A good article on Conversation Agent outlined some very important trends that are both around stories: one an internal story needed to shape your own business’ strategy, and the other a need to grasp the old art of storytelling.
Looking at emerging trends:
- Customer experience will be more important than ever — we outlined a few areas to consider above. To those, I’ll add the importance of the role of the community manager to represent brand experience.
- Storytelling will evolve – location will become a key component; the speed at which stories are developed is crucial; and above all, emotional connections matter — you cannot fabricate, push, or coerce emotional connection.
While most may know that we should be focusing on a customer’s experience, few companies have adopted this into their internal processes to the extent that they should. Customer’s experiences should fuel the development of products, processes and communication. Many of us have been in meeting after meeting where opinions are levied, but no customer sentiment is aggregated.
Fortunately, there are a few tools that are emerging that will help us deal with these challenges. Among the new tools, Get Satisfaction (focuses on providing an idea/suggestion aggregation tool), is one of the most attractive in crowd sourcing your companies’ future direction. On the web/usability side, there’s UserTesting.com , Userfly, or the IT favorite, Silverback. All allow you to get first hand accounts at what the average user thinks about your website or web order process. Some of these even have extremely low cost payment structures.
The hard part will be getting people to agree that you should be designing around customers – oddly, enough.
The second bullet point addresses an interesting shift in the marketing landscape. “Broadcast” and “Communications Plan” has been replaced by an idea of Storytelling. An age old artform that needs new stars. In the age of twitter and facebook, the art of the story may be somewhere in between “the hook” (why someone should tune in – in 140 characters or less) and “the shocker” – content that was created citizen journalist style, that has information that no one else has. Intelligence is a natural resource. It’s scarce, but present. Now it’s time to mine it.
