Free Market Research

The internet offers us many great things, but probably one of the greatest is access to free market research data based on our customers.

Free market research based on social media tools is fairly simple. You can use portals like Facebook, LinkedIn and XING to create so called groups where you surround yourself with other likeminded users.

Because of the relationship with their network which you currently don’t have access to, they will spread the word about your product or services to their peers just by “liking” or sharing certain articles you publish.

The articles your members like will then be featured and, in turn, spread to their network.

The free market research part comes in, when your community has grown to a size of multiple thousand users which – in context to your efforts – is not a hard goal to reach.

Major brands like Coca-Cola have developed communities of a few million users following and thus spreading their brand on social media portals like Facebook.

But back to the free market research and how you can get representative results.

Once your community has reached a size you’re comfortable with, you can start engaging them, asking questions about latest products and informing them about updates.

Each of these updates will be featured and visible to them when they logon to the community, bringing your brand back into their mind.

The part where you start acquiring free market research data from is when you start asking them about reviews for your products, for instance where they have last had a Coke.

Coca-Cola, for example, managed to get thousands of responses from their community sharing pictures of their last drink. Among those were images were some from remote locations like people hiking in the mountains, others having a BBQ and yet others just having a casual drink at the office.

Bose, the sound specialists and loudspeaker manufacturer is another company doing a terrific job getting free market research from Facebook.

While the community they have built is by far not as large as that of Coca-Cola, the free market research data they get through social media is even more valuable to their efforts because of their specialization in the market they serve.

Recently they asked their community where they last listened to music which got a tremendous response, the answers superseding the thousands, spreading the word of the question like a wildfire and engaging third party members until then not accessible to the company which lead to a significant increase in brand visibility.

Another interesting question for them to ask would be which song each member listed to recently. In context to market research it would allow them to determine certain aspects of cross selling in cooperation with portals like iTunes. Or, based on the market research data of music distribution portals, allow the determination of demographics in their in their community.

While these aspects may seem exciting enough by themselves, there is the aspect of getting free market research directly from your community, engaging and involving them instead of hiring an institute or agency to anonymously get you the data. While the data you get from the agency may be more efficient, the social media market research part is more fun to the community and gives them the impression of your brand being the more approachable one.

New White Paper: Corporate Online Reputation Management in the Financial Sector

I have just released a new white paper outlining the importance of Corporate Online Reputation Management in the Financial Sector.

It starts with the introduction about the topic, addressing the problems but also presenting a solution oriented approach for CORM in the financial industry.

The chapters are in the product description. You can download “Corporate Online Reputation Management in the Financial Sector” here.

Looking forward to your feedback.

What every CMO should learn from iStrategy 2010 in Berlin

First of all my utmost respect to the organizers of the conference for putting up such a great event. Given the fact that it was the first one I can only give my biggest kudos to the iStrategy crew.

See the web as a marketplace, not as a marketing instrument!

One of the primary things I have taken away from the event is that hardly any organization pays attention to what their website visitors experience once they have arrived. And even though this event was promoted solely around social media strategy, thus of course perceiving all the social media channels as marketing instruments, I can only repeat what I stated in the MeetTheBoss.tv interview: Please try to put yourself not only into the situation of the customer, but also move forward and start seeing the web as a marketplace, not only as a mean of marketing.

In my interview (for those that had to depart early or didn’t manage to make it to this great event at all) I stated a pretty plastic example; that what is being done now compares to running the energizer bunny through the city, catching everyone’s attention.

Those people will definitely visit your store, but if there is no sales staff there to engage with them your products can have all the value proposition they want and no one will buy, thus rendering the marketing efforts invested in this campaign(s) obsolete.

Wikipedia describes a market as “any structure that allows buyers and sellers to exchange any type of goods, services and information” and this is where you have to go people… the level of the web are customer centric web presentations allowing both customer initiated and proactive engagement from the side of organization running this web operation.

Real time website analytics, backed by behavioral targeting will allow you to pinpoint interested visitors, mark them as prospects and allow your sales staff to directly speak to them through a chat window which will appear on the visitors screen.

Just to give you an insight: I have been experimenting with proactive customer engagement instruments for the past 5 months and have seen two extreme results:

1. Once you initiate the chat window on your visitors screen roughly 40% immediately shut it and leave your site because they perceive their privacy to be invaded and they have never seen something like this before. Due to the fact that I see this kind of interaction to spread magnificently in the next months because of its simplicity however, I think that this rate will drastically reduce over the next 18 months.

2. The other 60% accept the chat request simply because you introduce yourself to them on the fact that you have seen their interest in the specific product/page they’re currently viewing and giving them the opportunity to ask questions they may have in context to this product. Questions which they would have not asked if you would have made them access the contact form (if you offer points of contact at all).

For those of you who would have expected the all healing solution in the post: I’m sorry to disappoint you at this point, but it’s not out there simply because your organization is too unique starting at the vertical you’re in and ending with factors like the mindset inside your company or enterprise and how willing the employees are to embrace new things or how keen they are to engage others.

