Dunkin’ Donuts Retains Customers With Social Media

I got to experience another great reason for businesses to keep an ear to Twitter and other social media outlets.  Last weekend I went up to New Hampshire to purchase fireworks with my father.  We stopped by a Dunkin Donuts to order a Medium Ice Coffee – Cream Only and a Large Hot Decaf – Cream and Sugar.  After driving for a few minutes and taking my first sip I realized that it was loaded with sugar and my dad had no sugar at all!  I was VERY annoyed so I posted a tweet @DunkinDonuts – no one messes with my coffee.

Eventually I calmed down and forgot about my coffee. Come Tuesday I see a DM from @DunkinDonuts apologizing and asking me to DM them my number.  I was interested to see what would happen so I sent my number along.

I ended up speaking to a women named Lisa.  She wanted to know what had happened so I explained I was frustrated at the time and posted the tweet.  They were going to file an official complaint and see if they could identify which person served me to write them up or recommend some training.  At that point I told them I didn’t want to get someone in trouble for messing up a coffee – It really wasn’t a big deal.  She then took my address and five days later I got a $10 gift card in the mail.

Dunkin’ Donuts really went above and beyond my expectations to make sure I was beyond satisfied.  It’s the way a company handles the screw ups that really shows character and even though they are huge, they are still taking the time to listen to customers.  This more than anything else will keep me buying their products.

Today it’s all about one to one communications delivered in a personal, relevant, and timely manner. You can have the same impact as a B2B Marketing & Sales professional. By creating alerts around your brand or content and letting your prospects and customers know you are listening, you open up a great deal more of opportunities for your company.  People are focused on themselves – its only natural.  Letting them know your paying attention helps you make a personal connection.  Are you listening?

CHALLENGE: GETTING MORE WEBINAR REGISTRANTS

As we all know, breaking through and getting prospects to respond to webinar invites is getting harder given the inbox overload that most people are experiencing.
For Building Engines, they were looking for new ways to draw people into webinars and adding video seemed like a cost-effective solution. The goal was simple and easily tested add a short video promo to their traditional webinar promotion (through email) and see if it converts more attendees.

SOLUTION: SEND A WEBINAR PROMOTION APP

Building Engines used the VisibleGains webinar promotion application with coaching and best practices for one of their campaigns. In just a few hours, Sarah was able to script, shoot, and build a webinar promotion video app to include in her campaign. She featured the video app in her email and on her landing page.

Click Here To See How IT Worked

RESULTS: LARGE GROWTH IN WEBINAR SIGN-UPS

For this campaign, Building Engines was able to generate an immediately measurable impact. The key results were:

• 13.8% click-through rate for the 11,000 email send which was almost double the prior webinar*s click-through rate of 7%
• Quadruple the number of registrants over the prior month with the second highest total registrants in a webinar to date
• 65% of the audience was Highly Engaged during the webinar

Since this first video app with VisibleGains, Sarah has created a number of other VisibleGains videos for her webinars with continued success.

CHALLENGE: GENERATING MORE ACTIVE LEADS

As Jill Konrath says, “Today’s buyers are crazy, busy people” and the impact on webinar attendance has been one of the casualties. So how can content be leveraged in other ways that are more consumable by an audience? At byallaccounts, Barbara Kotlyar was looking to use a webinar in new ways to achieve two primary goals:

1. Generate net new leads for her sales team to call into
2. Warm up leads already in her funnel

SOLUTION: INTERACTIVE VIDEO FAQ AND ON-DEMAND WEBINAR

Click Here To See Barbara’s Solution In Action

Joe Chernov from Eloqua says that people these days prefer “pre-digested content” and byallaccounts used a combination of the VisibleGains Teaser Interview and On-Demand Webinar formats to provide this to the people in their funnel.

Working with VisibleGains coaches and the easy-to-use VisibleGains builder, byallaccounts created interactive video apps that allowed the viewer to navigate to short segments they were interested in from a GotoWebinar recording and a related video interview with the presenter.

RESULTS: GROWTH IN WEBINAR SIGN-UPS

By using interactive video before and after her webinar, Barbara achieved the following:

• 20% increase in live webinar attendees by including interactive frequently asked questions with presenter
• 4x additional On-Demand webinar viewers with simple quarterly re-marketing of interactive webinar segments

After this success, byallaccounts continues to use video to promote webinars and for on-demand webinar assets. In addition, byallaccounts experiments with FAQ interviews and Highlight reels as promotional assets to increase the long-tail nature of the content.

Put Delta on the list of companies that have had their attitude adjusted by social media. On a return trip home from Afghanistan, Delta charges a group of Soldiers $2,800 out of pocket for traveling with more than 3 bags. Delta has a contractual agreement with the U.S. government to allow up to 4 bags per Soldier at no charge.

Delta had republished it’s policy noting on it’s blog:

“Currently, Active Duty U.S. Military Personnel traveling on orders may check up to 4 bags in First/Business class and 3 bags in Coach for free both domestically and internationally.”

Even though it does state that Coach travelers are given up to 3 bags, Delta is getting hit from all sides from the public view on their policy as this is snowballing into a big PR problem.

Delta has reviewed their policy and updated the amount of bags U.S. Military Personnel are allowed to carry:

“After careful consideration, effective immediately, U.S. military personnel traveling on orders in First and Business Class can check up to five bags at no charge and 4 bags in economy class.”

