Consumers Volunteering Personal Information Bring Real Value to Market[ers]

Posted on February 18, 2011 by Rob Runyan

Traditionally, online ad targeting has been driven by cookies, small files created by websites to track user behavior and interests. This can sometimes lead to great but creepy customer service, as Marketplace’s Steve Henn summarizes:

A couple weeks before Christmas, I was searching for a special video camera. I couldn’t find it online. Then four days before Christmas, Amazon sent me an e-mail with a link to the exact camera I was looking for. It was both wonderful and creepy at the same time. I got what I wanted, but I knew Amazon had been watching on me.

To be clear, Stik.com does not do any user tracking via browser cookies with or without users’ consent or knowledge. Today, however, a new ad targeting paradigm is emerging which has the potential to be even more powerful without freaking people out. I am talking about the type of permission marketing that people like David A. Yovanno, CEO of Gigya, Inc, call the future – where consumers knowingly offer personal information to marketers because they appreciate tailored advertising over impersonal and generic pitches.

“Now websites have the opportunity to embrace transparency, to be upfront with people during the registration process about how their data will be used, as well as how it will benefit both parties,” Yovanno wrote recently in a post on Mashable. “We have a new generation comfortable using Facebook and other mobile apps and who, according to recent survey data, are quite willing to share personal information with companies and brands in exchange for value provided.”

That’s why we’ve focused on Facebook in building Stik.com to help connect consumers and sales professionals.The type of data volunteered by consumers themselves offers an authenticity that can’t be replicated through pure data mining, and Facebook is far and away the best provider of authentic online identity.

Imagine the opportunity for realtors to reach out to Facebook users in their network who update their status with, “House hunting with the hubby!”

This is a realistic way to connect with potential clients for realtors, not to mention those in the mortgage and financial services industries, in the near future with a maturing Facebook-savvy generation willing to volunteer data. It’s difficult to predict what will become of surreptitious consumer tracking, but it’s easy to see that the value of user-volunteered information will endure.

Find the Right Service Provider from the Start

Posted on February 16, 2011 by Rob Runyan

Last week I wrote about the value of service professionals guiding consumers through a complicated purchasing process – like getting a mortgage. It’s just as vital that consumers find the right service professionals because bad or unclear advice can be worse than seeking no advice at all.

In reacting to the same survey we highlighted about consumer confusion in the mortgage process, Alex Stenback of Behind the Mortgage wrote, if getting a mortgage turns into a headache “…you might have just picked the wrong lender (think person, not organization here).”

Stenback mostly harps on getting quality customer service, especially in terms of clear and frequent communication from salesperson to borrower. That’s definitely important, but a slick salesperson can provide great customer service superficially while still overcharging the borrower. This is why trust is so important – there is simply no way (except comparison shopping) that the average consumer can evaluate the deal they are receiving from a mortgage lender.

The wrong lender can end up costing consumers a lot of money and – in too many cases recently – their home as well, whether it was after a teaser rate spiked or the borrower just realized they had taken out a loan they never could have afforded. Incentives for lenders are not often designed to encourage them to get their customers in the appropriate-sized loan at the lowest rate possible. The more someone pays in fees or a higher interest rate, the more the salesperson makes, and in some cases a LOT more. (Note: Congress has taken up legislation to curb these types of incentives but the efficacy of such efforts remains to be seen.)

The problem is it may be easy to determine you picked the wrong lender after the damage is done, but how do you find the right lender before any decisions are made? If you are like most people, you ask your friends for a personal recommendation. Studies have backed this logical process, showing that people get better deals from people they know or someone with whom they share a connection. So if you don’t know a mortgage lender then you might ask your close friends if they know someone. If they do then great, you’re in business. But the reality is reaching out beyond a few dozen email contacts is a time consuming process, and often yields little results. So a lot of people don’t find that connection and end up walking blind into a bank off the street.

At Stik.com we’ve given consumers the opportunity to reach more trusted sources of recommendations with a lot less effort. We’ve discussed the benefits of this to sales professionals before, but consumers are also a big winner here.

Finding the mortgage banker that is recommended by one or more of their friends, as opposed to opening a dialogue with a stranger, is a great way for consumers to ensure they’re getting started with the right professional.

Trusted Service Professionals Bring Clarity to Complex Mortgage Business

Posted on February 11, 2011 by Rob Runyan

It’s no surprise that consumers said understanding the mortgage process is the most difficult step in getting a mortgage in a recent MortgageMatch.com survey. What is surprising – and troubling – is that many people are just pointing mortgage shoppers to websites where they are left to educate themselves on the process.

