Influential Marketing Blog

5 Things Customer Care Teams Wish Marketers Did Differently

Earlier this week I had the chance to present at one of the largest annual meetings of customer care professionals in the world, the SOCAP International Symposium. SOCAP stands for the Society of Customer Care Professionals, and among other things, its members include the folks in charge of running call centers, managing customer response teams and sometimes branching into running loyalty programs as well. If marketing is all about the outward appearance of a brand and perception, then customer care (more than any other group) is focused on the reality of what your brand actually is.

This battle between perception and reality, interestingly, is where the divide between customer care and marketing usually arises. The larger the company, the more divorced these two disciplines seem to be - often only meeting at the last stages of planning a marketing campaign to finally discuss coordinating. Not surprisingly, a key theme I quickly saw during the SOCAP event was that the communication between marketing and customer care needs to get stronger across the board. In particular, there were 5 themes that emerged for me (as a marketer) that define what customer care people would love to see from us more frequently:

1. Involve customer care in strategic planning. This request could just as easily come from any other area of a business, but knowing the direction earlier that marketing and branding teams will be taking can dramatically help customer care professionals to manage current customers and even contribute to amplifying a marketing effort once it does hit the market.
2. Proactively escalate and share issues. The thing many marketing teams fear most is negativity of any sort. If you are in the pharma space, this means adverse events. In a consumer space, it might be a negative experience that potentially could lead to a recall. Most customer care teams, however, have very specific processes for dealing with these issues and quite frankly are a lot better at it than any marketing team could ever be. Contrary to what many marketing teams think, the customer care team wants to know about negative experiences as early as possible. Hiding or ignoring them simply makes the customer care team's job that much harder once they actually do need to deal with it.
3. Encourage marketing staff to take customer care training. This is already happening in some organizations, but it was cited more than once as an important part of helping marketing teams to understand how to deal with consumers in a positive or negative situation. Some companies already have this process in place, but for others who are considering it, it can be a great way to make sure that the marketing plans and efforts are informed by some real level of understanding of how consumers actually behave and what they really think.
4. Expand customer care lessons to third party agencies. As a marketer who works for an agency, I appreciated this point most of all ... and it is about making sure that any brand extends their learning and policies when it comes to dealing with consumers to the third party marketing agencies and vendors who might be acting on their behalf. This is particularly important because increasingly people are just assuming that anyone who they might interact with during a marketing effort works for a brand - agency or not, so everyone needs to be following the same guidelines and ideals.
5. Ask for (and listen to) customer care insights & trends. For all the money that marketers spend on consumer research, surveys and focus groups designed to help them understand their consumers, there is no better place to start than by understanding what your current customers who are already contacting you think. And the people they currently speak to are the customer care team. Before your head off with your newly approved marketing research budget in hand, make sure you are leveraging and paying attention to what your customer care team already knows (and would love to share with you).

NOTE: This post was originally published on the 360 Digital Influence team blog.

SBF: How To Avoid Wasting Money On A Sponsorship

Across my marketing career I've been involved in dozens of campaigns and marketing efforts that included some sort of sponsorship. Most marketers love sponsorships for the simple reason that they are packaged campaigns that are relatively low effort to implement. Someone else is doing something like an event or running a great organization and you simply want to be part of it and promote your involvement. The down side of the relative ease of sponsorships is that it is one of the areas where you could potentially waste the most amount of money and time.

Doing sponsorships right demands some strategic thinking, but also knowing what to look for to evaluate the right opportunities and make sure that you're choosing what to sponsor well. Here are a few tips that I have learned along the way and often share with my clients about how to make sure you are choosing sponsorships that will pay off in the short AND long term for your small business.

