Experience planning isn’t a simple task, because if it was, everyone would be getting it right. I think it actually takes a lot of thought to not loose someone at hello.

Lets take my church, for instance. When a visitor arrives they are subconsciously asking themselves the question ‘who here is like me’, all the time wanting to feel safe and secure, and not having to be noticed or attract attention to themselves.

As you can imagine, it doesn’t take much to knock one of those.

The trick to keeping someone at hello, I think, is to get into someone else’s shoes and really into their mind and understand what it is like to approach you for the first time.

Your Leading Thoughts

• How have you learnt to keep someone at hello? What are your tactics?

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

You Lost Me At Hello?

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgxVsxbhYhs

If you can’t see the above video, click here, or watch it directly on YouTube.

My friend James Whatley pointed me to this exceptional peice of work that he and the team at 1000heads did for Nokia. In the video above, you see the execution of a master plan of word of mouth creation and experience planning, in which they surprise a group of Nokia fans around the world by arriving on their doorstep or flying them to London and then giving them gorgeous sports cars to drive to fulfil a challenge that involved using various Nokia products like OviMaps and their phone.

Two things to say here. First of all, I hear people slam Nokia a lot (mostly Nokia fans) for not having Apple’s marketing machine. But I don’t see Apple hiring WOM planners like 1000heads and doing incredible things like this, or this, or partnering with Like Minds, for their fans on a regular basis.

Second thing: this takes us right back to our discussions on experience and expectation management. Remember this diagram below from Managing Expectations:

If we break this video down, the trailer (the front loading of the experience) is when people get the cars in the first place. It surprises people, it delights people, it’s completely unexpected. But what it now creates is suspense.

Suspense is the experience of anticipating an experience, and when you create one great experience, people will begin expecting another.

The real beauty of this video and work by 1000heads is not the cars at the beginning, it’s the fact that they exceed the expectations and deliver a better experience after that.

To put this into a metaphor, as per the diagram above, the film was better than the trailer.

Expectation Management for Event Planners

Here’s a quick note to the hash of people creating events around the world: you need to understand suspense and how to front/back load your experience to make sure that your marketing doesn’t exceed your delivery. I’d have you start by reading about the Expectation Pyramid, and then the Basics of Expectation Management.

If I was in a fighting mood I could list event after event where it sounded and looked far better than it actually was. The days of these hacks getting away with this won’t last much longer in my opinion.

Your Leading Thoughts

• If we were talking about a purely digital experience, when have you had your expectations exceeded?
• What can we draw from that experience to learn more about digital suspense?

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

Lessons in Experience from 1000heads

If you can’t see this video, click here, or watch it directly on Vimeo.

My wife shared this video with me yesterday, so I assume it’s doing the rounds. But watch it to the end and there is a masterstroke of salesmanship.

So go watch it.

Done? Now, here’s what I think:

The credits are the two guys in the video quirkily thanking the individuals who did each part, and asking you to subscribe to their channels. Of course, having watched 4 minutes or so of stop-motion mastery with these guys, their facial expressions and creativity creating an emotional bond, you trust them. You like them. And you want to be a part of the community that they are a part of.

It’s like an the end of the theatre - as the actors bow, I want to go and have drinks with them because I’ve shared an emotional 3 hours with them. We’ve been part of the same story, of which they were the story tellers.

Then these two guys let me know that I can have a deeper part of the story – I can buy one of the t-shirts that they wore. It’s memorabilia - and in the experience economy, memorabilia is what extends the experience through creating a physical touch point for the emotion experienced in a fixed event. By buying the memorabilia, I’m becoming part of the story.

No doubt if you go to buy the T, they’ve sold out. So now there’s demand for products which will only spread the video further and further.

All of this through an experience of 4 minutes.

Why Do I Think This Is A Big Deal?

People keep telling us ‘tell stories’ but they often don’t say how and they also don’t say how you monetise it. I think this is an exceptional example of how to do it.

Furthermore, as the experience economy becomes more and more prevalent in the digital world, this is also an exceptional value of how to create a digital experience (I’m not talking about flashy websites, but emotional experience.)

I’d highly recommend in fact that you read Pine and Gilmore’s The Experience Economy (affiliate link) if you haven’t by now, and you’ll see how good an example this video is, and how you can do likewise.

Your Leading Thoughts

• How do you think you can do a similar thing with your business and your products? Get specific, and as a community, let’s share some advice with each other and help one another out.

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

How To Sell, Today (With Video Example)

There’s only one problem with Apple’s model, and it’s an issue of anticipation and expectation. Namely, it is this:

Apple do such a good job of hyping and showing the new thing off, that when I get my hands on the new thing, nothing is new anymore.

