I have the pleasure of lending NateRiggs.com to Cheryl Harrison for this guest post.  Cheryl has over 10 years of experience using social media tools, going way back to the days of AIM chat rooms, LiveJournal and GeoCities.

Cheryl is an agency-reared marketer, a member of the Columbus Yelp Elite (where she has written over 2oo reviews of local hotspots).  She has been an active blogger at BeingCheryl.com since early 2008, and works as the Tactical Lead at Social Business Strategies.

Would you like to be a guest blogger on NateRiggs.com?  If so, go ahead and submit your post idea here.  I’ll be in touch.
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If you’re on Twitter, you’ve likely got an agenda.

“I want to sell more products or services.”

“I want to make people laugh.”

“I want to look smart.”

“I want to meet new people.”

While the motives are very different, accomplishing any of them requires some level of influence – people paying attention to what you’re saying.

Here are a few ways you can gauge your current Twitter influence:

1) Number of followers
Yeah, yeah, I know. This number can be spammed, scammed, faked and forged about a million different ways. However, this number still needs to be taken into consideration, because sheer reach does effect how influential your content can become (to some degree).

2) Number of lists
I give this Twitter metric a bit more weight, the reason being that you can safely assume that most of the people who have listed you are actually paying attention to you. Personally, I have 7 lists, 5 public and 2 private, all of which I am significantly more likely to check than the general stream of all tweets. In addition to analyzing the NUMBER of lists you are on, the name and description of the lists you are on can show you how your peers view you and for what you are influential.

3) Klout
Klout is a service that measures a Twitter profile’s influence, using an in-depth algorithm. Klout tells you what type of Twitter user you are (based on how often you share, have conversations, etc.), what users you influence the most (and who influences you), which topics you discuss most, how engaged your network is with you, how often your posts are retweeted, and a few other factors.

4) Tweet Level
Another service that analyzes a Twitter profile, Tweet Level gives users a numeric ranking to influence, popularity, engagement and trust (in addition to pretty good explanations of what the numbers mean). It also stacks you next to a few of your followers, both those ranking higher and lower than you, for comparison.

5) Tweet Stats
Tweet Stats allows you to view what day of the week and what time of the day you post the most often. What does that have to do with influence? Let’s say most of your posts occur early in the morning (EST). It’s safe to say that your influence in other time zones is virtually nonexistent. These are just numbers to give you a starting point from which to benchmark. A low score or list count does not necessarily mean you are not influential.

The best way to increase and maintain your influence on Twitter is to have real conversations with people and create value for them. Even if you only have 10 followers, be influential to those 10 people.

Who are some of the people you think are influential on Twitter?

LinkedIn is still gaining momentum in the B2B world.

With over 70 million professionals holding profiles, it makes good business sense for companies to start looking at how to use LinkedIn as an everyday business solution.

I thought it was interesting that even Chris Brogan would check in on LinkedIn, if there was a location-based component.  His target audience of clients lives there and check-ins in that context might result in new opportunities.

It’s important that company leaders realize that it will take a coordinated and dedicated human effort over time to see any results from tapping in to LinkedIn.  Your company may even consider assigning a group of personnel to spend a portion of their time monitoring, researching and actively participating in the many groups and subgroups available.

If you’re ready to dedicate more time and effort, you can always build your own group and subgroups inside the network.  This is appealing because there is literally no cost involved, outside of time and energy.  But make no mistake, the amount of time and energy that goes into successfully facilitating a group is high.

Be prepared.

How To Build a Customer-Centric LinkedIn Group

One approach companies can use to leverage LinkedIn Groups is to focus on customer centricity.  These groups are essential hubs of conversation.  If executed wisely, facilitating the right conversations (that provide value to members) works to build deeper relationships with customers.  The end result is increased customer retention and a greater potential for referrals.

There are a few important things you need to consider before your pull the trigger:

• Who is your niche audience for the group?
• Does that specific group already exist?
• What type of conversation will help them do their job better?

Once you’ve answered those questions, begin mapping out the objectives of your conversation.  A good way to start is by solidifying what you want the members to take away from the conversation.  Work from the desired result and build backwards.

