Monthly Archives: May 2009
Book Report: Creating Customer Evangelists
| May 14, 2009 | Posted by Angela under Random |
At PEER 1, our employees will do book reports and post it to the staff site to share with others. I was up this week to post a book I recommend to others. It was tough to choose because I have so many books that I have in my back pocket to reference when I need some inspiration. Book topics I enjoy reading are Business (Leadership, Customer Focused, Purpose Driven), Personal Finance (Budgeting, Living Debt free, Saving for the future) and Inspirational / Motivational books. Sounds boring I know but that’s just what I enjoy at this point in my life. I find it relevant to what I want to accomplish.
So what book did I choose? Creating Cusotmer Evangelists by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba. This book is a bit old (2003) but I think the content is still relevant. The book contains very fundamental concepts that I believe are crucial to understand when managing and growing your customer base.
I first read this book in one of my college business classes back in 2004. We were focusing on the Net Promoter Score and researching how industry leading companies like Starbucks, Apple and Southwest Airlines were able to maintain off the chart scores. These leaders are not leaders because they only have a compelling offering. That’s just one piece of it. The other piece is how they have built a community around their offering.
Of course, step 1 is to have a compelling offering (you can’t make mud look pretty). Once you have established a customer base, focus on them! These are your friends. If they are happy, they will market your product for you – they will be your evangelist. Often times I think we completely miss the boat here. We spend so much time and resources on gaining new sales that we lose sight of what we already have in front of us. Below are 6 basic tenets of creating customer evangelists (straight from the book / website):
1. Customer plus-delta: Continuously gather customer feedback.
2. Napsterize knowledge: Make it a point to share knowledge freely.
3. Build the buzz: Expertly build word-of-mouth networks.
4. Create community: Encourage communities of customers to meet and share.
5. Make bite-size chunks: Devise specialized, smaller offerings to get customers to bite.
6. Create a cause: Focus on making the world, or your industry, better.
It makes perfect sense. Now, with the evolution of social media, we have so many outlets to practice these six key principles.
It’s important to know what your competitors are doing but it’s more important to know what your customers are doing. Once you lose sight of this, you have lost site of your business. Focus!
One company that I think has done a phenomenal job in creating a community is Harley Davidson.
The Goose in our frontyard…seriously
| May 7, 2009 | Posted by Angela under Family Stuff, Random |
Once again, I am awakened by our barking dogs. Our bed is positioned right next to the window facing the street. We have a corner house so our dogs have a whole side view of what’s going on in the street. They are great guard dogs but sometimes you can do without the barking when it’s just a rolling plastic bag they are barking at.
Early this morning, our dogs were going crazy. I woke up and yelled at them to shut up! Well that woke up Jason. So now we were both up. In between the barking, you could hear this strange sound. Our dogs have killed a cat before (sorry to say) and so I was hoping it was not some injured animal. The sound was very frequent like a quacking duck. The dogs did not stop their barking. So Jason went outside with a flashlight to see what the heck was going on.
Turns out there is goose wobbling down our street. Jason comes inside and says “There is a goose on the street.” A goose? Seriously? So I had to go outside to see for sure (not that I didn’t believe him). It was dark so cars couldn’t see it. Jason was trying to get it to the sidewalk (like it knew the difference). Then when it saw that we were trying to help it, it chased us (or at least that’s what we thought). It almost came running inside our house. It just sat there in our yard. We called animal control and told them we had a goose in our frontyard. They first started laughing and then they gave us the number to Wildlife control. They didn’t answer. The goose laid in the yard the rest of the morning and when we were ready to go to work, it was not there anymore. We hope it is ok. We were thinking it might have been sick and just got disoriented. Who knows. But there was a goose and here is a clip to prove it.
Teaching students the basics of Entrepreneurship through Junior Achievement
| May 6, 2009 | Posted by Angela under Community Involvement |
I am a Junior Achievement (JA) volunteer and I started this semester’s program 3 weeks ago.
JA Worldwide is the world’s largest organization dedicated to educating students about workforce readiness, entrepreneurship and financial literacy through experiential, hands-on programs.