You know what I mean here. I remember touching the iPhone for the first time, and as cool as it was, the demonstrations on the website had done such a good job of showing the device to me, that physically holding it had little new about it.

The Power Of New

I always say that the two most powerful things in products and the marketing of them are newness and usefulness, and the most powerful of these is new. If something is new (and marketed powerfully as new), then it can even surpass it’s own weaker usefulness. This is the story of the iPad itself. While many doubt its utility, everyone is certainly swept up in it’s newness.

The whole Social Media world is based on the power of new. If you link to your blog post, it may get retweeted. But if you announce it as a “New Blog Post”, you’ll get a lot more attention. Massive sites like TechCrunch and Mashable all function on the pulling power of new. Everyday millions of bits of information are shared on Twitter and Facebook – most of it, new. Of course this new is really nothing new in itself – it’s what journalists have known for years – hence the pressure to always break a story first, because people don’t buy old news.

Getting back to Apple, as I described above when I first held the iPhone, the problem for me was that although the device was new, when it came to holding the device, there was no longer anything new about it. This is what I expected from the iPad – for people to finally hold the thing, but have nothing new to report or review.

But this time, Apple created newness on another level by delivering surprises that no one knew about. This article from Gizmodo, “10 Essential iPad Tips and Tricks” reveals 11 new things that you can do that people didn’t know before. This is smart, because when people are now reviewing and talking about the iPad, rather than just discussing it’s usefulness (which people are debating), there is something new to discuss – the new features! And what we know about the Social Media hype machine is that it loves new.

Creating New

The reason why I’m excited about this is because back in January I wrote about Apple needing to employ this new level of new in their whole buzz experience. You can read it here. The main point I brought out was a framework to explain how Apple uses suspense to market their products, which I call the Pyramid of Expectation:

In this model (based on Pine and Gilmore’s in The Experience Economy – affiliate link), we see four levels of experience that the customer can have based on the level of their expectation.

When a consumer has an expectation, it is like a promise that the brand has made with them. The promise says that “we will deliver what you expect”, and this expectation is built on a range of things, from marketing to trusted referrals. Of course the idea is that the brand manages these expectations as best they can – but you can read more about that here.

Quite simply, according to this model,

• Sacrifice is when the expectations aren’t met
• Satisfaction is when the expectation are met
• Surprise is when the expectations are exceeded
• Suspense is the experience of anticipating an experience

Therefore, to create new, one needs to look at this model and ask themselves where their customers expectations are? In the case of the iPad, most people are in suspense mode. They are having the buzz experience of anticipating the launch – but traditionally, when they get their hands on the product they go down into satisfaction mode – their expectations were met.

What Apple did this time was rather than letting them drop into satisfaction, they instead delivered a surprise – something new that they were not expecting – and therefore exceeding expectations.

Lisa Barone wrote a great peice for Duct Tape Marketing in March this year on “How to use Surprise to Generate Word of Mouth“. In it she lists the following axioms to create surprise:

• Show Up Where They Don’t Expect
• Go Further Than You Have To
• Give Them Something Different
• Listen When They Think You’re Not
• Make The Little Things, Big Things

By just using these, you can immediately find simple and effective ways to add that element of new into what you do.

Your Experience of New

Experience happens in the senses of the beholder, and what one experiences as new and useful, another may not. Of course, correct profiling can generate target audiences, but still, with each person having different dominate senses and motivatiors within a target audience that is based on sociological information, there is a need for marketing and products to be both multi-touch and multi-sense.

I’m curious, then, because what I percieve to be new may be what you percieve to be old. So what I’d like to discuss with you is:

1. How much is new a driver for you on a daily basis?
2. How much is usefulness a driver for you on a daily basis?

Thanks for reading – and I look forward to talking with you.
Scott

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

How Apple Created a New Level of ‘New’ with the iPad

This is a photo of me, Chris Brogan and Molly Flatt and the Like Minds Summit earlier this year. Looking at it reminds of one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learnt – namely that what I remember from that day isn’t the content we discussed (despite it being amazing), but it’s the feeling of friendship that I had.

Earlier this year I guest posted an article on Search Engine People discussing a simple framework to focus on feeling, because the reality is that when people reach the door, close the laptop, or put their head on the pillow, they don’t remember what was said, they remember how they felt.

Armed with 4 A’s, I used a restaurant as an example to explain how this is done – and you can apply this to anything: a shop, website, event, person, anything. You can read the whole thing here. The synopis briefly is that you need to consider:

Anticipation: How do you people feel about you, before they’ve experience you?

Ambience: What does it feel like when people are with you?

