Tag Archive for: Marke

News Update – Best of the Day

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daily1When managers talk to executives about social media the main question is always: Will the executives see the value for relationship- and brand-building. A new whitepaper called “Social Media: Embracing the Opportunities, Averting the Risks” says: Yes, they do!
And if your executives still don’t know why they should implement social media guidelines, Brian Solis has some good arguments for you.

Case studies on employer branding and how to leverage it with social media is hard to find. Brett Minchington, Chairman/CEO of Employer Brand International (EBI), interviews Kerry Noone (Marketing Communications Manager, Sodexo) about how their social media strategy is building a stronger employer brand at Sodexo. Listen carefully…

Sometimes old TV spots turn out to the best…

PS: Find new books in my The Strategy Web bookstore. Just updated today…!

Best feature of social networks? The Pick-a-boo effect…

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pick-a-booDon’t we love to play this game with kids because we know how happy it makes them… Pick-a-boo. But as adults using social networks: What is it that makes us happy? Some weeks ago, I asked some friends of mine who in turn asked friends of theirs as well as their colleagues: What is the main benefitial feature of social networks? The most frequent answer that came up was the ‘Who has been on your profile lately’ feature which goes along the lines of ‘The Pick-a-boo’ effect.

Now, what does that mean ‘The Pick-a-boo’ effect’? Well, people register in social networks in order to get in contact or connected with peers, (old) friends or humans that are (or might be) interested in them or/and their work. The tricky point is that there are people in the world of social networks we don’t want to contact any longer, in the future or in general. Nevertheless, we still love to take a peek as we wonder if they are still interested in us, what they are up to and what impact is driving their lives. It’s kind of human vanity and curiosity thing. We want to compare ourselves with them, want to check out how ‘sexy’ our online (and offline) reputation is – not only in terms of business life. We want to play Pick-a-boo. We are there and everybody in social networks knows that, but we are not visible all the time. And, we would love not to be visible for everybody when we are looking at people’s profiles who appear not to be relevant for our life. But we’ll pop-up from time to time to stay ‘up to date’.

So, we make us accessible and available in social networks for those who are also users of these networks. As we don’t know the size of the target group of people who is interested in us, we want to find out about it. By this we are making the ‘ego-community’ transparent for ourselves. And most of us ‘social medians’ are eager and would love to know that, wouldn’t we? Some networks have acknowledged this desire of being famous and our nasty habit of being vain. And they satisfy our need and desire for that with great application features supporting this pick a boo effect: status updates, birthday calender or ‘contacts of your contacts’.

No matter if you are a sales person, a recruiter or a consultant. We all want to know how a person looks like after making a call, or attending a meeting or a conference. And we all want to know more about them, either because it facilitates a second conversation or because we would like to recruit someone or sell something. The more we know, the easier the effort. Playing Pick-a-boo has become standard.

The active Pick-a-boo
Let’s identify the active pick a boo effect in social networks. We try to find the person or/and go to a profile page, x-ray the contact or find out details on his mentality, personality or hobbies. So, we take a quick look at the profile and then we are off again. Sometimes, we might be going there for a second or a third time before getting in touch with that person. And the funny thing is: We know that the other person knows that we have been visiting their profile page. Is it because we want them to do the first step. Or we ‘pick-a-boo’ just to let them know, someone is interested.

The passive Pick-a-boo
The passive benefit of the pick a boo effect lies in the feature ‘Who has been to your profile’ application or widget. Although a paid service feature on some social networks (XING and LinkedIn), it is probably the most viewed or reloaded feature of active social ‘medians’, those users who have access to it. Why is this ‘pick a boo’ application so attractive for us? We can…
… receive transparency on the ego-community
… monitor the quantity and quality of visitors to our profiles
… identify our ‘personal branding target group’
… evaluate our job market options
… see how often Google is used for ‘Recruit-Googling’
… see who ‘delivers’ good contacts to us
and finally the best of all parts: Via the passive pick a boo effect, we can contact people and definitely have a starting point for a business and/or private conversation.

