You’ve seen them many times. Stickers on the cover of people’s laptops.
Some proclaim an allegiance to a movement, team or brand.
At Sprinklr, we have a few different stickers we’ve made over the course of the years.
Expensive? Not particularly, but if we went into the purchase of these stickers with the question of “What’s the ROI going to be?” we never would have bought them.
Recently, however, I had an experience that made me glad we did.
Stickers on the Train
Riding the Monday train from DC to NYC a few weeks ago, I was quietly plugging away on my own sticker-clad laptop.
“Do you work for Sprinklr?” the man sitting down across from me said.
I wish I could say that this kind of thing happened all the time, but it doesn’t (at least not yet).
“Yes, I do,” I said, still a bit surprised.
“We just signed a contract with you guys on Friday,” he said. “I noticed your sticker, and I figured that you either work for Sprinklr or have some connection.”
Those little stickers, for which no ROI could have been forecasted, resulted in a two-hour conversation with Scott Lascelles, the CMO of Springleaf Financial, a consumer financial services company with more than 800 branches across the U.S. My laptop’s sticker also led to a visit by Scott to the Sprinklr office and a whole series of ideas.
How Social Media Is Like Stickers
The opportunity that sits in front of all large brands is to be like the stickers on the back of a laptop. It’s to do things and say things that spark genuine conversation.
Such opportunities are even better when you have some context about the history of the relationship. I was fortunate to know the people involved in building the relationship with Scott and Springleaf, and could bring that into our conversation.
Doing that at scale, however, is a different challenge…but we are seeing companies like SAP, Omaha Steaks, Citi, Cisco, Zillow, Virgin America and Microsoft making it happen.
The ROI on Conversations
I’m not going to say that you should do things without any regard to their financial benefit to the organization. And I’m not saying that you should throw money around haphazardly.
What I am saying, however, is that in the Age of Social, our objective is to do things that begin genuine conversations with our audience.
Stickers are designed to be social.
Social networks are social.
People are social.
And they expect the brands they interact with to be social with them.
Social entities start and have conversations with each other.
Do things that start conversations.
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