1. Think strategically, not emotionally. The biggest mistake many small businesses make when choosing to sponsor an event or organization is to do it out of convenience. Someone may be a friend of a friend, or perhaps an event is coming to your hometown and so the logical thing seems to be that you would want to sponsor and support it. Doing favors for the community is completely fine, but the best sponsorships will fit some sort of marketing strategy at the same time. There are many deserving causes and efforts worth supporting - why not focus on sponsoring something that is either tailored to people who you consider your target audience, or has some thematic tie to your business?
2. Participate in person. Nothing can make a sponsorship really come to life as much as you or one of your employees personally participating in the event or organization. They may mean supporting a group by volunteering, or simply showing up to an event that your company is sponsoring. Your presence there not only makes your business real, but it also gives the organizers someone to thank.
3. Barter services in return for sponsorship. The barter method of sponsorship where you provide some type of service in return for your sponsorship is a long standing tradition for small businesses and can help save some cash. In the best case, this barter arrangement will also come with some sort of exclusivity for your category. The last thing you want is for all your competitors to also appear alongside your brand at an event or as supporting partners for a particular organization.Exclusivity is golden anytime you can get it.
4. Make your logo work harder. On the TV show The Office, there is a reason they called the new parent company for Dunder Mifflin by the name of Sabre. It's the ultimate big corporate name that means nothing. You're not quite sure what Sabre does or the products and services they provide. The only thing you know for certain is that they probably don't sell actual sabres. Lots of companies have names like that, and it means that you need to make your logo work harder in the places where it appears, by adding a tagline or something to describe your business beyond just having your logo up there.
5. Use the "gratefulness metric." In general, the smaller the event or organization, the more grateful people involved in the effort will be at your organization's sponsorship. Gratefulness is a powerful motivator to help you get real value from sponsoring something. The people behind the event will be more concerned about making sure you get value from the event and you may very well create a longer term relationship that will not only turn them into future customers, but word of mouth advocates for your business.

NOTE: This post is part of Small Business Friday (SBF) - a weekly feature on this blog to share marketing ideas for small businesses and was originally published on the American Express Open Forum site.

Marketing India With The Rickshaw Challenge Race

If you imagine what India looks like, chances are you will picture two things. The Taj Mahal (of course) and the organized chaos of the Indian roads. In most cities large and small, people, cows, bicycles, cars, elephants, trucks and scooters all coexist in a transportation ecosystem that has managed to work despite its complexity. People communicate by honking their horns or flashing their lights. Cars like the Ambassador are routinely patched up or completely rebuilt and last for decades and in the midst of this bumper to bumper jumble is a vehicle that may be the most iconic of those on the Indian roads ... the three wheeled rickshaw.

Part scooter and part taxicab, the majority of these rickshaws are actually used as lower cost taxis - navigating their way through tight openings and rapidly transporting people from one point to another. For the last five years, these rickshaws have become more than just a mini-sized taxicab ... for some adventurous travelers they are the ticket to one of the most unique holiday experiences you can have in India.

The Rickshaw Challenge is a series of road races where participants can choose their own rickshaw's and race across parts of India. The Malabar Rampage race through South India is in its final day today and you can see live updates from the teams on the race blog. For any of the races, you get rickshaw driving lessons, have the chance to "pimp your shaw" with a custom design, and be part of a unique community of racers who have created their own culture and fraternity. The route for most races, which takes you through big cities and rural areas, offers a unique philosophy for seeing India:

By racing in a rickshaw you have to slow down, after all the top vehicle speed is 80 kmh or 50 mph. (Way faster than any of the local wildlife, FYI.) This way you’re forced into enjoying the adventure: from the awesome views to the local people and fellow racers.

The rickshaws are "guaranteed to break down" - but as the informational site about the event shares, even the most rural of towns will have the parts and skill to be able to put the simple engine back together. So even though you'll break down, you won't get stranded. The race is happening right now and there are lots of photos and team blogs that you can read to get a sense of the race. One of the best is called RickRollShaw shares soundbite experiences such as this:

This type of holiday is definitely not for everyone - but it does demonstrate a useful and important marketing lesson about creativity and ultimately word of mouth too. This is the type of vacation that people who participate (and even those who don't) will talk about for a long time to come. It is uniquely Indian and something no one else could offer. That's the way to market a destination for tourism, but an important lesson for any other industry as well. If you can create something unique enough, people won't be able to help sharing it with others.

NOTE: Thanks to Arun Rajagopal for spotting and sharing this with me.