Spot On!
Seeing all these benefits of the Pick-a-boo application ‘Who has seen to your profile lately’, it surprises me that the biggest network of all, Facebook, still doesn’t have this application feature. Or will it be coming with the announcement of becoming a paid service platform? We will see…

Curious to hear your view and experience on the Pick-a-boo effect in social networks?

Is Twitter a sales tool?

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twitter-dollarIn a lot of talks and meetings with clients I am asked if Twitter is a sales tool. Now, what would you say? The university professor might answer with a Solomonic answer: “Well, it depends how you see it…”. Being a member of the Twitterati it is one of these questions where you have to hold on to your horses in order not to be too excited. The best answer is probably: “Yes, it is… and No, it is not!”…

The why for “Yes, it is”…
Looking at the latest development in the “Twittersphere” it can be said that the micro-blogging service can be used as a push tool for sales promotions meant to generate an upside in revenue. The best examples are accounts from companies like Dell (selling re-furbished IT for 3 mio. USD), Threadless (selling shirts – no numbers released yet) or Zappos (selling shoes – no numbers released yet).

Although we don’t know see any revenue figures of Threadless or Zappos, seeing the follower numbers alone offers the option to sell through the indirect way to this new “distribution list” by keeping up the conversation with new thoughts and ideas gathering engagement – or direct via ‘extraordinary’ offers. Just take a look at my sales statistic or metric, I summarized on the Dell Outlet account and you can evaluate your sales options.

Especially, the aviation industry has used the power of pushing their offers through this new media channel – thus uplifting their revenue figures. Some airlines like JetBlue (called “JetBlueCheeps“) and United Airlines (“twares”) offer cheap seats Twitter sales promotion programs (also for unsold tickets). The companies push their announcements via Twitter and the user -hopefully- listens to their Tweets and needs exactly the route offered.

In Germany Lufthansa has also started with sales promotions via Twitter – and obviously after this test the worldwide Twitter offering is “coming soon”.

The PRO view…
Yes, Twitter is a sales tool as there is no limit in terms of target-group, industry sector, the costs of the product or the product and service itself. Use it as a sales tool if you think your customers or your desired target-group is open-minded, loves last-minute offers or is ready to be engaged via social media.

The why for “No, it is.”
Nevertheless, the way how companies use Twitter to address their target-group with their sales promotions appears like some kind of old “watering can” marketing principle. Is this really time-to-market sales? Can this be called “targeting” which is the modern form of receiving sales promotions? One thing is for sure: Forecasting on such sales push activities is nearly impossible… the proof is in the test. But: once started, there is no way out. Sales promotions on Twitter are relying on the “hope” factor by offering an additional sales channel called “SomeTwitterAccountByOurCompany”.

And sales strategies go against the means of social media anyway. Sales philosophy is “We know what you want and here is your customized offer!” – social media is “We listen, learn and share what our customers want to buy from us!”.

From the airline examples we can learn that the offer is not just positive extra media promotion. It is limited in its sales power in a way that consumers need to be flexible and last-minute offer driven. Sounds a bit like the ebay way of selling…

So, Twitter sales promotions are relying on the “hope” factor by offering an additional sales channel called Twitter account. Some follow as they are just listening to the company or product development, some as they learn from the tweets and some as they want to share common knowledge. Not all followerrs really want to buy something. You are in good company when your company does not want to aggressively buy followers in order to go down the good old spam route.

The CON view…
No, Twitter is not a sales tool but more a customer service tool with the positive side-effect that you can sell indirect by giving good service, helping your customers and solving their problems in real-time. Don’t use it when you think your customers are bound to traditional cliches, rarely take the advantage of accepting fast shopping opportunities and don’t know what social media can do for them.

Spot On!
Generally speaking… – From a followers point of view (in this case meaning customers), there is a positive argument about Twitter sales promotions: Interested customers will follow (=read) the sales push tweet – uninterested won’t, they will ignore it. And customers don’t even have to delete the message like a spam mail. It is dying with the followers timelife stream…

Advice
The Critical question to ask are… Do we have a long-time social media strategy or do we just want to “drive” a short-time sales push? What have we done in the past to push our sales revenues? What worked out well? I am sure, if you ask yourself these questions, some more questions on your web strategy in terms of sales achievements will follow…

Am I right…?