While you are working through this, also begin familiarize yourself with the recently updated LinkedIn Group features.  It’s a good idea to visit other groups and look at what they are having success with.  In most cases, you might even be able to connect with other group managers who can share experience and give you insider tips.

Case Study: Let’s Talk Blood Donor Recruitment

Incept is a conversational marketing firm that helps blood centers recruit and maintain blood donors to keep blood supplies on shelves.  They are a client of my firm, Social Business Strategies.

Blood donor recruiting has its challenges, and most of the blood donation groups on LinkedIn today offer a hub of conversations between professionals who donate blood.  While that’s great and folks from Incept do participate in those groups, they do little to help Incept’s customer base of blood center professionals.

In building out a new customer-centric group, where Incept can bring together blood center pros, our conversation goals are simple:

• Connect niche LinkedIn users who work in blood centers across the country and have a focus on donor recruitment
• Build a resource to uncover real issues that blood center personnel are facing today, and share “how to” knowledge to help the members solve problems
• Create opportunities for relationships between blood center personnel, industry providers and the team at Incept

LinkedIn Search Optimization

In setting up the group, we knew we wanted to rank highly in LinkedIn’s Group search results for phrases like blood donor recruitment, blood centers, and even donor recruiting.  Using correct keyword placement and density in the title, summary and description is helping to get the Group indexed highly by LinkedIn’s unique crawlers.

With that, one of the challenges we needed to overcome was to maintain Incept’s branding (developed by Next Level Thinking) while making sure that the most prominent keywords were placed towards the front of group titles.

To get there, NLT created a group logo that called out the “Let’s Talk” portion of the brand theme, placing “blood donor recruitment” towards the front of the Group title in LinkedIn.

The Incept brand tie-in was deliberately minimal, with only the type font and colors being used in the logo.  We made this decision to visually combat the potential perception that the group is sales-focused.  The critical factor is delivering on that promise by staying mindful of how Incept’s team participates.

How To Use Auto Response Messages in LinkedIn Groups

Meet Timothy Johnson.  He’s on the human business team at Incept, as the lead content engineer.

In this video, Tim discusses how he’s using some of the automated response messages in the LinkedIn Group to make it easier to respond to each person interested in joining the conversation.

(Side note: This video was shot and uploaded directly to YouTube from my Sprint EVO 4G.)

What else would you suggest, related to building a customer-centric LinkedIn Group?

I’m thinking about writing a short eBook that I’ll host on my blog and provide to you free of charge.

For months now, Twitter-related links have been the main traffic referral source to my blog.  You’ll notice that I don’t have a lot of subscribers, compared to other bloggers that I benchmark myself against.  It’s frustrating.  But in traveling recently, I’ve met people from all over who tell me that they’ve been reading my blog for some time. To be honest, those comments were appreciated, but also surprising.  My subscriber count is really low.

Then, Mike Brown said something that got my gears turning.  When I asked him: “Do you subscribe to my blog?”  He answered:  “No.  But I do read your posts from Twitter every day.”My average daily returning traffic is somewhere around 3,500 visitors.  My current subscriber count on Feedburner at the time of this post is 142.  I have over 17,000 followers on Twitter and that continues to grow.

Distributing and Consuming Media

I put a lot of work into using Twitter to share content and feed the system.  There seems to be this idea of 12:1 in terms of presence building, meaning that to be successful in building your online brand, you need to promote the work and ideas of others 12 times more than you promote your own stuff.  Realistically, I average tweeting about 15 to 25 social objects that I don’t own each day.

I think that this is, in part, the result of my own media consumption patterns.  I primarily use email subscriptions and Google Reader to stay up on what’s happening and the bloggers that influence me.  Reading posts from tweets and links is rare for me, except when someone directly copies me on a tweet with a call to click.

This makes me wonder: am I weird?  Are most people doing things differently today?  I want to find out how you get your media.  Will you take this poll I’ve started in LinkedIn?  Pretty please?

What Presence Building on Twitter Really Means

I believe presence building is mainly about creating yet another lever.  By showing up to and participating in the online cocktail party, we build more than just a following. We open opportunities for real relationships.

Recently, my friend Desarae was in town from Minneapolis.  We met on Twitter.  While she was in Columbus, I introduced her to many of my close friends using Twitter.  It was easy.

