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Goodbye 2008, hello 2009.

Made many resolutions for your business this New Year? Perhaps you’re reflecting on 2008, and wondering what opportunities 2009 will bring. Perhaps you’re taking a look around the current market and worrying how the credit crunch may eat into your business revenues this coming year. Perhaps you’re starting to wonder how you are going to distinguish yourself from your competition.

Whatever resolutions are set, most business owners are probably worrying about how they avoid the fate of Woolworths, and other UK retailers. My tip for 2009 is simple: avoid mediocre as if your business depends on it (it does).

In my view, the problem with Woolies was that no-one ever left their house thinking ‘I must pop into Woolworths for ______‘ - they lost their way and potential customers couldn’t see any value for themselves - in other words, it turned into a mediocre business.

I’m not normally one for predictions (setting myself for a fall ain’t normally my bag), but I do firmly believe that 2009 will see an increase in mediocre businesses struggling. Not solely due to a looming global recession, but also because customers are going to be much better at sniffing out remarkable businesses that they’d rather do business with. They don’t have to settle.

In the dark days before the Internet (I think everything was in black-and-white, and I’m not sure there was any electricity!), Customers had no option but to shop on their local high street. Businesses like Woolworths were positioned for this and they won. Now people don’t have to brave all weathers and venture outside to interact with a business - the Internet means you don’t get to win by simply taking part.

Do yourself a favour at the start of 2009: aim for remarkable. A great place to start would be with Guy Kawasaki and his fantastic Art of the Start speech - 40 minutes well spent if you intend to make 2009 a remarkable year:

For Graham and I, we’re hearing from a lot more people eager to talk about how they can start leveraging the Internet to overhaul a mediocre business - a realisation that has no doubt been aided in this economic climate. We’re really excited and looking forward to helping all our clients achieve that in 2009.

However you decide to beat mediocrity in ‘09, we wish you and your business every success.

Growth in blog readership has been widely reported over the years (the latest suggests that blog readership has grown by 300% since 2004), but a recent survey also shows how influential blogs can be when consumers are looking to make buying decisions.

The BuzzLogic sponsored study - Harnessing the Power of Blogs - found that what blog readers consumed on-line strongly influenced purchasing decisions, and played a key role in taking them to the point of actual purchase. The survey looked at over 2,000 consumers in the US, and highlighted some interesting trends:

Blogs influence purchases. One half (50%) of blog readers say they find blogs useful for purchase information.

Blogs influence it’s readership in various stages of the buying process. A blogs role as a buying guide breaks down with readers as:

• Decide on a product or service: 21%
• Refine choices: 19%
• Get support and answers: 19%
• Discover products and services: 17%
• Assure: 14%
• Inspire a purchase: 13%
• Execute a purchase: 7%

Ads on blogs can spur various activities:

• 40% of blog readers have taken action as a result of viewing an ad on a blog; 50% of frequent blog readers say so.
• Top activities include the following: read product reviews online (17%); sought out more info on a product or service (16%); visited a manufacturer or retailer website (16%).

The ability to use the Internet as a research tool to aide your buying decisions is no big surprise - how many times have you been influenced by readers reviews on Amazon.co.uk? I bet at some point, you were either assured or turned-off of purchasing an item based on what you read. I know I have. We tend to seek out the opinions of others - to learn of their experiences.

The fact that blogs have been credited with the capability to influence purchases probably reflects how blogs make sharing product reviews and buying experiences so easy. The participation aspect of blogs also means others can add to the conversation about their particular experiences, offering a balanced view and increasing the depth of information available from a single site.

You can read BuzzLogic’s summary of the report over on their blog.

The question of ROI from ’social media’ tools or ‘Web 2.0′ style implementations is never far from any debate about the business worth of the new technology.

Twitter is a perfect example of a tool that is seeing huge uptake among both individuals and corporates but which has no obvious revenue model itself and lets its users determine how to monetize its use, should they wish.

The Industry Standard just published a piece on Twitter that reveals that PC manufacturer Dell reckons it can attribute $1 million in revenue directly to its use of the service. That is a solid enough number to change the game for many companies, I think. Will it change Twitter?

Hat tip to Neville Hobson for pointing me to this post - via Twitter!

Southern Electric only send me a gas bill twice a year now. The reason? “As part of our ongoing commitment to the environment we want to reduce the amount of paper we use”. Right. Anyway, the latest one arrived last week. I pay by direct debit and usually give no more than a cursory glance to the bill because it’s not as if I have to do anything. This is simply for reference, after all.

And there it was, bold as… well, bold because it was in a bold font. The sum of £636.83. Ouch, I thought. But only for a moment. In fact, that was the amount Southern Electric owed me. Were they going to send it to me? No. Were they going to reduce my monthly standing order of £135 because that was obviously excessive? No. Instead, they were simply going to carry it forward “as payment towards your future bills”.

I called them.

