On Internet Business

When bad advertising goes good

Posted by Michael under Social Media

Microsoft profits leaped by 60% in the final quarter of 2009 and the company has claimed this is owing to the ‘heavyweight marketing campaign’ for Windows 7 which is an amazing response given that the advertising was roundly, widely and deeply panned by industry watchers – blogger after blogger and advertising commentator after advertising commentator said the adverts, especially those for Windows 7 ‘parties’ were uniformly awful.

So how did the operating system become the best-selling operating system to date?

Partly because the adverts weren’t aimed at the industry experts but at the vast underbelly of people who have to use a computer for work or study but whose understanding of the systems involved is as limited as the average person’s understanding of the internal combustion engine – it turns out that this huge section of society was perfectly happy with advertising that the cognoscenti described variously as patronising, painful or just plain bad.

Microsoft admits it was assisted by a rebound in personal computer sales in the run-up to Christmas, partly resulting from the last minute investment in laptops as Christmas gifts, but it does seem to have found a level of communication with the bulk of the marketplace that’s worked well.

And so to the iPad, derided on release by the Guardian Newspaper the Wall Street Journal, to name but two. Good product, Bad name, was how most people described the new product and while there are minor concerns about its functionality (why no Flash support?) the major one has been over the name. The number of jokes about it on Twitter led to #iTampon becoming a trending topic. Several high profile women in the technical and media industries have made terse comments about the way that the name seems to suggest sanitary protection and expressed concern that either (a) something must have gone wrong in development for there not to have been a single woman in the many brainstorming meetings around the name who could point out the obvious connotations or (b) they pointed them out and were overruled anyway, which smacks of a patriarchal approach to selling the product.

The question for Apple is whether they, like Microsoft, have got around the gatekeepers of technical development and reached right down to the potential buyer – given that at the press conference, Steve Jobs described the product as ‘so much more intimate than a laptop’ – apparently without irony, it seems unlikely that Apple had understood the way the name might be viewed rather than being confident that the industry response and the public response would be differently graduated, as in the Microsoft case.

Apple are very quiet about this avalanche of wit at the iPad’s expense, suggesting that they’re caught out by the media attention and public fun being had at their expense. If this is the case, it’s a rare example of Apple being wrong-footed in marketing, but the next six months will show if they can still turn bad advertising, and bad publicity, into good sales.

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2009’s big social media #fails and how to learn from them

Posted by Michael under Social Media

Two examples from 2009, one from the very beginning of the year, the other from the very last days of the decade, reveal how even big businesses can get the social media world all wrong.

In spring, Skittles, the fruit sweet brand, failed to pull off the Twitter trick. Basically the Skittles homepage was reframed as a Twitter search feed for its own product. During the first few days, this innovation caused a huge buzz in the social media industry, with many people saying that Skittles was the first ‘Social Media Mozart’ but it hardly reached the social media users. Then it did. Over a couple of weeks the Skittles home-page was visited by hundreds, then thousands, of Twitter users, following the twitterfeed that showed Skittles related tweets. And while a few of those visitors were saying nice things about the brand, most were swearing, blaspheming, making racist, sexist or homophobic remarks all prefaced with the #skittles hash-tag. And, guess what? Every one of those potentially offensive tweets bounced right onto the Skittles homepage. It was troll-bait of the highest order and the trolls came in their masses. The brand failure was, for several months, glaringly and publicly evident.

Why did it happen?

Skittles hadn’t prepared their ground. Other companies, like Lush Cosmetics, are noted for their long history of engagement with their purchasers, so the Lush twitterfeed is a good mixture of brand led information and responses to that information, queries from the public being answered by the brand, and customer to customer interaction along the feed. Skittles had none of that and the tweet-savvy Twitter community knew it was being used as a brand enhancement device. Skittles made a cynical bid to hijack the Twitterati and got hijacked in return.

