In 2008, Oliver Wyman worked with nine prominent U.S. orchestras to study the experience and behavior of first-time concert goers. The results were published in June of that year in “Turning First-Timers Into Life-Timers“. That report sparked a lot of conversation in the orchestra world and influenced the thinking of its marketing leaders (see the Jan-Feb 2009 Symphony article “Into Thin Air” for reactions and the Jan-Feb 2010 Symphony article “The Price is Right” for stories on orchestras applying the report’s recommendations).

I was recently made aware of the First-Timers report by the good folks at the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra (ESO) — where we’ve been plying our data-driven trade for the past year. Wyman’s methodology — a) customer segmentation b) loyalty driver research c) targeted and tested promotions — is chock full of the basic staples of a data-driven diet. However, some of the report’s emphasis and a few recommendations struck me as off. With all due respect to the Wyman consultants, I’d like to offer a (somewhat) dissenting opinion on First-Timers.

The City of Edmonton recently released the 2009 Edmonton municipal census data as part of the Open Data initiative. The current catalogue doesn’t include results at the neighbourhood level (except in PDF). Edmonton blogger Mack Male recently shared a neighbourhood census file. He also gave an excellent map-based example of what could be done with such interesting data.

The loyalty ladder is a relationship marketing concept that sees customers gradually moving up through relationship levels, starting at the bottom as prospects (those who have the intent to purchase but have not yet done so) and ending up at the top as advocates (intensely loyal brand champions). The loyalty ladder typically looks something like this:

According to the Wikipedia article: “The relationship marketer’s objective is to ‘help’ customers get as high up the ladder as possible. This usually involves providing more personalized service and providing service quality that exceeds expectations at each step”

The title of this post comes from what was (and likely still is) Russ Greiner’s thought for the day. Just below it, he writes “I plan to update this daily… but that is not the highest priority.” I’m not sure Russ has ever updated “First things first; second things never”. The man understands priorities.

Russ is one of the researchers at the Alberta Ingenuity Centre for Machine Learning at the University of Alberta (the school’s machine learning program attracts and develops some real talent). He was kind enough to hear out a somewhat urgent, out-of-the-blue request from us last week. A true gentleman, he turned it around the next day and wished us well.

Does your website help your business? It’s the bottom line question — one you’re probably already asking. Eight Leaves Marketing offers custom web, graphic, and design solutions for local businesses. We call it the Greenhouse Program, because, you guessed it, we want your website to actually grow your business — and we have the nuts and bolts know-how to make it happen. The Greenhouse Program is an affordable, all-in-one online marketing solution for small to medium organizations that puts the emphasis where it matters: building websites that stand out, get found, and convert new customers.

Customer satisfaction surveys often allow customers to provide open-ended feedback or comments on their service experience. A while back, we gathered these responses from a retail client survey, in part to try to determine the differences in the language used by very satisfied and very dissatisfied customers. We felt that these differences, if they could be found, could provide insights to help fuel employee training and marketing and communications programs. I intend to post on how we actually went about this text mining exercise at a later date (and on all the wonderful analysis that can be done with customer satisfaction data), but, in the interest of getting some sleep, I’m going to just jump ahead and tell you the two words most used by very satisfied customers in that survey: friendly and helpful.

At the 2009 Sasquatch! festival in Washington, a guy got up, started dancing, stayed dancing. No friend in sight, just a guy by himself, sort of losing it on the hillside as Santigold played ‘Unstoppable’ on the stage far below. What happened next was…

At the end of the video, you can hear someone in the crowd asking in happy disbelief “How did he do that? How did he do that?” Because I’ve accounted for about 100K of the video’s nearly 3M views, I can suggest some answers.

Why pursue SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to everything you can do to improve your ranking on organic (as opposed to sponsored) search results of popular search engines (primarily Google since it handles the highest search volume — by far). Ranking high on the first page for relevant keywords can help you attract new qualified customers who are specifically searching for products and services that your business provides. Generally, the higher you appear on the first page for your target keywords, the more traffic and (with a well-designed site) the more qualified customers you acquire.