What’s funny is that another friend, Mike Cordes, introduced us.  He did that using Twitter as the medium.  You might notice his Twitter picture and the blue TweetMyTime jersey.  I met Mike on Twitter when he asked if he could join team TweetMyTime at the Columbus Marathon.  To this day, all three of us primarily communicate using Twitter because it’s fast, easy and loads of fun.

Do you get where I’m going with this?

McLuhan was right.  The medium really is the message.  In social penetration, frequency of communication is important.  A medium like Twitter allows for unobtrusive frequency to be easy, while also taking advantage of Chris’s idea on Anywhen.

It would seem then that using Twitter as a primary communication tool to find and build relationships is a statement of human brand value.  For instance, one might get the message:

• “I’m here because I’m open to meeting new people”
• “I enjoy talking with other humans and I want to do it often, even when I’m doing other things.”
• “I know that you are too busy for random 10 minute phone calls and respect that.  I can talk with you in 14o characters or less when you have time to respond.”

Twitter is also a numbers game.  The larger you build your presence (presence being thought of as a phone book, in this sense), the more you can leverage the nature of serendipity.  Not every follower will end up as a true relationship, but if conversion of those relationships is a small percentage, then a larger presence will also equal a larger percentage.

From a small business lens, I believe presence building is absolutely essential.  Why?  As a small business owner, you have limited dollars and even more constraints on your time.  In that sense, building strong relationships through more frequent communication provides a competitive advantage in terms of finding opportunities (leveraging serendipity) and retaining customers (building stronger, lasting relationships).

Humans Marketing Channels and Theater of the Mind

Essentially, marketing creates leverage.  In the traditional sense, marketing messages help to position the product or service in the mind of the end consumer so that when the consumer finally hits the point of purchase – whether it’s a checkout counter, shopping cart or B2B account executive – they already want to buy what you sell.

But now things are much different.  Communication tools have changed in such a way that we humans have an entire arsenal that allows individuals the ability to create the leverage that you once needed a department of people to accomplish.

Human marketers are artists at creating theater of the mind.  This is the idea of using technology to create the illusion of being everywhere at once, and all the time.  This type of visibility driven largely by using Twitter has helped to create a new breed of celebrities and heros, fueled by both intellect and inherent charisma.

Visibility is also the sister of accessibility, which is very different from the celebrities of older media such as television and radio.  Celebrities in those mediums are primarily exclusive and work hard to stay away from the commoners by using money and status as the barrier.

Yet, humans are delighted when someone they admire is accessible to them.  Twitter, as a communication tool, provides that type of accessibility but also the convenience to make communication manageable.  For instance,  think about how many tweets your favorite blogger or author must get each day. I’m willing to bet that if you tweet them right now, they will probably respond, even if it’s only a few words and an emoticon.  When these popular (and busy) folks do respond, how does that make you feel?

As mobile devices improve over time, so will our ability to master this type of communication illusion.

What This eBook Will Be About

I want to write this to teach you how to build presence and create your own illusions, starting first with Twitter.  Here’s the basic overview of my ideas for chapters:

• How I Listen and a Few Other Ways to Approach Listening to the Web
• Selecting Your Presence Building Tools and Knowing Why
• The Importance of Frequency and Timing
• Copy Writing in 140 Characters for Successful Presence Building
• One-to-One Conversations in the Public Twitter-Sphere
• Leveraging The Social Graph of Others for Friendly Mutual Gains
• Feeding the System with Value without Being Boring
• Conversational Social Marketing and Response (Guest-Written Chapter)
• Hub & Spoke:  How To Tips for Business Blog Content Distribution on Twitter and the Effects

But before I put a ton of effort into a project like this, I want to ask you:

Will this be of value to you?  Will you read it?  And most importantly, what would you add?

Please let me know in the comments…

The Ohio Growth Summit kicks off bright and early tomorrow at the Small Business Development Center at Columbus State Community College.

Please be aware, we’ve had a slight change in plans.  Ben Blanquera will not be able to join us for the discussion.  Ben has used his personal brand to found Columbus TechLife, and has a very unique personal brand in that he balances his own initiatives with the high demands of being a corporate technologist at Progressive Medical.  Ben’s been called to duty at Progressive and needs to stay committed to his responsibilities there.  At any rate, his perspective will be missed, but we should all admire what Ben has accomplished in the area of personal branding.