O2 have finished 2009 on a low note in social media, or rather, with notes being what has brought a twitter and forum backlash down on the company. O2 has been sending marketing texts to many customers who have repeatedly asked to be removed from its marketing activities. By Christmas, frustrated O2 customers were being contacted every day about free festive ringtones etc, despite having texted the opt-out number on numerous occasions. Finally the furious O2 customers, including the Father Ted writer, went twitter and developed their own hashtag to complain about the total lack of customer service from this media supplier. They also vented on the influential Moneysupermarket.com forum, and flooded geek forums with their concerns. What rubbed salt in the wounds of many O2 subscribers living or working in London was that during the second half of 2009 there were periods when they were unable to able to make or receive calls or transmit data because of pressure on the network from smart phones like the iPhone – but somehow, O2 managed to get its own spam through to them!

Why did it happen?

A conjunction of failures here: first the iPhone pressure caught out a lot of mobile phone companies, who found that smart phones were prioritised over the network and because they were using up vast bandwidth, ‘classic’ customers were unable to get connected. But for O2 it was much worse, because until November they had the exclusive contract for Apple phones, so their sales in that area were harming their customer base in the non-smart phone arena. Add to that the inability of their own marketing team to respond to requests to stop sending spam texts, and O2 ended up looking like they didn’t give a damn.

What to learn from this

1. You can’t move into new areas of business communication without expecting reciprocal relationships. Companies do best when they engage first with their established customer base using new media and then take that loyal group forward into new campaigns.
2. Just ‘using’ new media is impossible – the interactive nature of the technology means that any company that steps into social media is open to being held up to public ridicule, complaints and scorn, using the very technology they’ve tried to exploit themselves.
3. Social media engagement requires a consistent response from a brand, not just a dipping in and out – it’s not like print or TV advertising which offers the chance to step back and assess response. Going into social media means being ready to work on a day by day basis with customers, with no time to stop and think about your response. If you make people wait, they will believe you are either incompetent or have something to hide.

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Which is the best online project management software?

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Social Media

There are dozens of project management offerings, some of which are not actually project management at all. Basecamp which is probably the most widely known solution should not strictly be regarded as a project management too – rather it is a communication tool and a definite upgrade to using emails. However, it has its limitations: it cannot measure the work load for the whole team nor for each member individually, or can it evaluate the realism of set deadlines. Instead it simply helps exchange information inside a team and/or with clients.

So what are the strengths and weaknesses of the major alternatives:

Huddle

Pros:
RSS Feeds
File upload/management/inline editing (with lock feature)
Writeboards
Task deadline dates
Telephone conferencing

Cons:
No milestone tasks
No reports
No time-tracking
No task reordering
Doesn’t look great if printed

Teamwork Project Manager

Pros:
Relatively inexpensive
Task due dates pinned to calendar
Data is backed up by Teamwork but also customer-driven backups (at cost)
At risk issue tracker

Cons:
Still seems to have a few bugs such as saved items not showing up on refresh
May be better for larger projects, as the price for small teams is a little expensive

Smartsheet

Pros:
Gives a change history for all changes
Supports drag and drop for custom ordering
Supports hierarchical grouping

Cons:
Slow in comparison to other systems
No filtering so you can’t ‘show’ completed tasks or over-budget tasks in list format

Easy Projects

Pros:
Great interface and good ‘getting started’ popup
Excellent range of reporting tools

Cons:
The registration required to get started takes forever and all fields must be filled in before registration can be processed
No risk tracker

Central Desktop

Pros:
Makes collaboration very easy even for new users
Extremely easy to set up and operate

Cons:
Little value in depth management such as Gantt charts and resource management options
Skimpy budgeting elements

Wrike

Pros:
Email integration into projects
Excellent collaboration tools
Hierarchy functionality
Excellent automatic task management reminders

Cons:
No risk management system
Finance functionality is very low

Clarizen

Pros:
Easy to use
Good hierarchical task structure.
Good progress tracking
Risk manager

Cons:
A web based system can be difficult for new users to learn
No ‘one click’ report button
May be more suitable for larger companies than small

So, after assessing all these project management software systems, my favourite is Teamwork Project Manager due to its balance between functionality and a clear and easy-to use-interface.