News Update – Best of the Day

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daily1Why do also small businesses need a website? The answer is easy. A recent Nielsen Online custom survey from WebVisible, Inc. shows that if somebody wants to buy a product, 92% do some research online first and then might purchase locally. So, if small businesses do not have a website, these companies are “virtually invisible to these local consumers”.

Launching a product in today’s business scenario is not the easiest effort. So, tips are always appreciated. Here are three tips I found lately that put your prospects in the center of attention. My brief summary…
1. Make it easy for prospects to find and study your new product.
Customers need to be ready – Stop convincing them that they are ready!
“Research by MarketingSherpa shows that customers now find suppliers — not the other way around — in 80 percent of b-to-b transactions. B-to-b buyers like to research, analyze, and make rational group decisions.”
2. Encourage word-of-mouth marketing.
Find VIP editors and bloggers, customers and influencers that your customers trust in.
3. Let your prospects help you figure out your new-product launch message and media mix.
The Dell Ideastorm approach… – Make the “voice-of-the-customer” design, create and promote your products. “Then, use their specific language in your advertising copy as keywords to attract their Google searches, etc.”

The viral video to Guitar Hero 5 is probably causing a lot of talks in the world…

Real-time is the future and real-time starts with Twitter?

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It was about time to relaunch the Twitter front page and some days ago, Mashable already mentioned this next step. From the old front page it was nearly impossible to understand what this platform is all about, the new one shows what this platform could be in the future…

Twitter becomes more like a mixture of user-generated CNN, Facebook and Google in taking the best of bread from all platforms. It is a real time information exchange news service in a social networking coat.

new-twitter1
Now, their new front page focuses on their biggest benefit for every single user in the world: their real-time search engine. In placing this in the main center of attraction and attention, Twitter leaves a lot of open space for thoughts and speculations about their future strategy in expanding their business (and business value).

The new real-time strategy is supported by the three tag lines…
– Popular topics right now (main tags real-time search)
– Popular topics today (last 24 hours)
– Popular topics this week (last 7 days)

Will they finally follow the Google business? At least some kind of similar bottom up strategy can be seen in this approach. A road that Google started off some years ago…

old-twitterCompared to the old front page (see right), the main benefit of Twitter becomes more clear now for new users and makes the USP of the platform obvious right from the start.

If we are just talking about search and the business benefit of “being and knowing first-to-market”, this will be a clear winner for Twitter compared to Google where search results for certain topics can be some years old.

Real-time is the future (of news business) and real-time starts with Twitter?

Launch Bookstore auf The Strategy Web

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bookstore-tswDie Nachricht von dem Partner E-Commerce Strategie der QStores bei Quelle liest sich fast schon wie ein lustiger Zufall für mich. Erst gestern habe ich mein Blog The Strategy Web um einen neuen Bücher Shop erweitert. Allerdings mit aStore von Amazon, nicht QStore von Quelle…

Warum ein Book Store?
In den letzten Monaten habe ich ab und an Rezensionen geschrieben zu Büchern, die mich in irgendeiner Weise fasziniert, bewegt oder nachhaltig beeinflußt haben. Diese (Business)-Bücher wurden dann in der Sidebar als Widget “Buchempfehlung” vorgestellt. Leider verschwanden mit jedem Update einer Empfehlungen die anderen gänzlich – und grundsätzlich zu schnell.

Karl-Heinz Wenzlaff, der die Idee des Bookstores an mich herangetragen hat, meinte mal in einer Mail: “So schnell kommt man ja mit dem Lesen nicht nach, wie Sie die Buchempfehlungen wechseln”. Mag daran liegen, daß ich mir als ehemaliger Literaturwissenschaftler das schnelle Lesen beigebracht habe. Was hier jetzt aber eher kontraproduktiv war. Mit dem Bookstore kann ich das Problem elegant umgehen.

