I met a good friend yesterday. It had been a while since we’d met and he informed me of a new exciting venture he was entering into with some other good folks. It’s an online project centered around the facilitating of environmentally focused activities of its members.
We got to talking about the kinds of interactions and features that work well on websites and about some of the ones that don’t.
He told me about a great little touch that he remembered on a website called CD Baby which made me consider various little social media touches I had seen first hand or come across in the news or via a blog.
It is the little things that make the difference in all walks of life, and social media is no different.
CD Baby
Back to my friend and CD Baby. My friend had told me about a great little touch where, on the order confirmation screen, users have the opportunity to add something in a freeform text box where the question asked is: “is there anything else we can do for you?” I have looked at the website but not put in an order myself so can’t be sure of the exact wording or how it appears but you get my point. According to my friend, people used to ask for things like gum with their order and then gum would be popped in with the CD.
What is important is that they added something so seemingly small and innocuous when set alongside all the other things that had to be in place yet here was my friend telling me about it some years later. He made no comment, for instance, on the UI flow of the ordering process or the menu structure.
CD Baby (again, possibly?)
It reminded me of another great friend and former colleague who, I think, was also ordering a CD (and possibly from the same site – Michael, if you are reading this, perhaps you can confirm and share your experience – Michael did confirm that it was CD Baby – his original comment added as a note at the end of this post) who came over to me at work one day excited about the language used in the email confirmation text he’d received after completing his order – stuff about how his order would be treated with the utmost priority and how, as he was reading the email, someone was carefully selecting the specific CD and carefully wrapping it…… you get the picture.
I call all these things ‘special moments’ — moments when brands and organisations create points in time where something out of the ordinary happens. They often share several characteristics: they make people smile; they get talked about; they’re often very simple and generally (comparatively) inexpensive to implement.
Singapore Airlines
If you have ever flown Singapore Airlines Business Class (Ed note: What’s this Business Class you speak of Carl?!) you might remember what a great experience that is. You get the standard modcons you’d expect: the seats are great, the food delicious and all the stuff in between. But the thing is… I expect that stuff… the thing that stood out for me was the the little gesture, in this instance it was when the cabin crew knew and used my name. And that’s the thing I tell people about. Like I am now.
Forbes Travel Guides
I was interviewing a woman the other day who works for Forbes Travel Guides. Her job revolves around the best hotels in the world and she has stayed in quite a few of them.
I asked her for a ‘special moment’ story from all her luxurious stays. It wasn’t anything to do with great food or wonderful bathrooms or hugely-wide flat-screen televisions. It was about a porter who noticed that one of her suitcases was damaged and got it fixed for her. The little things, right?
Potentially Your Brand
Another friend was showing me the first template development for her new website last week. All that you would expect was there — solid functionality, a clear, simple and elegant design and a look that would resonate with her target customers.
But my point to her was simply this. What can you do that’s unexpected? Things that just work are great and necessary but they don’t generally get talked about — they don’t generally form the subject of stories.
What can you do, I asked, that will make your customer smile? What will make them share stories about your site?
What might make someone, for example, write a blog piece and mention your brand or company.
Note – comment from Michael on Original Post
The CD Baby mail you are referring to in #2 is the most successful email Derek Sivers ever wrote.
From When he started CD Baby, every customer got a standard email,
“Your order has shipped today. Please let us know if it doesn’t arrive. Thank you for your business.”
“After a few months, that felt really incongruent with my mission to make people smile. I knew I could do better. So I took twenty minutes and wrote this goofy little thing….
Dear Susan, Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow. A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing. Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy. We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved “Bon Voyage!” to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Saturday, July 28th. I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as “Customer of the Year.” We’re all exhausted but can’t wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!! Thank you, thank you, thank you! Sigh… Derek Sivers, president, CD Baby the little store with the best new independent music
This one silly email, sent out with every order, has been so loved that if you search Google for “private CD Baby jet,” you’ll get almost twenty thousand results. Each one is somebody who got the email and loved it enough to post it on his website and tell all his friends.”
