On December 9th, Passenger hosted a free webinar featuring Analyst Cindy Commander and Researcher Chris Townsend, both of Forrester Research, Inc.

The webinar was entitled: “Customer Collaboration: Learn from Your Customers Before You Learn the Hard Way.”

Moderated by Passenger’s Co-founder and Chief Innovation + Marketing Officer Justin Cooper, this interactive panel discussed the ways companies can turn valuable customer insight into meaningful company change.

The presentation from this Webinar is available now by clicking the image below to download.



Webinar Overview:

All companies know that their customers are already talking to one another about their business, its products and services ― both online and offline. By deciding not to participate in and learn from these conversations, key business decisions will be made based on general assumptions of what customers want, which are frequently off base. This interactive session will review different approaches to Customer Collaboration and provide answers to the following questions:

1. How to integrate customer communities into my business?
2. How can I get my customers more involved and engaged in the innovation process?
3. How can customer communities help me grow my brand?
4. What’s the difference between this and an open community?
5. What are best practices for engaging a customer community?
6. How can I measure the ROI of customer collaboration?
7. How does this replace/differ from the traditional research I’m conducting?
8. How do I position this is a “need to have,” not just a “nice to have” to my bosses?

About the Participants:

Analyst Cindy Commander helps senior marketers develop strategies around issues of marketing organization, culture, team development, and relationship building. Her research in the innovation space covers two key areas: (1) how marketing leaders should get consumers more involved in innovation; and (2) how marketing leaders can drive innovation more broadly within their own organizations with a focus on building innovation teams, culture, processes, and insights.

Researcher Chris Townsend’s primary coverage is innovation management, including the software and IT services to support corporate innovation, as well as the internal management best practices for creating a corporate culture of innovation. Previously at Forrester, Chris has worked extensively with innovation and global management expert Navi Radjou, researching technology trends in developing countries.

Justin Cooper is the co-founder and chief innovation + marketing at Passenger. An expert in customer experience design, brand strategy and customer collaboration, Justin’s work bridges the traditional rift between brand objectives and consumer expectations through a creative, but business-pragmatic approach to innovation.

Passenger's Justin Cooper provides guest editorial for Jennifer Leggio of ZDNet.

Gartner’s Adam Sarner recently released a report predicting that more than 60 percent of all companies will have a community for engaging their customers by 2010. This is a clear sign that many brands are coming to terms with the huge opportunity that social media offer companies to communicate directly with and learn from their customers, but it still begs the question of how they will get tangible ROI out of these communities. As companies begin to embrace social media as a strategy (rather than as a tactic or a campaign), we see many examples of how the conversation can help or hurt household names. These high profile successes and failures are a good thing because we are learning, but also indicate that we are still navigating the social media waters.

The next area for developing understanding is how companies can appropriately engage with their customers in a way that is mutually beneficial to consumers and the brands alike.

Marketing executives need to do away with the “top down” mentality in reaching their customers. Traditionally, marketers create their messages, test them with some people in their deemed “appropriate” demographic (often other marketers and analysts, not customers), fine tune them, and then push the message out to the masses. With the Internet, we now have the ability to hear directly from consumers what they want, and need to embrace this way of communicating. Whether we like it or not, social media and technology in general are changing the way that marketing and advertising executives have to approach their customers, and if they don’t change their approach, they should be prepared for a public flogging. Dell is one example of a company that has learned from harsh criticism that the social Web has enabled, and is now recognized as one of the more innovative companies that utilizes social media to collaborate with its customers.

While we have taken great strides since the inception of social media, I see a big hurdle that people are only just beginning to get over: the “build it and they will come” model (i.e. create a “social media campaign” that typically has a beginning and an end, or set up branded social networks or Facebook fan pages and wait and see what customers will say). This model of building a campaign and simply listening to your customers is flawed for few reasons:

1. You can’t just listen because you may misinterpret what is being said. Social media is more about purposeful discussions - it should be used to set goals and have conversations around specific ideas or issues, whether it be your next ad campaign, product development or marketing initiative.

2. Listening doesn’t mean waiting for your turn to talk: the second flaw with the general social networking approach. Consumers want to interact with the people at the brand that are making decisions and do so because they hope to impact those decisions. Therefore, not having this conversation jeopardizes the opportunity to have a great competitive advantage. By inviting consumers to be a part of the behind-the-scenes action that goes on with a brand, you’ll see how enthusiastic they are about providing feedback that is meaningful and worth the investment.

3. Listening without actively participating is difficult to measure. Opportunities to learn from customers through the social web are endless, but if you can’t analyze it and report back to the folks footing the bill for your efforts, it will be all for naught. You need to know what to do with the information you learn, and have the tools to analyze and harvest it into a useable fashion and then act on it.

This is an exciting time to be a marketer because social media allows us to finally have two way conversations with our customers. The market researchers have historically only listened to customers in focus groups whereas marketers are blamed for only talking at them. Brands need to embrace this concept or inevitably get left behind.

