Does your audience know where you’re going? Do you?
Word-of-mouth marketing guru Andy Sernovitz offers an excellent piece of advice (and an example of how it works) in this short post:
If you want to keep fans engaged, let them know where you’re going.
Nothing is more frustrating than being dependent on a product and never knowing when they are going to make it better. We’ve abandoned more than one vendor because “that feature will be out someday” just isn’t good enough. I can’t run my business based on your secret plans. [. . .]
What Andy says makes me wonder how many companies looked at Twitter, thought that something like it would be useful in an enterprise/intranet setting, but laughed off the concept of using Twitter itself because of its history of downtime and the opacity of its roadmap.
Enter Yammer and its white-label counterparts.
Andy talks about the beneficial effects of sharing your roadmap in terms of how your fans will react. (Read his full post for details.) But I would add another benefit of sharing your roadmap, one focused on your own enterprise: When you share the roadmap, you commit yourself to hitting certain stops on the itinerary on certain dates.
Bands on tour don’t say “We’ll be in Texas at some point,” not if they want to reward their fans and keep themselves on schedule. They set dates — Houston on the 10th, Austin on the 11th, Dallas on the 12th — and push out posters (like the one above), postcards, MySpace pages, and anything else they can to get the word out.
Foresight in business isn’t perfect, and it’s not as simple to launch a new operating system or a open a new restaurant as it is to get in the bus and drive to the gig in Brighton. But it’s worthwhile to give your fans / customers / users / evangelists an idea of where you’ll be and when you’ll be there. By telling them you’ll be telling yourself.
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Related posts:
- Good reads for your weekend (See the item about Yammer.)
- What happens when you can’t keep up with your popularity?
- May the best product win?
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(Image by Tom Harman.)
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5 Comments so far
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Great frame of mind! I think the concept is recycled but the message is reworded to really hit home.
Ed — Glad you liked this. I’m sure the concept *is* recycled, not just from Andy to me but before that. But ever since I came across this Goethe quote, I don’t worry so much about originality:
“All intelligent thoughts have already been thought; what is necessary is only to try to think them again.”
Now, I *do* think that a *few* new intelligent thoughts (special relativity?) have been thought since then, but Goethe had a point: we need to come to grips with concepts for ourselves. In the business world, in particular, I think a lot of the basics transcend eras — yet they still need reinvention, not because they’re so old, but because we’re so new.
Tim, I think you make some wonderful points here. But I wonder about appropriate timing of sharing that roadmap, especially if you are concerned about staving off the competition until all the i’s are dotted and the t’s crossed.
I believe that this is a key consideration but am not quite certain as to how to bridge that gap.
What is one of the 5 main aspects in writing a good introduction? Let your audience know what topics you’ll be hitting on! This philosophy should be applied in most aspects.
In response to Miz Liz: It’s up to you to determine what and how much is appropriate to share with them in the beginning. But leaving them clueless and wondering, in almost all cases, is a bad idea. You don’t have to give them a detailed road map of every turn, etc, but give them an idea of the direction you’re going.
Customers are like investors, and any potential investor is going to want to know what your plans are. There’s no reason to keep them in the dark about the overall picture. One doesn’t have to go and spoil the surprise over a new concept, etc, but keep them informed and you’ll see positive impacts.
Tim -
Thanks for mentioning my post!
I think there is no answer to how much is too much or how soon is too soon. Just depends on your situation.
But usually: You can share a lot more, a lot sooner. Transparency always makes customers happy.
Cheers,
Andy