Was findet man im Bookstore?
Mein Bookstore trägt die Überschrift “Books and Recommendations” also nicht umsonst. Zukünftig werden dort unter der Rubrik Books Angebote zu relevanter Lektüre die Blogthemen betreffend integriert. Webstrategy, Marketing, Sales und Mobile Web sowie “Unterhaltsames und Nachdenkliches” bei Easy Listening (witzige, lustige und trotzdem nachhaltige DVDs) und Easy Strategy (moderne Startegieansätze der ‘Light-Version’ sowie Romane).

Wie schwierig ist es, ein aStore zu erstellen?
Überhaupt nicht schwer, denn mit den Amazon aStores benötigt man keine Programmierkenntnisse. Der Aufbau von aStores ist nahezu selbsterklärend. Man kann seine Kategorien selbst definieren, Farben & Design anpassen, die Sidebar konfigurieren und die finalen Versionen per Link, iFrame oder Frameset sehr einfach für jeden Blog-, Webseiten oder Communitybetreiber integrieren.

Monetarisierung oder Service?
Wer glaubt, als Amazon-Partner kann man seine Blogaktivitäten gut monetarisieren, der muß ein anderes Blogthema als ich haben. Vermutlich ist nahezu jedes andere Blogthema der Umsatzgenerierung dienlicher. In den letzten Wochen bin ich oft gefragt worden, welche Literatur man so in den Themen des Blogs ließt, um “Up-To-Date” zu bleiben. Der Bookstore ist ein Service für meine Leser – nicht mehr, nicht weniger.

Ich wünsche Euch viel Spaß und hoffe, dort gute Vorschläge und Empfehlungen eingebaut zu haben. Natüprlich erfährt der Bookstore regelmäßig ein Update…

News Update – Best of the Day

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There are not many case studies on how to leverage social media for business and how to engage customers, partners, and press with social media. One great company example offers Cisco. Mia Dand summarizes Cisco’s approach on openness, transparency and ROI. And if you find the time see also the example of the American red cross by Beth Canter, including their social media strategy handbook…

Twitter and agencies seems to be a relationship that is not yet established for a powerful client mode. AdAge shows some amazing examples where agencies are handling Twitter streams for clients – but the agencies don’t even own their branded accounts, or have a powerful leader or expert which can be shown as a good case study to their clients. Scary?! My advice: Before starting to believe in the agency’s knowledge on social media, read the examples above and then take a look at this short post by Lawrence Perry: How not to be annoying on Twitter and other social media. Then decide which agency is the right one to handle your social media activities…

…and whenever I find a good example of a funny commercial, we will share this…

Personal Branding – how to build your career 3.0

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Personal branding is the way to stand out of the crowd and being noticed in some special way in the business world which makes you unique. It is your value proposition for the future of your career. In a session at the webinale09 I held a speech about ‘Career 3.0 – split between personal branding and productivity’ and gave some projections on the relevance of social media activities and how these affect your career development.

Today, we want to learn from Dwight Cribb, founder of his successful recruitment agency, what professional recruiters think about personal branding and what is the relevance for personal branding. You can follow his offline and online thoughts via his Twitter account.

Q: What is the first thing you do when somebody is being suggested as a perfect candidate?
Dwight Cribb Of course I will first probe what the relationship between the candidate and the person suggesting him is. Supposing that the recommendation is made during a phone conversation, I will in parallel check the candidate’s profile on Xing. If that does not provide the information I require I will probe deeper with people search engines.

Q: Let’s imagine somebody is not doing anything for personal branding. This person is not blogging, micro-blogging or social networking. Does this have a positive or negative impact on your perception of that person?
Dwight Cribb This largely depends on the type of position I am recruiting for, both in terms of seniority and discipline. I would normally expect someone in a directly client facing role or someone who communicates directly on behalf of a division or company to have at least some presence on the web. It is, however, true that not being on a social networking site is today more of statement than being on one. A few years ago one could be forgiven for thinking of people who had not yet discovered Xing, LinkedIn and facebook as being somewhat backward or conservative. As it is today largely impossible to not have noticed these networks flourish, we must assume that those not on them have shunned them on purpose. This may be a good strategy if one relies on others to communicate with clients and the public, especially as a senior manager. A C-Level executive will through his utterances on social networks have a severe impact on the brand communication, it thus needs to be 100% in line with the other communication, if not it will cause at best confusion and at worst it will undermine the credibility of the brand.

