Intuit: "Customers First: TurboTax in Social Media" — Live from BlogWell

3:40 — Bob Pearson introduces Kira Wampler, Intuit’s Word of Mouth and Social Media Leader, Small Business Division.

3:40 – Kira: The reason why I call this the “new normal,” is that with WOM and social media, somehow people forget how to be good marketers with these new tools. What’s normal about it is: People talking. People have been talking to each other since we have existed — and we’ve been talking about brands and products since time immortal.

3:41 – Kira: What’s new, is that today this talk spreads very quickly online.

3:42 – Kira: We’ve long known that word of mouth is how we’re going to win. It all started with organic word of mouth: People using great products, sold by great people, and supported by great people. It’s really deep in our DNA.

3:43 – Kira: Our three circles in social media:
- Social media
- Technology
- Communication

3:43 – Kira: Our communities were originally about helping QuickBook customers help each other use our products.

3:45 – Kira: Intuit’s communities respect the fact that customers don’t want to leave their online forms to successfully use their products and solve problems.

3:46 – Kira: In the world of social and winning with social, it is no longer OK to say, “That’s not my job.” Customers don’t care where you are within an organization, they care that they’re having an issue with their product or service and they’ve found someone who they can engage with — they just want the problem resolved.

3:47 – Kira: We started our customer care journey in Twitter a little over a year ago. It was the result of auditing the online conversation. At the time we thought there would be a little bit of talk out there, but in fact, we found there was a lot of it.

3:48 – Kira: If you’re not at the party, it’s easy for people to gossip about you.

3:48 – Kira: We thought: Let’s start helping people, then we’ll figure out how to scale this up.

3:49 – Kira: What we’ve found is that by our presence within these social networks, we’ve unleashed all the fans and promoters out there just waiting to help out.

3:50 – Kira: Because we exist, we draw the “professional haters” off the people that are just there trying to help.

3:50 – Kira: Don’t only think about it as, “Who do I have inside?” Also, think about the fans and supporters you have on the outside waiting to help you out.

3:51 – Kira: If you’re following @Intuit, you’re going to get info from us (and, more importantly, from others) on how to use our products for businesses.

3:51 – Kira: We have a long history in direct response. What’s good about that is that we’re trying to beat our last best effort.

3:52 – Kira: We didn’t create a separate website that needed it’s own SEO or traffic, we built it on top of existing resources. It meant that everyone coming in could connect with our existing small business communities.

3:53 – Kira mentions their grant contest — which drove some of the most traffic to their site, ever.

3:54 – Kira: We had over 2,000 stories submitted to our grant contest. We got real customer stories about what’s going on in their small businesses. Interestingly, we did not ask anybody to share a story about QuickBooks; but we got a lot of people talking about how they’re overcoming their challenges with QuickBooks. In fact, we got some of the best product testimonials we’ve ever had through these programs.

Q&A

Q: You mentioned peers are so important to making purchase decisions. How are they deciding together?

A: Kira explains how they approach influencers (such as accountants) and educate them on how to use their tools. There are also customers (like micro businesses) that don’t need accountants, and they’re the ones that talk to each other.

Q: Can you talk more about what you do with Twitter specifically?

A: We have a wide spectrum of activities in Twitter. We started with a very small SWAT team (3 people), that focused on our brand of products. We began strictly by listening. The best thing is: Start small. You’re going to learn a lot with your first, early efforts. One of our earliest mistakes: How could anyone ask a support question in 140 characters? We’ll go and make a special forum just for Twitterers, and within three days, people were upset, saying we didn’t want to be part of Twitter. We immediately deleted it, and basically, the approach is: I work at Intuit, I saw your xyz product Tweet, let me know how I can help. Intuit now has close to 130 employees with Twitter ID’s that help engage online.

Q: Do you actually have the capability to do the “forensics” of social media users, and ultimately learn their habits to translate into ROI?

A: It’s a little bit of yes and no. We have a lot of data. But that link between the two, that link is the Holy Grail. We are continuing to invest in this. Because we can drive you to engaging experiences on our site (and make it easy to convert you), it’s been a pretty powerful piece of data for our teams internally.

Q: How do you handle that delicate situation where fans on Twitter give the wrong answer when jumping in?

A: We had this situation the other day with a brand fan that had a large following that gave out some incorrect answers. Internally, we identified who knew the individual well. Offline, Intuit got her the accurate information — but didn’t request she fix it. We saw her as a responsible adult, and gave her the option to fix it if she so chose — and she did.

Q: Do you provide opportunities, inside your communities, for small business owners to learn about social media or to create commerce for themselves to accelerate their businesses? Even though it’s not directly related to Intuit?

A: Helping people succeed with social media isn’t just a nice to have for us, it’s an imperative. Some of what we’ve done is simple education; for example, the word of mouth kits to some contest participants. I’ve been pushing the team to say we need to make it easier for small businesses to have an effective online presence.

Q: What are you doing for tracking, specifically on Twitter? How do you determine success?

A: Currently, we use Radian6 to monitor the online conversation out there. We primarily use the tools to monitor, but what we particularly like is how real-time the solution is, it makes it easier to engage online immediately.

Q: What does your social media department look like?

A: In our small business division, our social team is now our social and our community team. This is really exciting; before that, there were two of us on the team. Now we’ve got the community folks within our world. We’re in a marketing org, and we partner very closely with PR — and many of these team members are hip-to-hip with us. There’s a lot of trading back and forth, where we may incubate something and hand it off to another team, or add resources to manage the new projects within our team.