are asking a customer to take time to do something on your behalf. How often can you do that?

Frank Dale: That’s a good question. It’s going to depend heavily on the audience and the relationship. Having said that, a good frequency would be maybe one in every five interactions, unless this is somebody who is buying the same thing all the time. Then it’s probably not a good choice. If I’m running a restaurant, I probably don’t want to pay somebody who comes in weekly one in every five times. Once a month is a good frequency. It’s going to depend on the relationship and the nature of the product or the service.

The bigger issue is the question that you’re asking. That’s generally going to be the issue that may either prompt them to respond or put them into a frame of mind where they find it intrusive. And the question is, tell us why you love Gymboree. If you keep asking that question, people don’t like that. They don’t want to feel like they’re advertising for your company. If the question is, did your child have a good time? Or, what do you hope other people would know? then while they’re certainly going to talk about your product and service, which is exactly what you want, in their minds, you’re a third party in that story. The story’s really about them. When you go back to what the typical behavior pattern is on social networks, it’s largely people broadcasting their lives.

If you can frame the question in such a way that the person is broadcasting his experience, he’s far more likely to respond, and you’re going to get a good response. He’ll include you in the story. He’ll likely share that story with someone else. In the Gymboree case, if Gymboree sends out the form and someone at Gymboree likes the story, Gymboree is going to publish it on a hub that we post for the company. But we’re also going to send a triggered email to the customer, thanking her for her story and giving her the option of sharing it with her friends. The thought process there is if I am a parent, I probably know other parents, and I want, if I’m running Gymboree, a happy parent to talk about his great experience with Gymboree to a lot of other parents.

We’re taking the classic offline word of mouth and taking advantage of the reach and low acquisition costs you can get online. That’s the key there. Understand that the question can’t be about you. Understand the relationship with the customer. If you personally would find it intrusive, that’s a good reason not to do it.

SM: We do all of the things that you talked about in 1M/1M, but I’m always a bit worried. I don’t want to bother people.

FD: That’s a legitimate concern. I think the bigger thing is, what is the persona of your customer? I’m an entrepreneur, and I feel like I have some understanding of who your audience is. These are probably people who aren’t hitting you … my bet is that they’re hitting you at off hours, which means that’s when I would want to go after them. Sometimes, the fear, especially with something like Twitter and pumping out 200 things a day, that you’re just going to overwhelm these people tends to be unfounded. It’s kind of the same thing with Facebook if your Facebook page is particularly active because it’s going to disappear in the stream. The key is to spend more time optimizing when you send over the volume, looking for that your particular audience tends to be engaged.

We just did a study of 300 customers and looked at B2B versus B2C. When is Facebook more effective? When is Twitter more effective? When is LinkedIn more effective? If you’re a B2B marketer, LinkedIn is critical. What times of day are people more likely to interact? Those are going to be broad-brush answers because we’re aggregating B2B firms across multiple verticals. But roughly, it tracks what you would assume. With Twitter, top of the hour, bottom of the hour if you’re going to go eight to five or nine to five or nine to six.

SM: Yes, but you’re talking about a situation where your region is limited. Our region is global, so we are trying to catch people in their peak times. We assume that our audience is too busy to sit glued to Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn day in and day out. So, we will catch them for five minutes at some point when they log in, and there needs to be something from us that they see so that there’s a brand mind share in there.

FD: The important thing that you said in there is your audience. In your case, your audience is global, so you can absolutely get away with that. And it goes back to something I said earlier. With something like Twitter, it’s going to disappear in the feed. The average person isn’t on there all day every day.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium
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