As for blogging, I think that is a very personal decision and I would never think badly of anyone who did not blog. I may, however, think badly of someone who blogs badly or in a manner inappropriate to his or her position. So overall it would not reflect badly if I found out nothing about a person online, it would just peak my interest and make me more curious to receive other information in the form of a CV or a recommendation from a third party.

Q: Will personal branding and the individual online reputation replace the traditional CV some day?
Dwight Cribb I doubt whether it will replace the CV, it is more likely that it will continue to augment the CV. Online reputation is a fantasy product. We each spin our profiles in a manner which we feel supports the image we want to convey. It is self marketing. A CV is more strongly based in chronological fact and provides a picture which comes closer to the reality than the pictures which get drawn in communities.

Q: If everybody has a strong personal brand, don’t companies fear these people could get chased by some competitor and recruiters? Or that employees just work for their own career purpose?
Dwight Cribb Most successful employees work for the own career advancement. But in the long term they will only achieve this by delivering results to their employers, because people are very good at spotting meaningless self marketing and will not fall for it for long. Good employees have always had a strong personal brand (also called reputation). It has been true in all areas and across the ages, if you do something well you will be admired by your peers and your reputation will spread. This means that others will try and employ your services, sometimes via a recruiter.

Q: What is your advice on how companies have to handle personal branding of the employees in the future?
Dwight Cribb Let people define themselves what they are comfortable with. Give them a clear guideline what company resources and what company information they can use to build their reputation and to what extent they must make clear what is their opinion what the company’s.

Q: What do you think of the personal web managers vision?
Dwight Cribb There are instances where this makes perfect sense, but I belive they are far and few between. This is a role which has precedence in the offline world, many high-profile business people, politicians and celebrities employ someone with this brief. Whether they do their job online, offline or in both really does not make much difference. We have come to expect that the picture we get presented of these people has been scripted and planned in detail. We even often admire the way in which they craftily manipulate their image. But I think we would be less inclined to condone or accept this level of abstraction in communication in our closer environment of colleagues, family and friends. A facebook status update from a friend loses relevance if I know that it was posted his or her personal web consultant, who was busy making them be liked by their friends and acquaintances.

Q: Give us 3 tips how to create a personal brand, please.
Dwight Cribb Be yourself, be honest, laugh at times.

Thank you for your time and your advice, Mr. Cribb.

Dell: social media business or the just good marketers?

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Dell is the social media super-hero these days and one of the most named examples of social media intelligence. At least, if we believe in a lot of blog posts…

Last week, Dell reported in a blog post that their Twitter account @DellOutlet earned more than $2 million US dollars in revenue. Money that can be attributed directly to their Twitter activity. This does not surprise us, having heard that Dell broke the $1 million US dollar barrier some months ago.

Nevertheless, let’s think a minute about the ‘social aspect’ of this Twitter account. The funny thing about it is that Dell is just using old marketing techniques to generate revenue via Twitter.

Or is the use of coupon codes a marketing innovation of the web 2.0 era?

These couopons come flying into my mailbox at home every day – quicker than I have time to throw them in a bin.

“Dell Outlet sells refurbished Dell products at great prices, but inventories fluctuate, making it difficult to know when products are available or on sale. Dell Outlet uses Twitter as a way to message out coupons, clearance events and new arrival information to those looking for Dell technology at a discounted price.” (quote from Dell blog)

Reading this statement, the question is what is the social media strategy? Isn’t this just good old marketing tactics? This Dell Twitter account @DellOutlet is not acting in any way like social media has been teaching companies lately.

“Listen, learn and engage” (Brian Solis) is the value proposition of social media. The customers are coming to you as they have heard about the quality and value of your product, service or business. Then, they buy and do some good word-of-mouth activity via Twitter, Facebook, blogs, rating sites etc. for your business. This is resulting in community building – not a sales channel like the Dell example.

