loyalty

When We Use the Wrong Kind of Glue

For the longest time, I’ve been a Samsung guy when it comes to Android smartphone choice.

I never really had brand loyalty before when it came to phones – I’d simply use what I needed at the time, which resulted in me switching between Nokia, BlackBerry, Motorola, and more.

Then I got a Samsung S3, and I was hooked, and stuck with that brand for years.

Recently, my phone died, and – since I was now on a new network that wasn’t restricted to phones or service contracts – I decided to look around a bit.

My research brought me to the ASUS ZenFone 4 and, after a bit more research, I decided to take the plunge – and I’m so glad I did.

The phone is everything a high-end phone should be but at half the price. I felt a sucker for sticking with Samsung for so long.

Last night, I went to see the new Justice League movie. Typically, I’ve stayed away from the DC Universe of movies, as I’m pretty much a Marvel guy through and through.

Add to the fact that director Zack Snyder has made more than a few turkeys recently, and early reviews were scathing, I wasn’t expecting much.

Man, was I wrong – this movie is fantastic! Great story, wonderful ensemble cast with excellent chemistry, and a neat weaving of today’s climate – racism, isolationism, despair – into the bigger superhero story arc.

Simply put, this was what the Avengers: Civil War movies lacked, and it felt like a true team up on-screen.

Again, had I let brand loyalty sway my decision, I would have missed out on one of the best movies of this year (as far as action/superhero movies go).

Loyalty Is Worthy, But It Needs to Be For The Right Reasons

In a way, brand loyalty is much like personal loyalty. We find someone, or something, to offer loyalty to, and we lose focus because of what blind loyalty can instil.

I recall, many years ago, being in a relationship where it was clearly over. There were so many warning signs that I either didn’t see, or chose not to.

So, we stayed together, and it was awful. Have you ever tried to excuse something that’s wrong because you want it to be right?

Even though all your friends are telling you it’s wrong?
Even though your family fear for your health?
Even though your other half sees the effect your loyalty is having on you and so reinforces the wrong-as-right?

If you have, you know the devastating effect it can have, both short-term and long.

You know the sinkhole isn’t getting any better, because you refuse to fill it in with logic, sense, and clarity.

Until you finally break, and the recovery from that takes even more strength, and you miss out on the things that could have been so much more to you.

This is true for work as well as love, friendship as well as family.

We make our own bonds, but sometimes we use the wrong kind of glue.

All in the name of loyalty.

Be Loyal to You

I watched a friend literally die from loyalty many moons ago. He was an ex-junkie, and was with the wrong people at a time in his life he could ill-afford to be.

Personal tragedy had left him vulnerable and, although we tried to help, his loyalty was with those who had been around him at his darker times in his previous life.

His dealer became his confidant. His loyal friend. His go-to shoulder.

Of course, my friend couldn’t see that this loyalty was only proffered when it came attached to money for solutions to the pain.

Whether he ever realized that, I’ll never know. His loyalty went with him to his early grave.

Loyalty… is…. difficult. So many things vying for it, so many things to get wrong.

Because there is something inherently good about loyalty – after all, who doesn’t want to be the one that others count on and never let down? – it makes it easier to screw up.

And that’s okay, because none of us are perfect. Hell, I continue to hurt those I love even when I try and make it the last thing I’d ever do.

Because pain comes with loyalty. But if pain can come from loyalty, so can softness. And repair. And love. And acceptance.

Especially when we realize that being loyal to ourselves will reflect the loyalty we both give and receive.

It may not cure bad choices through misplaced loyalty overnight – but at least it’s a start.

Building Loyalty is Simple, So How Come We Make It So Hard to Do?

Loyalty. A funny concept. One that can mean so many different things to different people at different times.

Sports teams have loyalty from their fans. Well, the true ones do. Think Manchester City as opposed to Manchester United, where the latter?s ?fans? are more interested in prawn sandwiches than a good soccer team.

Indie bands have loyalty from their fans. Until they sign that big record deal, that is, then they become sell-outs.

Humans have loyalty from their dogs. But then you would be pretty loyal as long as you had someone cleaning up your shit.

So, yeah, loyalty ? a funny concept.

And yet it?s something that?s so important to so many people, they spend their lifetime(s) trying to work out how they can build loyalty around what they do.

After all, build loyalty, you build bigger success, right?

More readers; more subscribers; referrals; business; money. Get that gold rush and you don?t have to worry about marketing whatever it is you’re trying to build.

So, yeah ? loyalty is something pretty much everyone wants to achieve in some form or another.

