1. why your business needs HEROes

When Dooce rants, it’s sheer poetry. Breathtaking in honesty and scope, Dooce’s rants about motherhood have a quality that people appreciate, especially other mothers. You do not want to be the target of one of those rants.

Dooce is a thirty-four-year-old woman named Heather Armstrong. In August of 2009 she reached the end of her tether. Marlo, Heather’s second child, had arrived two months earlier, in June. Heather knew what new babies mean: lots and lots of laundry. Her old Kenmore washer was failing. So she bought the big, heavy-duty clothes washer from Maytag, the company that for decades has advertised its dependability, and on top of that, she bought the ten-year warranty.

Twelve weeks into the life of baby number two, the Maytag was not doing its dependability thing. Heather’s poetic rants appear on her blog, at dooce.com. Here’s an excerpt from her rant about the Maytag, titled “Containing a capital letter or two”:¹

It takes a poet to tell compelling stories that include baby poop. Google “Maytag washer poor service” if you want to see the post; it’s in the top four results.

As it turns out, Heather’s sort of popular. Her book about mothering and postpartum depression,² It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita, made the New York Times bestseller list in April of 2009. Her blog has a readership of about 350,000 unique visitors a month. Her readers are devoted; her posts tend to get a few hundred comments each. When it comes to moms, Heather has power.

Let’s skip to the end here. Maytag’s third visit to repair the machine failed. Heather called customer service. Back to the poetic rant:

Bad move, Maytag. Because now Heather starts tweeting. Her million-plus devoted followers on Twitter see this:

Now Whirlpool (Maytag’s parent company) will tell you this story has a happy ending. Whirlpool monitors social media; they see the tweets.³ Unable to contact her by phone, they tweet back from their (admittedly seldom used) @WhirlpoolCorp account. Heather sends her phone number, and Whirlpool calls her the next morning. A more competent repair person comes and fixes the machine. And after two months of a Maytag that couldn’t be depended on, and three weeks of abuse from service people, Heather’s laundry emergency abates.

But the damage has been done. A million people have seen the tweets; how many have written off Maytag forever? Heather will not retract her rant; it’s true, after all, and as she told us, “No one should have to go through this.”

Her original blog post attracts 2,906 comments. Forbes writes a story about it.⁴

Whirlpool says it learned from what happened. Now it responds to tweets like this in public, on Twitter. That may make a difference in the future. But for now, it’s clear that in a contest between a poetic blogger with a twelve-week-old and a 67,000-employee, $17-billion multinational company, there’s no contest. The blogger won.

unleash your employees

Here’s what you can learn from the parable of Maytag.

Individuals like Heather now have incredible amounts of power over companies. And not only through social technologies like blogs. With their smartphones they can connect from anywhere, anytime. They’ve got video. They’ve got Google, Facebook, and a thousand Internet startups empowering them.

Your company is not and cannot be nimble enough to serve them. With your established processes and departmental boundaries, you move too slowly.

Only your employees can help. And only if you unleash them.

The same technologies that empower your customers are available to your employees. Right now, they’re using Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia and getting ideas about how to help your business. Technology is cheap and easy now. In marketing, in sales, and yes, in customer support, your staff are not just interested in reaching out to customers. In fact, they’re ready to build solutions, applications, and systems that will transform your business. The question is: will you let them? You must, and here’s why:

To succeed with empowered customers, you must empower your employees to solve customer problems.

This is much harder than it sounds. It means your staff are going to be coming up with solutions on their own. The ideas don’t come from management; management’s new job is to support and empower employees. The technology doesn’t come from the information technology department; IT’s new job is to support and encourage employees. It’s a complete inversion of the top-down way companies run. And it’s the only way to thrive in the age of the empowered customer.

Before you decide this is impossible, we’d like to show you a real, large, successful company where it’s working: the electronics retailer Best Buy. The Best Buy story sounds a lot like the Maytag story, but the difference is in the empowered employees and what they do for the business.

CASE STUDY

Best Buy empowers its workforce

Josh Korin is a recruiter—his job is to help companies hire people. Like thousands of other people, he bought an Apple iPhone at Best Buy in February 2009. Because Josh doesn’t like downtime, he also bought Best Buy’s $14.99-a-month Geek Squad Black Tie product protection plan.