Given that most of us do not have the time, energy or expertise to wade through complex financial jargon, it’s time we moved passed the web 1.0 paradigm that empowers the individual with increased access to information. The next generation of the web is built on personal connections, and it is time we recognized the value of trusted service providers and leveraged our new technology to help consumers connect with them for their most important purchasing decisions.

Consider this story the New York Times reported last week that many mortgage sites are trying to dumb down their content for confused consumers.

“We shoot for a ninth-grade reading level for everything we put on the Web,” Arturo Perez, a home loans marketing executive at Bank of America said in the story.

But would you trust a ninth grader to choose between a fixed and floating interest rate? Of course not.

Removing jargon and writing clearly should be applauded, but let’s not pretend we can take an incredibly complex topic and make it easily digestible for a braces clad audience struggling with multiplication tables.

The same New York Times story reported that:

A poll of more than 1,300 homeowners conducted by Harris Interactive, a market research firm, for LendingTree, and published in December, found that while 96 percent of Americans comparison-shopped for “anything,” only 61 percent said they did so for mortgages. The remaining 39 percent took out home loans based on just one quote — even though 9 in 10 of those buyers said they knew that rates varied among lenders.

Consumers clearly have instincts for comparison shopping, and they don’t dissipate when they start shopping for a mortgage, but they often just don’t know where to look.

This is why we need service providers that we can trust – to decode the complexities of the process and explain it to us with our best interest at heart. At Stik.com we’re helping consumers find multiple mortgage bankers, brokers and realtors who can do that by searching the shopper’s social graph. We encourage consumers to do comparison shopping but to start with people you can trust.

It’s about time someone started championing the service professionals and their value, instead of working to eliminate them with half-baked information-based solutions designed for seasoned practitioners and not everyday people.

The ‘Likeification of a Nation’: “Like!”

Posted on February 8, 2011 by Rob Runyan

Last week Michael McClure at Professional One Franchising wrote about the “Likeification of a Nation,” and on top of a clever headline he provided a prescient post. In it he wrote:

I know that “Agent Ratings” is a hot topic in real estate these days (and rightfully so), but “Facebook Liking” is more basic, more fundamental and just flat out EASIER than filling out an online form to rate someone. And if you’re into Facebook (500M and growing, hello!), the act of “Liking” becomes second nature very quickly, doesn’t it?

Yet while we can see why a lighter touch solution is sensible from the reviewer perspective, McClure elucidates the value to the consumer looking for a trusted resource:

So, if we fast forward a little bit, how many of us are going to just go look for the “most-Liked” restaurant, the “most-Liked movie, the “most-Liked” house…and the “most-Liked” Realtor?

In our minds, this is the real value of the Facebook “Like” as a rating mechanism. Combining implicit relationships (via the Facebook social graph) with explicit recommendations (“I recommend Andrew Agent as a trusted service provider”) provides consumers all the information and social proof they’ll ever need to make a decision.

Few people care if I thought the duck confit was over-tenderized for the price point or that the couple at the table next to me was wearing sweatpants – more people want to know if I would recommend the restaurant to my friends. Most 2,500 word reviews on Yelp! can be summed up in one click of the “Like” or “Recommend” button.

We can (will) highlight the technical upside to a Facebook “like” vs. a homegrown rating system, but will save the details for another post. The key takeaway is that Facebook has provided consumers with a lightweight, socially connected tool for making important purchasing decisions. It is time the professional class took advantage of this unique platform to build their reputations and grow their referral business on Facebook. Stik.com is here to help.

Sales Professionals Build Their Online Reputation, Boost Their Business

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Rob Runyan

Reputation has always been important for sales professionals. Consumers need to believe in the salesman to believe in the product.

The difference today is it’s much easier for that reputation to spread far and wide thanks to the review websites and social media. This scares some sales people because a bad review can stick with you. More information is generally thought to favor the consumer, but there’s also a huge upside for sales people not to be ignored.

There’s an article in the Memphis Daily News today about social media’s impact on real estate in which Joe Spake, a real estate broker with Revid Realty in Memphis, talks about how social media is helping him makes sales. He says:

All of my new business that hasn’t been referred in the last two years has come straight from social media – from being out there, from blogging, from being on Facebook or Twitter – people that I don’t even know in real life call me up to help them find a house. There’s a big credibility factor there.

Spake is exactly right about the credibility factor, but I would take issue with calling this business that “hasn’t been referred.” He’s talking about business that doesn’t come from offline referrals, but those finding him on Facebook or Twitter are just replicating that offline experience.

It’s just that now consumers are reaching out to social media contacts for advice on which realtor or mortgage banker to use. Instead of reaching out to four or five friends on the phone, smart consumers are consulting their social networks where friends number in the hundreds if not thousands.