I guess you can count this as a win for social media, bringing a problem that would have normally been overlooked the attention it needs.  The problem seems more about the 4th bag, being their firearms, is a requirement to travel with on top of their personal belongings.You can read the Delta blog post and comments from the public here.  Funny after reading and seeing how this is a big PR hit, no where does it say they will be getting a refund….funny.

So now the question is back to you. This video was uploaded yesterday and Delta has already responded and updated their policy. Do you think Delta has handled or is handling this appropriately? What would you do to keep your company in the good light?

I recently sat down with Ann Handley of MarketingProfs and CC Chapman of Digital Dads , Co-Authors of Content Rules.  What a fun time we had getting their perspective on the key themes of their book, which is a great guide for all marketers and especially honed in on the use of video as a part of of an organizations content strategy.  They address easy ways to get started with video for marketing and key concerns, including I have a face for radio syndrome – where people are scared to be on camera.

Click Here To Check Out The Book

Cisco announced today that they are discontinuing the Flip Camera. Also, our favorite camera, the Kodak Zi8, has also been discontinued. We all know that every phone/tablet/iPod has a camera, but they are not good enough for business video. So what can we do?

The good news is that Kodak recently came out with the PlayTouch. The PlayTouch offers all the features the Zi8 offered, including 1080P HD video, a mic in, USB plug and play video transfer, as well as a few new features we like.

Watch the video below where I review the PlayTouch

Key Features Of The PlayTouch

• Clipping/Trim Videos Right On The Camera – this is a huge time saver!
• Microphone In Jack Can Also Be Headphone Jack (not both at the same time)
• Same great quality video recording as the Zi8, including image stabilization
• New Larger Touch Screen
• Video Effects, Like Sepia, B/W and 70′s (whatever that means, maybe it puts bell bottoms on everyone?)

We’ve always recommended the Kodak Zi8 for our customers, and we’ve begun to recommend the PlayTouch. Until portable device cameras get better, we’ll be sticking with these.

Let us know if you have any questions. Comment below.

I had the chance to sit down and have an interview with Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman, authors of the new book “Content Rules.”  I wanted to share a clip of what Ann Handley and C.C. Chapman cover about using video.

We’ve found a very nice microphone that will work with the Kodak Zi8, Canon DSLR’s and a lot of cameras that allow a headphone (1/8″) microphone input jack.  It’s the Sony ECM-AW3 Wireless Micriphone (Click Here To See The Mic).  The mic works pretty great, take a look at the video below for my test review, technical specs and where you can buy this wireless microphone.

Pros:

• Fairly Inexpensive ($160 – Amazon)
• Easy To Use
• Great Sound
• Works on Many Cameras
• Package Comes With Needed Cables
• Uses 2 AAA Batteries (Not Included but No Digging at Radio Shack for Button Batteries)
• Portable & Easy To Move Around With
• Automatically Reconnects When Walking Back Into Range
• 3 Hour Battery Life

Cons:

• The Mic Is Large, Hard to Hide
• No Way To Listen To Audio While Recording (Unless Your Camera Supports It)
• Bright Blue LED Gives It Away (Does Come With A Cover)
• Very Open Mic (Will Pick Up A Lot Of Background Noise)

Please let me know if you have any test cases you would like to see or have any questions.  Just comment away!

More good news on business video going mainstream for sales and marketing.  Constant Contact is enhancing its support for the use of video in its email offering.  A couple of notable pieces here:

• Customer driven -  While it has been pretty easy to incorporate a video in a Constant Contact email, clients asked for more functionality and Constant Contact responded.  This means that they heard from a lot of customers around the importance of video for communicating with customers and members.

• Small businesses are using video -  The far, far majority of Constant Contact’s client base is small and very, very small businesses.

• Value increasing,  Cost or creating video is falling  – Given most of Constant Contact’s users are small companies they spend their resources wisely.  They must be seeing value from video or they would not bother.    So, again, the fact that this was customer driven  is further evidence that the value of video for marketing and sales is increasing and the cost of production is dropping.

What other indications are you seeing that video for sales and marketing is going mainstream?

AOL recently announced that they would team with Mark Burnett (Producer of popular TV show Survivor) to produce video versions of CliffsNotes (John Wiley Publishing).  The concept is to engage the audience by using video with a comic approach.  Although there has been much criticism regarding the further destruction of literature appreciation, this approach is rather focused on engaging an audience so they can comprehend and retain the information.  I believe that this idea is a variation on our theme of  “Business Casual Video”.

There were a couple of interesting takeaways for me:

• Short is getting shorter -  CliffsNotes were the original way to take long form content and shorten it.  Video makes it easier to make short even shorter, as the story can be told more quickly with site, sound and motion.

• Video increases retention -  Studies show that we absorb and remember content much better when it is communicated with pictures, sound, and type together, rather than simply text alone.

• Fun is fun -  Comics are a great medium for engaging an audience.  They are not necessarily easy to make–but it is much easier to be fun than to be funny. Comics can provide a great way to tell a story, and make content digestion much easier for viewers.

So, when you want to mix it up, think about a short video that is simple, with pictures and a fun voice.  These drive engagement, comprehension, and retention, leading to higher and better conversion.

Do you have examples of other ways that traditional written information is being transformed in video?

(Image from http://www.cliffsnotes.com)