SBF: 6 Ways To Get People To Believe You Online

Let's be honest - the web isn't always the easiest place to create trusted relationships. After all, the personal cues that we might use when meeting someone face to face don't apply. You never know who may be behind the keyboard in any online conversation and there are plenty of unscrupulous characters ready to take your money, reputation or time in thousands of ways. This, unfortunately, is the online world we live in ... and it is also the world that you must consider when trying to build relationships with your customers and promote your small business online.

Trust online matters. If you can build it right, then you can drive people to your business either online or in the real world. To build it amongst the many barriers online, there are some basic principles like trying to create a useful and engaging experience online and making sure that it WORKS (ie - a site that doesn't crash all the time). That alone, however, won't be enough. This post is meant to offer some ideas for what more you need to do beyond the basics:

1. Talk like a real person. Nothing gives the impression that you're faceless more than using completely neutral third person language across your site. Instead of using the same old marketing mumbo jumbo to describe your business, how about giving people a bit of the story behind your company? Why was it started and how did you build it? When you can tell a story in your own voice, it creates a foundation for believability in everything else you do online.
2. Share your plans. If you think about your relationships in real life, when people share more about what they are thinking and planning to do, you feel more involved with them. Giving the inside story is a great way to build trust. There are several ways this could translate online. One may be to offer some sort of exclusive experience and content through a loyalty program or Fan page on a site like Facebook. Another could be to choose a set of customers to be part of an inside circle of advisors that you ask for feedback and inspiration. The more you can share online, the more people you can get invested in your business.
3. Admit your failures. One of the things you can learn from Domino's recent campaign about their Pizza is the power of admitting when you have failed. No one is perfect and sometimes it is the fallability in each of us and our businesses that can go the farthest to build trust.
4. Respond directly. When it comes to social media and the world of the web, there are few things as powerful as finding a way to directly engage with your customers online. This could mean using a tool like Twitter to respond directly to customer feedback, or simply posting comments on blog posts that mention your business or the category your business is in.
5. Use multimedia. As the cliche goes, a picture is certainly worth more than words, and online this is particularly true. If you can find a way to include more images of your retail location, or a photo gallery of your employees working together, or video of your products - each of these can go a long way to sharing the inside story behind your business and establishing a basis for trust.
6. Encourage advocates. Sometimes the best way to build trust in your business is to have lots of people online saying good things about you. This could involve having more people review your business online, or finding people who are particularly vocal about the industry you are in and introducing them to your business. Whether it is an individual rating or a influential content creator - every voice that you can get supporting your business online will be another reason for people to trust you., so you’ve decided to start using the Internet to promote your business more actively and most people you talk to who know about the web tell you the same thing … you need to redesign your website. The problem for many small businesses is that getting to the point when you actually have the budget or manage to get the right help to do it may take some time.

NOTE: This post is part of Small Business Friday (SBF) - a weekly feature to share marketing ideas for small businesses and was originally published on the Amex Open Forum site.

Twitter Sponsored Tweets & Predicting The Future Of Marketing On Twitter

This week Twitter finally shared a business model that introduces the idea of promoted tweets as a way for organizations to pay for branded tweets to appear in search results much as paid results appear on any Google search. It's a simple and relatively conservative first step and though some people may have cried foul or accused Twitter of "selling out" - my sense is that the fallout will not lead to any significant drop in usage for Twitter.

The bigger question is what does this mean for where Twitter is heading? The fear that some users have is that this is only the first step in a progression for Twitter, an opinion that seems to be supported by the blog post on the Twitter Blog yesterday which referred to this move as "Phase I." To help understand what this might mean for the future of Twitter, I did a bit of thinking on why this move happened today, why it matters for marketers, what the potential issues might be, and where it might lead Twitter in the future.

Why Will Marketers Be Willing To Pay For Advertising On Twitter?

The first question you might ask is whether organizations will even be willing to pay for advertising on Twitter in the same way that they currently pay to show ads in search results on Google. I think that they will because ...

