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Jul
17
2008

Internet Strategy Forum Summit – The Building Blocks of Online Customer Engagement

By | Design, ISFSummit, News & Notes

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Presented by Dan Stickel, CEO of WebTrends

Let’s take a look at Google’s innovation and how they do it.  They divide their efforts:

  • 70% on core products – search quality, crawl/indexing, AdWords, AdSense, Toolbar
  • 20% on emerging products – Blogger, Google Mini, Picasa, News, Pack
  • 10% on break-out strategies – Offline Ads, Code, WiFi, Talk

Google also has these key ingredients in everything they do:

  • Focus on users
  • Think big
  • Ignore Constraints
  • Break the mold
  • The right people
  • Small teams
  • Iteration & experiment
  • Bottoms-up ideas & projects

Google harnesses the innovation of the entire world through easy-to-use tools.

Use some of these same ideas to turn motivated visitors to your website into customers.  Listen and build a better experience.

Get a 360 degree view of visitors:

  • Listen – On your website, through onsite search, via surveys.
  • Learn – From offsite information and CRM.
  • Act – Email, Direct Mail, and use behavioral targeting.

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Jul
17
2008

Internet Strategy Summit Forum – Mapping the Digital Landscape: A Strategic Guide

By | Internet Advertising, ISFSummit, News & Notes, Social Networks

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Presented by Geoffrey Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer

Data can be made to say anything you want.  People don’t trust advertising or marketing.

The growth rate for total media spending is only 3.3%.  The growth in traditional media – radio, tv, print is negative.  All the growth is online.  eMarketer is predicting 22.2% growth in online media spending, which includes online video and rich media.

Advice: Learn about communities. Test new marketing concepts without spending much money.

73% of online americans watch video online.  27% of online americans watch full length tv shows online.  47% are more engaged in the ads and 25% more engaged in the show than with traditional tv.  However – the audience is much smaller and spends less time per day watching.

Advice: Spending on online video ads should increase. They allow more measurability, target-ability and share-ability.

There are a few ways to use online video:

  1. Post video footage of your products and services on your website.
  2. Post video ads on content video sites (YouTube, etc.).  Relevancy is key.
  3. Create webisodes (ex. Will It Blend)

30% of US marketers are using blogging as a tactic.  Watch for what people are saying about your company.  It may appear higher in search results than what you say.

Strategies for social networking:

  1. Look, Listen, Lounge, Learn
  2. Advertise – Improved Targeting
  3. Advertise on smaller niche sites – be relevant
  4. BYO (build your own) social network – remember its not about your product or service – create something of value to your customers

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Jul
17
2008

Internet Strategy Forum Summit – Evolution of CRM

By | Internet Advertising, ISFSummit, News & Notes

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Presented by David Placier, VP of Marketing, Disney.com

Definition of CRM – Customer Relationship Marketing

  • Differentiating marketing treatment and/or service level for an individual or group
  • Differentiating in order to optimize customer value to company
  • ROI based
  • Targeted effort, not mass

Customer value = income you receive from an individual – expenses acquiring, servicing and marketing to individual

When CRM started isn’t clear – Local shops use CRM by giving you different suggestions and service depending on what they know about you from past purchases and visits.

Direct mail credit card acquisitions change their offer based on your credit score, your assets, your zip code, public data about you.  They change their investment and marketing treatments based on this information.

Airline customer loyalty programs give premium seats and have separate lines for their best customers.

Online

Advertising – display location – where you surf may define which treatment group you get, but site experience is not differentiated by customer value or characteristics.

Search advertising is differentiated by treatment group – what you are saying, where you are landing, what you are searching for.

Product recommendations are characterized by previous choices, but maybe not by value and this experience is available to anyone.

With social media, find opinion leaders to treat differently and they will buy more, say more and influence more.

Future of CRM

  • Personalization
  • Optimization
  • Addressability
  • Commonly available data
  • Cross device/platform continuity

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Jul
17
2008

Internet Strategy Forum Summit – Internet Marketing by the Numbers

By | Analytics, ISFSummit, News & Notes

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Presented by Mike Moran, Distinguished IBM Engineer

Yes, an engineer talking to you about marketing.

You need to watch what your customers are doing so you know what to do next.  While there are a lot of things out there that you can’t measure – there are about 20% that you can measure that lead to a sale.

You have a website out there which probably eventually leads to a sale.  What things do you do that lead to that sale?  What things does the customer do that leads to that sale?