Justin Cooper is the co-founder and head of marketing + innovation for Passenger. An expert in customer experience design, brand strategy and customer collaboration, Justin’s work bridges the traditional rift between brand objectives and consumer expectations through a creative, but business-pragmatic approach to innovation. You can stay up to date on his work via the Passenger blog.

Passenger will be hosting a FREE webinar featuring Analyst Cindy Commander and Researcher Chris Townsend, both of Forrester Research, Inc., in a session planned for Tuesday, Dec. 9th entitled:

“Customer Collaboration: Learn from Your Customers Before You Learn the Hard Way.”

Moderated by Passenger’s Co-founder and Chief Innovation + Marketing Officer Justin Cooper, this interactive panel will discuss ways companies can turn this valuable customer insight into meaningful company change.

Who:
Cindy Commander, Analyst, Forrester Research
Chris Townsend, Researcher, Forrester Research
Moderated by Justin Cooper, Passenger

What:
FREE webinar: “Customer Collaboration: Learn from Your Customers Before You Learn the Hard Way”

When: Tuesday, Dec. 9th at 10:00 a.m. PST/1:00 p.m. EST

Where: Click Here to REGISTER

All companies know that their customers are already talking to one another about their business, its products and services ― both online and offline. By deciding not to participate in and learn from these conversations, key business decisions will be made based on general assumptions of what customers want, which are frequently off base. This interactive session will review different approaches to Customer Collaboration and provide answers to the following questions:

1. How to integrate customer communities into my business?
2. How can I get my customers more involved and engaged in the innovation process?
3. How can customer communities help me grow my brand?
4. What’s the difference between this and an open community?
5. What are best practices for engaging a customer community?
6. How can I measure the ROI of customer collaboration?
7. How does this replace/differ from the traditional research I’m conducting?
8. How do I position this is a “need to have,” not just a “nice to have” to my bosses?

About the Participants:

Analyst Cindy Commander helps senior marketers develop strategies around issues of marketing organization, culture, team development, and relationship building. Her research in the innovation space covers two key areas: (1) how marketing leaders should get consumers more involved in innovation; and (2) how marketing leaders can drive innovation more broadly within their own organizations with a focus on building innovation teams, culture, processes, and insights.

Researcher Chris Townsend’s primary coverage is innovation management, including the software and IT services to support corporate innovation, as well as the internal management best practices for creating a corporate culture of innovation. Previously at Forrester, Chris has worked extensively with innovation and global management expert Navi Radjou, researching technology trends in developing countries.

Justin Cooper is the co-founder and chief innovation + marketing at Passenger. An expert in customer experience design, brand strategy and customer collaboration, Justin’s work bridges the traditional rift between brand objectives and consumer expectations through a creative, but business-pragmatic approach to innovation.

Passenger Co-founder and Chief Innovation + Marketing Officer, Justin Cooper, leads a panel discussion stacked with industry experts to discuss, "Customer Collaboration: Focus on What Matters and Forget the Rest"

iMedia Brand Summit
September 16th, 2008
2:30pm
@ Loews Coronado Bay Resort
4000 Coronado Bay Road
Coronado, California 92118
Tel: +1 619 424 4000

Your customers are talking about their experiences with your brand every day, but you’re not a part of the conversation. Unless you have a means of engaging with this invaluable community and capturing that knowledge, this insightful perspective will go unnoticed. Learn first-hand how to foster an ongoing dialogue with your customers that can transform the way your organization conceives ideas, designs, refines, and markets its products and services. By positioning your company to incorporate the collective intelligence of your customers into your business, you will enhance brand equity and stay one step ahead of the rapidly evolving marketplace.

In this panel, attendees will learn from leading brands and industry experts as they discuss the transformational nature of the customer collaboration experience, including:

- How to infuse the voice of the customer into your business processes
- How to identify the emerging needs of your customers
- How to empower key customers to fuel passion for your brand

Summit Overview:

Now in its seventh year, iMedia Brand Summit’s primary goal is to bring together brand marketing executives with peers and solution providers to share ideas and tackle hard issues surrounding the integration and application of interactive media in their overall marketing mix. iMedia’s Brand Summits deliver a dynamic combination of session content featuring top-level speakers and numerous opportunities for networking between marketers and solution providers in an exclusive, by invitation-only environment.

Passenger Co-founder and Chief Innovation + Marketing Officer, Justin Cooper, joins a panel of industry experts to discuss, "Crowdsourcing: The Killer Development Tool."

LATV Festival
July 30, 2008
11:45am
@ The Highlands in Hollywood, CA

There was a time when every piece of creative content consumed over television was carefully incubated and designed at the budget of a small war. While much remains the same, the times, they are a-changing.

Taking a page from gaming and software development worlds, video content creators are discovering the power of community. Web 2.0 technologies now enable creators to take a job traditionally performed by a designated agent and outsource it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call. Done right, it is much less costly and can be more effective.

NATPE’s LATV Festival brings together nearly 1,000 content creators, agents, studio, network and new media executives to celebrate the art and commerce of video content in the TV production capital of the world.

