Monthly Archives: February 2009
Being a blogger, i do not get sore thumbs thanks to
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Image from: http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/
1. Not everyone or every business needs a website. If they do, in many cases the need is just for an HTML business card. If you have no time or inclination to create a dynamic, interesting site, your money is better spent elsewhere.
2. Before you hire a designer, consultant, or expert involving things like SEO, Social Network Marketing, Web-site design or anything remotely resembling the above, do your homework. There are a handful of TRULY brilliant people and an army of poseurs. Buy the best-selling book, hire the truly successful consultant, even if it costs more. If you go with the flashy web-site guy and his free e-book you get what you paid for.
3. The Internet is not a bulletin board. It’s not an infomercial or a television advertisement. Just putting up a flashy smile and waving your arms won’t sell anything. If you want to sell to people on the Internet, use people to do it – smart people with personalities who actually answer e-mail, interact with customers and listen to feedback.
4. Trying to recreate the brick and mortar world on the Internet has fail written all over it. A magazine with a quarterly subscription is limited by print costs, distribution, etc. The net is dynamic, fast-moving, and you have to engage your audience’s attention, then hold it. That means constantly changing dynamic interactive content. The more interesting site wins every time. A quarterly updated e-zine is just a parody of the old model and doomed.
5. When Seth Godin pointed to Lulu.com and said you no longer have anyone but yourself to decide whether your book gets published, he was not saying you can make a success of your bad book. He is saying if you put everything you have into that book, if you live / eat / dream your book and it’s good and you can get one person to buy it and recommend it, anything is possible. He also says if no one buys the book, you need a new book. New technology is not the answer to making things that suck work.
6. Entertainment, laughter, things that make people return happily to your section of the universe – these are the best tools at your disposal. Lolcats has a very simple site with a million unpaid comedians drawing their traffic. It works. Corporate sites are like the old rabbit fur blanket I once owned, and the reaction my cat had to it. I would drop her on it, and she literally seemed magnetically opposed, leaped away in panic. Boring, overbearing web marketing is going to fail. The only people making money on it are the consultants.
7. If you claim to be an expert in Social Networking or Social Marketing and your Facebook, Blog, MySpace, Twitter, etc. profiles feature you in a big flashy picture with dollar signs trailing out of your ears – or they are filled with links and offers and deals and e-books, etc….you are not only not an expert in ANY of those things, but you are part of the reason that people are afraid of the changes the Internet has to offer. That crap is archaic, doesn’t work, and leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
8. It costs more in time, money, and ulcer-inducing stress to monitor every minute of your employees time on the Internet than it could possibly be worth, and it’s like teaching pigs to sing. You are wasting your time, and it annoys the pigs. It does not stop your “most valued assets” from doing what they want – it only puts them in fear of you, adds tension to your working relationship, and kills enthusiasm. Instead, why not take a positive attitude toward the Internet, encourage useful interaction, engage your people in a manner that shows you are interested in how well they do, and not just in how rich YOU get – and see if it doesn’t improve productivity. I can almost guarantee it. I’m not suggesting you let people surf for porn or spend all day on Facebook, just that you not stand over their shoulders like an ogre threatening their livelihood if they show an interest in something new.
9. Myspace and Facebook -for all their size – comprise only a tiny portion of the Internet. If your “home page” resides on a service like this that only other members can view – you have efficiently blocked yourself from a huge portion of the most useful, innovative folks on the Internet. Facebook and Myspace are tools, but your web presence needs to be open, interesting, and accessible.
10. People will help you. REAL people are out there with every skill imaginable. You can make friends with them, do business with them, interact with them, share what you know and what you can do. The more you participate, the more you receive in return, and the greater your potential becomes. Don’t be a dillweed…join in the “conversation”. It’s our Internet (at least for the moment) and we should celebrate that and take advantage of it. Those merely trying to exploit it are starting to stand out like sore thumbs.
Don’t be a sore thumb.
Written by David Wilson – Visit Website
Founder of Tweepleblog
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Be social: do not leave your home at March 7th
I’m aware that you probably will not live in NY. But anyway, you can apply the guideline and donate your savings to a noble cause in your environment.
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Press release
Stay Home March 7th to Feed Hungry NYC Families with SM4SC!
sm4sc.com — Social Media for Social Change (@sm4scNYC and @sm4sc on Twitter), a Tech/SocMed coalition, is raising funds for NYC hunger charity City Harvest by holding a “stay home” night March 7th.
Take your “going out” money, and make sure a hungry family gets to eat. .50, $50 or $500 — all donations welcome.
It’s an easy way to get involved — join
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Forecast: with this statement I do not agree
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The Only Function of Economic Forecasting is to Make Astrology Look Respectable is said by John Kenneth Galbraith.
As stated in earlier posts it is my sincere belief that rolling forecasts (and fort his sake I classify these as economic forecast) are the management tool in uncertain times.
Artist unknown
Oops, remarkable! 02/25/2009
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[daily dose of imagery] by
Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
Outside in or inside out: an approach to customer experience and customer service
Lot of fuzz going on with regard to customer journeys, customer experience and customer service. I really liked this post by Bruce Temkin. It created insights and confirmed my humble opinion. Hope it has the same effect to you!