And not just loyalty, but fierce loyalty. Because if you grab that piece of gold, the world is truly your oyster.

That shit starts revolutions.

And so companies spend thousands (millions?) on trying to create loyalty programs.

Bloggers spend thousands of words trying to say the things they think their readers want to hear to become loyal.

Social media ?gurus? spend all day on Twitter when they should be doing real work, just to try and get that extra loyal follower to buy into their crud.

And it?s all a waste of time. Seriously.

Because you don?t need to spend thousands, if not millions, of dollars trying to build loyalty.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Think like the person whose loyalty you want and ask what really matters to them. #pureblogging” quote=”Think like the person whose loyalty you want and ask what really matters to them. #pureblogging”]

You don?t need to be that desperate typist.

You don?t need to be that good-for-nothing-except-quotes-for-Mashable social media douche whose only loyalty comes from those laughing at him religiously.

If you want loyalty ? fierce loyalty ? it?s easy: be fiercely loyal first.

Show people you care. Show people you mean what you say.

Every time.

Show people they can trust you. Show people you deserve that trust. Show people you?re not a dick who simply panders to those stroking your ego (or your dick). Show people every one of them is equal.

And it?s not fucking hard to do this.

– If you?re a blogger, encourage dissention of your views and don?t let fanboys be your voice.

– If you?re a business, embrace your critics as much as your fans (if not more so).

– If you?re a manager, let everyone speak and not just Tommy Kiss Ass.

In fact, no matter what you do, in what discipline and in what medium, it?s really not hard at all to build loyalty.

Think like the person you want to become loyal to you and ask what really matters to them.

Get that simple thing right and you?ll have loyalty so fierce you?ll wonder why you were making it so difficult to achieve to begin with…

Your Product Will Catch Me, Your Service Will Keep Me

I?m a marketer by trade. It doesn?t matter if it?s traditional marketing, or digital/online marketing ? at the end of the day, the tools may differ but the trade stays the same.

Yet in a previous life, I also headed up the main call centre for the U.K.?s largest communications company, and that was based around the service side of things.

And you know what?

Service beats marketing hands down any day if you want a successful company.

You can have the greatest product; the most amazing sales pitch; the must-buy item of all time. And yes, they?ll bring in the dollars.

But that?s where they stop.

Sure, you can regurgitate a sales or marketing message into a different campaign, and call it something different. But at the end of the day, it?s still a limited experience.

Service, on the other hand? That?s the gold in the jester?s hat.

A Tale of Two Service Superstars

The other thing about?great service is it not only builds loyalty to a company, but encourages organic marketing via the advocate(s) that service has created.

You listen to a customer, and show you care about their support of your product, and they’ll be the first to share your details to friends, colleagues, family, etc., when it comes to them looking for the types of product or service your company creates.

Point in case – MeanThemes and Postmatic.

Nothing Mean About MeanThemes’ Service

Anyone that’s been around this blog for a while will know I tend to change its design more than Madonna changes “dance partners”….

It’s become a running joke, and I’ll admit to tinkering with the look and feel much more than any blogger should. But, for me, it’s all part of the ongoing evolution to present the best experience possible, for both reader and myself.

The theme?you’re looking at now (at least, if you’re on-site – if you’re reading through email and haven’t seen it, pop on over, I won’t bite!) is Myth, from MeanThemes.

I’m a huge fan of the Medium approach to content presentation – large featured image, clean typography, no distraction content area. So, for me, Myth was perfect.

Setting the theme up was pretty easy, but then I ran into some roadblocks with some settings (mainly, plug-in conflicts and some drop quote styling).

Any time I wrote to Chris, one of the co-founders of MeanThemes, through their ticketing system, he was on the ball and responded within 24 hours, often much less.

Not only that, but I’m currently looking at the Lasso plug-in for front-end editing to tell stories more effectively on here, and that has some weird CSS tricks it needs you to implement.

Chris spent a week looking at the plug-in, how it integrates with themes, what CSS improvements it needs, etc, and is submitting all that info to the Lasso creators.

Now, remember, this isn’t part of the MeanThemes toolset. Nor is it really any of Chris’s concern.

The fact he took all this on board, though, and advised me to wait until his suggestions reach the Lasso team, validates my decision to go with MeanThemes and make them my de-facto go-to if/when I decide to change up my theme again.

Postmatic and the Art of the Customer Journey

I’m a huge fan of Postmatic, as anyone who’s read my blog posts over the last 6 months can attest to.

For me, they make blog commenting fun and more social again, and they make it so easy that anyone can take part and enjoy.