Assistance: How are you providing people what they need, so they don’t feel unsure or unprepared or?

Association: What does it feel like to be linked to you?

What I wanted to discuss today is what this statement, people don’t remember what was said but how they felt, means for us in the light of recent conversation. Right away, for example, I think of conferences where we often find organisers and speakers cramming content down throats, without thinking about how those attendees will feel about the event as a whole.

When you get to thinking about experience and feeling, you have to be user focussed, because that’s where all the feeling happens!

I was speaking to Chris Hall the other day (we meet up face-to-face a lot), and he was saying that the top thing he remembered from Like Minds wasn’t the content, it wasn’t hanging out with the great people, it was actually when I saw him on the Thursday night before and gave him a hug. That messes with my organiser mindset that says people will remember some profound thing that I said or some great innovation that we made. Because they won’t. They’ll remember the bit that made them feel special.

I wonder, then, how you can stop thinking about what you are saying, and instead on how you are endeavouring to make people feel special.

Your Leading Questions

• When did you come away from something and you remembered how you felt far more than what you heard?
• How do we translate feeling into action?
• How do we measure feeling?

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

People Don’t Remember What Was Said, They Remember How They Felt

One of the things I persistently tell my staff is “get on the phone!” When trying to get information, sort something out, or close the loop on a contract or task, I really do hate it when people leave things to email when they could so easily pick up and phone and do it right there.

Even when my wife says to me “I’ll text them” I say to her, “why text and wait for an answer when you can get one right away if you call!” The other day I even had someone say to me that they hoped so-and-so got their tweet about their meeting. My answer again was, “Phone?”

We seem to have forgotten sometimes that our mobile phone does indeed make phone calls on top of email and tweeting!

How we similarily reduce Social Media to media

I think we also tend to forget that Social Media is social on top of media. We are trying to build relationships, provide useful experiences, develop connections and communities, create opportunities – but many are functioning on a level that will not get achieve these goals.

The connections that I have – the people that I am collaborating with, who are building with me, who partner financially with me - my communication with them is far more than a tweet. Of course it is! But so many are frustrated when they don’t get this level of connection, when all they are doing is just tweeting.

I keep telling people to Scale the Levels of Communication. What I mean by this is depicted in this model below:

The idea here is that by sending someone a personal email, you communicate at a level that would’ve taken 50 tweets. Not rocket science, but I don’t see many people doing it. (Three people I have experienced who do this exceptionally are Chris Hall, Chris Brogan and Robin Dickinson.)

No wonder people aren’t getting the deals, the contracts, the opportunities – they are just keeping things at the lowest level of Social Media communication!

Anyone who works with me knows I want to make things as personal as possible, as quickly as possible. My preferred method of communication is totally a phone call, because it it conveys passion, enthusiasm, stress, trust, discouragement, stature, confidence, frustration, etc in a way that 10 emails one after the other just can’t.

A phone call means I can talk it through right there and then – and even better – I get to hear your voice. I get to hear how you communicate, rather than just reading it. Even better again is meeting up. If up to 93% of all communication is non verbal (and the rest that is verbal consists mostly of intonation, tone – things that are very hard to translate into writing), then how little of communication are we actually getting through 140 characters!?

Let alone, all the people who are dyslexic, unpractised at communicating in 140 characters, too busy to really get into Twitter, etc. By hiding behind your Twitter client you’re missing so, so much opportunity.

How I practically do this

- If you email or tweet me good or bad news, I’ll call you back.
- I tell people when they meet me to call me.
- If have something important to discuss, I’ll do it over the phone and just use email to set an agenda. I’ll then email you minutes of what we discussed for the record.
- If we’re collaborating on anything, I want to speak to you before we do.
- When I’m connecting with someone, even on a low level, I’m always looking to scale up as soon as I can.
- If I’m building a relationship with you and it’s long distance, and I really want to make it work, I’ll go out of my way to physically meet you (normally that means I run an event and pay for you to come, hey Trey and Olivier?
- While we work together, we’ll have calls at least once a week.

Does this scale? I don’t know. I’ll level with you, my companies are small and I don’t have many clients / partners. But I have a very deep connection with those few, which produces working relationships that I have been able to build incredible things with.

This ‘high touch’ also creates an exceptional level of VIP experience. It’s the same thing that we put into Like Minds for both our participants and speakers. I spoke to all our keynote speakers, for instance, several times in the months leading up, and am still speaking with them now. That’s what makes people call it things like “a conference apart” and “not the same old same old” – because we partnered in this together through regular communication with all involved.

Let me hear from you

Literally, call me. Let’s be doers of the word and not hearers only.

