Archive for the ‘On-line Marketing’ Category

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.

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.

The economic climate has pushed the long-term problems of the ‘other’ climate off top spot as far as the news is concerned. However, many businesses are finding the triple whammy of rising energy costs, cash flow squeeze, and global warming a reason to increase their use of internet marketing.

A good example is Foneshop.com, which is one of the UK’s leading online mobile phone retailers. When they launched their web site in 2003, they managed about 10 orders a day, according to the company’s Group Marketing Director, David Hyett. Their goal was to reach 100 orders a day. By using an AdWords campaign in conjunction with SEO techniques and landing page optimization, Foneshop.com has seen its total orders rise by about 56% and, more importantly, the average value of each order has risen by 54%. They invest about 60% of their monthly advertising budget in AdWords. The result? Over half of their customers find Foneshop.com through Google and the conversion cost per customer has decreased by 29%.

In stark contrast to this, research by Microsoft last year estimated that UK small businesses are spending £3 billion annually on invisible web sites. In a survey of 400 UK SMBs, the research uncovered that

“44% of SMBs not doing search marketing think it is too time consuming; 56% think it is too expensive; and 33% too complicated.  However, 76% of SMBs promoting their website on search engines see an immediate increase in sales.”

It’s no surprise, though, that companies that do ‘get it’ are choosing to switch from paper-based advertising campaigns to online marketing. And those that do are reaping the benefits, not only of being first to exploit the potential of reaching a wider market for less cost, but also of grabbing the kudos of being environmentally friendly.

Yes we can, Obama declared - and yes, indeed they did as the US Election ended with an Obama victory. In a post I wrote last week - Barack Obama Winning On The Web, I looked at how statistics on the Internet suggested that Obama was winning the race for attention and possibly, engagement, on the web.

The statistics seemed to give Obama the edge with numbers for YouTube views, Facebook friends, Blog mentions etc much larger than those of his opposition, John McCain. I suggested it would be fascinating to see analysis surface about the effect of Obama’s on-line campaign, if Obama was to win the election. Well, he did, and there has.

ReadWriteWeb have posted an article which references some data collected by Trendrr (I think that 2 ‘r’s at the end of the name future proofs them, ready for web 3.0!). The article - Obama’s Social Media Advantage - although it’s no proof that Obama’s on-line engagement helped him win the election, it does show that Obama had some 500 million mentions on the Blogosphere in the last 10 weeks or so, compared to McCain’s 150 million (although these mentions may have been positive or negative). The data also points to a huge amount of extra engagement in the days leading up to the polls - with Obama gaining more than 10,000 new followers on Twitter, and McCain just 924 (OK, I know that’s 920 more than I have in total, but still!!)

Again, it’s difficult to see how much impact the campaigns had on these figures, but it is clear that Obama managed to cause many, many more conversations, and I’d be very, very surprised if his on-line activity didn’t feed this. I’m sure that by using on-line engagement, a greater web visibility, and the ability to create a story worth talking about, Obama has managed to drive conversations.

The article finishes with a statement which should resonate with all organisations which deal with the public - not just election campaigns:

…looking forward to the next campaign cycle, it seems clear that all political campaigns, especially at this level, will start ignoring social media trends at their own peril.

I’ll keep an eye (or an RSS net) out for any further analysis on the Obama campaign, and any more direct correlation between his on-line engagement and his election win. How much impact did the on-line campaign have and how much will this trend change for the next election, or elections in other countries?

What do you think about Obama’s on-line campaign: how much of the success can be attributed to social media, and more importantly for social marketing in business: how can this be measured?

UPDATE: Several other websites have recently posted summaries of Obama’s on-line campaign, most notably the BBC.co.uk - with Online lessons for UK in Obama win, and Guardian.co.uk - with Obama’s win means future elections must be fought online.

Now that our kids are of an age - finally! - to be left at home alone in the care of the eldest, my wife and I take every opportunity to grab a chance for a walk. At week-ends, this can often lead to a hour or two spent drinking cider by the fire in a country pub. Yesterday, however, the sky was blue and the ground dry early on and we grabbed the chance for a walk in the fresh morning air. After a couple of days of intermittent but heavy rain and a cold cold breeze, it felt almost like late summer again. No pubs were open at that time, of course - and it was Sunday - so we made do with a long walk and a full breakfast on our return home.

So there you have a picture of marital and bucolic bliss. (Not that we live in the countryside but it’s only a short walk away.) And, of course, that is not the point of this post.

Getting to the point
On the walk back home my wife asked me about one of the bpodr proposals we sent out last week. My wife runs a successful company. bpodr recently helped the company revamp its web site. In addition, we’ve devised a strategy for increasing site traffic, helping the company expand into other markets, and set up a personal blog (and blogging strategy) for my wife. She’s well aware, then, of the benefits of the internet tools available to businesses of all sizes.