That’s why we’ve built Stik.com to make that experience easier for consumers and sales professionals. We agree with people like Dave Fleet, vice-president of digital at Edleman, who writes in his “20 Social Media Trends for Business in 2011” that social impact will drive reputation. Sites like Service Alley are giving consumers the option to browse reviews from their Facebook friends for home service providers from carpenters to electricians to painters.

The sales professionals in any industry that recognize this and seize the opportunity have a lot more to gain than fear from the social media impact.

Americans Still Don’t Trust Banks, Why they Might Trust Bankers

Posted on January 26, 2011 by Rob Runyan

No one should be shocked to hear that Americans are putting little trust in banks these days, as Scott Malone of Reuters reported on Tuesday. “Just 25 percent of Americans and 16 percent of Britons said they trusted banks to do the right thing,” he writes based on the 2011 Edelman Trust Barometer.

The institutions that Americans closely associate with the financial crisis still have not regained the public’s confidence, and may not for quite some time. But building that confidence in the institution may not be essential to building back the business.

What’s more important is building trust between consumers and the sales professionals they interact with on a day-to-day business. In other words, consumers don’t necessarily need to believe in Citibank, but they need to trust Tom the mortgage banker who is making the loan. In turn, the confidence he instills in consumers can inspire greater trust in the company he represents.

At Stik.com we think that familiarity is a prerequisite for trust. So we help link up consumers with mortgage bankers, realtors, financial advisors etc., whom they share social connections with on Facebook. If Tom is not only a mortgage banker at Citibank, but also our high school buddy’s college classmate, there is a level of trust developing and easily deepened with referrals and recommendations.

We’re certainly not the only ones who think this way. Business News Daily’s Brian Anthony Hernandez writes in his 2011 social media predictions that: “Now more than ever, customers and clients expect businesses to interact with them, and businesses’ reputations can hinge on how they respond to comments criticizing their products or services on social media.”

Banks, like all consumer-driven businesses after a public relations disaster, will seek to restore their public image, but they’d be smart to invest more time in building consumer trust in their front-line sales staff.

Quantifying the Value of Facebook Likes

Posted on January 25, 2011 by Rob Runyan

Our friends over at TechSavvyAgent offer a numerical illustration of the value of a “like “:

In the top image Tech Savvy Agent received 10 Likes and 12 Comments which led to 4,892 Impressions of the status update.

In the bottom image we received 472 Likes and 44 Comments which led to 22,466 Impressions of the status update.

To any regular Facebook user, this should come as no surprise – articles, comments, pages and people that are “liked” show up more frequently in the Facebook ecosystem than “uncurated” content that has not elicited any interaction from other users.

It is worth remembering, however, that “likes/recommendations,” comments and reviews are permanent links that drive exposure over the lifetime of a page. The ever-changing news feed is just one of many channels that rely on Facebook interactions (likes, comments etc.) to surface content to users. Facebook search, Bing and other high-traffic channels also increasingly rely on Facebook interaction data to determine the most relevant search results for social users.

Stik.com is built around aggregating Facebook recommendations (“likes”) and Facebook reviews for our professionals, increasing their exposure throughout the Facebook ecosystem, both in the news feed and as a social search result. It is the easiest way to build a durable professional reputation online and stay top of mind in your personal network.

One Rule for Social Media: Forget Twitter and LinkedIn; Focus on Facebook

Posted on December 17, 2010 by Nathan Labenz

My friend Ben Casnocha once warned: “beware of advice from … professional advice-giver[s], rather than someone in the trenches.” “The best advice on networking will come from someone who is not a professional networker.”

Of course, this depends on your definition of “best”. If you are looking for a portfolio of strategies that will help you get every possible bit of value from social media, stop reading this and return to your social media guru of choice. On the other hand, if you seek simple social strategies that will help build your business with minimal time investment, this one rule is for you.

Why focus on Facebook?

Almost everyone who uses the internet is on Facebook. In the US, that’s ~150 million people, compared with 40 million for LinkedIn and 25 million for Twitter. That means there are about 100 million people who are ONLY using Facebook. Since these people have fewer online connections, they are more likely to deal with people in their immediate networks. This means less time wasted with clients who are interviewing a bunch of different professionals.

Facebook is about long-lasting real-life relationships. For trust-based industries such as real estate and mortgage, in which professionals do a small number of deals each year, it’s crucial to protect your core customer base of family, friends and friends-of-friends. As Redfin’s numbers show, it’s very hard to win business from clients who have a pre-existing relationship with another agent or broker.