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Online Customer Service

Posted by Michael under Online Retail, Social Media

It seems that online buyers have even worse experiences than face-to-face consumers, as a Harris Interactive survey, reported by Zen International, discovered that 75% of those who buy online had problems using websites to make purchases in the past year.

It’s astonishing that this is the case because businesses are likely to lose immediate sales but also the domino effect of bad experiences being reported on social media for future potential customers to discover. And that’s a likely scenario as 13% of people said the had reported on bad experiences in 2009, against 8% in 2008. And 74% of people who responded to the survey said that negative information about a company that they found online would affect the likelihood of their doing business with that company in future.

So what practical steps can be taken to ensure your business offers not just great products but also great customer service?

• Encourage customer feedback – make it easy for customers to tell you what they think about you. The customer is always right, but even if they aren’t they will still be telling people about the poor product or service they encountered. So you need to engage with your customers and understand them, so you’re ready to respond effectively.
• Empower customer service representatives – the front end of your business is the people who deal face-to-face, by email, or by phone, with your clients. Is it worth arguing over small amounts of money? Is it worth losing a customer? Allow customer service people to fix problems swiftly and to ensure happy customers – don’t be a company that palms off problems, never responds to queries or creates a labyrinth of obstacles for people to get through before they can let you know they are not happy, because if they don’t tell you, they will tell the world.
• Monitor customer satisfaction – set up a questionnaire so that you can monitor and track customer satisfaction.  Make it easy and quick so your customer doesn’t mind completing it and offer an incentive, perhaps one respondee a month gets a freebie, so that they know you are giving something back in return for the information they supply.
• Monitor social media – a great tool for monitoring customer comments is tweetdeck which allows you to quick and easily see what is being said about you and reply to customers using this form of social media. It is the customer that now decides the method of communication and businesses need to join the conversation. Such systems of monitoring also allow you to head off problems before they develop, for example by telling clients how you’re going to deal with deliveries over a postal strike, which allows them to know that their business is important to your business.

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Social Media Revolution – fact or hype?

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Social Media

This video makes some pretty big claims for social media and the way it will affect the business world.

80% of companies where, and of what kind, are using LinkedIn to find staff? I don’t think it’s mines or pet-shops or garden landscapers!

Wikipedia is more accurate than the Encyclopaedia Britannica? I doubt that’s true – although Wiki information may be more up to date, the pernicious tendency for people to alter wiki pages without fact-checking, or to post misinformation deliberately means that it can’t be relied on for accurate information. The SEOmoz blog highlighted the problem very well last year.

But 96% of Generation Y joining at least one social media network is a real kicker – if they are going to outnumber baby boomers next year, is your business reaching them, and do you even know what is being said about you on those networks? Do you have a strategy for measuring commentary about your brand, and a system to try and rectify bad information when it gets put out there?

What about those 300 million users of Qzone? Is that kind of untapped market of interest to you? If so, how do you tap it?

If 34% of bloggers post commentary on brands and products, what could they be saying about you? Do you know the key bloggers in your business and understand their purpose? Are you even on their radar? A quarter of online searches produce user-generated content. That means 25% of what people find out about those brands is personal – like word of mouth – and we tend to listen more to personal commentary than anything else. If somebody says they loathe what you do, it has much more effect on you than being told a certain behaviour is not considered generally acceptable. And so it is with brand information – if blogger X says your product is great, that has more effect on people’s thinking than if you do.

A social media driven economy will be more personal, more reactive and more interactive. Those Generation Y users will expect to give feedback not to you, but to the world, and you will be expected to respond.

Are you ready?

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Posterous – small business saviour?

Posted by Michael under Social Media

Posterous is making news at present and it could be the answer for small business owners who struggle to equip a traditional business for the new online world.

How it works

Posterous is essentially just another blogging platform – but the difference is that your email account is the administrative interface, so you don’t have a separate, dedicated interface to create blog posts.