And yet, if I mention the term ’social media’ she guffaws. She snorts. She jeers and mocks. In short, she laughs. To her ears, ’social media’ is an ‘airy-fairy’ term. ‘It sounds as if it was made up to sound important,’ she says. ‘It’s an empty phrase. What does it mean?’

What’s in a name?
What indeed? This raises a couple of questions. Firstly, what is to be gained by collecting a number of internet tools and giving them a label of any sort, never mind one that has intelligent business people sniggering behind their hands? Secondly, how do people expert in these tools and passionate about the benefits they bring convey the impact they can have on a business without resorting to the ‘airy-fairy’?

(A quick aside: if you haven’t read this Dennis Howlett guest post on Chris Brogan’s blog and the huge number of responses it generated, please give it a visit. Although much of the discussion was about the take-up of the technology, there were a significant number of comments on the terminology itself. I think it will prove to be one of those posts which will be seem to mark the start of a sea-change in ’social media’ thinking. And by ‘post’ here, I include the comments - a good post is really only as good as the conversation it inspires.)

In most cases, there is a technological divide between companies of a certain size and the enterprise. The latter usually has the budget and staff - although perhaps in shrinking numbers at the moment - to allow a bit of boundary pushing, testing, and breaking when it comes to the sharp edge of internet innovation. Smaller businesses, however, are by nature and necessity slow to the curve. They need proof that any expenditure will satisfy at least a minimum ROI before they write cheques.

What are we measuring?
Terminology doesn’t often win over business owners. It’s usually about the bottom line and for companies trying to deliver services to these business owners, being unable to offer hard evidence for success and hiding behind what can, at times, appear to be condescending jargon, is not a recipe for a successful sale.

Griping about the difficulty of measuring ROI or complaining that revenue growth is hard to equate directly with increased web site traffic or asserting that the value of reputation cannot be counted in pound coins does little to instil confidence in the tools we propose to use. Surely it is up to us who hope to use the tools to be able to define exactly how the customer will benefit.

If it’s hard to measure something, it comes down to one of two reasons. Either we’re measuring the wrong thing or we’re using the wrong tool to measure it.

This goes for our set of tools, too. Hide behind a vacuous term and you don’t deserve a client’s business. Tell the client you can work wonders for the business but it will be hard to put that in hard numbers and watch while security arrives at the door.

On an almost daily basis I’m confronted by sales and marketing heads at small - and not so small - businesses who, when I let them know as politely as possible that their web sites are great steaming piles of doo doo, shrug apologetically and respond with some variation of:

“We’ve been planning a revamp but it’s just not a priority at the moment.”

OR

“It’s just a token site. None of our customers are on-line, anyway.”

Got to love a token site. Perhaps this is a company that also does:

• token customer service;
• token business cards;
• token delivery vans;
• token packaging;
• token products.

If I buy from them, will they send me a token invoice?

Who’s Counting Your Tokens?

When I was a wee boy in Edinburgh, we used tokens to pay for our milk. Once a month I would go with my mother to the basement of the big Co-Op and stand around while she bought a set of tokens. I loved it in there: they had those great pneumatic message tubes, which would carry cash and receipts to and from the sales counters to the accounting office. Every morning, we would place a number of tokens in an empty washed milk bottle and put it outside. In return, we would get that number of full milk bottles.

You’ll understand why I get sentimental about tokens. The milk tokens of my childhood, however, had intrinsic value. The token web site, in comparison, has none. In fact, it’s true to say that, like a reputation black hole, the token web site is in danger of sucking your prospective customer’s every good intention into a singularity. The singularity of No Sale!

I would go as far as to say that No Site is better than a Token Site. At least a prospective customer can fall back on his or her imagination. Confronted by the full horror of your grisly web presence, however, it’s hard to construct a business case solely on the clever way you make me scroll through a lot of home page copy that says a lot about how your company was doing four years ago.

So, if you can’t really be bothered with a web site that presents your company in its best light, at least make your token something valuable. Give them a reason to follow up via phone or email. Make it a one page site that lures rather than distresses.

None Of My Customers Have Internet Access

Really? That’s an increasingly niche market to work in. Of course, that’s probably not what you meant when you said your customers were not on-line. I guess you meant that they didn’t use the web as a business tool.

Not yet. But, as they browse a few fun sites like YouTube and check the football results via the BBC, who knows when they may get the urge to search for some business information. It’s human nature to explore and pretty soon they’ll be looking for new services and prices and terms of business. That’s when they find a competitor with a site that is not in need of a revamp and is very much the opposite of token.

What then?

Ignoring Your Web Site Does Not Save Money

Revamping your web site and establishing a creditable on-line presence may seem like an expensive option at a time when cash flow is becoming less and less dependable. But this is exactly when you need to ramp up sales, establish your market leadership, and ensure that customers, prospects, employees, and shareholders see mention of the company name as often as possible on-line.

It may be hard to pin down accurate ROI for a web presence that meets your business objectives but it’s sure as hell a lot more cost-effective than traditional interruption marketing in trade mags and other print outlets with declining readership.