When the iPhone conked out six months after he bought it, he was annoyed of course, but he also felt pretty smart for buying that protection plan. That is, until he went back to the local Best Buy store, where they offered him a BlackBerry as a loaner until the iPhone was fixed. Josh reread the protection plan agreement and decided what he was owed was another iPhone, not a substitute. The manager at the Best Buy wouldn’t budge, though. So Josh began to exercise his voice as an empowered individual.

As soon as he got home on August 29, Josh Korin’s 596 Twitter followers saw dozens of messages from a very angry man. Here are a few. (The “@username” messages here are directed at a particular Twitter member, while the # indicates a “hashtag” included to make tweets show up in searches on that term.)

Despite these complaints, this did not blow up into a PR nightmare like Maytag’s. Hemmed in on one side by Amazon and on the other by Wal-Mart, Best Buy can’t sell electronics as just a commodity; service is its major differentiator. So the company has invested in service, including monitoring people with problems on Twitter—searching continuously for tweets that mention terms like bestbuy and geeksquad.

Even though Josh was tweeting his complaints on a Saturday, two things happened right away. One was that Best Buy’s CMO, Barry Judge—one of the main supporters of Best Buy’s Twitter response force—responded from his own Twitter account at @bestbuycmo. He saw Josh’s tweet since it mentioned his Twitter user name.

And second, Coral Biegler stepped in. Coral is a “community connector”—her job is to monitor Facebook, Twitter, blogs, and other forms of social communication for problems just like this. And she (@coral_bestbuy) immediately responded with this message:

This message is directed to Josh, but the tag “#twelpforce” indicates that it comes from Best Buy’s Twitter Help Force. The Twelpforce includes both dedicated employees like Coral and members of Best Buy’s blue-shirted floor sales team and Geek Squad service representatives. If you include “#twelpforce” in your tweets, any one of twenty-five hundred Best Buy employees who have signed up with Twelpforce could respond and try to help you out. They do it over a hundred times every day. (Check it out: go to http://twitter.com/twelpforce and you’ll see all the responses.)

Of course, Twelpforce didn’t just spontaneously spring into being. Two of the social technology veterans at Best Buy, Gary Koelling and Steve Bendt, helped conceive it with support and encouragement from Barry Judge. A technology wiz in the eCommerce group, Ben Hedrington, invented the technology. A marketing guy, John Bernier, found a way past obstacles including labor laws, legal problems, and technical challenges to make it work. Without John Bernier’s ingenuity and perseverance, Coral Biegler would never have been in the position to respond, and Josh Korin would have been doing for Best Buy what Heather Armstrong did for Maytag—trashing it. What John Bernier and his team did—what they were permitted and empowered to do for Best Buy—is what really transformed this situation. They put Coral in a position to solve a customer’s problem.

Coral called Josh Korin at home the next day, a Sunday. She arranged for him to go down to the store and get a loaner until his phone was fixed. “Coral was unbelievable,” Josh told us. “She consistently said, ‘I will find you a resolution, since you walked out of the store not satisfied, and that’s not OK.’”

But this isn’t the end of the story. Of course Josh is a loyal customer of Best Buy, now. Of course he tweeted that he’s happy, and helped Best Buy to avoid its own Maytag moment. But what Coral didn’t know at the time is that Josh’s wife is @interactiveAmy, a Twitter member with over three thousand followers who gives presentations at places like the Social Media Breakfast group of Chicago (#smbchicago). Here’s what interactiveAmy’s Twitter followers were hearing:

Josh Korin and his well-connected wife never got to create an avalanche of negative word of mouth for Best Buy, because Best Buy, with some timely, well-placed intervention, turned these detractors into promoters.

the HERO-powered business

We’ve got a word for people like Coral Biegler, John Bernier, and the rest of the people at Best Buy—and in companies all over the world—who are taking technology into their own hands and creating solutions for customer problems. They are highly empowered and resourceful operatives: HEROes for short.

Coral Biegler is a HERO in customer service. Twelpforce is a HERO brigade. John Bernier was the HERO who helped make it possible. None of these people is an IT professional, but all of them are comfortable using technology to solve customer problems. They’re empowered and resourceful because Best Buy is run in such a way that they can be. It’s a HERO-powered business.