Posterous also offers an intelligent service that works for you to solve posting problems. If, for example, you want to add a photograph to a blog post, you simply attach it to the email that you send to Posterous and it then resizes the photo and loads it alongside the text. It will also flash code and embed videos and parse you links so if you add a youtube link, Posterous turns it into an embedded player on the page.

The biggest point in its favour is that it’s free – so for small entrepreneurs, or people whose business is seasonal, it’s a cost-free way of getting good outreach without making investments in hard or soft systems.

Multi-platform posting

Because you can configure Posterous to automatically update your blog, twitter or flickr account, it can be used as a simple one-stop shop for a variety of social media.

Downsides of Posterous

One problem with the platform is that it’s only just got into customisation – until very recently every account opened with Posterous had to look and function in the same way, so more sophisticated users couldn’t develop their accounts beyond the basic platform level. It remains to be seen if the ‘theming’ that Posterous offers will be flexible enough to suit the really skilled user.

Another feature that is lacking is the ability to at static pages or links – this can be done, but only as part of the sidebar called ‘About Me’ which looks unbusinesslike to say the least.

The biggest problem, in the long term, is that you can’t export content from Posterous to other places – without a system of data transfer the value of the system is limited.

Overall assessment

However, for small businesses who don’t have dedicated staff to master and monitor social media, internet pages and the like, but who recognise the need to move past a simple shopfront style website and offer a less static feel to their business presence, Posterous is a good stepping stone. And when Posterous Pro launches at the end of this year, it will offer advanced features like advertising and give paying users more space.

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Microsoft tackles analysing social media

Posted by Michael under Search, Social Media

Measuring the impact and effect of social media campaigns has become a key issue for business. Many tools that measure social media (they are called analytics) are blunt instruments – they create charts but have no real-time flow and have to be accessed, they don’t alert the company to new emergence of social buzz.

Microsoft’s new tool is named Looking Glass and it’s still a prototype with a few chosen companies being involved in a test and response phase at present.

What makes Looking Glass interesting? Two things – the first is that it sends e-mail alerts if social media activity picks up or changes direction – so it reveals negative or positive feedback in social media commentary within the alert. The other key feature is the reporting reveals which days of the week generate the highest activity on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, and other social media sites. A Microsoft spokesman said, “… if you are not using it as a listening tool, then you are really not getting the complete benefit of a Twitter or a Facebook because a part of [your] job is to watch the conversations on the wall.”

Looking Glass is not the only kid on the block though – new systems with similar approaches have been launched by Squidoo which offers a way to let brands filter their online reputation for a fee. And Trackr has launched an online Authority List that tracks and identifies thought leaders the online communities. As it says on its website: Discussions on brands, products and trends are no longer controlled by marketers. Influential bloggers, reviewers, gamers, and other digital creators lead these conversations and shape opinions.

So why does Looking Glass stand out? The main reason is that it blends social media data with reporting from other campaign channels such customer databases, call- and service- centres and sales data so that an organisation has a seamless sense of the ‘buzz’ and a clear picture of where that buzz originates. And it allows a company to keep track of who is saying what about it, through which channels. Not all businesses are convinced of the need to monitor social media, partly because they can’t see how to integrate monitoring with PR or other promotional activity, if Looking Glass can offer the ability to link sales data, commentary and management of brand, for example, it may make the breakthrough into the mainstream that the other systems haven’t.

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Building business success with social media

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Social Media

Increasingly businesses are understanding that the value of the internet is not straight sales, but relationships, and social media is an unparalleled tool for building closer links, creating trust and undertaking advocacy, when linked to a retail or service function that’s accessible online.

Celebrities Score in Social Media

One definition of this form of social media use is microblogging – Twitterer Stephen Fry is perhaps one of the most famous micro-bloggers, closely followed by Eddie Izzard, who is tweeting his 1000 miles in 7 days run for charity.

If you’re a public figure already, using social media to document your activities is a natural outgrowth of your celebrity – but businesses can use this approach to become more informed about their customer base as they build brand loyalty. This means that marketing successfully to this generation of web-savvy consumers is about more than SEO and refresh rates, you need to be able to find them through social media they use, and convert them from that to becoming a customer.