They’re also great at implementing updates that make sense, both from a blogger and from a reader/subscriber perspective.

Yet, more than that, they have one of the most awesome user support teams in place.

For example, I mentioned earlier I’d had a conflict between Myth and a couple of plug-ins. Postmatic was one of them, where the little check box to subscribe to posts wasn’t showing.

While Chris from MeanThemes helped me resolve that issue (with some CSS, then a full theme update to fix the way the theme hides labels on the comment form), Jason from Postmatic set up a test server to go through the Myth theme and see how Postmatic could help.

I also had some issues with how Postmatic’s comment plug-in Epoch (currently in beta) displayed comments when activated.

Instead of blaming a theme, or citing incompatibility, the Postmatic team worked to add new features to Epoch that meant the native styling of a blog’s theme could be adapted by the Epoch plug-in.

And to put the icing on the cake, when I borked my theme because I dropped in some rogue code, Dylan – the Postmatic lead dev – jumped in to fix it for me. On the friggin’ weekend!

To say I was impressed would be putting it mildly…

The Relationship Behind the Sale

I speak a lot about the relationship behind the sale.

I see it as a key part to any business. As I mention at the start of this post, yes, marketing and sales and advertising and all the other cool and sexy stuff is great. They?ll get you the keys to the front door.

But the real business success stories come from service.

Service is the solution to any problems or aftershocks created by sales, or marketing, or advertising. Service is the host that?s waiting to look after you once you use the keys that sales and marketing have given you.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Service is the solution to aftershocks created by sales, marketing, or advertising. ” quote=”Service is the solution to any problems or aftershocks created by sales, or marketing, or advertising. “]

Simply put, by all means, have the best sales, marketing and advertising team around. But make sure you have a superstar service team or mindset, because that?s where your customers old and new will really be.

Just like I?ll be there for Chris and the MeanThemes team, and Jason and the Postmatic team, because?they?ve made me an advocate for their brand, personal and business.

Even if I personally stop using them, I?ll still be happy to recommend their businesses.

And that?s all you can ask for your company when building service success stories. Agree?

Note: If you want a top-notch WordPress or Ghost theme with awesome support, please do check out MeanThemes. And if you want to make blog comments and engagement fun and social again, sign up for Postmatic.?

On Fostering the Long Tail Effect of True Brand Loyalty

One of the things I’ve always been a huge proponent of is fostering true brand loyalty for the long tail – strategic and continuous and ?growth – versus getting quick buzz hits then using the rinse and repeat formula.

This stems from various reasons but the core overall one is simple – create a loyal army of consumers-turned-customers-turned-advocates, by providing solutions that meet their needs, and much of your marketing will be done organically.

This creates three benefits:

You have a true two-way relationship with your customer;
You have word-of-mouth from trusted resources that no amount of money could buy;
Your brand has an immediate advantage for new innovations, feedback and growth through shared ideas.

Loyalty also has another added benefit – more often than not, the cost of new customer acquisition versus existing customers satisfaction is much higher. Not always, but mostly.

If you can reduce the spend on acquisition, you can re-allocate that to reducing churn of existing customers, enhancing the loyalty and appreciation factor immensely.

Two brands that understand the implementation of long tail loyalty are?BlogOnCloud9?and Livefyre.

Brand Loyalty: BlogOnCloud9

When I switched over to WordPress hosting experts BlogOnCloud9 back in 2010, I wrote a post then on how happy I was with the move and service. Almost three years later, nothing’s changed – except the service and approach of Dana and Karen, the founders of and partners in the service, is even better.

Last weekend, on a Saturday evening, I was tinkering with my blog to add some CSS code in order to change the email sign-up box I have at the end of every post.

Because I’m not a CSS guy, I messed up the copy/paste and completely borked my blog. Since I’d changed some code in the functions.php file, it messed up the rest of the site and all I had was a scary blank white screen of death.

I resigned myself to the fact I did something stupid on a Saturday night, and pinged Dana and Karen an email saying what had happened, and if they could help resolve. This was done not expecting anything until Monday at the earliest.

Not one hour later, Dana emailed to say he had found the bad code, fixed it, and that the site was now fully operational again. This was at 8.00pm on a Saturday night!

I was floored. BlogOnCloud9 isn’t a massive hosting company employee-wise, but that service and response at the weekend outdid competitors far “larger” than Dana and Karen’s baby.

Brand Loyalty: Livefyre

Ah, Livefyre. Regular readers and subscribers here will know I’m a huge fan of the?Livefyre comments system. There’s just something about the platform that behaves like a true comment system should.Social integration; real-time chat functionality; community fostering, and more. It’s just an awesome platform.

