Archive of tag "Bob Pearson"

3-Minute WOM Lesson: How to create your word of mouth marketing plan

December 1, 2009

[Welcome back to the Word of Mouth Marketing newsletter. This is text of the great issue all of our email subscribers just received. Sign yourself up using the handy form on the right.]

In this issue, our Social Media Business Council Chief Evangelist, Bob Pearson, shares his tips for creating your word of mouth marketing plan:

1> Know your talkers first
2> Avoid getting lost in tools and tactics
3> Fans love to help
4> Listen to Bob’s live Supergenius preview

You can see Bob — as well as 30 other brilliant word of mouth marketers — live at GasPedal’s Word of Mouth Supergenius on December 16 in Chicago. This “How to be Great at Word of Mouth Marketing” conference features 12 how-to classes, 12 real-world case studies, and 6 brilliant authors.

1> Know your talkers first

Your plan to get people talking should begin with identifying who you hope to talk. Bob recommends initially focusing on your potential talkers by learning the language they use, the communities they join, and who they seek influence from. Bob suggests the simple step of putting your brand and key topics into Google and asking yourself if you have a personal relationship with everyone who shows up on the first page.

2> Avoid getting lost in tools and tactics

Word of mouth is much bigger than social media tools — it’s something you build into everything you do. While a YouTube channel or Facebook page may be part of your overall strategy, Bob says real word of mouth is the result of all the work you’ve done to get to know your customers. If you start thinking tactics instead of talkers, you’ll immediately narrow the potential ideas and strategies you could use to get people sharing.

3> Fans love to help

When building your plan and thinking about how to reach influencers, don’t overlook the people who already buy and love your stuff. Bob says that customers typically want to do one of three things: 1) Share ideas to help each other, 2) Share knowledge about products to help peers, or 3) Help solve a fellow customer’s problem because they’ve been there before. Before you get too far in your plan, be sure to ask: How does this involve our existing fan base?

4> Listen to Bob’s live Supergenius preview

Hear Bob expand on his big ideas for creating your word of mouth marketing plan, as well as reveal his word of mouth superpower here:

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Thanks to all who shared the news of Bob Pearson joining GasPedal and the Blog Council

April 15, 2009

We’d like to extend a big thanks to everyone who helped share the news of Bob Pearson, Dell’s former head of social media, joining GasPedal as President of the Blog Council and SVP of Communities.

Here’s some of the great stories not only covering our news, but also touching on the larger movement we’re all seeing in corporate social media — one in which social media is becoming mainstream and is transforming all departments within the corporation:

Matt Van Hoven: Media Bistro
Chris Billeter: Media Bullseye
Neville Hobson: NevilleHobson.com
Brian Morrissey: AdWeek
Lee Aase: SMUG
Peter Himler: The Flack
Susan Gunelius: KeySplash Creative
Mark Walsh: MediaPost
Holly Sanders Ware: New York Post
Matthew Watson: Speed Blog
Hilary Weber: iMedia Connection
Gavin Heaton: Servant of Chaos
Dave Evans: ClickZ

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Bob Pearson joins GasPedal as President of the Blog Council

April 7, 2009

Big news! Bob Pearson, former VP of Communities and Conversation at Dell, is joining GasPedal as President of the Blog Council and Senior Vice President of Communities. (Read the announcement here.)

With more than 25 years at three Fortune 500 companies and as one of the pioneers of corporate social media, Bob brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to GasPedal and the Blog Council — and he’s as excited as we are to make our communities a better experience and more resourceful for all of our current and future members.

To welcome Bob aboard, we thought we’d ask him a few questions on his experiences in social media and share his thoughts:

Q: How did you get into social media in the first place?

I got involved in social media when I started at Dell. Our number one focus was to reach out to customers who were dissatisfied with their technology experience. We wanted to figure out the best way to reach them, which drove us to build a great blog monitoring platform and to put a process in place where we had blog resolution experts.

The core of it was: How do we have a better experience directly with our customers? Social media made a lot of sense at Dell, because Dell was a direct company from the beginning.

Q: What did you learn from working in social media at a company like Dell?

Social media reinforces a lot of the core beliefs that people have at any company: That you want to have complete transparency with your customer; you want to have conversations with customers, not toss a lot of content at them. It’s the ultimate way to have that direct relationship and interaction with the customer.