As posted by Jake McKee on CommunityGuy.com

I’ve been running into Jessie Cooper from Passenger at multiple conferences lately, and I have been really impressed with the direction that Passenger is taking with their customer collaboration toolset. As a full-time community manager I struggled to find tools that would help me do my job, rather than services who offered to do all the hard work of building customer relationship for me.

I’ve been talking a lot lately about my opinions of the industry players in the customer collaboration space. I believe that most of these service providers are trying to create a “safer cigarette”; they are playing off the traditional desire of marketing managers in a campaign-based, 1.0 world to write a fat check, check out, and be updated via weekly report on success. The Passenger toolset, however, strikes me as the “anti-smoking campaign”, sending a clear message that the way marketing managers must work today is different and there needs to be a tool that honestly helps them engage and manage the flood of communication and interaction.

It is my pleasure to post the interview below with Justin Cooper (no relation to Jessie). Hopefully we can have Justin come back again soon - I want to hear more about what they’re up to.

1. Who are you?

I’m Justin Cooper, the Chief Innovation + Marketing and Co-founder of Passenger. I consider myself a student of customer experience design, brand strategy and customer collaboration, because my perspective evolves every day. Over the last 6 or 7 years, I’ve worked with dozens of globally recognized brands with focus on bringing them to the table with their customers for purposes of innovation. I have an enduring love for my family, my friends, the arts, technology, the collective intelligence, surfing and sushi.

2. Tell us about Passenger - what is it and what makes it different than the competition?

There’s a lot of noise out there surrounding ‘community’. The notion of community means very different things to different people. For Passenger, ‘community’ is the venue for very purposeful interactions between a company and there customers, employees and business partners. ‘Community’ is also an inherent byproduct (a sense of ownership in the process) of inviting customers to contribute to meaningful change from outside the confines of the corporate walls. We’re different because we understand the subtleties of the word ‘community’ and how we focus on enabling companies to innovate with their customers in a very transparent way. We also believe that the design of the member experience is critical to the successful collaboration. We spend an incredible amount of time understanding how we can improve the member experience within the Passenger platform, so that brands can continue to optimize these interactions. The experience too often gets overlooked, which should be counterintuitive to and environment that is designed specifically to discuss how to improve the customer’s experience with a brand. We’re also leading the ‘no incentives’ charge, because the only incentive for people wanting to participate should be access to the brand and the social currency that comes along with being able to tell your peers, “you’ll never believe what I talked to Adidas about today.”

3. What do you consider to be the unique features of your software? Which feature are you most proud of?

Passenger is not focused on features as much as we are on delivering only the features that are necessary in order to optimize collaboration within the community. The platform consists of collaboration, networking and analytics technologies. We’re focused on involving as many people within an organization in customer collaboration as possible. For this reason, we don’t pretend to be able to provide you with reports highlighting the things that we think may be important to you, we put you in the conversation and provide you with a Dashboard that enables you to synthesize all of these conversations into action that YOU feel is important. Aside from the tools that we provide for you to get in on the mix, our ‘Sessions’ feature is pretty powerful. Sessions enable the community to come together synchronously to view rich-media (things like television pilot rough-cuts, new shoe ideas, new vehicle designs) and to discuss both with participants from the brand as well as with other members the feelings surrounding these topics or ideas “ a very visually stimulating experience.

4. I’ve been pretty hard on your industry lately, mainly because there’s a trend to let clients write a check and check out of the process. Have I been too hard on the industry?

I would appreciate you keeping the heat on! Customer collaboration requires a fundamental redesign of the way that brands have traditionally approached the market. You can’t just build it and they will come, you have to show-up and actively participate. This takes commitment. Collaboration dies if the brand is not participating. You have to not only listen, but respond AND anticipate customer needs. You’re also grooming and recognizing champions both internally and with your customers. Recognition for contribution carries a lot of weight and ultimately drives the community’s momentum.

5. Do you empower customers to move beyond the confines of the small groups and into the larger community? If so, how?

Empowerment comes from involvement in the process of bringing the most salient ideas to life. It’s the sense of “I helped build this”, which translates into advocacy as I had mentioned before. Beyond that, people are already involved in the larger groups anyway, technology enables this. The best part about this information being delivered back to the larger community is that it is coming from a trusted source in a time when people no longer trust companies.

6. How do suggest that customers translate the private, behind closed doors activity into the rest of the community or customer base that doesn’t get to see this private activity?

This activity is simply transferred by the customers themselves. People can’t wait to talk about things that happened behind closed doors. The rest of the community or customer base will realize the effects of collaboration in the form of better experiences, products and services going to market.

7. As more and more companies become interested in, and perhaps even start community engagement projects, what do you think is the biggest potential danger zone?

Danger zones include:

* Not having objectives.
* Being absent. You must show-up.
* Not recognizing contributions.
* Not being conversational.
* Not being transparent.
* Not demonstrating action.
* Treating people as respondents to research.
* Paying people to participate.
* Not having the Passenger platform and team in your corner.