Measure ROI in terms of (Gain – cost)/cost. For transactional ROI look at how many transactions you have.  What was the ROI for everything you had to do to make that transaction happen.  For relational ROI, how much did it cost you to acquire this new customer.

Take a look a direct marketers. They understand what works and doesn’t.  How?  They create multiple versions of every marketing piece and analyze the results.  They test the responses to multiple designs and adjust everything based on those results.

Apply this to your website. Define numeric objectives.  Try different approaches.  Get real feedback and constantly look at performance to see what’s working.

For example, you want to increase sales.  For your website there may be two ways to accomplish this – get more people to come or to persuade more of the people that do come to buy.  Measure based on the increase in traffic or the increase in conversions.

Sometimes it’s not clear what metric to use, so just choose one and stick with it.  You’re looking for a trend so just consistently measure the same thing.

Conclusion – Respond to your customers. Change things until you see something start to work.  Do it quickly.  Instead of trying to figure out what to do, just do something.  Let the market tell you what works and what doesn’t.

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Jul
17
2008

Internet Strategy Forum Summit – Creating a Social Strategy That Will Work

By | News & Notes, Social Networks

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Presented by Charlene Li, VP & Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

The ease of posting anything on the Internet means that negative messages about your company may be higher in the search results than your own messages (ex. comcast technician sleeping on my couch – see YouTube).  This gives individuals enormous power, but it also means individuals help each other.

What can companies do about this?  Should this be something to fear?  It’s important for companies to have clear objectives about what they’re trying to achieve by using social media.  Think about relationships instead of technologies.

In the book, Groundswell, the following methodology is recommended:

  • P – People – Who is your audience? What are they doing online? How do they do it and when?
  • O – Objectives – What are you trying to accomplish for your business?
  • S – Strategy – Plan for how relationships with your customers will change.
  • T – Technology – Once all the other steps have been examined, take a look at what tools make sense to accomplish your goals.

People – Different types of people have different levels of online participation.  You can profile your customers at groundswell.forrester.com to see where they are on the participation ladder: inactives, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, creators.  Age is a major driver of participation, but as more content becomes available online, there has been more participation.

Objectives – Different departments in your company will have different objectives for social media:

  • Market Research – Listening
  • Marketing – Talking (have open-ended conversations)
  • Sales – Energizing (activating your most passionate customers)
  • Support – Supporting (your customers can help support each other)
  • Development – Embracing (customer ideas and feedback can speed up and provide higher quality development which better meets the market needs)

Strategy – Start small because you will make lots of mistakes.  Think big about how this can transform your organization.  Control is an illusion – the conversations about your brand will happen whether or not you participate.  Understand what motivates people to participate – very rarely is monetary – they want to help, make a difference, be heard, and be part of a community.

Technology – This will depend on where the people you want to reach are already.  It may make more sense to participate in an existing community than to start your own.

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Jul
16
2008

Video Streaming for Suits

By | News & Notes

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Its strange.   Every so often we are irresistibly drawn back to the subject on online Video in business. Sarah had an earlier post about Qik, and I’ve written about YouTube and CacheFly and LimeLight as video distribution networks.  Somehow, video keeps capturing our imagination with its seductively simple business potential.

I was asked last week to look into what was avalible in Live Video Streaming.  A company wanted to capture show-floor interviews and happenings at conventions and needed to know if it was technically feisable on a insubstantial budget.  As it turns out, the space has simply exploded with options since I last looked.  Good time to do a review series wrapup on Video Streaming.

Ill start next week with a look at Stickam, followed up with a competitor Ustream then hopfully wrap up the review with some tips on how to integrate streaming video into your online business community.  We may even try a bit of video ourselves, who knows.

Jul
15
2008

What Social Networks Should I Join to Promote My Business Website?

By | Social Networks

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Social networks are a hot topic right now.  Just last night I had a client ask me, “Should I join Facebook? I don’t understand how to use Facebook or MySpace.”  Just like any business (good) decision, what social networks to join takes a bit of thought in order to get the results you’re looking for.  And that is exactly the first question to ask yourself:

What goal or problem am I trying to solve?

The answer to this question can completely change which social networks you should take a look at.  It may even mean that it makes more sense to create your own social network or community.

Where are the people I’m trying to reach?

Just because you hear about MySpace or Facebook in the news doesn’t mean that your customers or potential customers (or whoever else you’re targeting) is there.  Just like in the real world, certain types of people hang out only in certain places.  You need to understand where people are in order to get the most out of your efforts.

What will be the reaction to your message?