1. People who are already used to getting paid to endorse products, services or ideas (ie - Celebs & the Internet-famous) are actively using Twitter and increasingly expect to be able to monetize their voices as they can in other media.
2. Twitter is great for driving traffic, the one thing many marketers care most about, because links are front and center and often you NEED to click a link to get the real context behind the soundbite/headline shared in 140 characters.
3. There are two relatively simple and basic built-in metrics to Twitter (number of followers and number of clicks on a link) - which makes measurement very straightforward and uncomplicated for most marketers.
4. As more and more brands create corporate and branded Twitter accounts, pressure and desire to grow their own followings will increase - which means they will seek more ways to build their branded followers on Twitter.

What Are The Real Potential Issues With Marketing On Twitter?

The concern for Twitter "selling out" isn't a big deal in my mind. No one who stops using Twitter for this reason really matters to the ecosystem of marketing or to the site anyway. The real concern is one of disclosure and ethics. In particular the following issues:

1. There is no recognized standard for disclosure in tweets. Some tweets include the hashtag "#spon" which stands for "sponsored" and would make no sense to someone unfamiliar with the lingo.
2. Disclosure and transparency will always be hard in 140 characters. The challenge of proper disclosure often comes down to the simple limitation of space. Often you just can't fit a message that makes sense, and the right disclosure to be ethical within 140 characters.
3. Any disclosures are often lost in retweets. The ecosystem of retweets are primarily how a message spreads across Twitter to reach many people and even become a trending topic. The problem with retweets is that often for space limitations or other reasons the disclosure that may have been included in an original tweets is stripped out of the retweets so very rapidly a message loses any sort of transparency of bias that it may have originally contained.

What Will Twitter's Business Model Phase II And Beyond Look Like?

This is probably the toughest question to answer, but if I were helping the site to identify this, I would focus on three core areas (the first of which they have already started with their recent announcement for the promoted tweets):

1. Sponsored Search Results. Twitter search is rapidly becoming a utility used by some as frequently as Google search. Putting into place a model that duplicates much of the functionality of Google's AdWords program is the simplest place to start. People are already familiar with this model as well as the idea that there is a combination of organic search results (those that appear based on algorithms) and paid search results (those that appear as a result of an organization paying for their placement). I expect to see their sponsored tweet program evolve in a similar way to how Google has evolved Adwords - even down to the local focus through geotagging tweets and messages.
2. Paid Registration & Account Verification. Due to increasing fraud, Twitter began verifying accounts of the famous and semi-famous. Now that mark of "verified" has become something of a badge of honor - indicating that you are important enough to be verified by Twitter. There is a long waiting list to get accounts verified and an obvious choice seems to be to make this into a paid subscription service. The option to have a free account on Twitter will continue to exist, but for those who use Twitter for professional reasons, there should be a paid option as well. For paying a monthly or annual fee, you have your account professional verified and perhaps the ability to appear more highly on certain types of search results as well. A cross between registering your domain name and a Pro account on Flickr, this option would likely be chosen by hundreds of thousands of "power users" of Twitter - including myself.
3. Sponsored Influencer Tweets. The most contentious move to monetize Twitter would likely come from having a model where individuals would be paid for what they tweet about and organizations would be able to pay a fee to sponsor individual tweets. This model already exists through several services, including Ad.ly. The simplest way for Twitter to add this functionality would be to acquire Ad.ly and roll their model and services into Twitter. Ultimately, this move will come down to a timing issue, as I believe it will happen after the first two changes are already implemented.

5 Marketing Lessons From Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution

I used to dream of a good marketing TV show. Not one that makes the world of marketing into a scripted drama, like Mad Men. Or one that pretends to be about business but actually ends up being about relationships and emotional conflict like The Apprentice quickly became. The Shark Tank on ABC comes close, as up-and-coming entrepreneurs try to sell their ideas for funding to a group of ruthless investors ... but even that format is a bit abstract when it comes to more of the day to day reality of marketing.

Recently I've gotten hooked on an unlikely program - a reality TV show about a British chef who is trying to convert the unhealthiest city in America (Huntington, West Virginia) to be more health conscious about the food they eat. Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution is a show about a quest Jamie Oliver is on to educate America about the food we eat, the dangers of processed food and how to cook healthy. He won the TED Prize earlier this year for the idea and is now fighting his battle through a TV program on ABC.

