Pocahontas and my Daughter at Disney's Animal Kingdom

In January of 2009, I took my family to visit Disney World in Orlando, Florida. While there, we experienced something profound in the way that Disney treats its different fan bases.

See, my then eight year old daughter, had spent the better part of her years to that point loving and wanting to be a Disney Princess. Mostly she’s into Arial, probably because of that whole fish-tail thing, but in reality, all of the princesses rocked her adolescent world. Chances are, if you’ve dealt with a young daughter of your own, you know what I’m talking about. So, knowing this about my girl, I gathered as much information about Disney World and how to find princesses as I could. Turns out there this place called the Akershus Royal Banquet Hall at Epcot Center where you can dine with the princesses. Belle greets everyone coming in and takes photos with the kids, and then while you eat, Cinderella, Aurora, Jasmine, and yes, even Arial, come by one at a time to visit each table for photo opportunities. The only person missing is Snow White. You have to book your reservations well ahead of time, and at $35/head for adults, its a bit pricey, but KNOWING that my daughter would get to meet all but one of the princesses sealed the deal for me. I booked our brunch with the princesses for our second day there.

So, our first day at Disney World was a lot of fun. Nothing but great experiences and wonders. We got there about lunch time, wandered around the Magic Kingdom, rode rides, ate food, and caught the fireworks show at the end of the day. All in all, a great time was had.

The second day, knowing what our first real stop of the day would be, I suggested that my daughter wear her princess outfit. Not knowing what was up (did I mention it was a surprise?) she was hesitant, because at eight years of age, she was becoming self conscious of her public dress and grooming. Between encouragement from my wife and I however, she eventually put on her gown and tiara, and we were off.

This is where our entire experience shifted about ten degrees off-kilter from our first day.

We boarded the bus from our hotel, and as it pulled away from the stop, over the speakers ran the normal safety/destination/have a nice day rigmarole. Unlike the day before, however, today it finished with “Please, be on your best royal behavior. Today, we’re riding with a Disney Princess.” I shot a surprised glance to my wife who did the same to me, then we both watched our daughter who seemed unfazed. Then after a few seconds, it registered and she looked up at us wide-eyed. “Was he talking about ME?” We both gave her our “I think so” shrugs and faces and we drove on. Everywhere we went after that, every cast member referred to our daughter as “Princess”, many actually stopping what they were doing to take the time to say hello. “Hello, Princess, can I get you something?” “Hello, Princess, are you having a nice day?” “Hello, Princess, you seem to be running out of Pixie Dust, can I get you some more?” (Out comes the wand that sprinkles glitter all over her head and shoulders).

Encouraged by that day’s events, she chose to dress up like a princess for most of the rest of the stay. After all, its not like at home where princesses might get strange glances. At Disney World, princesses were the ‘it’ girls of the land. In fact, grandpa had given her a coffee can of coins before we left, and it added up to about $90, which she was allowed to spend on anything she wanted. I had made sure to reserve a session at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique on our third day for her Princess Makeover, and, feeling more like a princess than ever, she purchased a full-ensemble Jasmine outfit. From then, on, it wasn’t ‘Princess’ anymore, it was ‘Princess Jasmine’ from the cast members.

And don’t think it was just simple pleasantries, either. She got preferential treatment everywhere we went. Late on the fourth day, wandering around the Animal Kingdom, I turned a corner to see a meet-and-greet line with Pocahontas. Not a princess, but still, up there in my daughter’s ‘would like to meet’ list. As her handler saw me, he said (as he’d probably been saying for the past 5 minutes) “sorry folks, Pocahontas is finished for the day.” I then recognized that there was no one in her line and that she had just finished taking a photo with her last customer. OK, I thought. Too, bad, but nothing to be done about it. Then, probably a full 15 seconds later, my daughter, with her aunts, rounded the corner of the trail dressed in her full Jasmine ensemble. My daughter, realizing what she’d just missed, looked after Pocahontas for a moment, and the handler, who was just turning to follow Pocahontas down a ‘cast members only’ side trail, stopped mid stride, turned back and said loud enough for my daughter to hear, “Your Highness! I’m SO SORRY! I didn’t see you! Pocahontas! Come back, we have a royal visitor!” Pocahontas returned, my daughter got her photo, the rest of the visitors were turned away, and again Pocahontas and her handler headed back down their trail.