I’d like you to meet a special guest, and a good friend of mine, who will be joining us for the discussion.  Meet Desarae Veit:

Are you attending the Ohio Growth Summit?

I’ve been focused on brand and communities this week.

Yesterday, we talked about internal customers (the people who work for your company) and how brand can be developed from the inside out.  Today, let’s look at external brand loyalists and an example of a loyalty program that, at the very least, keeps me coming back.

Here’s what I mean:

Treats vs. Staples

My office is a block down the street from Katzinger’s, a very well-known and wonderfully tasty delicatessen with great service.  That last link will show you some of the reviews that local spot has received on Yelp.  I’ve even written about the Katzingers before and some of the great experiences I’ve had as a customer.  It’s one of my favorite lunch spots in Columbus, and it’s closeby.

Yet Katzingers has become a lunch treat, not a staple.

The loyalty program at Subway, coupled with their $5 Footlong program is why I go back regularly.  It’s the extra hook that keeps my attention and places Subway at the top of my mind around 11:30 a.m. each day.  What’s more is that I’m not alone.  Go to your local Subway at lunchtime and check out how my people order from the $5 menu, and if yours is a franchise that buys into the card program, take notice of how many people approach the counter with their card in hand.  While I don’t have the actually statistics, it always appears to be a solid majority of the customers in line.

Make Loyalty Easier

Mobile is everywhere.  Apps are everywhere.  How could Subway enhance the customer experience of brand loyalists using an iPhone or Droid?  What type of functionality would be helpful to carry around with you in your pocket, in terms of visiting your favorite lunch spot?

I’d love to see a Subway iPhone App that not only let me check my reward points, but also allowed me to place my order in advance.  Building on the fact that I get the same sandwich from Subway on almost every visit (as brand loyalists often do), developing functionality that allows me to set up my order preferences would be huge.  What would be even cooler is if the iPhone App could tie into my Foursquare check-in data at the location and send the pre-populated content of my order preference to a monitor behind the counter – so that my sub was ready by the time I walked into the store.

Subway probably isn’t going to find a way to build a better tuna melt.  In my mind, there doesn’t seem to be much room to improve the product and keep the price in check.  Where they might be able to improve, however, regards the delivery of their product and the customer experience around receiving it.

What do you think?

So many companies focus on brand from the external perspective.  That’s not a bad thing.  It’s critical for your business to be able to communicate a clear vision, brand values and stories to the customers who buy your products and services.

But what about the customers who live and breath inside your own four walls for 40-plus hours a week?  I’ll argue that those hardworking folks are even more important as an audience.  They should come first.

Let’s look at an example of one Ohio-based company that seems to understand this.  Cool?

Scotts Lawn Service’s Internal Brand Statement

A few weeks back, my friend, Beth Dockins, invited me to visit her at the Scotts Miracle-Gro Company.  We planned to meet for a few minutes at their new building and then head to lunch for some catch-up chatter and idea sharing on how social media is working for larger companies – inside and out.

When I walked in, I was delighted to see this:  (Pardon the poor quality of the pictures.  They were taken with my iPhone.  I hope you’ll understand why the lighting wasn’t ideal in a moment…)

Scotts very clearly states what's important to them with this values-driven and branded display. The statements they are making to their internal audience is that as an organization, Scotts values it's people and the environment.

Scotts' newest building has been named the Kelly Swartz Center, in recognition of an employee who tragically died after a fall in the manufacturing facility. A good majority of companies have a tendency to name buildings after C-level associates.

Scotts' C-level team is focused on recognizing rank-and-file employees for their contributions to the company and clearly states this in the messaging present in the display. Notice that this message is signed by the company's CEO, Jim Hagedorn.

I think this is one of the boldest brand statements Scotts can make. Rather than simply preaching respect for the environment, they are making efforts to physically live their brand values by building this center to the specifications of the highest level of LEED Certification. Scotts has put their money where their mouth is with this facility.

Why Focus on Internal Brand First?

There are actually a few reasons:

#1 – Your employees are a captive audience -  Your company is essentially buying the time and attention of your employees.  That said, your company then has a certain level of communication leverage.  Educating the captive audience is much less challenging than competing for your customers’ limited attention, as they are constantly bombarded with other brand messages.