The show has all the real life appeal that drives viewers to watch reality programs - along with the story of a man on a mission usually reserved for documentary films. Along the way, the show is rapidly becoming a brilliant case study in social marketing and how to change beliefs. The last episode which aired this past week showed Jamie making a bet with a local radio DJ in Huntington that he could get 1000 people in the city to cook healthy in 5 days. Over the first few episodes, you also saw Jamie helping school "lunch ladies" to make healthier food for schoolchildren and working with a small group of high school students on reinventing their lunch menus.

If you do any sort of cause related marketing, or have an interest in changing the world in your own way ... I highly recommend watching this show. Here are a few initial marketing lessons that I'm taking away from the program over just a handful of the first episodes:

1. Set an impossible goal. Jamie has already set what may be the most ambitious goal ever - to change the way the entire country of America eats. The way he initially brought it to life, though, was to focus on educating what has been called the unhealthiest city in America - Huntington, West Virginia. By choosing a seemingly unchangeable city where more than 50% of adults are obese, he created a goal that seemed unreachable. When you have a goal like that, you become an underdog and if there is one truth of human behaviour (especially in America), it is that you can't help but cheer for the underdog.
2. Put in the hard time for your cause. One of the most unique things about Jamie's Revolution is that he is fully invested in the first goal of changing Huntington - spending at least two months (and perhaps longer) living and working in the city. By being there every day and understanding the community, he is able to find the right influencers who matter to help him spread his message, and (more importantly) to build some credibility as someone invested in the city rather than an outsider focused on quick results.
3. Build your own evangelists. By being in the city for an extended period of time, Jamie was able to create his own groups of supporters. This was important when he launched his crusade to teach 1000 people to cook in a week because he already had people in the community who would speak on his behalf and help recruit others.
4. Convert your biggest enemy. Central to his early successes was how he understood early on that converting his biggest detractor would be a necessity towards converting the rest of the city ... particularly because this individual happened to be the host of the largest local radio program. So instead of focusing on those who might be more "influential" such as the Mayor or Governor, he focused on someone who could have an even bigger impact if he could change his perceptions.
5. Don't count on one campaign (or focus on one demographic). This may be the most valuable lesson to take away from the program. In most cases for marketing campaigns, you choose a target audience and build a campaign around that. Jamie, on the other hand, has focused on Elementary schools, gone to a college campus to start a flash mob, ventured into people's homes to interact personally with them, and even taught a group of steel workers how to cook. By speaking to multiple groups at the same time, he is effectively building his revolution beyond just one group. Ultimately, that's what a revolution will take.
   

Video of the Flash Mob:

SBF: 5 Innovative New Business Models To Consider In 2010

As time goes on, one of the more interesting trends that continues to happen with surprising regularity is how frequently new business models and ways of doing business are emerging through social media and online tools. In many cases, these trends are helping to reinvent how businesses sell and consumers buy all kinds of products. For that reason alone, new sites are worth paying attention to no matter what industry your business happens to be in.  The benefit of that for your small business is that watching these new models may also spark a new idea or method of selling that you can consider for your own business:

1. Woot - This online retailer takes the unique approach of only selling a single product each day. Around each daily product is a dedicated conversation stream, live commentary and a detailed description. By focusing on a single product, not only do they add a layer of conversation and description to the product, but they also give their users the perception that each daily deal is special and only available for a limited time. This focus allows them to add urgency to their site and convert browsers to buyers quickly. While you may not be able to convert your entire business to just selling one product at a time, this model may be the next evolution of the long-standing "deal of the day" model that many businesses have used at one time or another in the past.
2. Groupon - How much would you lower your standard prices if I could guarantee you 100 customers? Or how about 1,000? The premise behind Groupon is to offer customers "collective buying power" - which essentially means that you can offer a great deal and it will only kick in if a set number of consumers take you up on it. Go on the site and you will see deals sorted by region and many of them have been redeemed by thousands of people. What Groupon shows you is that sometimes you CAN actually count on volume to compensate for lowering your prices. The nicest thing about the site is that instead of trying to recreate this model on your own site, you can add a special offer for your business to Groupon.
3. Hotwire - By now most people are familiar with the new auction based pricing model that Priceline introduced into the travel industry. Letting consumers set the price for what they are willing to pay was a revolution in the travel industry at the time when Priceline was introduced. Hotwire used the slightly adapted model of offering exact prices, but not letting you know the details of what you booked until after you pay. If you have your own eretail site, this model can be a good way to get rid of excess inventory in a different and more fun way.
4. Blippy - If you don't live your life in social media, the idea behind Blippy will likely confuse you. It is a social site that lets people automatically share the latest things they have purchased (and how much they paid for them) by linking the site to a single credit card. This level of transparency and sharing may seem crazy to many people, but the site represents a social experiment that points to an interesting opportunity for businesses whose customers may be used to sharing every small detail of their lives. It may be an outlier in this list of business models as they admittedly don’t have a revenue model for the site as yet – but the shift in what people are willing to share online is the real trend worth watching.
5. Dubli- This site offers some of the most creative pricing models you can find online - and models that have not yet been duplicated across many others sites. The first is what they call a "reverse auction" where products have a starting price and you use credits that you purchase on the site to reveal the current price. Each time a member of the site uses a credit to reveal the price, the price goes lower until someone decides to make the purchase. The second model is based on a "unique price auction" which means you need to have the lowest bid that no one else chooses to have in order to win.

NOTE: This post is part of Small Business Friday (SBF) - a weekly feature to share marketing ideas for small businesses and was original published on the Amex Open Forum site.

How To Start A Movement

Some ideas are a banquet. They go on and on, and invite us to consider what they really mean for hours or days - or sometimes much much longer. Then there are the flashes of insight. The quick sparks that we immediately react to and understand when we hear or see or touch them. These are the types of ideas I wish I could find and share more often. Ideas that inspire in a moment. Starting a movement, for most people, is much more complicated than just having an idea. If you happen to work in a place where this is part of your goal, your questions are often about stakeholders and messages and creating something "viral." We are all seeking the formula that turns that idea into a movement.

This weekend I saw a short 3 minute video presentation from Derek Sivers at TED that presented an irreverent conclusion - that leadership, your idea and even your "strategy" may be the most overrated elements of creating any kind of movement. Here's the video:

As a blogger, I often try to focus on coming up with new ideas. One of the biggest - Social Media Optimization - only turned into a movement because of this principle of the first few followers. There were five others who added an additional 11 rules to my original 5. They were equals, alternately being cited as creators of SMO as much as I was, and their voices brought context and attention to the original idea. But as this video points out, it's not just about creating new ideas.

If you want to make a change in the world, sometimes the real trick is recognizing a great idea or effort and being one of the first few followers. As Derek says in his presentation, "if you really care about starting a movement, have the courage to follow and show others how to follow."

SBF: 6 Pitfalls To Avoid When Choosing A Domain Name

We all know that a good domain name matters. When you are doing any sort of marketing, your call to action will often be to get people to your website - and if you choose a URL that doesn't make sense or is hard to remember, you are just making it hard for your customers to find you online. Yet despite this almost universal understanding that domain names matter, many small businesses make the same mistakes repeatedly when it comes to domain names.

Whether you already have a domain name for business or are in the midst of choosing one, here are 6 mistakes to avoid when it comes to domain names:

1. Pitfall #1 - Automatically using your business name. It may seem like the best thing to do is to take the exact name of your business and append a “.com” to the end of it. The problem is, sometimes your business name is too long, or your customers may know it differently.
2. Pitfall #2 – Not reading it together without caps. One thing that is easy to forget about domain names is that when someone reads it without any uppercase letters, the words run together. So if your small business lets people trade books and in the real world it’s called “The Books Exchange” – if you register that name online (www.thebooksexchange.com), you inadvertently just gave your site a whole new meaning.
3. Pitfall #3 - Assuming the best URLs are taken. Last year I finally registered www.rohitbhargava.com. You might think that couldn’t have been that hard, but I have have trying to get it for more than a decade (literally). How did I finally get it? Many domain names that have been registered for years come back on the market after their owners fail to renew them. So keep checking … you dream URL may become available any month.
4. Pitfall #4 – Thinking people can spell, or that they all spell the same way. One of the basic truths about people is that they can’t spell seemingly simple words. And even if they can, across different cultures, various words are spelled differently.  Traveler has one “l” or two, words like “organize” with a “z” change to “organise” depending on where you are. As much as possible, try to use words that are easy to spell and are spelled consistently.
5. Pitfall #5 – Not registering common alternate versions. Sometimes no matter what you do there are going to be multiple ways that people will try to find you. Coca-cola will always have to register www.coke.com as well as their full name. Think about the common alternatives for your business: for example, plurals, or versions with qualifiers like “the” or “a” in front of them, and register those.  Even if it just captures one more potential visitor to your site, isn’t that worth the extra $10 a year?
6. Pitfall #6 – Failing to use relevant keywords in a URL. One of the best ways to get better Google rankings is by having a URL that has a particular relevant search term or keyword as part of it. So if your entire small business is focused around shoes, try your best to get that word into the URL you do choose. Your site will likely rank much higher on search engines as a result.

NOTE: This post is part of Small Business Friday (SBF) - a weekly feature to share marketing ideas for small businesses and was originally published on the Amex Open Forum site.

5 Crazy Social Media Ideas We'd Love To See (But Probably Won't)

This year for April Fools Day, I was thinking of running another gag like I did last year - perhaps announcing that Zappos decided to buy Amazon or or something along those lines, but instead I thought I would go in a different direction. Today's post is about a few things in social media that many of us would love to see, but  most likely never will. For now, they will remain just ideas, but you never know ...

1. The Idiotic Startup Name Police - One unfortunately accepted truth of social media has become that the trendier the idea, that more nonsensical the name of the service will be. So instead of respectable or logical names that actually describe what something does (such as LinkedIn), we get Robunko or Smokzee which mean nothing but fit what seems to have become the number one criteria in naming your social media startup: an available domain name. This invite only group would be responsible for policing idiotic startup names from new companies. The punishment? Having to legally change your middle name to your startup name.
2. The "Before Their Time Social Media Evangelists" Linked In Group - As someone who evangelizes social media use within companies, I feel for those forward thinkers who advocate using social media for months or even years, and finally find themselves proved right and listened to only when there is some sort of brand crisis that forces their organizations to pay attention to social media and create a strategy for it. This invite only group on LinkedIn would be a support system for those people to give them a place to vent about being "right all along" and enjoy their ultimate vindication as their organizations finally start listening to them.
3. The SMGAT Test - If everyone is a social media guru, then the natural question to ask is what qualifies someone for such as title? Perhaps what the industry really needs is a standardized test for it. The Social Media Guru Aptitude Test (SMGAT) would offer a standard against which any aspiring social media guru's level of guru-ness could be measured. The test would include such challenges as forcing them to do 5 tweets without mentioning themselves or creating a strategy without using the words "listen" or "engage.". Not to be biased, but I'd also offer bonus points if they were Indian (or at least willing to wear a turban consistently to prove their guru-like stature).
4. The Social Network Defriender Tool - Many of us had more promiscuous days when our standards for friending or following people were not quite what they are now. The problem is that today it is tough to remove anyone because there is no easy way to filter people. This tool would allow you to filter based on a lack of communication between you and a someone, or any other factor and then give you a short list of people to potentially delete.
5. The "Not Worth A Pitch Email" Gmail Plug-in - Everyone seems to be in the pitching business, but often insignificant pitches are sent to all of us and make it through because we have no way to filter them. This special plugin for Gmail would be specifically to capture those types of pitches. You could set it up to recognize offending phrases such as "discounted viagra" or "exciting new hire" or "world's first" anything. Once a phrase like this is recognized, it not only deletes the email, but also sends the sender an automated pitch from a library of useless pitches that we can all contribute to.