Special service? In front of other visitors? You betcha. Being a Princess at Disney World is the fast track to VIP treatment. A ‘members only’ club experience right out of the gate.

This would have impressed me, anyway, but having just finished reading Seth Godin’s Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us, I was amazed to watch as Disney very simply and elegantly added the newest member to their Tribe and made her a fan for life. I have no doubt that she will eventually outgrow her enamor of the Princesses. She already dresses up less and less. However, I have no doubt that based on her experiences, she’ll remain a Disney fan for life, and based on the way I saw them making her feel, they’ve actually made two. She’s in the Tribe of Disney Princesses now, and all it cost her was the guts to wear her outfit.

So, back to business. Is there something you can do to mimic this in your own business? Something small, but special, that would make your current customers or clients feel like they’re on the ‘inside’? Something that would reward your best clients, or maybe turn your average clients into your best clients? Simple things like adding someone who filled out a survey for your to a ‘discount list’, or ‘mailing list only’ specials to subscribers of your mailing list? Those are really basic, but can you grow it from there? What if your mailing list subscribers got an unpublished automatic ‘rush’ service when they placed an order? Or upgraded to overnight delivery? If you’re running a local business, maybe they get invited to a private after-dinner party?

What you can do, will obviously depend on your business and your clients, but if you look hard enough, you can certainly do something. After all, when you break down the whole Disney Princess experience it’s this:

1. Call every little girl in a princess outfit “Princess.”
2. If you see a little girl in a princess outfit, bump it up a notch.

Now, how hard was that?

The other night, Amelia finds me on Facebook and friends me. Cool enough. Of course, after accepting her invitation, one of the next things I do is head on over to twitter to try and find her there as well. I find her account, easily enough, but its a protected account, so I request to follow her. Last night, I get the following message from her on Facebook:

Hi Chris got your tweet invite but I don’t tweet just got onto facebook through brenda…..

At this point I’m going to pick on Amelia just a little bit here, and ask that she recognize that I’m absolutely NOT blasting her personally, its just that she’s convenient fodder for this situation that I’ve seen play out time and again. In fact I do recognize that she, along with a lot of other people, are just starting to figure out these tools and I commend them for at least playing around with them. I’d also like to point out at this point that since lots of people ARE figuring things out right now, that it has started to turn into a race to see who gets there first.

Anyway, after I had mustered up a good head of false indignation and misplaced ire, I got ready to answer her directly, when I realized two things:

• 1. it didn’t matter how she answered my next question, my responses would all be pretty similar
• 2. this would make a good post that could help more people than just her.

So, now its a blog post, and I’ll just send her and the other trainers a link to it.

So, anyway, my next question to her would have been this:

What is your competition doing on Twitter?

There are only 3 basic responses to that question; nothing, I don’t know, and something.

My responses to each of those are:

Nothing

You mean that there’s a space on the internet, the fastest growing in all of history, and NO ONE from your industry is there, and the first one in basically OWNS that space?”

I don’t know

“You mean that there’s a space on the internet, the fastest growing in all of history, and you have NO IDEA if your competition is there, what they’re doing, or how they are using it?”

Something

“You mean that there’s a space on the internet, the fastest growing in all of history, and whether they’re actually doing it right or not, you are letting your competition exist there UNCHALLENGED?”

Now, about her account being ‘protected’, my personal feelings on that are that you might as well not be on the network as far as branding and promotion go if your account is protected. Since she hasn’t really used Twitter, I understand that its kind of locked up until she gets there. Also, there are plenty of reasons to have a protected account, but a protected account shouldn’t be the account that you use to connect to your potential clients, your professional community and your fans. Keep the protected accounts for personal or ‘top secret’ uses only. If your account is open, you are FAR more likely to attract new followers, be indexed on Google, retweeted, and linked to than if your account is locked.