If you just jump into an established community with messages about how great you are, it can have exactly the opposite effect of what you’re saying.  People inherently trust their peers more than messages from companies, so you’ll need to take the time to understand the community and the people who frequent it.

Those are just a few questions to get you started with thinking about your business goals first.  We’ll take a look at how to answer these questions and some new questions to think about in future posts.  For some outside reading, Groundswell, put together by Forrester Research, is a great book on how to use social networks and community for your business goals.

Need Help using Social Networks to promote your Business Website? Get started with a free website analysis or contact us for a quote.

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Jul
14
2008

Where consumers lead, Business follows

By | News & Notes

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ReadWriteWeb has posted an article discussing a recently released Forrester Research report. The pull quote that found its way into the RWW article was that 63% of 260 IT professionals polled believe that web 2.0 technologies will have a positive impact on business this year. I’d normally fact check the quote, but at $279 for the report, I think this time I will just take RWW at their word.

I understand, all too well, that this trend is not without some amount of pain for the corporate IT professional.  Earlier this year, according to the article, Forrester predicted that businesses would be timidly dipping their toes into the arena in 2008.  Knowing how businesses make technology decisions, this lukewarm reception to the web 2.0 crowd from corporate IT does not in any way surprise me.  As control of sensitive data leaks out the glass facade from every department into the systems of 3rd party, unaffiliated companies, you can glimpse the deck chairs of the Titanic getting a newly marshaled arrangement from IT.  Business IT folk have little enough time to create internal applications and services to compete with the Jones down the street.  Now the poor devils have to somehow stay lock-step with the Googles, Yahoos, Microsofts, Facebooks, and Salesforces of the world?

But I can get an integrated map with all my clients locations and directions, their favorite local restaurants, courtside tickets for their favorite sports team online, flowers delivered on the CEO’s birthday with a signed card from our company and more if I use their online CRM.  Plus it never goes down, is readable from my blackberry and its free!

I do believe where consumers lead, businesses will inevitably follow. It is a current upon which companies can try to resist, but rarely succeed and surely never come out better for it.  Looking around a customer’s office, I can see the tendrils of evidence left by the trend.  Gmail has replaced some VIP email accounts who want the web interface features Google offers.  Some sales groups are trying out Salesforce and others have SugarCRM. Social Network providers are being talked to about adding their services to the client’s corporate websites.  Internally, Directors are looking at web 2.0 communication companies to provide secure discussion forums.

As an online business consultant, my recommendation is for companies to embrace and extend the 2.0 technologies without risking too much.  Do pilot tests of some mashup technologies with your existing apps.  Talk to the web 2.0 CEOs about their security options, many times they are looking for exactly that partner to help them better their business offering.  Let the web 2.0 company do 80% of the heavy lifting in a partnership.  As long as your investment is small and your exposure is limited, don’t be afraid to be the first on the block to try a new approach.

Jul
14
2008

New Website for Sazbean Consulting

By | News & Notes

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We decided to give Sazbean Consulting its own home in order to provide relevant information for you, our customers, and to better highlight our services.  Take a look around.  We’d love your feedback.

Sazbean Consulting is passionate about helping businesses (B2B & B2C) use the web effectively. Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) companies face unique challenges in the online world. Our experience in Internet analysis & strategy, website design, coding, project management, eCommerce, analytics (statistics), advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), website optimization, hosting, content, graphics and infrastructure gives us the expertise to help companies meet these unique challenges and reach their business goals.

If you need help improving the ROI and lead generation for your business website, we’d love to help! Get started with a FREE Website Analysis.  Or call 248.707.9666 or contact us for a free initial evaluation and consultation.

Jul
12
2008

Coworkers Have Strong Influence in Purchase Decisions

By | News & Notes

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Americans in the workforce have a significant impact on their coworkers’ consumer shopping behaviors – 96% say they regularly or occasionally give shopping advice to their peers, according to (pdf) a recent WorkPlace Media survey conducted by BIGResearch.

Moreover, nearly 93% indicate that they seek similar advice from their coworkers before making purchases. – Marketing Charts – Coworker Word-of-Mouth Strongly Influences Purchases

You may already know that your customers turn to their peers for help in making purchase decisions.  This study shows that coworkers have a significant influence, which makes sense since we spend a great deal of time (like or not) with these people.  Coworkers often have similar needs and experiences for work purchase decisions.  Keep this information in mind when you think about where your customers turn to get information about your products.  Relying on traditional advertising may not reach these influencers, but putting your customer first with great customer service and communication certainly will.

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