Things don’t start well. It’s the usual phone bingo. The chance to speak to someone about a bill is the last item on the list, of course. Then there’s that sinking feeling as the voice tells you it is transferring you to a ‘live operator’. I wonder which extension they use for the morgue.

Surprisingly, the phone is picked up quickly and I’m speaking to Dawn, who is certainly ‘live’ and cheerful and friendly, to boot. My spirits lift. I tell her why I’m calling. “Really?” she says. “Let’s aheva look.” She does. “You’re right,” she says. Then she does a calculation and reduces my direct debit and tells me she’s sending the extra money direct to my bank account. No moaning, no trying to pursuade me otherwise, no excuses.

A handy refund in time for Christmas and my direct debit amount halved. Result.

I also get my electricity through Southern Electric. They post my bills on-line and I rarely bother to check those, either. There’s a pattern developing here. As I was on a roll, I asked the service rep if she would check my electricity account, too. To be honest, I expected her to say that I owed about £636 and she would just switch the balance from the gas to the electric account.

But no. She said, “Are you sitting down?” It turns out there was a balance in my favour of just over £1,000. “I love this part of my job,” says Dawn.

The main lesson from all this is obviously to check bills carefully. Setting up a direct debit should not be seen as an excuse for avoiding money management.

But that doesn’t excuse Southern Electric. When I first set up a direct debit with them, I paid £50 a month. As soon as they worried that I might use more gas, it rose to £75 and then to £135. Worse yet, these rises were based on estimated meter readings. When these readings were shown to be way off base, did they lower the monthly payments? We know the answer to that. In fact, Southern Electric were borrowing money from me and not even paying me the base rate. I suspect that they should really be paying me a few percentage points of interest on that money.

If it wasn’t for the friendly, sympathetic, and incredibly helpful service rep (her name was Dawn), I would be looking for a new supplier immediately. But the fact that things were dealt with quickly and with no fuss and with an apology and good wishes from the marvellous Dawn means that I’m happy to stay with Southern Electric and take some of the responsibility for keeping an eye on my own money.

Southern Electric got it wrong and then they got it right. Just think how much more right they could have got it had they just sent me a cheque out of the blue and told me I was paying them too much. That would have made Southern Electric truly remarkable in the Godinesque sense of the word.

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Video by Dr. Michael Wesch - Kansas State University.

The Web 2.0 machine may be using us, are you using it?

A survey report published this week by UK-based online publisher E-consultancy - Online Customer Engagement Survey 2009 - shows that around half (51%) of organisations have placed a greater focus on engaging with their customers online, reacting to the current economic climate. The surprising thing is that this number is so low - in a tight marketplace, I would have thought that a majority of businesses would be looking at how they can reach customers more effectively.

The report was commissioned by digital agency cScape, and is available from their website for free for a limited time. Some highlights from the report:

“Areas associated with Web 2.0 and social media such as user ratings & feedback (41%), user-generated content (37%), blogging (36%) and brand presence on social networks (36%) are also expected to attract significant sums of investment.”

“More companies are viewing tactics such as blogging, user reviews and on-site video in the context of a broader customer engagement strategy and pulling only those levers which are most appropriate for their business model and customers.”

“Despite the relative novelty of micro-blogging utilities such as Twitter, it is interesting to note that 7% of companies say they have improved their customer engagement through this channel.”

With the current state of the economy, and fears of a recession looming, finding new ways to reach your audience on-line should feature in any business planning for the coming year. The Web is a fantastic tool to cultivate communication with customers. How are you planning to rise above your competition in 2009?

Seth Godin has a sore thumb.

He has also just lost KitchenAid a sale. Given the popularity of his blog, KitchenAid may have just lost a lot of sales, actually.

Here’s my reason. My wife Laura and I bought a chalet-apartment in the Alps. Over the summer we took out a cheap kettle we had bought. It took so long to bring the water to the boil that I used to set it going before I walked to the local bakery for bread and croissants etc. If I stopped for a clumsy exchange in French with the bakery staff, the water was past tepid by the time I returned. It also failed to sing, squeal, whistle or any other of the comforting noises you want and expect from a kettle.

In other words, we got what we paid for.

So, this coming Christmas holiday trip to France, we plan on buying a better quality kettle that will make noises and heat the water quickly. The KitchenAid kettle was one of the options.

No more.

Do I feel I need Seth Godin to tell me what kettle to buy? No. Do I think Seth Godin is a leading expert on kitchen appliances? No.

But when Seth Godin tells a story about customer service, I listen. It isn’t because Seth said his kettle melted that I won’t be buying a KitchenAid kettle. Hey, Seth may be careless with how he positions the kettle on the gas, for all I know. No, the issue is that if my kettle were to melt - or go wrong in some equally basic way - I don’t want the customer service experience he had.

I like the look of the Le Creuset kettle in my local kitchen shop.