The best part of all of this is, that between all of the trainers, they already have a very solid foundation for a community. They are not a single person standing alone in the twittersphere, they are a ready-made network, able to share information freely among themselves about interesting topics in their industry, ready to set themselves up as leaders, poised to grow, and available to help and answer questions, even if their original followers are simply their students.

My advice to the trainers would be this. Each trainer opens their own Twitter account. Next, start a Twibe over on http://twibes.com, which basically creates a twitter community that allows someone to join their community and automatically linked to EVERYONE in that community. Also, people can come and go, and there’s no work on the part of any community member to keep track of who is where, since its all updated automatically. Third, set a schedule so that on busy days, they know someone will take the time to stop by and check on the twibe conversations, answer questions, greet new members, etc. The trainers are staggered through the globe, in Europe, the US, Australia and China. If everyone just logged in on their lunch break, they would have more than enough coverage in any given day. Finally, any of the trainers who blog (another topic altogether) should either manually tweet when a new post is published, or download a plugin for their blog that will do that automatically. I currently use WordTwit from Brave New Code.

Bob and I start talking about Twitter in episode 303 of Creative Independence which will drop this weekend. We cover setting up your account, branding, account options and the like. In episode 305 we’re going to go over some of the more interesting ways to leverage Twitter in your business. We also need to jump onto using Facebook soon, since it seems to be where everyone is starting.

I’m dying to let you know who these people are, but until I know who is where, and more importantly, whether or not their competition really is using these tools, I’d hate to tip off the competition that they can basically get in there unchallenged at this point.

Visible changes to your image or changes to your processes, especially at the point where they interact with our client’s processes, can stumble client relations. At the best, these kinds of changes can create trepidation, discomfort and unease; at the worst, these changes may produce costs and upgrade pains for our customers. Remaining firm to our core values and products, and offering help with the transition should make it easier for our clients to stay with us and remain our clients.

I hate it when a visit to a Borders Bookstore turns sour, which happens more and more these days. They are not close by, so I don’t just swing out anytime I feel like it. A trip to Borders is not like a stop at the local grocery store. Its generally more of an outing, and I usually stop by on a Sunday while visiting the in-laws 40 minutes away (they live right around the corner from a Borders).

First, I’m a card-carrying member of their rewards club, but I’m not sure it does me any real good. I earn rewards for every book I purchase, but they expire faster than I seem to be able to accumulate them. Their 30-50% off deals for members are actually pretty good, but if I don’t remember to print a coupon and bring it with me, its all in vain. If they would just tie the discounts to the card! I realize that its probably very petty on my part, but I’ve actually left books unpurchased at the counter after I’ve realized that either my coupon had expired (happened once) or that I’d completely forgotten it in the printer tray (many, many times). To make matters worse, when I leave like that, I’m generally in a bad mood. Letting your customers leave your place in a bad mood is bad for business.

Second is pricing. I know, and just about EVERYONE knows, that you can get your books cheaper on Amazon.com. If all you want is the book, and can skip the rest of the experience and don’t mind waiting for it to be shipped, then you might as well buy it on Amazon. Since I enjoy the rest of the experience, I want to give my money to the store so that I can help them continue to provide the experience. However, even Borders.com’s online prices can be heavily discounted from their in-store prices. For instance, I just picked up Born to Run for $25 and the revised 4-Hour Work Week for $22 in-store. If I’d bought them from the website I’d have saved $15 between the two. I guess I realize why this is, but since I generally check the website first for availability, I see the pricing online first. When I get to the store to find out that on top of spending my own travel time and my own gas that I’m paying $10 more for a book because its on a shelf rather than in a warehouse somewhere, there’s just no way that feels good. Not only that, but Amazon still beats their on-line pricing, and offers free shipping on orders over $25.

Shopping at Borders lately has been like watching an old friend slowly die. Or maybe just become someone you don’t want to hang around with. You know the kind? You love them and the great memories and feelings keep you coming back, but every time you visit these days, you just realize that you like them less and less, and all of the sentimentality in the world isn’t going to change that. This all leaves me with the question: why am I paying extra to support an experience I no longer seem to be enjoying? I’m not ready to call it quits, but every visit moves me that much closer.