Customer Journey Catherine Wheel

In an earlier post I explained how the Customer Journey for an organisation should not be a linear progression, but a cycle. To illustrate this I used a simple piece of ready-made clip art from PowerPoint and quickly inserted this into my content.

However, given a bit more time, I have now pulled together a better diagram to illustrate what I mean.

In this diagram I have used the same 5 segments to show the cyclical path a user takes (Awareness, Interest/Desire, Action, Experience and Advocacy). But I have also added an inner section that represents the running of Internal Process and an outer ring that represents the tasks that customers perform.

I've used various and more specific versions of this diagram in previous consulting work for clients, but I think this diagram represents a more generic approach which can be adapted as the need arise.
The only real problem I now have is… what do I call it?

For the time being, I think I'm going to use the term Customer Journey Catherine Wheel. A diagrammatic version of the popular firework that hopefully explains the round and spinning nature of both this model and the physical namesake.

What do you think? Is it a silly name? Can you come up with a better one?

Combining paid, owned and earned media

In a post from earlier this year, I gave my thoughts on the blurring boundaries between paid, owned and earned media http://press20.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/paid-owned-and-earned-blurring.html . I was therefore very keen to read the report from research and advisory company Altimeter Group on 'The Converged Media Imperative'. This paper lays it out clearly, that brands now need to combine the different media channels of paid, owned and earned to get the most from them.
http://www.altimetergroup.com/research/reports/how-brands-must-combine-paid-owned-and-earned-media 

Now to me, this is hardly a revelation and it is great that this report has been published. My post from last April suggested that rather than there being definitive boundaries between the three, there's significant cross-over. And this is the point Altimeter have explained too. In fact our models of this integration are incredibly similar, see below:

My diagram to show the blurring

(The star representing press releases)

Altimeter's diagram showing the convergence of paid, owned & earned

Funnels

I'm a believer in the use of diagrams to depict complex situations (or just those where a picture paints a thousand words). And the diagrammatic use of funnels to show a development, progress or evolution is something I've come across quite a lot in my work.

Here's a few that have caught my eye:

1. The ecommerce Funnel:

Also known as the conversion funnel, this diagram shows the visitor drop-off at each stage along the online purchasing process, from homepage to sale confirmation.

2. The marketing funnel:
Also known as the 'advocacy' funnel, this plots user relationship along reducing path of engagement. There are numerous different versions of this funnel and each roughly follows the AIDA(s) marketing steps.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA_(marketing)

Thanks to http://www.relationship-economy.com/ for image

3. The Twitter Funnel

In an interesting article recently on Mashable, Tim Trefren covers the Twitter sign up funnel and plots the 5 stages of initial usage:
1. Hit homepage

2. Go to signup page, fill out registration form

3. Browse suggested topics

4. Add e-mail friends

5. Search for someone

4. The Social Media Funnel:

Taking this to a higher-level, John Bell from Ogilvy360 has created his version of the Social Media Funnel.

Wordle graph of my blog

I'm always on the look-out for ways to chart/graph/depict complexity. I was therefore please to recently stumble across http://www.wordle.com/. By typing in the feed from this blog, it creates the visual representation you see above.

A better quality version of it is available here on Wordle's site.

The Super Influencer

As part of a piece of research I've been doing for a startup I'm working with, I've revisited the Universal McCann research 'When Did We Start Trusting Strangers?' that I mentioned in a previous post.

Peer-to-peer influence is a strange thing when you investigate it further. Now, thanks to social media and the 'always connected' society, everyone has the potential to influence everyone else. However, "not all influencers are created equal" as the report says. This has therefore created a new breed of Super Influencer! (Fabio Turel goes into more analysis about the report's findings here).

However, what the report does mistakenly do is depict the network of connectivity between individuals as a set of 1-to-1 connections .





I'm sure the visuals done were not meant to be exactly representative of the exact web of connections the report goes into more detail about, but were done by a graphic artist to a brief. However, had his/her brief been a little more realistic it may have looked something more like this:





http://infosthetics.com/archives/2006/03/social_network_physics_visualization.html
(a social network data visualization based on a model that is based on "mobile particles that randomly bounce off each other")

The Conversation Prism

The Conversation Prism
Originally uploaded by b_d_solis

Brian Solis (Mr PR 2.0) has evolved the concept of the 'Social Media Starfish' (I'm sorry, I could never take that label seriously) into The Conversation Prism, explained further here.
Here he tries (and succeeds more than anyone I've seen so far) to map the different conversation sites and technologies across the Web2.0 landscape.

I think this is a bold step and one that we will see improve over time. I'm especially sure that there are far more indexes and scales along which to measure the impact, effectiveneess and relationships of these intertwining tools, services & networks. Lets see where this goes in the future.

[Cheeky note: I also hope that NBC don't realise their 'Peacock' has been borrowed!]