If you’re in a niche market where you believe that few of your customers inhabit the web, then all the better. For a start, you’ll probably discover new customers. It also gives you the perfect opportunity to define the way the web is used for your business sector.

Frankly, if your site needs revamping and you think it’s just not worth doing, you may as well close your doors and send the staff home now. Because your future sales are out there.

And they’re looking for more than mere tokens.

The New York Times published an interesting article last week - Obama still dominates in Web 2.0 world, Internet searches. The article compares some key statistics about the attention that both candidates are garnering over the web. It shows Obama is well ahead when it comes to Facebook connections (2,000,000 v 564,000), YouTube views (84,000,000 v 22,000,000), recent mentions in the blogosphere (10,291 v 3,924) and others. It shows Obama is quite clearly ahead when it comes to engaging with, and possibly gaining the attention of, his target web audience.

Obama and his team have leveraged a host of social tools to reach it’s audience, including: a Facebook page, MySpace page, Youtube channel, Twittering, Flickr, an iPhone application, a blog, and more.

Reaching your target audience is clearly important in a presidential campaign, and part of Obama’s target audience is obviously a demographic who engage in social media, so reaching out to them in their natural surroundings sounds like a good idea.

It’s interesting to see the importance that the election team is placing on engaging with people on the web - a web that is changing the way people communicate - and are using a variety of tools, networks, and communication platforms to reach out. It’s also interesting to see that they are obviously backing that importance with a reasonable resource - both in time and money -  investing in social and web tools to promote the cause.

What a great marketing effort.

It will be fascinating to see if any traffic analytics appear after the election, and if Obama wins, whether these new sources of engagement are attributed to his success. I wonder how much more we are going to see these types of tools and networks being used for a variety of promoting communication - if it’s good enough for presidential elections campaigns, then surely all tyes of organisations and campaigns will continue to rely more and more heavily on reaching out using the web.

You can read the New York Times article in full by clicking here.

This week-end’s FT Money section carried a small piece on a company making it quick and easy - and cheap - for small businesses to get online. Mr Site sells ‘web site in a box’ packages, which come in three sizes or grades. If you visit their own site, you’ll see video testimonials of what are predominantly sole traders who’ve set up a site using one of the products. Levi Roots of Dragons’ Den fame - remember Reggae Reggae Sauce? - offers his own recommendation, too.

The testimonials work well and if I was a sole trader who felt it was time to get a web site but had little clue where to start, I think I would be motivated to shell out the necessary moolah to get hold of the basic version and give it a go. That most basic package comes with a blog, a PayPal cart, and a forum, as well as sufficient email addresses for the really small business. I won’t list the prices because I’m not really trying to run an advertisement for Mr Site. You can get the prices [here].

They make it pretty easy to upgrade to the next level and the added services as you move through the levels seem sensible. (Whenever I see functions that are turned ‘off’ in software, I’m reminded of Windows NT and the simple switch you needed to set to turn it into NT Server. But I digress.)

No More Newsagent’s Windows
What the existence of Mr Site products make clear is that the web site is now a commodity. These products make it almost as easy to get your web site up and running as it is to set up a blog on Blogger or the on-line incarnations of Wordpress or Typepad. It’s obviously answering a demand - and that demand is coming primarily from the late to the party crowd. Web sites are now as essential a part of setting up your new business as sticking a card in the local newsagent’s window used to be. That’s great and it’s great that it’s so easy to get on-line. Mr Site’s templates look good and it’s hard to see what they’re lacking for the price.
Mr Site appear to make no claims over and above providing a professional web site and that’s what their product does. The Daily Telegraph - according to a quotation on the ‘Press reviews’ page - describes it thus:

“Web designers will hate it; you’ll love it… All you need to build a professional site.”

So, it’s fair to assume that it does what it says on the box (with apologies to Ronseal).

Hello? Can You See Me?
Is that a problem? Not as such. When the web consisted of a few hundred web sites, adding a new one was a big deal. It got noticed. But when there are over a hundred million web sites, the appearance of a new one is not usually greeted with a fanfare and ribbon cutting. Or cake. That’s the issue: getting on-line is now quick, easy, and pretty cheap. And that’s great. But if you’re a business and you’re hoping for your web site to form part of your marketing strategy or if selling from your web site is your entire business model, getting on-line is only the first step. The first of many. Even with your web site on-line, you’re still going to be doing an impression of the invisible man until you learn how to drive traffic to your site.

The web is often touted as the solution to the problem of being invisible. And it can be. But it’s not about just having a web site and I worry that many of those small businesses and sole traders will wonder what the fuss was about when their site is up, looks good, and sits there unvisited except for its owner. It then becomes like any brick-based store in completely the wrong part of town or the wrong side of the street.

Of course, with the possibility of picking up a web site in a box for silly money, people become conditioned to expect all web solutions to cost next to nothing and are then unwilling to spend the money - or even the time, perhaps - that would actually make their whole investment start to pay for itself. The obvious solution, therefore, is a new product: on-line marketing in a box. Any suggestions for contents?