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Forrester Research's Groundswell blog reports that North American consumers still cite friends and acquaintances with first-hand knowledge of a product as their primary trustworthy source (83%).  Independent print and broadcast reviews come second (75%) and manufacturers' own websites are right behind in third (69%):

"If most of your customers like you, the lesson is this: help them to talk. Install ratings and reviews on your site. Create a blog and let them respond. Give them online tools and energize them. And embrace the fan groups they form on social networks. Fan the flames."

What about customers who are unhappy? No amount of "influencer marketing" can save them, according to Groundswell. The remedy is to seek out and solve problems of individuals who are talking and - here's the hard part - spend the time and money to fix customer service on the front end to stop the bleeding.

"Customers have always had a voice, drove peer-to-peer influence, and leveraged paths to talk directly to companies. They simply used the tools of time. And, the more savvy customers used traditional PR and the very mediums many companies employed to reach them in order garner attention, public support, and solutions. Certain companies listened, others did not…and still don’t."

My Creative Team, with whom I work on a large number of projects, recently completed a content marketing piece for client Pet Sitters International, an 8,000 member professional organization.  I wrote an article for MCT's most recent newsletter, THINK that talks about "The Buzz Factory: Marketing Tools for the Serious Pet Sitter," a series of how-to pdf's for the groups' membership that covers event planning, media relations and social media marketing.

As individuals, companies, and product and service providers, we can benefit from introspection, especially at a milestone like the arrival of a new year.  In fact, there’s no better time than now to do just that.

While you’re looking back at the business year and analyzing successes, near-successes and setbacks, one thing to seriously consider is to augment that thinking with input from those who know you best, your customer or client base.

There are many types of surveys and other methods to engage your customers in a productive dialogue.  Customer satisfaction surveys can help you define or update a benchmark measurement and are valuable in assessing your products, operations and even associates.  For marketing, branding and message development, however, a quantitative satisfaction survey has limited value.  

What we want to do is get a fresh insight into who you are in your customers’ eyes.  What does your role in their business mean to them?  We need to determine whether the features and benefits of your offerings, which you spent hours and dollars developing, are really the features and benefits that keep that customer interested in conducting business with your company.

You want to get out of your head and into theirs to find out what makes them tick.  Your success, it seems, lies closest to the approach that you take with the survey and how you process and act upon what you learn.

The best surveys focus on the survey taker.  That sounds simple enough, but consider this hypothetical approach:

1. How’s company X doing in helping you with your taxes?
2. What’s the three best things about company X’s people when they come to do your taxes?
3. Is company X’s brand promise working for you?

Seems straightforward - and it is - but you’re not really asking them to open up about their motivation for engaging you, Mr. or Mrs. X.  And that survey approach is all about your company, not them.  Consider this approach:

1. As tax deadlines begin to approach, what concerns start cropping up in your mind as you’re running your business?
2. Rank these concerns in importance to you and your business.
3. Which aspects of company X’s services best put your mind at ease?  Why do you think that is the case?
4. In light of this, what do you think makes company X best qualified to serve your tax needs?

The steps you take to brand and market your professional services firm is not radically different from your steps up the corporate ladder. In either case, it's typically not an overnight accomplishment - and if it is, you've probably done something disingenuous or perhaps illegal to get there. Is that the 60 Minutes van outside? Selling services is selling people - primarily yourself and secondarily your firm as a group of diverse people with a similar, cohesive goal. So, where do you start building that brand and planting the seeds that grow the elusive word-of-mouth success? Start with your cube neighbors. Do they know what you're about and what you're doing? Can your employees, associates, partners, accountant, attorney, and current customers recite your elevator pitch? Are you staying in contact with them with news, developments, accomplishments? It's a captive audience and they can be your biggest advocate. Don't set off the BS alarm. Start with talking in plain English, everywhere. On your website, in written and oral communications, in your collateral material. Buzzwords are for you and your comrades. The people don’t get them and glaze over when you use them. Not a good thing. This is the first step to what James Gilmore and Joseph Pine term "exceptional authenticity" in their book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want. Gilmore and Pine remind service providers in particular that "people tend to perceive as authentic that which is done exceptionally well, executed individually and extraordinarily by someone demonstrating human care." Become that helpful, smart coworker. Be a thought leader in your area of expertise and give away your ideas at every turn. Become an expert and the media, other influencers, and eventually the right customers will stop by your cube and form a line. Use the web as a forum for raising your stature. Blog, write and distribute white papers and case studies about what you're doing. Speak at events. Call reporters back within five minutes when they do call you. Tell your story until your voice fails - or until you are promoted. Individual self-promotion and professional services self-promotion is essentially the same thing. The key is creating and refining efficiency in your message - meaning discovering and developing your spiel, then creating all the fun stuff - logos, taglines, websites, printed materials, ads and press releases.

NFL Films, the $50M 300-employee adjunct to the hallowed league has filmed every game since 1962 on moody 16mm film. If you’re not familiar with the unmistakable three-quarters speed replay with orchestral background music, then you’re just not a football fan.

Now, according to Wired, the group is working to digitize the entire collection. So far, they’ve made it back to 1992 and have 110TB of football history-slash-data.

The driving reason for this is to provide easily editable footage for the expanding NFL Network, which opens the vault for fans of this stuff. Let’s hope going forward they never change that “mythology” achievable shooting with authentic 16mm film.

Ted Mininni, president of Design Force, writes in the Marketing Profs blog about the tendency to put a new face on a product to try to achieve instant fresh appeal with consumers. Whether is repackaging, a new package design, or a new name to the same old stuff, this represents a quick-fix mentality that often leaves out the insight of the buyer. A better use of time and resources, writes Mininni, is to get clear, usable feedback from customers:

Getting consumer feedback is a vital aspect of conducting an internal audit. Spending time, capital, and human resources on this exercise, if done thoroughly, is never fruitless. Never a waste of money. It's the best bang for your marketing buck. In fact, the results may surprise some executives and lead them back to reinstituting those products, those policies, and those brand values that made them successful in the first place.

Check out the results of the three-minute online survey of marketers from My Creative Team.

AdWeek reports that the NFL is taking back control of its website from CBS Sports. For the fan, this means increased film footage, both current and archival, which represents a tremendous plus. For the league, this represents the next step in gaining control of what could be considered its intellectual property.

"The ability to control your own destiny and be able to experiment and invest in building a robust platform was something we thought was best doing by ourselves," said Hans Schroeder, vp and gm of NFL.com. "It was hard to figure out a way to evolve the platform when you're doing it through a third party."

Let's hope this great league walks the fine line of journalistic integrity in reporting on itself.

From product and service attributes all the way down the line to product delivery and subsequent customer support, branding opportunities permeate B2B touchpoints. Harry Hoover, in his Think blog, unearths a great article from bnet on branding products and services in the B2B world. Here's a simple, yet tried-and-true tactic from the article: "In many industries, potential new customers will be influenced to buy by the caliber of people who already use the product or service: a blue-chip customer list demonstrates product quality and approval. Ask existing customers for their permission to use their name and some positive feedback on your Web site and promotional material."