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Artist Rania Mater www.raniamater.com
Posted by Bruce Temkin in Customer experience, customer service.
I often get asked to describe the difference between customer service and customer experience. To me, it comes down to this picture:
Customer service is an organizational function, like marketing and sales, that manages a subset of interactions with customers. Customer experience, on the other hand, is the connection that companies make with their customers across all functions and touchpoints. Here’s a definition for customer experience:
The perception that customers have of their interactions with an organization
I also like what Amazon.com’s CEO Jeff Bezos had to say on this topic:
Internally, customer service is a component of customer experience. Customer experience includes having the lowest price, having the fastest delivery, having it reliable enough so that you don’t need to contact [anyone]. Then you save customer service for those truly unusual situations. You know, I got my book and it’s missing pages 47 through 58
For most companies, customer service deals with some key “moments of truth” for customers. So that function is an important participant in most efforts to improve customer experience. But firms can’t just focus on customer service interactions or offload responsibility for customer experience to the customer service organization. That’s why the 3rd principle of Experience-Based Differentiation is: Treat customer experience as a competence, not a function.
The bottom line: Customer service is an important component of customer experience
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Artist Rania Mater www.raniamater.com
You will again fail, says Gartner
Not being a fan of the kind of consultancy delivered by Gartner, I post this item.
It always annoys me to read these kind of statements.
In my opinion, again another open door.
Artist Zhou Mi www.zhoumi.net
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50% of companies with online communities will fail to manage them well- Gartner
February 20, 2009 in Digital & New Media
Social computing is becoming a significant customer relationship management (CRM) market trend and represents a disruptive force in this market, according to Gartner, Inc. Gartner predicts that, by 2010, more than 60 percent of Fortune 1000 companies will have some form of online community that can be used for customer relationship purposes.
Social applications* offer a great opportunity for CRM practitioners to improve customer experience and influence the customer, particularly in an economic downturn when companies are trying to keep customers and increase wallet share, said Adam Sarner, research director at Gartner. Investments should focus primarily on the customer online buying process where it can offer a direct return on investment (ROI) in terms of sales, awareness and customer loyalty.
However, Gartner predicts that, by 2010, more than half of companies that have established an online community will fail to manage it as an agent of change, ultimately eroding customer value.
Rushing into social-computing initiatives without clearly defined benefits for both the company and customer will be the biggest cause of failure,² said Mr Sarner. Gartner recommends companies follow four steps when undertaking any social-software initiative:
1- Define the initiative and its purpose
Many organisations have not taken the time to assess the business case for investment, tempted by the fact that many social applications are nominally free. Before an organisation begins a project, it needs to define a mutual, balanced purpose. The stated purpose must include a measurable business benefit for establishing the application, and a customer motivation for participating.
2- Cede some control to encourage participation
For an application to be truly social, the community must have some element of ownership in return for the value it brings with it. Organisations need to determine the level of control ceded to the community, and understand how that affects the engagement between customer and company.
Harnessing an application’s community can be difficult, because it cannot be forced to contribute. In order to encourage participation and establish the right amount of ownership to cede, Gartner recommends that organisations follow five best practices that require them to accept the risk of criticism and use the valuable data provided to make real changes; apply ground rules to install self-moderation; solicit feedback to make users feel appreciated; enable company advocates to gain powerful allies, and lastly assign a community advocate to liaise with the community and to represent it to the company.
3- Understand and reward different kinds of participation
Companies need to recognise and provide social applications for all levels of participants that can be categorised as: the creators (I want to own this), the contributors (I want to be part of this), the opportunists (Since I’m here) and the lurkers (I’ll reap the rewards).
In addition, businesses must incorporate reputation mechanisms into their social-network initiatives to manage and get the most value from the four different groups. Social-reputation technologies allow users to rank the quality of input provided by contributors, filtering content and differentiating the best information ‹ whether actively (by voting) or passively (by page views). This is extremely important in high-traffic social networks, as well as for those where indicators of trustworthiness ‹ such as names and job titles ‹ are hidden behind online personas, said Mr Sarner. ³In addition to helping customers during their information-gathering phase, reputation systems also serve to recognise and reward your advocate groups.
4- Acquire skills to build relationships online
Companies must acquire new skills that focus on influencing social interactions to encourage participation effectively. These skills will need to cover social sciences, such as psychology, to learn how customers interact, and how their changing needs can be met; anthropology, to learn how cultures grow, develop and interact; and game design, to create engaging virtual environments to manipulate “player” behaviour through rules, rewards and outcomes.
Since many of these skills will be difficult to find internally, companies must allocate substantial budget to recruit these skills or outsource them to specialist providers. In a global recession, companies should prioritise the acquisition of these skills because of the direct benefits they can produce in customer loyalty and increased sales.
Mr Sarner concluded: Social networking has changed the way a critical mass of individuals behaves, including how they act as customers and prospects.
Customers, not just digital natives, can no longer be adequately described by demographic information; the usual target for corporate CRM efforts.
Artist Zhou Mi www.zhoumi.net