Recently, I moved away from Livefyre and reactivated Disqus following a crowdsource survey of my subscribers, who preferred Disqus over Livefyre (although Livefyre had a huge amount of fans in the responses too).

But I began to have issues with Disqus. Mobile load time could be slow; Reactions (how your post has been shared on Twitter) were unreliable; and valid comments were getting caught in the spam filter.

I knew Livefyre were working on a major update to their platform, Livefyre 3. The beta version is on this blog, with the public release due imminently. And I knew that I still loved the platform, even though I’d made the move away from them recently.

So I emailed Livefyre support, and the awesome Dhara Mhistry?was immediately on the case. No reprimanding (even in jest) for being “disloyal”, simply happy to help get Livefyre back on the blog.

Not only did Dhara and the Livefyre technical team ensure none of my Disqus comments were lost, she also answered all my questions regarding styling the comments to be more in line with the colour scheme here.

And, just like BlogOnCloud9,?Livefyre was there testing the comments on the weekend to make sure the change back over had been a smooth one.

The really impressive thing? I’m not even a paying customer – Livefyre Comments is free, although it does offer premium features for businesses and media properties.

Building Loyalty Really Isn’t That Hard

What’s key in both these examples are two things that both BlogOnCloud9 and Livefyre clearly understand:

Customers (and/or users) mess up, and being able to clear a way through that mess together fosters trust and loyalty;
Losing patronage for a while doesn’t mean the brand has lost an advocate or loyal user – you have to find out for yourself why you loved that brand in the first place when compared to someone else.

A lot of brand struggle to understand loyalty – true loyalty. Offering discount vouchers and early usage of a new product may win you favours – but what you do after that to build on that quick-hit loyalty is what will define your long tail success.

BlogOnCloud9 and Livefyre already know this. Now it’s up to your brand.

Note: BlogOnCloud9 recently launched BlogDroid (affiliate link), for a seamless WordPress experience no matter what level of knowledge you have.?

If You Want Fierce Loyalty, You Need To Be Fiercely Loyal First

Loyalty. A funny concept. One that can mean so many different things to different people at different times.

Indie bands have loyalty from their fans. Until they sign that big record deal, that is, then they become sell-outs.

Humans have loyalty from their dogs. But then you would be pretty loyal as long as you had someone cleaning up your shit.

So, yeah, loyalty ? a funny concept. And yet it?s something that?s so important to so many people, they spend their lifetime(s) trying to work out how they can build loyalty around what they do.

After all, build loyalty, you build bigger success, right? More sales; repeat sales; referrals. Get that gold rush and you don?t have to worry about marketing.

Okay, maybe just a bit about marketing (I?m a marketer by trade, so I?d be dumb to say you didn?t need my services, right?).

So, yeah ? loyalty is something pretty much everyone wants to achieve in some form or another. And not just loyalty, but fierce loyalty. Because if you grab that piece of gold, the world is truly your oyster. That shit starts revolutions.

And so companies spend thousands (millions?) on trying to create loyalty programs. Bloggers spend thousands of words trying to say the things they think their readers want to hear to become loyal. Social media ?gurus? spend all day on Twitter when they should be doing real work, just to try and get that extra loyal follower to buy into their crud.

And it?s all a waste of time. Seriously.

Because you don?t need to spend thousands, if not millions, of dollars trying to build loyalty. You don?t need to be that desperate typist. You don?t need to be that good-for-nothing-except-quotes-for-Mashable social media douche whose only loyalty comes from those laughing at him religiously.

If you want loyalty ? fierce loyalty ? it?s easy. Be fiercely loyal first.

Show people you care. Show people you mean what you say. Every time. Show people they can trust you. Show people you deserve that trust. Show people you?re not a dick who simply panders to those stroking your ego (or your dick). Show people every one of them is equal.

And it?s not fucking hard to do this.

If you?re a blogger, encourage dissention of your views and don?t let fanboys be your voice.
If you?re a business, embrace your critics as much as your fans (if not more so).
If you?re a manager, let everyone speak and not just Tommy Kiss Ass.

In fact, no matter what you do, in what discipline and in what medium, it?s really not hard at all to build loyalty.

Think like the person you want to become loyal to you and ask what really matters to them.

Get that simple thing right and you?ll have loyalty so fierce you?ll wonder why you were making it so difficult to achieve to begin with.

This post originally appeared on Sarah Robinson’s 28 Days to Build Fierce Loyalty series.

image: Jean-