Facebook users are addicted to the site. A full 25% of all internet page-views are now on Facebook, dwarfing the other social outlets. Neither Twitter nor LinkedIn, for example, surpass a half percent of page views. This means that your friends are pretty likely to actually see and read your posts. Stik users, for example, have had great luck requesting recommendations from their Facebook friends.

At Stik.com, we believe that clients will soon view sales professionals who lack a well-developed Facebook presence as “having something to hide.” Eventually, we’ll laugh at the days when privacy concerns trumped professional opportunities.

And why are Twitter and LinkedIn so much less useful?

On Twitter, competition is fierce, so you really need to go big or go home. Unless you are regularly hilarious in just 140 characters — which is hard and time-consuming — your few humble tweets will be forgotten just as quickly as they are pushed down the page by top-tweeters Lady Gaga, Ashton Kutcher, Barack Obama, or (heaven forbid) any of these robo-tweeters.

LinkedIn is about expertise and hiring, and LinkedIn’s business centers around getting corporate recruiters to pay for access to talent. Did you know that it costs $10 to send an “InMail” to a professional outside your network? How many clients do you think will do that? It’s still worth filling out your LinkedIn profile just in case, but don’t expect it to be a lifeline.

We’ve built Stik.com on the Facebook Platform to help sales professionals capture business from family, friends and friends-of-friends, with a lot less upkeep than most social media gurus proscribe. When clients search for a professional on Stik, they’ll find people that their friends know and they’ll read personalized recommendations that stand the test of time. We’re often asked if we plan to integrate Stik with other social networks, and we do in some limited ways, but we’re focusing on Facebook because Facebook is the home of the most real, trusting relationships, and you should too.

Social Media Beyond “Conversations”

Posted on December 13, 2010 by Nathan Labenz

Facebook is a hot topic in business these days, but most businesses are still trying to “figure it out.” The problem is particularly acute in financial services. Among big companies, Facebook participation is hit or miss. Allstate (~22,000 fans) and Citibank (~7,000 fans), for example, have fewer fans than they have insurance agents and loan officers. Among small and mid-sized companies, participation is even worse.

Meanwhile, individual Facebook users aren’t having any problems. Facebook is reportedly on track to become the first with a billion users in 2011, and seemingly all of Austin, Texas is following the 365 Things To Do In Austin, Texas page.What’s going on here? Rick Grant offers a handful of explanations in this recent HousingWire article, and I agree with his overall assessment. While it’s easy for banks to cite “lack of clarity regarding financial services regulations” as a reason to stay on the Facebook sidelines, the explanation rings hollow given their reputation for exploiting every regulatory loophole they can find.

The bigger problem seems to be, in Rick’s words, that financial companies “don’t know all that much about forging real relationships with their customers”.

If there is such a thing as conventional wisdom in social media, it seems to be that conversations are the key to social media. As Rick puts it, companies need to be “proactive in starting and then participating in conversations about issues that are important to consumers”. This advice is echoed by social media consultants of all stripes, and Facebook has supported this paradigm with a variety of analytical tools that help companies measure and track conversations. While I certainly recognize that conversations can be valuable, there are big problems with the conversation paradigm that are rarely addressed:

For most people, content creation is hard, time-consuming work. Social media gurus are like infomercial body-builders — they make it look easy, but their regimens aren’t easy for the rest of us to adopt.
People tend not to trust financial institutions and therefore don’t value “conversations” with these companies. Rather, people value conversations with other people. Allstate and Citibank seem to recognize this on some level — they have each replaced the Facebook Page Wall (the home of conversations) with a custom landing tab.

With these problems in mind, my view is that — for many financial services companies, at least — conversations are neither the most important nor the highest-ROI use of social media. Rather, the low-hanging fruit for financial companies is the opportunity to permanently position themselves as a trusted resource and their sales teams as trusted professionals. On Stik.com, this means accumulating Facebook Recommendations and Reviews for each sales professional. Stik profiles are less dynamic than Facebook Pages, but that’s by design. They are a permanent, public reflection of each employee’s track record, designed to answer the core question on every customer’s mind: Can I trust this person?

The Stik approach may make some branding and compliance experts uncomfortable, as it requires empowering individual employees to solicit recommendations from friends and past clients, but guess what? Sales and customer service teams are the core of financial companies’ relationships with customers, and Facebook is making a deliberate push to get more users to share professional information. We estimate that a full 50% of Facebook users will have professional information online within months. For commissioned sales teams, the rate could be much higher. The brand-risk ship has sailed, and the most that corporate offices can hope to do is steer it.

If you want to learn more about social strategies that don’t require hourly tweets, sign up for Stik.com or send us an email at info@stik.com.

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