Relationships are Two Way in Social Media

Tiny publisher Salt looked like folding a few months ago, but using their committed customer base (people whose books they’d published) to reach out through Facebook and Twitter, as well as their own website and mailing list, they launched a Just One Book campaign that made it to the literary pages of the broadsheets and won ‘celeb’ endorsement from Griff Rhys Jones among others. Their technique of using their authors to sell a message, rather than a book, is a way of building loyalty. They continue their campaign by asking their followers questions like ‘can you recommend a T-shirt printer – we need new merchandise?’ or ‘which living poet would you like to see move to Salt and why?’

The cleverness lies in asking the already Salt-aware public to share their expertise, a subtle flattery that the big publishers aren’t capable of delivering to their market share, and that encourages the Salt-aware to share their positive experience of this small, but no longer nearly so struggling, publishing house.

The most famous story, of course, is that of Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration. The Inauguration Facebook page was getting 4,000 status updates per hour, while Twitter experienced five times the normal number of tweets per second in the run-up to, and during, the ceremony.

These are all examples of successful brands filling the gaps between where their brand is positioned in the anonymous online world of the internet and where relationships are built: in chatrooms and forums, on livejournal, Facebook and Twitter.

Three Rules for Social Media Success

To achieve mastery of social media it’s important to:

1. Greet the contact as an equal, not a customer
2. Respect their expertise which may exceed the brand’s own expertise in other areas (Salt asking about T-shirt printers is an example of this)
3. Allow contacts to run with your business, rather than trying to patrol or curtail their enthusiasms.

There’s always the risk that your fan-base may misrepresent you, but that’s part of the ruggedness of the social media world, as long as you make clear the demarcation between your business and their input, reputation can be enhanced by this kind of ‘fanship’.

Photograph courtesy of egadapparel at Flickr

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Internet traffic and social media

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Social Media

Business people are increasingly aware of social media, without always knowing how to exploit it, or even how to react to social media incursions into the business word.

First of all, it’s important to understand what social media is – it’s a communication system, rather than an information system.  In other words, it doesn’t just supply the customer, or potential customer, with information but allows interaction. In the simplest form, this interaction could be as limited as letting viewers vote for a video or article (Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon) or as complex as the way that Flixster can recommend films to a user, by using the ratings of films provided by other Flixster users with similar interests. The strongest forms of social media allow not just communication but creation – such as the Skittles brand which was supposed to allow visitor uploads of Skittles related videos.

Managing Social Media

Managing social media is complicated – that same brand awareness campaign for Skittles had the Twitter component pulled after an upbeat start to the campaign degenerated into a long run of profane and pornographic tweets … all of which were appearing, in real time, on the Skittles homepage. The facebook campaign has been more successful, and the demographic data collection resulting from visits to the Skittles homepage has been highly successful (to enter the site you have to type in your date of birth) allowing a data-cull of immense proportions.  Presumably though, Skittles set out to increase brand awareness and sales, not to reap data, so the jury is still out on these kinds of highly managed social media campaigns – they involve high risks for the brand, especially if negative commentary outweighs positive.

Static websites may soon not be enough to sustain a business with a large online component. The internet is no longer website-based, it has become a fragmented series of systems, including social media, each of which appeals to different groups. Twitter, for example, is said to be a turn-off for teenagers (although in the weeks following this claim, many teenagers tweeted vociferously about failures in the research that led to the Morgan Stanley report) but MySpace is a big hit with the same teenage demographic. Facebook is a great campaigning area, but is also associated with bullying, both of individuals and groups. Brand bullying is a potential outcome of using this kind of social media, and that’s pretty well what happened to Skittles.

Getting Social Media Wrong

The way to avoid problems is to ensure that you build trust through social media, doing more listening than ‘talking’ and ensuring that you are relating to your customer base, not to trolls who can warp your views of your demographic as well as trying to force you to make revealing or damaging remarks as happened recently at radio station KNRK in the USA.

