Posts Tagged ‘FT’

The FT ran a piece in its Digital Business supplement (and on-line) yesterday on Lionel Menchaca, chief blogger at Dell. It’s well worth a read - although it’s not the best written article to appear in the FT - because of the unequivocal conclusion: blogging works.

As the article points out, Dell’s reputation was in the doldrums. As a large number of its customers were on-line and these same customers - and soon to be ex-customers - were vocal in their criticisms of Dell, Again, on-line.

Dell responded to charges that they were poor at listening by creating a sort of ‘chief blogger’ role and launching the Direct2Dell blog. It seems fair to say that the effect was positive in a surprisingly short space of time. Of course, the fact that the blog started at all was seen by the blogosphere as a bonus point. But the key thing is that Menchaca keeps it open and honest. As he says,

“We wouldn’t have any credibility at all if we only used the blog to publish marketing messages.”

The blog is a place that customers, ex-customers, and potential customers can air opinions, see what others are saying, and hear what’s happening at Dell, It also present a human side of Dell and makes the company seem approachable and willing to listen and to change.

In less than two years, Dell has turned its on-line reputation around. There may still be customer service issues from time to time or serious hardware faults but the blog can take a lot of the sting out of those potential PR disasters by acknowledging them and engaging with them before the gripe spreads across the internet.

And now for something completely different…
In another example of blogs driving interaction, Dennis Howlett’s guest post on Chris Brogan’s blog yesterday kicked off a debate about the terms ‘Web 2.0′ and ’social media’. The post itself was a blast of iconoclastic dyspepsia from Dennis. This was followed by a quick retort from Tim O’Reilly and then the comments started flying.

I won’t recreate the debate here - read the comments on the post for a great insight into some of the problems associated with taking these tools mainstream - but what the comments revealed was the power of an open forum for trying to define something and reach a consensus. This is what drives change.

The beauty of it is, that before you start, you don’t know who might have an opinion and who might be able to add something useful. In the enterprise space, this would be like inviting everyone in the company to every meeting just in case they had something valuable to contribute. Ideal but not practical.

(A quick aside: this happened on a smaller scale when I worked in Asia for Reuters. When I regularly visited Tokyo to present project plans and specifications for new systems, instead of the just the two or three decision makers, I would be confronted by a whole department of perhaps twenty staff filling the meeting room. The vast majority remained silent throughout the meetings.)

Opening up the debate might seem scary. You may hear things you don’t want to or which reveal things you would rather stay hidden. But, as Menchaca says in the FT piece, being open leads to credibility. I also think it improves the business culture of the company being open: it encourages a change of mind-set. Better still, of course, it lets you tap the knowledge and experience of the vast number of people your company will never normally encounter in the day-to-day running of your business.

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?

Mike Southon, co-author of “The Beermat Entrepreneur”, has a weekly column in the FT. It forms part of the ‘Entrepreneur’ section, which, in turn, sits at the the back of the Saturday ‘Your Money’ section. This obviously involves some newsprint origami before you reach it but it’s usually worth the effort.

I miss it occasionally and yesterday browsed the column titles on the FT web site to catch up with anything that appeared interesting. The title that immediately got my attention was ‘Reputations precede you‘. Southon rarely discusses the internet per se but here was a subject - the combination of entrepreneurs and reputation - that seemed a perfect fit for an examination of how on-line tools can enhance or damage a brand or its owners.

Here is what Southon said about reputation and the internet:

“Your reputation is defined by your case studies, which should be refreshed on your website and in your literature as often as possible.”

That’s it. Seriously. Over 700 words on reputation and entrepreneurs and not a single mention of a ‘blog’ or a ‘forum’ or a ‘podcast’. Not even a hint that a quick check of Google or Technorati (for instance) could show you what your global reputation might be.

Southon’s starting point for his column is a report issues by Coutts, bankers to the wealthy. It appears they have at least 18,000 entrepreneurs as their customers. It would also appear that those 18,000 care little for what an internet-based network of their partners, colleagues, and customers might be saying about them and their services or products. The thrust of the report is towards being in control of your PR by knowing everything about your company and then controlling the messages you deliver to ‘the media’. By ‘the media’, of course, is meant traditional press outlets. This is inevitable, since the report has been written by a PR professional at a top rank PR company with a web site that you can search for a long time without finding any evidence that the internet could form part of any integrated communications strategy.

But that’s by the way. Stuck like this in the world of reacting to the impact of traditional media means allowing your reputation management to turn like an oil tanker when what you need is the handling of a speed boat. The report’s author ends with a Japanese proverb:

“The reputation of a thousand years may be determined by the conduct of an hour”.

This was from a period before your company’s share price could be irrevocably damaged in the time it takes to watch the cherry blossom fall. The proverb needs updating:

“The reputation of your brand may be determined by the speed and manner of your reaction to a blog post read by a thousand customers.”

Today’s FT carries a short piece on some research recently carried out by Cranfield School of Management on behalf of Pipex Business. The upshot of the report is that many SMEs are struggling to see the real benefit of internet use.

Here is the most telling sentence:

The report concludes that the popularity of online communication in society has created more competitive markets and more picky customers.

Imagine that. Basically, what that sentence says is that customers are finding ways to get better information before making choices. And businesses are suffering because of it. The report’s co-author - Andrew Burke - draws a dispiriting conclusion: he thinks that widespread uptake of internet use means that SMEs struggle to gain competitive advantage with it.

Now, pardon me, but that really is a case of looking at things the wrong way round. Or, as we say in online marketing circles, RSS about T/T.

The majority of the 422 businesses that took part in the survey need to stop and think about their customers. It’s apparent that the company’s use of the internet is currently passive. There is no sense that they feel they should be trying to drive a conversation. If their customers are looking for information, what are they doing to provide it? If they want to seek competitive advantage, they should be looking to what they offer, not what the technology is doing.

If all businesses are doing the same thing, to stand out you must do one of two things: be remarkable in your sector or change sector. How do you become remarkable? Start off by changing what you do that everyone else does. Get rid of your dull corporate web site and replace it with a blog, for instance. Create a forum for all your customers to post up complaints about your service. Stop issuing press releases to media outlets that never use them and write pieces that will interest your customers instead.

Above all, change.