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- Friends.
- Quieting My Hanger
- Silence
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Friends.
Posted on February 28th, 2013 by Robbin and currently 2 commenting. Real friendship is a little bit magical. Love this photo from my wonderful friend, Libby Williams.
A dear friend of mine recently moved to Greenville from Asheville. The other night we were talking about what it feels like to make new friends when you move to a new community.
He made a simple observation that got stuck in my heart:
90% of a having a friend is being a friend.
We have a lot of discussion around here about “engagement”. What does it mean and how do you really measure true engagement within a community? So many brands and organizations still feel numbers of Facebook fans or twitter followers is a sign of promising engagement.
They really do.
The other day John Moore stumbled on this study: Facebook Fans: A Fan for Life? He sent the team this quick summary:
The authors studied the ‘People Talking About This’ (PTAT) measurement from Facebook between Oct and Nov 2011 to determine how many fans, after the initial ‘like’, are engaging with the brand.Their findings reveal less than 0.5% of Facebook fans engage with the brands they are fans of during any week.
Of the 200 brands they studied, only 1 brand had 2% of their fans engage with them during a seven-day period. (Included in these 200 brands are “passion” brands… Nike, Chanel, Harley-Davidson, Jack Daniels, Louis Vuitton, Tiffany & Co., etc.)
Just 20 brands reached the 1% level of engagement from fans on any given week.
The authors close by writing, “The real question is how cost effective is it for a brand to attempt to drive engagement if the most they can reasonably expect is that 1% of fans will engage?”
We are keeping a close track on the PTAT on FB stats. And our communities are fairing much better.
So it got me thinking. Wondering about the lessons we can learn.
Maybe… we have it all backwards.Perhaps the thing we should be measuring is our own efforts to be a friend? Something the community management team takes very serious at Brains on Fire.
As brands and organizations are we making a 90% effort?
What do you think about that? Chime in.
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Quieting My Hanger
If you work alongside me in the firesphere you know two things:
1) I have an odd obsession with promo item vendor 4imprint. We order a lot of goodies here at Brains on Fire (as you can see) and finding a partner you can trust makes it a lot less scary when you are awaiting an entire room worth of product delivery.
FedEx was not happy that this room exists in the BACK of our office.
2) I get hangry. Real hangry. Just ask the people at our local Jimmy John’s when the subs are not so fast. This hanger turns into a blind rage that does not always make me an ideal person on the end of the phone in a customer service situation.
Okay- what does this all have in common? Gimme a minute- I am a winded storyteller.
My borderline obsession of 4imprint came about from what could have been a hanger-debacle. We had a giant order coming in that had to be broken apart and dispersed to 10 different venues across the country. As Murphy Law dictates, something went wrong. We had no pens. Of 18,000 pens on order, we had 2,000. This was a “less than ideal” situation.
You may notice there is a lacking of pens in this picture.
However, what could have turned quickly into hangry Vicky (she is not pretty) turned into one of the greatest moments in solutions based customer service thanks to a phone call with Jen Liedke. Jen calmed me, reassured me and helped bring a resolution to the whole matter. And what really won me over, she checked in on me after. I was so impressed I sent a letter to the President to say thank you. Best part- I got a response:
I’m very proud of Jen and crew, but it is so wonderful to get an email like this. It reaffirms to me that we’re doing the right thing for our customers when the chips are down – and to me that’s when really get to see what people and companies are all about!
This was over two years ago. I still know her name. I still have the email. I still go there any chance I get.
The experience could have quickly turned into an I WILL NEVER SHOP HERE again scenario. But instead, I felt understood rather than being contained. I knew that this person in Minnesota was working just as hard as I was to fix this for our now mutual client. As a result, I am a forever client. And I spread positive WOM for them any chance I can.
This is me and positive WOM. And yes- that is a temporary tattoo of their logo.
I go to the mat for this company any chance I can get. You can get widgets, cups, buttons, etc from a variety of different places but do they have your back when you are in trouble? Do they work with you to bring a resolution or do they leave you out in the cold?
How do you listen to your customers? Their complaints? How do you turn their frown upside-down? How do you walk with your customers to turn them into forever clients?
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Silence
Last weekend I made a trip to the mountains of North Carolina, and much to my surprise I enjoyed some snow while there. We rarely see a ‘good’ snow down here anymore, so when it happens, it’s a delightful gift. What I found so refreshing about the snow is how still and quiet the world becomes. Snow is just about the only time the world stops for a bit. Vacations, holidays, and weekends are all sometimes still filled with work and running from here to there. When I was walking around outside this weekend, I loved being able to hear absolutely nothing. With immediate access to all of the screens in our lives, we forget that silence and stillness exist. I found the stillness energizing. Often, silence seems so intimidating that we avoid it. And maybe we avoid it because with silence we often have to face some things we may not want to think about.
Recently I have done everything in my power to not be still and quiet, and I have realized how much less focused and ‘blah’ I feel. There is healing power to just being in the silence and stillness. Yes it can be overwhelming at first, but once you get past the feeling of ‘I have got to turn my music on!’, the effects are clarifying and rewarding. Pico Iyer wrote an article for the NY Times about a year ago called The Joy of Quiet. This article was sent around the office today, and I am again reminded of how important the discipline of silence is. He offers suggestions for how to manage your time with all the screens in our lives, like a technology sabbath. The world is constantly asking you to plug into something; I ask you to take a moment, turn off everything around you and just be. I bet you will be surprised by what comes to you while you are lost in the silence.
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Mary Susan Henderson is the Office Manager and Keeper of Sanity at Brains on Fire. Meet her here.- Tweet