Most experts advise getting as senior a person as possible to be the ‘face and voice’ of your social media, which is working very well for Ford in the USA for example, who have senior communications executives blogging and tweeting about Ford’s restructuring. However, if your exec is not extremely media savvy, they are likely to end up making horrible blunders. Alternatively you can use a professional service to manage your tweets and micro-blogs, but that also has its problems. Hugh Jackman (Wolverine) has recently been caught out after a silly mistake on his blog revealed that he wasn’t actually writing the material himself.

Next time – how to get social media right …

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SMEs and the Internet

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Online Retail, Social Media

Many smaller businesses wonder why they should bother about the internet. There are three main reasons that getting to grips with internet technology and communication will help any business to thrive, and they are the same three reasons that can send a business under. The internet now:

1. challenges how business is done
2. extends customer expectations of a company
3. reveals new opportunities for growth

Concrete examples of each of these from the real world of business show just why even the smallest SME can’t afford to ignore the explosion in internet based communication.

Challenged and failed

Neal’s Yard were challenged, and failed, when they were given a chance to engage with bloggers via the Guardian’s online ‘pages’. Guardian Deputy Editor Adam Vaughan opened the ‘You Ask, They Answer’ blog so that the luxury toiletry and healthcare retailer could answer queries. Hit with dozens of questions from intelligent and sceptical consumers, asking about everything from the way Neal’s Yard homeopathy products could be said to ‘help fight malaria’ to their pricing policy, they failed to produce the responses they’d promised. Then Max Clifford weighed in with a trenchant soundbite on where, when, why and how they’d got it wrong – exactly the kind of publicity no company needs. You can read Clifford’s excellent explanation of why you can’t ignore questions here

Neal’s Yard still haven’t stepped up to the mark to engage with literate, intelligent, highly communicative questioners – but their failure to do so will remain on the internet for decades to come …

Expectations not met = fail, expectations exceeded = business growth

Customer expectations may range from understanding a company’s carbon footprint through to being able to contact the company and ask detailed questions about the product at any time of the day or night.

eBay is the perfect example of how customer expectations have changed the way business operates, and it could even be said that eBay is why Woolworths went out of business in the UK. Both were businesses (or systems) that allowed people to browse a range of similar goods and choose what they wanted, buying in small quantities and often providing low cost items that were needed in a hurry.

But eBay offered thousands of times more choice, and allowed customers to have their goods delivered to their door. Above all, it allowed each customer to ask questions of each vendor such as: how do I wash this? Can you confirm that this is microwave safe? Have you tried to use this underwater … all questions asked of a sandwich box vendor. In Woolworths, the staff would have answered with a shrug, but the sandwich box seller went on to create a short video, on Youtube, that described both the cleaning of the boxes and showed some ways of packing lunches including making radish roses and cartoon character cakes. His business took off exponentially because he’d exceeded customer expectations and they bought into his aspirational funky lunches, not just his cheap lunch boxes.

New opportunities for growth

In late July there was a heavy rainstorm on the South Coast of the UK – road drains were clogged with summer rubbish, streets ran with water and many an unhappy householder discovered that their gutters or drainpipes were blocked too.  On Twitter, a tiny decorating/handyman company seized the day. Their cheeky 140 character advert:  Recession Busting Prices – Front gutters cleaned and checked – £15.00 Front and rear £25.00. Worthing & surrounding areas – was retweeted around the planet. Although it didn’t generate a single customer, TandSWorthing think it was worth it because a lot of potential customers will have got to hear about them and will subconsciously remember the name when they want handyman type work carried out.

The basic rules to mastering the internet business model are to be:

• Integrated – don’t leave the internet to your tech team, make sure everybody understands what the internet business model means for your company
• Fast moving – respond to market opportunities or threats, to customer queries or to events that could change your business behaviour, like a local storm!
• Aware of development – a website that is static and hasn’t been updated for two years is like not opening your mail for a month, it implies you don’t care about those customers. You don’t have to use Youtube or Tweetdeck or Facebook but you do need to know what they are and why you aren’t using them.

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