Are you scaling up the levels of communication? If so, how do you decide with who you want scale up? Is it hard to scale up?

Photo courtesy of Pixel Addict

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

Scaling The Levels Of Social Communication

My aim with event planning Like Minds was to not make as much of a conference as it was an experience. It’s something I’ve been doing and talking about for a while, and out of all the incredible remarks people have made about Like Minds (thank you all, so much, by the way), I was thrilled by how many kept echoing my sentiment and agreeing that it was an experience.

Make People Feel Special

Chris Brogan said both on Friday and his blog post on Saturday that Social Media is about making people feel special. I’m so glad he did that. Like I said above, I’ve been hammering on and on (and getting criticised) about experience – but perhaps now that Chris has spoken people will wake up and listen.

I feel silly as I write this because I feel like I’m performing some kind of rank-pulling by using the big names (and while I’m at it, John Bell also agreed) – but I have to get this out and into the community.

If anyone wants to know the secret to our success with Like Minds, I can tell you it in one word: experience.

Experience is what separates the everyday from every day – a compelling experience separates what is so remarkable that you use it every day from the things that are common and just plain everyday.

What Was Said, and What Was Felt

People forget 90% of what was said by the time they reach the door. This knocks all of the arrogance out of you because you realise that saying profound things isn’t as important – or memorable – as making people feel profound.

I think that many things are an experience waiting to happen – they just need to stop making people listen more than people can, and make them feel things instead.

UPDATE: I should’ve said that Like Minds Alumni Vanessa Warwick wrote the same words before I did here.

Photo with many, many thanks to the dedicated Paul Clarke

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

First, Make Everyone Feel Special: Social Media Ethics 101

People don’t care.

No pretty picture today. No flowery language. Just let the reality hit you: people don’t care.

Remember Eurostar?

When everyone was angry, they went to the Twitter account for answers. The Twitter bio said “Official Eurostar Twitter feed. Not Eurostar customer service but trying to help get information out to our customers as received. Thanks for understanding.” But the truth is, people did’t care. I labour the point here.

If you represent the brand, you are the brand.

If people need anything from the brand, you better be ready to give anything they need -whether it’s your department or not.

The idea of customer care is so your customers don’t have to.

And that calls for some integration. With all the talk of strategy, engagement, conversation and the rest, too many people now vastly exaggerate what they can offer, and unfortunately don’t offer the basics of having something that works.

I learnt that lesson for myself again this week. We are taking registrations for Like Minds Lunch Time Talks and someone complains that the process isn’t easy. It doesn’t matter that it’s because they have to pre-order their food, and is part of us measuring how we are raising £100k for the city. They don’t care. And the truth is, they shouldn’t. They just want it to work.

Question

• If you had to offer 3 pillars for integration – and no more than 3 – what would they be?

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

People Don’t Care

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCpViu8kY3o

If you can’t see the above video, click here.

Compelling is not synonymous with what is good. My favourite book, the Bible, records some pretty bad stuff. Bad, but compelling. In business we want to create good experiences. Actually, scratch that -- we want to create great experiences. But the reality is that in life, it is often the most distressing bad experiences that compel you the most.

What you don’t want is boring. Boring is lost and forgotten, wasted to the pages of FAIL and such stuff.

Good and bad are both compelling. Tony Robbins, the life-transformation guru, wrote in Unlimited Power that people either move towards pleasure, or away from pain. One of Guy Kawasaki’s points in the video follows a similar though: polarize people. In other words, compel people to hate your product, or love it.

Good and bad -- just to philosophise the debate -- are generally subjective. Apple’s iPad announcement for many is life-changingly good, but others will find holes with, despise it, and not support it at all.

Watching this video from Guy (a personal favourite of mine), one gets very inspired to get on the edge of innovation. It’s the same feeling you get when reading Seth Godin’s Purple Cow (affiliate). Cue inspirational one liners: Being safe is being risky. The middle is crowded. Be different. Be purple. Do something remarkable.

Here’s the rub: it’s easy to say ‘be good and bad but not boring’, and it’s easy to do it when you have a flexible organisations with brands that clearly live in these places of polarisation (everything I do lives there, so I know it well.) But many companies can’t do it. Their mindsets don’t permit it, their guts don’t permit it, and perhaps their companies just don’t need it.

I don’t know. So, let me hear from you. Here’s some questions to spark some discussion:

1. Is poliarisation (being good and bad) a sustainable, long term strategy?
2. Do businesses need to innovate remarkable products? Is just delivering a good service remarkable?
3. Is remarkable just hype? Does boring sell?