#2 – You can build a brand army -  Scotts has hundreds of associates housed in the LEED Certified Kelly Swartz Center, each possessing some level of a personal social network.  Think social network in the sense of family, friends, religious communities, neighbors – not necessarily in terms of Facebook networks or Twitter followers.  By focusing on educating these employees, so they possess a certain level of respect and understanding for the values your company holds, large organizations can leverage the manpower of potential armies of brand evangelists and word-of-mouth marketing.  You and I both know that the MOST powerful form of buying conversion comes when a trusted friend recommends a product or service.

#3 – Being part of something bigger - Focusing on rolling out internal brand messages that align and focus efforts, creates a sense of pride among employees of all levels in the organization.  We humans all want to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.  We want to be in the in crowd, on the bandwagon and to have strength in numbers.  From the social media perspective, we now call this being “one of us”.  I’ll argue that it’s the job of internal brand communications to define what the “us” part of that statement signifies in a very real and tangible way.

#4 – Knowledge is power – Informed employees who buy into the brand values and mission of an organization, and feel a sense of belonging to something bigger than themselves, often have tendency to self-police their own systems.  If you buy in to a brand or organization you love, don’t you want to protect its integrity?  Internal brand communication plays a big role in establishing the guidelines that define what that integrity is for an organization.

How Could Social Media Fit?

For Scotts, I can see a few immediate opportunities:

#1 – Listening to the rank-and-file – Scotts has stated that its employees are important, yet I wonder how they collect the data they need to determine what’s important to them?  While I don’t know for sure, I’m willing to bet that it’s via older methods like email surveys, focus groups and one-on-one interviews.  There’s nothing wrong with these methods, yet social media technology now provides a variety of tools that make insight gathering much faster and significantly more accurate.

#2 – Better top-down communication from the C-suite – Scotts could leverage C-level blogs to open up dialog between various levels in the organization, much like what CEO Jonathan Schwartz does at Sun Microsystems, but with more of a focus on employees rather than investors.

#3 – Creating employee communities and team building – Scotts could benefit from using things like their company’s Facebook Page (or even tools like SocialCast or some of the killer applications from Jive) to connect employees and foster deeper relationships among coworkers.  At the end of the day, we become friends with some of the people we work with.  Scotts could use social media to help foster and augment that process.

#4 – Identifying human marketers – By giving employees an environment where they can interact, while fostering safe adoption of the technology, adoption leaders will emerge from various levels within the organization.  These will be the folks who take to using social media naturally.  If Scotts can identify. empower, train and reward them for their efforts, genuine social media marketers could potentially be born.

Can you see the importance of branding from the inside out?  How can you apply Scotts’ thinking to your own organization?

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Sometimes a wonderful opportunity just happens to fall in your lap.

When Mike Brown from Brainzooming called me last month, I immediately knew that the chance to work with him, Keith Prather and Barrett Sydnor on facilitating the Brainzooming process at Fort Hays State University was one of those opportunities.

Mike is a Hays Alumni and someone who I’ve highly respected as a strategist and speaker for a few years now.

I met Mike in 2007 at the TMCA Annual Conference, where he presented on some of the work he did with YRC Worldwide on building out their NASCAR Sponsorship program, and have been following his work ever since.

Go Big

As we were preparing, I asked Mike, “How many people will be in the room?”

Mike answered, “About 30 to 35 people from across university.”

[Scared pause.]

I asked again, “No, really.  How many people will we be facilitating?”

Mike answered again, “It’s going to be a big group.  Up to 35 people between you, me and two facilitators.”

Have you ever seen the commercial, from a few Super Bowl’s back, where the cowboys ride around on horses herding hundreds of cats?  That was the image that went through my mind as we talked on that call.

But, I trust Mike.  And I knew he had a plan worked out.

The Brainzooming Process

Driven by the necessity of working with large corporate teams, Mike and friends knew they had to beat the system.  They knew that in that environment, they needed to come up with a process that would help large corporate teams develop not only a strategy, but also an action plan in a very short period of time.

The result of years of work was Brainzooming, a strategy and ideation process that captures months’ worth of ideas and information in about seven hours of a highly facilitated, strictly timed and amazingly fun process.