Dell is talking, pushing and selling. It is the good old communication and marketing practice we all know from some years ago.

Why is Dell so successful? It is a matter of simple marketing technics. It follows the old sales intelligence… From more than 650.000 followers, 10% will be real followers (as you just follow when you are in the evaluation process mode before a purchase decision) = 60.500 followers. And if you are lucky company 5% will buy your product in the end = 3.025 users. This tells us about an interesting average revenue of 661,15 US dollar per Twitter client.

Ah, I love sales statistics… though admittedly, these might be taken from the easiest perspective of ROI measurement.

Spot On!
But is this Dell activity really ‘social’? It is the email marketing system – tables turned upside down. Opt-In or follower? Subscribe or unsubscribe is the question… Email promotion or social media promotion? Email spam or social media spam? What comes next in the marketers arena? And, the account is just following Dell accounts… is the client/follower really interesting for them?

Not saying this is not a very clever approach reaching out for clients… well-done, Dell.

Your views much appreciated…

Ad Effectiveness – Mixing Apples & Eggs?

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Sometimes you read a study and think: “Ah, this is interesting information”. So, you write about it in a News Update.

And then, you stumble upon it again, and think twice about the research. This happened to me with the ‘Ad Effectiveness study’ conducted by Forbes. And browsing through it again, my feeling was that the title of this eMarketer article reflected the result, but the study itself mixes apples and eggs in some way…

Still, the main statement of the study remains an important trend in online marketing, and is an even more important praise for the work of online publishers (yes, probably a bit self-referential for Forbes).

“Respondents were by far the least happy with ad networks, with half saying that the results did not meet expectations” (…) “Ad network spending is all about demand fulfillment while direct-to-publisher display is much aligned with the traditional advertising goals of demand creation,” said Forbes.com president and CEO Jim Spanfeller.

However, it has to be said that ‘ad networks’ is not a tactic for generating conversion. It is a supplier that offers ‘cheap space’ by bundling platforms into offers in most cases. Platform owners have a much deeper understanding of their target group and can definitely do a better consulting in terms of converting their target group into potentials for their clients. Absolutely, I agree with that statement, having done this for years…

BUT: Taking my view on the study, the set up of the study is in some way irritating. When the marketing executives were asked on budget allocations the results were these…

…and what they see as most effective tactics for generating conversion? Site or page sponsorship and SEO were considered the most effective ways online.

Thinking about the answering options (and bearing in mind my brand theme ‘tools, tactics, trends’) that were given to the responding marketers though, these options need to be separated from each other…

The question, I was asking myself is… Is viral marketing really an ad tactic? In my eyes it is not. It is a strategic communication tactic which integrates viral ads as some relevant online marketing tool.

So, this study set up seems to be a comparison of apple and eggs. Viral marketing is done in social networks. It is the way in which brand awareness other marketing objectives can be increased. Viral ads is the tool that may be spread like a computer virus by the users. It cannot be influenced like banner or text ads. Nor can it be bought. So, it is a modern marketing trend with little historical definition or proven success.

And, maybe such a study should think about: What can be bought by marketers, and what cannot in our times of social media.

Spot on!
The following summary is meant to make clear what steps have to be done first by marketers to create the conversation results their bosses appreciate… and it is a guideline for the chronology of setting up an online marketing strategy.

1.) Tactics
At first, marketers have to think about the tactics they can choose from…
SEO, e-mail and e-newsletter, site and page sponsorship, corporate web TV or viral marketing.

2.) Tools
Then, they have to decide on the tools that can be used to make these tactics efficient…
good texts (I am missing this most interesting option), banners, or viral ads.

3.) Trends
And finally, we have options that might create powerful conversion…
The use of ad networks, behavioral targeting and pay per ‘x’ models (x=impression, unique user, sales, click etc.)

If the online industry continues to publish studies that mix apples and eggs, it is no wonder that 57% of respondents said they still spend less than 25% of their marketing budgets online.

It is still early days in online marketing, it seems…