When we published Groundswell in 2008, the challenge was creating strategies for connecting with customers in social environments like Facebook or blogs. As more and more companies do this, the challenge has shifted. The problem is not just connecting with empowered customers, it’s what this engagement does to corporations. It’s a management challenge. Because these technology projects are grassroots solutions conceived by HEROes, not top-down management initiatives, they require a transformation in the way companies operate.

The purpose of this book is to provide you with the tools to tackle this management challenge, to create and participate in a company that is HERO-powered. We’ll explain how marketing, sales, customer service, management, and IT all need to change what they do and how they do it.

To lay the groundwork for this transformation, we’ll start with a closer look at the technologies themselves—how they’ve grown, how they empower customers, and how HEROes can use them to solve customer problems.

the new groundswell

The shift toward empowered consumers affects every business now, whether you’re selling washing machines, electronics, business services, banking, or entertainment; whether you’re in Salt Lake City, Chicago, Mumbai, or Madrid.

We are all in information businesses now. Media isn’t about books or DVDs, and financial services aren’t about stocks—they’re about information. Even for a manufactured product like a washing machine, the information about what it can do, whether it’s any good, and where to find the best deal is central to the transaction. The information economy is the economy, since information surrounds every product, real or virtual.

Companies that made their money from having better information than their customers are now out of luck. It used to be that advertising determined the opening weekend gross of a movie, but when Sacha Baron Cohen’s Brüno came out, ticket sales on the first weekend were already dropping on Saturday and Sunday,⁵ because bad buzz spreads faster than advertising. If your product breaks after the first week, or your price is out of line, or you’re offering coupons only in the store (or if your service puts parents of newborns through hell), your advantage is gone; everybody who counts will know within minutes. P. T. Barnum knew “there’s a sucker born every minute,” but now they won’t stay suckers for long, because they have access to the information you’re withholding.

The technologies behind this trend have grown and become more diverse. Four technologies now put more power in the hands of both customers and employees:

These trends, taken together, are what we call the new groundswell. They reinforce one another, but always in the direction of the individual, whether in the marketplace or the workplace. While they give power to customers, they also create new opportunities to serve customers, and new ways for workers to connect with one another (see table 1-1). As we said, if you want to succeed with empowered customers, you must empower your employees to solve their problems. Now we’ll show how this works for each of the component technologies.

smart mobile devices mean information is available everywhere

Three out of four consumers in America and four out of five in Western Europe have a mobile phone.⁶ But don’t think about phone calls. Think about phones as mobile information conduits. By 2009, 17 percent of the adult population, both in the United States and in Western Europe, already had mobile Internet service.⁷ Every consumer with one of these phones is empowered with information and social connections, wherever they are.

For example, Occipital’s $1.99 RedLaser iPhone app scans any bar code and tells you where the product is available online and what it costs. Go ahead, use it in the supermarket or the bookstore. People armed with powerful mobile devices have more information power than the marketers and retailers they do business with.

TABLE 1-1

The forces in the groundswell power shift apply in the marketplace and the workplace

With one hundred thirty thousand iPhone apps as we write this and millions of mobile Web sites, corporations are reaching out to serve consumers through these same channels. E*TRADE’s mobile applications have created loyalty with its fast-moving trader customers. And with so many employees now using BlackBerry phones, iPhones, and other smart mobile devices, companies are providing their employees with access to corporate information—not just email, but customer and product databases—on mobile devices as well. People need to collaborate wherever they are, not just at their desks but in meetings, at home, and on the road.

pervasive video transforms the online experience

The Web has been a text-and-graphics medium for most of its short history. Now video is taking its place at the center of many Web experiences. In one month in 2009, according to Comscore, 100 million Americans watched a total of 6 billion YouTube videos.⁸ Cisco says that in 2008, video represented 21 percent of all the data flowing over the Internet, and estimates that will reach 91 percent by 2013.⁹ More importantly, individuals now have access to inexpensive, reasonable-quality video tools, including sub-$150 video cameras from Flip (a Cisco subsidiary) and Kodak and mobile phones that shoot video now, too.

The result is that anything that happens anywhere is likely to be recorded and sometimes posted for all to see. Four hundred thousand people viewed a video of then–U.S. senator George Allen’s use of the obscure racial epithet macaca to refer to a campaign worker;¹⁰ partly because of this remark, he’s not a senator any more. Anything your employees do, anywhere, is about to be public in a very visual way.