I’m not going to give away Brainzooming’s secrets.  They’re not mine to give.  But, what I will do is show you a small glimpse of what the day was like and some of the methods Mike has developed.

Mike, Keith, Barrett and I still have a ton of work to do behind the scenes, but I must say, Brainzooming is absolutely worth talking about (and also worth your consideration for any type of organizational strategy project – it works.)

Here’s a teaser:

Leading Adoption from the Top

You should meet Dr. Larry Gould.  He’s the driving force at Hays, who is leading the charge towards organizational adoption of social media tools at the university.

I like Larry and his style.  In talking with him, it’s immediately evident that he can see the value of using social media tools at his institution, but also the value of the education around these tools for his students.  The best part is that rather than getting stuck in researching this new medium to death, he’s taking action that leads to learning.

All of us were honored that he called us to help him work up a plan on how to get there.

I also want to give special thanks to my new friend, Casey Rohleder, for all the work (and killer ideas and energy) she put into helping Mike prepare for this session.   Building a large team of the right people across an organization is no small task and Casey’s work on developing audience personas rivals what I’ve seen come out of Resource Interactive. Bravo, Casey!

What’s your take on using social media in the classroom?

Twitter Lists have been one of the best innovations our friends in San Francisco have come up with, in my humble opinion.  There are so many possible ways Twitter Lists can be used – we’ve only just started to scratch the surface. Trust me on this one.

Part of using Twitter, Twitter Lists, and social media as a whole, is looking at yourself as a user from the outside in.  How often do you think of yourself in terms how you look as an agent in the Matrix (yes, the movie…).

We all have mentors and groups of people we admire in our business lives.  I certainly do.  And in the end, everyone has somebody who we see as a successful role model.  We want to be like our role models.  That’s the whole “model” part of the term, right?

Benchmarking Using Twitter Lists
Ever wonder how the content you share on Twitter stacks up against the folks you dig as relevant and helpful?  Maybe your group is other business owners in your local market.  Maybe it’s your competitors?  Your Twitter List might be made up of other nationally recognized bloggers or bloggers in your niche market?

Whatever your list is, here’s a self-benchmarking idea you might try in 5 easy steps:

• Build a Twitter List of all the people you want to benchmark yourself against
• Add yourself to that Twitter List
• Set up that Twitter List as a column in whatever social media monitoring tool you use (Hootsuite, Seesmic and Tweetdeck are what I use)
• Monitor the column and take notice of what your group tweets out over the course of a day, week or ongoing
• Tweet out the content you normally do over the course of the day

As you watch, ask yourself some of these questions:

• How often do my tweets show up in the stream in comparison to the other members of the list? Do I tweet frequently enough to be noticed?
• How does your content look next to theirs?  Similar?  Different?
• Are my Twitter List members sharing more links than I am?  Where do those links lead to?
• What type of content do they share?  What are they vetting as relevant?
• How do the folks on my Twitter List structure their tweets?  Are mine similar or different?
• What’s the number of @replies the folks on my Twitter List typically tweet through out the day?  Do I talk with that many people?

What questions would you add to your own self-benchmarking as a Twitter user?

Sometimes you have the chance to meet people that simply fascinate you.

That was the absolutely the case when I first arrived at BlogPaws this past Friday afternoon.  Upon arriving at the conference, I had the chance to meet Lisa Epstein and Natalie Malaszenco, of Petco, and was immediately impressed.

Natalie and Lisa had made the trek from San Diego to take part in the conference and represent their brand among other major sponsors that included Kodak, PetSmart, Nestle Purina and a slew of other organizations – big and small.

I quickly learned that Natalie would be presenting on some of her experience with building a niche industry blog following for major corporate brands.  Upon hearing this, I knew it would be on the list of sessions I just had to attend.

Natalie is no stranger to helping large companies adopt and leverage the power of social media.  She touts a background that includes being a web start-up entrepreneur, holding a patent, and even time spent in global roles with Dell.  Natalie played a large part in the development of the Dell Community, which has been a focal point of talk in the social media industry recently.  The combination of her experiences has allowed her to touch just about every aspect of digital communications.

