At FM we often talk about how brands need to engage in real conversations with their customers. Indeed, we’ve built a significant piece of our business around helping brands do just that. At this point it has become almost accepted wisdom in our industry and we’re quite proud of the work we’ve done in this space – what we call “conversational marketing.”
Witness the high-profile success stories of brands like Dell, Starbucks, Comcast and Zappos (to name just a few) who have experienced extraordinary lifts in sales and brand sentiment due to their aggressive and honest conversational outreach.
It’s a tough thing for a brand to do when you take into consideration the volatile nature of the social media world. It’s easy enough to talk a good game when it comes to engaging with consumers, it’s a much different thing to, as they say, walk the walk.
As an example of how to do this right, I want to highlight a brief snapshot of one of our brand partners, Sun, and how they are personally getting involved in the conversation.
Last week we launched IT Innovation in partnership with TechDirt, Sun and Intel. See here for details. The idea is simple: create a community site for IT professionals, underwritten by Sun and Intel, that allows a three-way dialogue between TechDirt (the community leader), Sun/Intel (the brands) and IT pros (the consumer).
But when we say dialogue, we mean it. When Sun was presented with a critical comment from a knowledgeable consumer (see here and below quote), they didn’t hesitate to get involved in an authentic way. Not only did they respond to the consumer’s questions, they actually requested more information; to get more of the consumer’s thoughts than he had already provided. The Sun rep then left his email address and title so the consumer could get a hold of him at a later date.
The is just a single moment in time, but it is indicative of how far we’ve come from the days when brands silenced skeptics and critics at all costs. The willingness of a brand to engage in conversation with all of its constituents has truly become an asset.
Kudos to Sun for leading the way with this kind of innovative work.
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User Comment:
Sun is sponsoring? With what money?
I saw their hardware crash in value over the past 5 years. Their decision to exclude VARs from business cost everyone money. I never knew they could be a team player?
And aren’t they just waiting to be bought by someone who just wants their patents and java?
Sun Reply:
Thank you for your comments. I’m not sure what you mean by “hardware crashing in value” but I believe you’ll agree that Sun continues to deliver value to its customers with technological innovations that directly impact a customers business. A CMT based SPARC T5240 server delivers more performance than many of the highest performance systems of 5 years ago at a fraction of the cost. That is not a crash in customer value, but an increase in the performance delivered per dollar. Certainly this impacts the residual value of 5 year old systems FROM ALL MANUFACTURERS of computer equipment.
And, by continuing to invest in Solaris and expand its role as a virtualization and storage platform, Sun provides standards-based solutions with better ability to scale with system performance than most OSs. In addition, Oracle has publically stated that it will increase this investment in Solaris after the Sun acquisition is completed.* Sun has also focused on expanding the value we are delivering to our customers by offering a broad range of servers based on Intel Xeon processors.
I’d like to better understand your comment around “excluding VARs from business”. I’ve worked directly with Sun VARs for the past 5 years and over that time we’ve substantially increased the importance of VARs to Sun’s business. If there’s a specific issue related to Sun’s VAR relationship that you’d like to discuss, I’d be more than glad to help resolve it. Contact me on Twitter at JoshRey or by email at Joshua.Reynolds@Sun.com.