What’s the most common way to gain customer feedback? 

The survey.

But most surveys are impersonal and uninteresting, and it’s tough to entice customers to respond. Worse yet, few consultants and companies conducting surveys deliver real-time feedback so participants know that their voice was heard. 

IBM handles things differently. Dave Rodgerson, the Marketing Manager for IBM Canada, emailed me today explaining his very creative approach to gain high-quality customer feedback and deliver a truly memorable customer experience. 

Instead of using a bland survey and traditional marketing materials to gain customer insights and convey new messages, Dave and the IBM Canada Retail team created a “Retail as Theatre” event recently at the Second City theatre in Toronto. The “breakfast theatre” event blended stage performance, humor, food and live audience interaction delivered through IBM technology. What an interesting way to learn, share and showcase IBM technology and services! 

Check out the event summary and if you’re in retail, their array of studies for: 

• General merchandise retailers
• Apparel retailers
• Grocery online merchants
• Drug stores
• Pharmacies 

Tying the customer experience event to social media 

As if the event wasn’t creative enough, IBM introduced a fictional character at the event, Dash Walmsly, who they’re now leveraging through social media. Some people find him funny, others … well, let’s not go there. Whatever your feeling about Dash, he’s a great example of how to creatively convey a challenging message through both traditional media and new media channels.

Experience Dash yourself: 

IBM isn’t the first to use a goofy fictional character for B2B marketing. Check out Biff Manly and one of his videos that the GrowthANSWERS consultants used to promote one of their events last year.

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Social media is the unquestioned “hot topic” amongst marketers right now. Facebook is exploding in the 35-54 year-old demographic (us Gen Xers are reconnecting with our long-lost high school friends), Twitter is becoming mainstream, and social media is the medium that can deliver massive returns with minor investments. 

Social media “experts” are popping up left and right. Some truly are. Check out the Twitter following of these marketing influencers: 

Chris Brogan: @chrisbrogan
Ann Handley: @MarketingProfs
Our own Brandon Zeuner: @bzkicks 

Many of our consultants have been asking about social media, but aren’t quite ready to use it for themselves or their clients. We’re just starting ourselves, but learning quickly and working on new social media exercises and best practices to add to our upcoming v3.0 release. These will cover the basics for using the different categories of sites: 

• Networking
• Micro blogging
• Blogging
• Bookmarking
• Story submission
• Collaborative research
• Video sharing
• Photo sharing
• Music sharing
• Document sharing
• Content creation

If you want in-depth social media guides, just check the web. Here are a few great introductory free social media resources to get you started: 

Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

• Social media & business marketing by HubSpot, on Slideshare
• The Essential Guide to Social Media free ebook by Brian Solis
• 7 ways to be worth following on Twitter by TwiTip

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Free as an economic model has been around for a long time. Radio and TV use it, and free seminars often entice people to walk into a captive selling environment. Ever been on vacation and taken the free night at your hotel in exchange for a timeshare pitch? “Honey, we’re going to sit through the presentation to get our free night, but there’s NO WAY we’re buying a timeshare.” A week later, you own one. 

And in this digital age, most of the top websites are free: Google, Facebook, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia, Skype and blogs. 

This past weekend Chris Anderson, author of the Long Tail, covered the strategy of giving things away for free as a business model. It’s a preview to his upcoming book. As Mr. Anderson explains 

“Gratis can be a good business. How? The majority of customers who pay subsidize the majority of those who do not. Sometimes that’s two different sets of customers, as in the traditional media model … The last decade has seen the extension of this ‘two-sided market’ model far beyond media, and today it is the revenue engine for all of the biggest Web companies.”

Freemium is the new model on the web, which delivers a free version for “light” users, with a full feature set for paying customers. This new model is stronger than many of the ad-based free models (does anybody really click on those Facebook ads?), but geared toward online services.

So how can business consultants use the power of free? 

Carefully. 

When you sell your time and expertise, you can’t afford to give away too much value–you have a limited amount of each. You can even devalue your offering by giving away free services and advice. It’s very different from a free product, and the reasoning is rooted in human psychology–the perception that if someone is willing to work for free, their work must not be of great value. 

What to give away 

On the flip side, “free” can still help you build your brand, generate leads and win deals. Better yet, if you deliver something free over the internet, your marginal cost is almost zero and people can find it forever. The key is to make sure that your free offering 

• Delivers value;
• Shows professionalism;
• Displays expertise;
• Can be delivered in economies of scale; and
• Doesn’t “devalue” your offering.

What should you give away for free? The internet makes digital content the obvious choice: articles, papers, videos, blog posts, ebooks or tools (calculators, worksheets, questionnaires) that help potential clients assess or evaluate a part of their business that you can improve. Think of it as using the freemium approach, and make it easy for your fans to connect with you so you can convert them into clients.

What not to give away

Here are things that you shouldn’t give away for free:

• Mini/trial engagements. If the company won’t pay, find one that will.
• Complete recommendations for client problems. This can work in certain situations, when your prospects know that they can’t execute your recommendations. But beware of the ones that are just fishing for answers.
• A stand alone offering that doesn’t entice the recipient to want more. If they can take it and do it alone, many companies will never start a conversation. 
• An overabundance of time trying to win an engagement. Take your potential clients through your selling process, ask for the business, identify and overcome objections, ask again, then move on. Don’t waste precious time with people that won’t engage.

Done correctly, free as an economic model can allow you to pick and choose your clients, grow your practice by adding more consultants and increase your fees.

And if your clients need to start distributing digital content over the web, check out a few links to help you implement the long tail.

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