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

The Good, The Bad, And The Boring

Today I’m going to layout how to go beyond even exceeding expectations and begin to get into the realm of managing expectations. This is ultimately your ability to control what people expect from you – and controlling those expectations means you are able to exceed them every time.

So first, to refresh your memory and provide a frame of reference, here’s the diagram from yesterday. When it comes to managing expectations, we can do it on all these levels, as we went through. If you under promise and over deliver, you will give customer surprise. It’s a hack job, but you’ll do it. What we need, though, is something more than this, and something which has more sustainability and long term strategy – and we find it is in customer suspense where expectation management really flourishes.

Suspense is, as we know, the experience of anticipating an experience. This can be the first time someone interacts with you, or it could be the nth time. Your ability to continue to place your customer in suspense and not merely surprise, satisfaction, or even sacrifice, comes from your ability to manage their expectations. The longer your go on with a customer, the easier it is for them to drop down the pyramid unless you innovate in the way your manage expectation.

Understanding suspense by looking at films

I think one of the best ways to understand suspense and expectation is with films. When the trailer for a film comes out, we have a peak of suspense because suddenly we are anticipating the experience of the film. This suspense spike lasts for a short while, and then goes dormant – until the film starts playing TV spots and other advertisements. We go to the see the film – and our suspense is the highest right before the film starts. From then on, we are now in the experience that we were anticipating, and based on our expectations, we will leave surprised, satisfied, or sacrificed.

This above diagram somewhat sums up what we experience for most films. But there are times when quite drastically, the trailer created more expectation than the film delivered, and we have sacrifice – the classic line being “all the best bits were in the trailer!”

This lesson of “the best bits were in the trailer” is first lesson in expectation management: what is your end?

In order to know what you have to give, you must take stock of what you’ve got. What is the sum total that your customer leaves with? Equally, you need to know what you will receive. You’ll see why in a moment.

Consider the following three scenarios:

1. A B-grade movie knows that it has a cheap storyline to give, and short-term ticket sales to receive. Given that its delivery is weak, it front-loads the best scenes into the trailer on purpose, to create expectations (suspense) that it knows it can’t meet, in order to get people in the cinema so the studio can receive its money. Important: even when they give their end away at the beginning, people still come thinking there is more. No matter how much you give away up front – people will always think there is more, even if there isn’t. So the studio makes lots on ticket receipts over a short period of time. They don’t even think about getting long-term revenue here. This is sacrifice.

2. Apple know that they have a great, game changing product to give, and years of sales and increased market share to receive. Therefore they release information to create a lot of expectation and buzz, but not more than they can deliver on. There’s the suspense. Then, they back-load the expectations. This means they keep the best stuff hidden They know that if they exceed expectations and surprise, they have done well, and even if they just meet expectations and satisfy, they have a very loyal fan base to receive sales from. They are actually more concerned with creating lots of suspense at the beginning to get people talking, than delivering a surprise on that suspense. This is surprise, or satisfaction.

A new café opens in town that already has a number of cafés. They know that they have a ‘newness’ factor, a unique selling point, and high standards from newly trained staff to give, and sales, a customer base, and permission to build long term loyalty with those customers, to receive. Given that they are new in town, they must not only satisfy expectations, but exceed them (surprise), to get customers to return and prefer them over their competitor. The first months are critical for them to continually surprise in order to lock in long term loyalty. This is surprise.

All this might seem like common sense, and it is. What each scenario highlights, however, is that once you know your end, and what you will receive, you know how much of the end to show, to get what you want to receive. A general rule of thumb is:

• If receiving short-term gain, front-load the expectations, in order to get numbers and sales in a spike.
• If receiving long-term gain, back-load the expectations, so that your over delivery gets people back for the next thing you do.

If you find that you’re running events, for example, but no one is coming back – then this may well be why. Why should they come back if you only satisfied them but didn’t surprise them? Given all the competition, if you only satisfy, then you lack uniqueness.

This is only a small part of expectation management, but it’s the start. Below I’ve given you a summary, and have asked specific questions from you. I’ll answer every question you ask to help you get better at this.

Actionable Summary

1. Work out the sum total of what you have to give. This is called ‘the end‘.
2. If you want to get short term gain, give away the end up front.
3. If you want long term gain, give some of the end up front, but keep either a good portion, or the best portion, stored up.

Leading Questions

• Do you identify where you are failing, because you are not managing expectations?
• Does this model work with content marketing online? I’ve got a hunch that it does, but keen to hear your experience.
• Have you proven this model wrong? Are you having long term success by front-loading experience?

This thought comes from Scott Gould's thinking blog for thinking people. Scott is also on Twitter and Facebook.

The Basics Of Expectation Management