The videos from the Customer Service is the New Marketing Summit are starting to roll in, and we’ll be publishing them all here on the blog in the next day or so. Here’s the first one — Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos, talking about “Building a Customer-Focused Culture.” Thanks to Eddie Codel for the fine work filming and editing.
February 7, 2008
Slides from the Summit Now Available
SlideShare is featuring the presentations from our fantastic “Customer Service is the New Marketing” Summit speakers as their spotlight item today. Check ‘em out:
Tony Hsieh, Zappos
Robert Stephens, The Geek Squad
Michael Murphy, Virgin
Alex Frankel, Author, Punching In
We’re editing video of the event, too, and will have that out in a couple of weeks.
February 5, 2008
Notes from the Summit
“Customer Service is the New Marketing” — What a zany idea.
Well, not so crazy judging by the number of people who showed up for Get Satisfaction’s first Summit yesterday. The San Francisco Weather Gods startled everyone by punching the “Rain” button that had been stuck and depressed for the last few weeks. With our eyes now opened by sunshine (and ten or twelve cups of coffee), a packed crowd sat down to see if anything innovative is going on in customer service.
Boy, is there.
At the conference, I was chatting with Kathy Badertscher, of the DIY online book publisher Blurb, and she remarked that she had taken more notes at this Summit than she’d taken at any other conference in recent memory. She’s not the only one. Here are a few of the best blog posts and comments I’ve seen so far about what went on yesterday at the “Customer Service is the New Marketing” Summit:
On the Damn, I Wish I’d Thought of That! blog, Andy Sernovitz put together not one, not two, but three lists of great ideas he heard at the conference. That’s 38 great ideas! Bravo, Andy. These are real, actionable ideas.
Brian Solis, host of the “How to Listen to the Market and How to Engage Customers Online” workshop, put together a compilation of the tools that were talked about throughout the day. These are the online Web services you can use to open your ears and eyes to the things customers and bloggers are saying about you online. If you still haven’t started using these kinds of tools, drop what you’re doing right now and get yourself set up.
Ross Mayfield gives his impressions of Robert Stephens’ tongue-in-cheek (and very laugh-out-loud) “Marketing is a Tax You Pay for Being Unremarkable” presentation, which included the history of the Geek Squad.
On the Web Strategy blog, Jeremiah Owyang puts forward his findings from the Online Community Best Practices workshop he hosted. These are things you can utilize as best practices and benefits/cost analyses as you figure out how you’re going to incorporate and grow a real community.
If you want some wonderfully detailed and business-savvy coverage, Christine Herron’s take on the Summit’s main events are where to look. She writes down nearly every percentage and statistic mentioned — very impressive.
Jon Silvers’ Blog Bites Man blog has some well-rounded thoughts on what he considered “probably the most riveting presentation” at the Summit: the speech by Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. I can attest that everyone was as impressed by Tony’s humble and unassuming style as they were by his insight. “Creating the right culture is what keeps Tony up at night,” writes Silvers. “Not sales, not merchandising, not operations… culture. To address culture, everyone in the company — whether you’re in sales, service, or merchandising — everyone, gets five weeks of training. It includes immersion in the culture, core values, customer service, warehouse, and more.”
Five weeks! Now, that is impressive.
I was personally impressed that all of the speeches, panels, workshops were bursting with witty and telling observations. These are the exact same kind of interactions companies are trying to foster by marrying customer service and community. No one took themselves too seriously yesterday, but it seemed like everyone got something seriously useful out of the Summit.
Well done, community.
If you were there, thanks for attending! If you missed it, we’ll have video of the presentations posted in the coming weeks, which I’ll try to roll out as it gets edited. Flickr pics of the event are also available here.
And, of course, thanks again to our very generous sponsors, Joyent, VentureBeat, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Web 2.0 Expo!
February 4, 2008
Summit Start
We’ve been counting down to the big event: Our Customer Service is the New Marketing Summit. It’s here, and it’s now getting under way.
If you can’t make the conference, check out our live stream of the event, courtesy of Veodia.
More details on the conference can be found here.
[Update: Some users are reporting problems accessing the live stream. We’re recording the Summit for posterity, and we’ll have that content up in the coming week on this blog and in other spots. In the meantime, if you’re having problems getting the stream to work for you, we have another option. We have blogging going on at the event as it happens. You can check it out right here.]
January 30, 2008
Featured Speaker: Gina Bianchini of Ning
This interview is with Gina Bianchini, the founder and CEO of Ning. At Customer Service is the New Marketing, Gina will be on the Customer Service as Community, Community as Customer Service Panel.
I was first exposed to social networking when I started using the web in 1994. I got my first “real” dose of social networking in 2003 when I started using Friendster. At Ning, we define social networking very broadly to include all the different ways people want to connect with each other. If fact, when we started Ning, we were looking to what people were doing with eBay, Craigslist, Classmates.com, forums, etc. for what we wanted to create.
I like to think that community aligns well with customer service because there is essentially no difference between the two. Ensuring that the people using your service are happy or at least clear in the deal they are making with you when they use what you offer is the most important thing you can to do in our little corner of the world. If you don’t make that a priority, I’m not sure how you are going to be
successful.
We are all about community at Ning. We enable anyone to create their own social networks for anything. The people creating social networks on Ning, our Network Creators, are our most important constituent. We hopefully put our money where our mouth is in terms of being responsive and giving them the best service we can.
My day usually starts when I roll out of bed, check email to ensure that nothing blew up while I was asleep, and then go to the office. From the office, my only priority is ensuring that we’re putting out a great service and that we’re working on ways to make it even great-er-er. This is usually influenced by what our Network Creators are telling us they want.
As told to Douglas Hanna
There is still time to register for Customer Service is the Marketing, which takes place this upcoming Monday, February 4. Head over to the web site and you can attend this tremendous networking and learning opportunity.