If customers want videos, companies will give it to them. The Wall Street Journal’s home page now features video news analysis every day; sites from Home Depot to Amazon share video tips on their sites. Even the Realize Gastric Band, a surgically implanted device for obesity treatment, has its own YouTube channel.¹¹

Cisco also pushes those Flip video cameras for internal sharing within corporations, and it’s working; more and more people are communicating with video. Salespeople in particular seem to be open to visual learning through video.

cloud computing services aggregate power to benefit individuals

Online sites and services come from servers embedded in the Internet cloud. Online hosting services including Amazon’s EC2, Google’s App Engine, and Microsoft’s Azure make it easy for entrepreneurs to launch new information services for next to nothing. Developers can test and build applications that empower consumers with no more investment than a few thousand dollars. Zillow.com will tell you how much your house is worth, based on recent sales of comparable houses. Farecast, now part of Microsoft’s Bing search engine, monitors airline prices and predicts whether they will go up or down. When computing power is cheap and information can be gathered online, there’s no barrier to some bright developer building a service around it.

The same cloud computing resources that empower consumers make it possible for companies—or individuals within them—to reach out quickly. Any corporate site can embed a map from Google or Bing. When Derek Gottfrid needed raw computing power to process terabytes of digitized images for the New York Times’s “Times Machine” archive, he just rented computing time on Amazon’s EC2 servers—for several hundred dollars.¹² The New York Times hosts TimesMachine.com on Amazon’s servers, too, and pays only for the resources used.

More and more, corporate applications are running in the cloud as well. Corporate service providers like Salesforce.com (customer relationship management), Yammer (internal messaging), and Socialtext (knowledge sharing) aren’t software, they’re cloud Internet services accessible with a login from any Internet-connected device. When the servers, software, and storage are in the cloud, workers can use these services efficiently from any connected device.

social technologies have become universal

In the United States at the end of 2009, 59 percent of all online consumers were in social networks¹³; Facebook now has over 400 million members. In some places, like South Korea, three out of four online consumers connect with social content at least once a month.¹⁴ The result of all this is that you can tap into your friends—or strangers—for help with anything. Buying a DVD? The reviews on IMDb (Internet Movie Database) will tell you if it’s a cult hit or a dog. Whether a company’s product is a lemon, a retailer is charging a higher price than others, or a supplier delivers poor service, the information is instantly available.

Corporate social applications have taken off. Nearly every technology company has a support forum where customers help each other solve technical problems. Companies from Ford to Coca-Cola use Facebook, Twitter, and blogs—both their own and their fans’—to spread the word about their products.

Internally, social technologies connect workers. At the Spanish megabank BBVA, workers share in an internal blogosphere. At the airline information supplier Sabre, employees communicate on a Facebook-style internal social network called cubeless. Companies from Dell and Intuit to the insurance giant Chubb are using social applications to surface and support innovations that their employees come up with. Workers say they benefit from these connections every bit as much as consumers do.

build a HERO-powered business

All these technologies are immediately accessible. All are free or cheap for customers. All are accessible to employee HEROes. The tools to change your business, to become more responsive to these empowered consumers, aren’t the problem. It’s the way your business runs that needs to change.

In the first half of this book, we describe what HEROes actually do. We show you the full range of HERO projects and provide you with tools to evaluate whether the value of such a project is worth the effort. We follow this with a detailed survey-based analysis of different types of empowered customers and introduce the four-step process your company needs to square up to them, which we call IDEA: identify mass influencers, deliver groundswell customer service, empower customers with mobile information, and amplify the voice of your fans.

In the second half of the book, we describe how management and technology work in concert to create a HERO-powered business. Managing a business like this means setting up technology and management structures and creating a culture that grants a lot more autonomy to the employee problem solvers—a challenge both for top-down managers and locked-down information technology departments. We start this discussion by addressing the HERO Compact—the deal your HEROes, your management, and your IT group must make so that people can generate solutions, not just chaos. We’ll show you the patterns in employee use of technology and how to manage them. We also discuss how IT and managers can boost the power of HEROes with systems that encourage innovation and collaboration. Finally, we’ll describe how IT can not only support employees with technology, but keep their companies safe and secure as well.

Harnessing the power of HEROes is a difficult journey for most companies, but it’s worth it. At the end you will be not just more customer focused, but also more collaborative and agile. When you see what the HEROes in our book have done for their companies, we think you’ll see it’s a journey worth taking.