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The Faceless Company

insightslogoI wrote a post yesterday at Insights Group about giving a face to your company.  Customers no longer want to just purchase a product from your company.  They want to know something about you.  They want your company to have a face and a personality.

People are more likely to do business with a company if they have some sort of connection.  Be it a referral or emotional attachment or just some type of experience that puts a face behind a company. – The Faceless Company – Sarah Worsham – Insights Group

Does your company have a face? What kind of face does your company have?

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Social Media is Already Affecting Business As We Know It

webcloudzillaIn his post yesterday, The Future of the Social Web: in Five Eras, Jeremiah Owyang summarizes a larger Forrester report on how the social web will impact businesses for the next fear years.  Of particular interest to me are the 5 eras and how they are defined:

The Five Eras of the Social Web:

1) Era of Social Relationships: People connect to others and share
2) Era of Social Functionality: Social networks become like operating system
3) Era of Social Colonization: Every experience can now be social
4) Era of Social Context: Personalized and accurate content
5) Era of Social Commerce: Communities define future products and services

Forrester has era 5 starting around 2011, but I don’t think the eras are so clear-cut.  Many companies are already tapping into the social web to define future products and service (era 5) through the concept of co-creation.  Through it’s Nike+ iniative, the company engages runners and uses information and feedback to produce products they want.  Brother has tapped the social web for hobby sewers to provide products and services for both its customers and for its dealers – leading to more sales of its high-end hobbiest sewing/embrodiery machines.  Comcast has famously used the social web to improve customer service.  I believe there is quite a bit of cross-over in the eras, with business leaders already jumping into the 5th era.  The nice thing about the social web is that any sized company can jump right in, without the need for expensive research tools.  I do believe, however, that the social web will also force these eras to happen and businesses who have not entered the fray will be left behind.

(photo by cloudzilla)

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Tr.im – Twitter Stats You Need

trimlogoIn my effort to find or create the perfect Twitter utility, I’ve been experimenting with various url shorteners to see what kind of statistics they can give me.  Today I started playing with Tr.im and, so far, I’m pretty happy with the results.  One of my requirements is that it work with Twitterfeed, which I use to send RSS feeds directly to my Twitter account.  What I’m looking for in terms of statistics is how many clicks each url gets, and then an overview of clicks for all links.

Tr.im isn’t quite my perfect Twitter stats service, but it’s the best I’ve seen so far (other than getting some 503, service unavailable errors, which may be related to Twitter issues).  I’m able to see the clicks on up to 15 tweets – or tr.immed urls, as they call them – from the dashboard, along with aggregated country information for those tweets.

The exciting part is when you drill down into one of your tweets.  From the summary you can see the breakdown of humans vs. bots for the clicks (at least in their estimate), along with more detailed information about each of the human visitors, including location, operating system, client/web browser, and how long ago they clicked. On the timelines page, you can get a visual representation of when clicks happened for the first 72 hours (or at least you should, but it wasn’t working for me). Referrers will give you known websites that are referring to the url.  Agents shows a breakdown of visitor browsers and operating systems (platforms) and the locations page will give you a breakdown of click location, similar to the summary (although now it includes bots).

Tr.im, which is part of the Nambu network (a twitter client, currently for Mac and iphone), also offers some additional features, including a Firefox extention, a Mac dashboard widget, bookmarklets, and ubiquity scripts. For Mac users, the dashboard widget is a really nice addition which frees up a tab in your web browser.  I’ve only been using Tr.im for a few hours, so we’ll see how it handles my tweets throughout the day – and whether something better catches my eye.

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