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Reference Point
a newsletter for customer reference professionals
JULY 2006
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do you out-spend or out-inspire?Following is a great little checklist to refer to the next time you're putting together a success story campaign, customer videos, events or other messaging efforts based on your customer references. It's from a blog by Kathy Sierra called Creating Passionate Users.It will help you avoid a problem common to us marketers. Our job is to develop motivational messages that attract the interest of buyers. Unfortunately, we often put them to sleep instead. Our efforts to develop and stay "on message" can translate into "boring people to tears" with eye-rolling corporate-speak. What a shame when this happens to those of us who run customer reference programs, because the most powerful possible marketing message comes from happy customers. But check out the success stories and case studies out there -- many of which are available on corporate websites, of course -- and you'll find they often lack candor and emotional appeal, or even a clear explanation of business value provided. In the race to get references, meet deadlines, build robust and user-friendly data-bases, and all the other pieces required by an effective reference program, we can overlook the whole point -- to create powerful customer messages. Below is Kathy's checklist. I recommend keeping a copy handy. Best, *************** -- We had our first summer teleconference, "Gaining Buzz for a Reference Program," yesterday. For a summary of the discussion, and to join in, join us here. For information on future teleconferences, please click here . -- Stay tuned for our next live events, including our first Customer Reference Forum Europe. Customer Reference Europe will be in October in London, and the Fall Customer Reference Forum (US) will be in early November in Dallas. To be kept informed of Customer Reference Europe, please respond to this email with "keep me informed about CRF Europe" in the subject line. To be kept informed of the Fall Customer Reference Forum (US), please respond to this email with "keep me informed about the Fall US event" in the subject line. *******************
Out-Spend or Out-Inspire, courtesy of Kathy Sierra: What kind of customer messaging are you creating?
Here's a link to Kathy's post on the subject.
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Reference Point is a Customer Reference Forum newsletter about reference programs and how to improve them. To subscribe, please contact me (contact information is below or just respond to this email). To unsubscribe at any time, just reply to this email with "unsubscribe" in the subject line. This email list and your name will never be made available to anyone else, not even to others on the list, unless by mutual request and agreement.
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