The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) has released its biennial survey of members. One of the most interesting findings - for those of us who beat on about exploiting the benefits of the internet for business, anyway - was that 43 per cent of respondents had improved sales figures after linking to suppliers and using their website to advertise their firm.

This simply underlines the value of using the internet for business transactions. Even more, it highlights how improtant this will be during an economic downturn.

As John Walker, the FSB National Policy Chairman, says:

“The number of small businesses who have their own website has grown over the past two years, which indicates that small firms are becoming increasingly internet-savvy. Despite the onset of an economic downturn, all small firms should look to the internet to maximise their sales and increase efficiency.”

The FSB report is called Putting the economy back on track: Transport, Environment and ICT and was written by Professor Oswald Jones and compiled by the University of Glamorgan.

As a final comment on the way that businesses are now turning to the internet, the report reveals that the number of small businesses who now have their own web site has increased by a quarter to around 70 per cent since the last survey.

Businesses who are still deciding whether the internet is something in which they should be investing energy, focus, or finance take note. Your competitors are doing it and they will be gaining market share.

If you feel that your web site just isn’t working as hard as it could be, are envious of how well your competitors are ranked in the search engines, or want to make sure your site is doing all it can to promote your business effectively, you may be happy to learn that Google have just released their Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (PDF - 550KB).

Primarily aimed at webmasters, if you’re prepared to roll up your sleeves and make some minor and (in most cases) straightforward changes to your web site, you’ll find the guide to be a great help and a useful resource even if you don’t know how to develop a web site. The guide offers this description on the importance of SEO:

Search engine optimization is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results. You’re likely already familiar with many of the topics in this guide, because they’re essential ingredients for any webpage, but you may not be making the most out of them.

The guide includes the following sections, each containing a concise overview introducing the topic, clear examples showing the techniques in use, and a guide to good practices - including what to avoid:

• Create unique, accurate page titles
• Make use of the “description” meta tag
• Improve the structure of your URLs
• Make your site easier to navigate
• Offer quality content and services
• Write better anchor text
• Use heading tags appropriately
• Optimize your use of images
• Promote your website in the right ways
• Take advantage of web analytics services

If you don’t feel like getting your hands dirty with what goes on under the bonnet of your web site, being familiar with what goes into making an optimised site is still a great idea. You could always treat the guide as a checklist for how well your site measures up, or refer to it when hiring in a company to develop or modify your site. If your web site is important to your business, being able to perform your own web site health-check, without the need to call in the experts, will pay huge rewards to your web presence and give you an idea of where you need to invest precious time and resource.

If you think your site is failing to measure up, or think you don’t have enough of the guide’s suggestions in place, Google have also put together some helpful tips for hiring an SEO company, so you can make sure your making the right decision when calling in the experts to fix it for you.

You can read Google’s announcement on their webmaster blog, and grab the Google SEO Starter Guide here.

I always enjoy reading about small businesses, especially in the UK, who improve their business and enhance their customer relations by embracing the Web. So I was pleased to read recently about a small UK company who have not only transformed their business by using social media to connect to their customers, but have been rewarded for their efforts by a Dell initiative to award small business excellence.

Wiggly Wigglers is a small, Herefordshire based company, operating out of some farm buildings, who are passionate about the gardening products they supply. They have successfully built, and are maintaining, an on-line strategy that includes regular blogging, weekly podcasting, and an active Facebook group.

By adopting social media, and placing it at the core of their marketing strategy, Wiggly Wigglers have reported that their business:

• Serves 90,000 customers worldwide and delivers its products across Europe;
• Cut its advertising budget by 80 percent when the company turned to social media over traditional advertising;
• Built its catalogue based on Wiki ideas generated on its Facebook page by experts and customers.

Congratulations to the team at Wiggly Wigglers, a brave decision to embrace the Web and communicate openly and honestly with their customers is clearly paying massive benefits (not to mention £25,000 worth of Dell products and services!).

Idil Cakim posted back in April on the Next Fifty Years blog, about how Wiggly Wigglers are doing social media the right way - Wiggly Wigglers: Gardening through Social Media - and summarises their on-line activity with a glowing reference, and a great checklist for others looking at marketing on-line:

There is a dotted line between being Heather’s podcast listener, blog reader and Wiggly Groupie on Facebook and becoming her customer. Heather is doing several things right from a social media marketing standpoint:

- She has a strong voice. It’s genuine and personable.
- She is passionate about what she writes.
- She informs and educates her customers.
- She offers applicable tips.
- She keeps in touch.
- She encourages product trials with discounts and give-aways.
- Her products have a social angle—they make the world greener.
- She welcomes new friends.

Wiggly Wigglers should be an essential case study, worth, er, studying, for any business looking at enhancing their web presence through social media. If you are considering implementing a social media strategy, making sure you can happily (and honestly) place a tick next to at least 6 of the above tips, will prove a solid foundation for your efforts.