The other thing that we learned about our customers was that customers generally want to do three things: They want to share their ideas so they can improve the next generation of products and services; they want to review your products so they can help other customers make purchase decisions; and then, really, no one knows your products better than your customers — so they want to share their solutions with other customers.

Part of a company’s role in 2009 is actually to empower the customer’s voice and to enable it, as opposed to the older way of doing it which was to talk at the customer — that’s never really made sense.

Q: How is social media changing business? And through that, changing the world?

What’s happening is a new discipline is forming that we refer to as social media. In the very beginning of social media, people tried to label it as either a marketing thing or a communications thing or something else. The answer is actually, “none of the above.” It’s actually a new discipline that companies can use to impact any business process, any aspect of their relationships with employees or customers. It’s important for communications, it’s important for HR, it’s important for IT, it’s important for tech support — it’s important for all aspects of a company.

The leaders in social media will see it as a discipline and embed it throughout their company. Those are the folks who will optimize these capabilities.

Q: What are the major trends you see in social media today?

The pace of change in the online world is tremendous right now. There’s an average of 500,000 people going online every day for the first time in their lives. We now have about 1.5 billion people online today. How we search and the meaning of search is changing — Google is now the new homepage, or MSN, or Yahoo!. But also, YouTube, as an engine, would be the third largest search engine in the world.

It’s so important for companies to become students of social media, so at the same time they’re building the discipline in their companies, they’re also on top of the trends of how people buy, browse, and socialize.

Q: What brings you to GasPedal and the Blog Council?

I want to join because I believe very passionately that what we’re all doing collectively — all the members of the Blog Council — is essential in creating this new discipline and how we use social media. When you’re creating a new discipline, it’s critical to share insights and learning on everything from online policies to how to deal with hurdles within a company.

That’s my commitment — I want to join and help this become the best place for people to actually learn in real time to help their own companies. I think that was the initial mission of the Blog Council and I want to do my part to help accelerate it.

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You can say hello to Bob or ask him a few of your own questions through Twitter. Follow him at @bobpearson1845

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From the book: New word of mouth case study on Dell

March 9, 2009

One of the biggest additions to the new edition of the best-selling book, Word of Mouth Marketing: How Smart Companies Get People Talking, is the five new case studies of brilliant word of mouth marketing from Dell, Potbelly, FreshBooks, Microsoft, and Levenger. We’re highlighting a different case study each day this week, starting with Dell:

Word of Mouth Case Study: Dell — Just Start Talking

The risks of not taking part became apparent when we look at what Dell did (or, more accurately, didn’t do) in 2005 when the company was criticized for poor customer service by Jeff Jarvis, a high profile blogger. Jarvis posted some relatively mild complains, and when Dell didn’t respond, the situation snowballed as more and more bloggers jumped on the story and spread negative comments.

By the time Dell finally came around to responding in an appropriate, personal way, they had lost significant credibility and had thousands of negative posts all over the web.

Because Dell was one of the first to get called out for not listening to its word of mouth, they became one of the first to learn how to do it right. Here’s what they’ve since done:

  • The company blogs with a real human voice that makes them accessible and open in five languages (including Norwegian, because a talented employee wanted to do it).
  • Dell’s 35 “Community Ambassadors” spend their days online talking, sharing, and solving problems. These folks are on the front lines, building goodwill and finding new friends for Dell.
  • Bob Pearson, Dell’s Vice President of Communities and Conversations, makes sure the company stays committed at the highest level and for the long term.
  • Dell talks to its customers wherever they want to talk, including Facebook, Second Life, Twitter, or whatever comes next.
  • Anyone can suggest ideas for the company, comment on them, and vote for their favorites through IdeaStorm. So far, some 10,000 ideas have been submitted and more than 650,000 people have voted on them.

These projects represent simple websites, some customer service time, and a lot of listening — anyone can do it.

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We’re giving away 10 copies of Andy’s book. You can win one by letting a friend know about it! Click here for more details.

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Disclosure: Dell is a member of the Blog Council, a GasPedal project for social media executives at the largest companies in the world. But even if they weren’t, we’d write about them anyway.

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