At BlogPaws, Natalie presented during the Better Business Blogging: Using Your Blog to Engage With Customers session, and was quickly vetted by those tweeting at the conference as one of the very best presenters BlogPaws had to offer. When you hear her talk in the video below, you’ll understand why.  (The picture you see on the side was taken right after her talk.  Natalie had the chance to make friends with Lenny, one of my wonderful pups.)

Natalie was kind enough to share some of her insights with me regarding the details of her presentation.  If you work in social media for a mid-sized or large company, or even if your are passionate about the pet industry on the web, this is definitely an interview to watch.

Ladies and gentlemen, please meet Petco’s Natalie Malaszenko.

What’s your take?

My choice of banks has usually been dictated by location and proximity.

Growing up in Massillon, Ohio, I banked with First Merit.  Why?  A branch was located about two blocks from my house.

When I moved to Westerville, to attend Otterbein College  in 1999, I banked with Huntington.  Why?  There was a branch about a mile south of campus and an ATM down the road from my apartment.

When I moved into Victorian Village this past fall, I switched my bank to National City.  Why?  You guessed it.  A branch was less than a block away, around the corner from my apartment complex.

For me, banking has always been about convenience.  And, up until recently, convenience was largely determined by a bank’s physical location.

Redefining Convenience
When I met Michael Cain, a VP at the mega-regional bank, Fifth Third, I learned that a huge percentage of their customers rarely step foot into a retail branch.  When I consider my own banking patterns, I can see how the culture of banking has changed in the past decade largely due to the rise of the Interwebz.

It’s simply more convenient for people to access their accounts online and manage transactions.  But, with this also comes a challenge for banks: customer service has started to take a back seat to the idea of self-service.

Transactions that were once the sole job of a human teller behind a counter are now often facilitated by online and mobile banking self-service applications.

Think about that for a moment.

With the right applications installed, your iPhone or Droid or Blackberry can become your main connection to customer service for just about any financial transaction you’d like make.  It’s fascinating and maybe even a bit scary at the same time.

Why I’ll Stay with PNC, Even if I Move
Last night, I was in a pinch.

It was about 7:30 PM when I realized that rent was due today.  The PNC branch around the corner was closed and I was about 3 miles into a much-needed run through Grandview.  I knew that  I had not yet transfered my paycheck from my Social Business Strategies account to my personal checking.  Uh-oh.  Not good.

About two weeks ago, I downloaded PNC’s iPhone application to my phone.  The registration process was easy and, after playing around with it, I felt comfortable that even if I lost my phone, the application was secure enough that it would be almost impossible for anyone to hack into my accounts.

At mile 4 – after what I deemed was enough mental anguish – I stopped, opened the PNC mobile banking application and within about three clicks was able to transfer the funds I needed with really no hassle at all.  When I closed the app, my Paul Oakenfold station on Pandora resumed and I dashed back into my route.

Customer Retention & Marketing
I talk about humans all the time, and yet I find it interesting that one of the best and most convenient customer experiences I’ve had since sitting at DK Diner in Grandview took place on my iPhone.  What’s more, is that my entire transaction happened over the course of 2 minutes – and I can verify that because I was timing my rest.

Now, consider the other ways PNC could have asked me to invest my 2 minutes trying to fix the problem:

• Calling PNC and getting through the initial voice prompts on the phone to speak with a customer service rep?  About 10 minutes.
• Driving to a branch (if it was open), walking in from the parking lot, waiting in line to complete the transaction with a human teller?  About 10-15 minutes.
• Driving to the ATM, and completing the transaction there?  About 15-20 minutes.

Using PNC’s iPhone application created a different kind of customer experience, one that saved me time and gave me peace of mind in knowing that my rent would be paid on-time.  Because of that, I’m now married to the iPhone app, as a user.  I don’t plan to live where I’m at forever, but when I do move, the doorway to customer experience that PNC has created will move with me – right in the pocket of my jeans.

And here’s one last point: I’ve spent the last 30 minutes writing this blog post about my customer experience with PNC Bank.  I know that today there are around 1,200 of you who read my blog on a regular basis.  I’m light years away from having “Brogan influence“, but I have a little.

So then, is this blog post and personal account not an element of marketing for PNC’s brand?

Can you see the point I’m trying to make?  If you can, how would you describe it in your own words?