I was a Program Assistant for PREP (PreFreshman Engineering Program) back in 2001 and this was when I discovered my passion to inspire our youth. When I started working at Rackspace back in 2003, I was introduced to Junior Achievement. I love Junior Achievement because it allows me to take business practices from my work life and share it with students. Students are learning their basics in school – which is needed – but they need to understand how it pertains to the real world.
As members of this community, I feel that it is our responsibility to inspire our youth. We can’t leave it up to only our teachers. I know that I would have never gotten to where I am at today without certain individuals inspiring me throughout my childhood and young adulthood. I am still being inspired, not only by accomplished individuals but from our youth. I learn so much from the students I teach.
This semester, I am working with middle school students. It’s something about this age group that I feel like I can connect to the most, more so than elementary or high school.
The topic for this semester is Entrepreneurship. Yay! My favorite!
The first day I met with the students, I was so nervous! I got all these butterflies in my stomach. I kept thinking “will they like me?” “will they listen to what I have to say?” “do they care?” I had done this before but when you meet a new set of students, it’s like going in for an interview.
No matter what, I had to come in very confident. They needed to know that I knew what the heck I was talking about. I am already young so sometimes I may not be taken seriously.
I first had to introduce myself and let everyone know what I did for a living. We were going to go over the basics of Entrepreneurship. Then we were going to play a game, structured like Jeopardy, where I gave them hints of CEO’s and/or companies and they had to guess the name.
I had a very energetic group of kids. It took them a while to settle down. I introduced myself and explained what I did. I educated them a little about the Internet. As soon as I mentioned YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, their attention level went straight to 100%. These were things they knew about and could relate to. I talked about the founders of these companies and how they had a vision. They loved it!
Phew! I was in. We went on to play our game and not only did they learn but I actually learned about CEO’s I didn’t know of before.
Last week, they had an exercise to develop a blueprint of their Teen Club. This was essentially teaching them how to build a business and think of ways that they would sell it – who would come and how much it would be. They designed their entire Teen Club.
This past week, they created slogans and commercials for a preselected product. These were products that were unheard of and weren’t necessarily real. The products we used were spray on pantyhose, an alarm watch that only woke you up when it sensed you had enough sleep and then programmable paints for your home. All were real products except the programmable paint (which makes me think…).
They were so creative! They came up with slogans and even promotions. They are very smart kids. I hope they remember the lessons we are learning:
- Fill a Need
- Know your Product and Customer
- Be Creative and Innovative
- Believe in Yourself
(Sometimes real world businesses need to be reminded of these basics.)
More updates to come as we continue our sessions.
San Antonio Walk with us to Cure Lupus
| May 2, 2009 | Posted by Angela under Community Involvement, Family Stuff, Health & Fitness |
Today was the “Walk with us to Cure Lupus” event at Brackenridge Park. My family had a team, Team SOL (Stomp Out Lupus), and we set a goal to raise $3000. My mom was the team captain and she got our team to raise $3688 as of today. The overall goal for San Antonio was $12,500 and we raised $22,656. Phenomenal! We are raising money for the Alliance for Lupus Research. Lupus is a disease that it difficult to diagnos and the medications to treat Lupus are very strong. We want to learn more about this disease so we can find better treatment methods as well as create awareness. We are doing this in memory of my Aunt RoseAnn who lost her life to Lupus at the age of 27 years. We also have members of our family on both sides that suffer from Lupus.
My Aunt Ruby helped put the event together and she did such an amazing job. We had such a great turn out. There was a balloon arch, Ronald McDonald appearance, drinks and snacks and a t-shirt contest. The weather was also perfect. It is so moving to see family and friends come together for a common purpose.
I really like Brackenridge park. It’s well kept and it is right in the heart of San Antonio. My only complaint? There are no recycling bins! We had tons of plastic bottles left over and the only option was a trash can. This is LAME San Antonio! So as a citizen of San Antonio, I am going to be contacting the San Antonio Parks and Recreation Department and inquire about putting recycling bins at Brackenridge. I will update you with my findings.
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