March 5th, 2010
by Karin Zabel

This week at the Customer Reference Forum in Santa Clara, CA, I was excited to hear Julie Tung, VP of Global Customer Programs at Oracle, speak about her experiences and best practices managing a successful global reference program.

Julie described how Oracle built an impressive customer reference program by fostering a company-wide customer focus and paying attention to the best interests of their customers. Her presentation really jibed with my experiences in evidence and case study management as a reference professional. Highlighting advocacy, customer centricity, loyalty, and strong relationships as the building blocks of a customer focused culture, Julie spoke specifically about how Oracle expresses its focus. They listen to customers, respond when they have an issue or question, and collaborate with them. It may seem simple, but these small things have made an enormous difference for the company.

In addition to the fundamentals, I’ve found C-level engagement and executive sponsorship are crucial in creating a successful reference program. For Julie, this was also part of the action plan. She and her team specifically targeted executive sponsorship from both parties during customer engagement, along with customer advisory boards and one-to-one issue resolution. Executive sponsorship is important not only because it can mean the reference program gets funding but it can then validate projects and get buy-in from sales and marketing groups around the company. This type of upper-level involvement can also help break silos between teams so they can work together towards a common goal.

At Oracle, the results of creating a company-wide culture of customer focus spoke for themselves. The reference program saw increased participation, a larger pool of customers and communities, open dialog with executives, and an increased ability to fix programs in response to early warnings from customers. In short, customer focus led to happier customers, C-level engagement, and better customer references.

One of the most impressive parts of her program is that her team is able to do all of this successfully while supporting 9,000 Oracle products with 100 reference professionals. Her ideas on how to leverage executive sponsorship to scale her program and meet the demands of the sales team within such a company are remarkable—I’m glad she brought them to the forum.

tags: #CRF2010, customer, customer reference programs, engagement

February 9th, 2010
by Eric Larson

Just a few weeks ago, we blogged about the Super Bowl vs. Social Media question and how Intel and Pepsi had answered it. Now that the Super Bowl and its commercials are over, let’s take another look. Who made a splash? How did the commercials attempt to engage beyond their 30-second ad spots?

Here’s what we saw on Sunday:

• Pepsi’s withdrawal from the Super Bowl time slot meant an easy monopoly for Coke. Coke ran two ads during the game as well as sponsoring the Hulu.com AdZone 2010 (for those lacking televisions) and running a philanthropy-based promotion on Facebook. As the New York Times’s Stuart Elliott put it, “Coca-Cola is telling Pepsi-Cola that when it comes to Super Bowl advertising, you can walk and chew gum at the same time.”
• Much of the post-game ad-analysis focused on pants (or a lack thereof) and alleged misogyny. In ads for Budweiser, Dockers, GoDaddy, Chrysler, and even Dove, gender stereotypes were trotted out and replayed for laughs or titillation. Unsurprisingly, those ads were also the ones that showed up embedded in critical and defensive blog posts, roundups, and rants. One way to engage people through social media, it seems, is to give them something to be mad about.
• Other companies—like Intel, who we’d discussed in the past—opted for much safer, less potentially offensive material. A cute lunchroom robot and a pair of geeky friends made for amusing, appealing spots that highlighted the passion Intel inspires in nerds.
  But what about Pepsi? Did they miss out by shifting their energy to social media?

Instead of spending on Super Bowl ads, Pepsi invested $20 million ($13 million less than they spent on the 2009 Super Bowl) in the Refresh Project, which will donate that money to social causes nominated and voted on by fans. According to Nielsen Co., Pepsi received over 20% of online chatter about Super Bowl advertisers over the last two months—not a bad percentage for a company without an ad spot.

But to gauge the real impact, we’ll need to watch what Pepsi does with the Refresh Project going forward. Will they give away the $20 million to deserving causes and resume TV ads as usual? Or will they use Refresh Project as a way to transform the way they reach consumers? For instance, what if Pepsi were to film the idea owners and the people they help to show how this $20 million dollar investment changed the world? And what if that inspired others to donate money or create new efforts to help people?

tags: advertising, communities, engagement, media