Utilizing social media as an instrument for internal communication!

Social media has so much more to offer than what it’s primarily being (mis)used for by the companies out there today.

Another very interesting aspect is the internal usage to gain and preserve intellectual property, preventing/reducing the risk of – for instance – re-initiation of projects which have been worked on prior reducing process faults and costs resulting thereof.

An internal blog made available to the whole organization can not only enable horizontal communication which will allow you to spread innovative ideas immediately (and improve them through the discussions which inevitably are going to happen over time) but also catch other ideas for improvement of processes and organizational purposes.

As I have pointed out above, there is no all curing prescription drug which will take care of all your needs. And nor is Microsoft’s Sharepoint!!!1

Corporate Online Reputation Management (CORM)

Nothing is as bad as leaving something uncommented. And why should you? I have just recently found out that pretty much none of the fortune 500 companies of the world listen to what is being said about them on Twitter.

While I could understand that not all channels can be monitored (which is also a lie) Twitter is one of the “hottest” portals.

Don’t see it as negative energy being spread about you on the web but see it as an opportunity to engage with a customer, thus strengthening your relationship with them. Don’t believe me? Well, give it a try. It works, trust me. John McCrea does a magnificent job with it on Plaxo, so why shouldn’t you or Lufthansa, or Bose, or Allianz Global Investors?

Beside the fact that you directly engage with the customer however, you can catch a lot of FREE!!! (That’s the thing without paying millions for people collecting market intelligence for you) customer feedback. Not only what your customers think about your products but also where you should go to have a look for more info about you which you may have not been able to assess which may be stashed in a third party discussion board, blog, etc. Oh yeah, did I mention that THIS INFORMATION IS FREE?

BOTTOM LINE!

Yes, the iStrategy is definitely worthwhile, especially to those organizations which have not undergone any efforts of implementing social media into their marketing strategy. (IMPORTANT: the marketing strategy is only ONE PART of what you should do. Don’t forget the: the objective of social media marketing is to drive customers to you. Don’t make the mistake and leave alone in your desolate virtual warehouse, a. k. a. your website!)

Should you join the next one? Pretty much so.

The value proposition is there, loud and clear and it will most likely give you important insights into the market (and hey, I’m probably going to speak there).

And if you don’t learn anything there is still the possibility to network with some really big people there from several industries.

Even if I repeat myself: there is no golden rule. The more individual your strategy is the more authentic it will come across. Copying is not really the solution. But copying for inspiration and then making it better definitely is an idea to pursue.

For any questions you may have please comment them to this post and/or use my contact info to reach out to me. Or follow @lars_hilse on twitter.

German government endorses Cyberterrorism?

Germany’s government was offered to buy records of the Swiss subsidiary of the British HSBC.

These records, which were offered for 2.5 million EUR,  contain data about German citizens who have placed money in Switzerland to avoid taxes.

The database was definitely illegally acquired, supposedly offered by a former IT specialist with HSBC who now lives anonymously in southern France and whose identity is being withheld by French authorities.

France, to which similar data has been offered in the past, denies Switzerland’s request to give up the suspect for prosecution.

Of course withholding taxes is a crime, yet the ethical indifference whether a Government should buy stolen data to profit from it, thus encouraging cyber terrorism is more than worth a thorough discussion.

How do I prevent employees from stealing and exposing company data?

The biggest threat is on the INSIDE

10 years ago you would have had a good chance of catching your employee walking out the door with a batch of files. Today all a person needs to put your entire organization at stake is an inexpensive thumb drive which will allow them to steal and expose a pretty significant amount of your organizations data – if not all of it – because everything is stored, archived and managed electronically, most of the time for convenience sake. This also makes it convenient for thieves.

Increasing the risk is that you are hardly able to buy computers without USB ports anymore, yet you can deactivate them by using software, minimizing the first and most obvious risk.

However, first thing’s first and the most obvious thing is that most organizations grant their employees free access to all of their files.

This risk can be reduced by deploying an MLSEC, or multi level security guideline giving them access to the files they need to work with and only allowing them access to these files for the duration they actually need them. You may have heard the data classification terms Top Secret, Secret, and “need to know” basis before in movies. This is exactly what is being described therein.

One measure which is more of a deterrent than an actual preemptive measure is logging file access, meaning that each and every file access is logged to their ID including time, date and what they did with it. True, this will not keep them from taking the files but presents a barrier for some to breach knowing that they’re being scrutinized.

These – and other, more individual measures – were implemented by me in a large, US based law firm upon one employee taking important case files with them.

More info on the whole topic and how it can help your organization is available upon personal request.

Looking to learn more about “geo tagging” and search engine optimization

Google does not reveal all its secrets. Any why should it? The thing about SEO is that you’ll probably want to look at it as a part of your whole web strategy. My experience from consulting several clients around the globe was that the real SEO power came from regularly reoccurring articles. That is why I’m a bit fan of corporate blogs and implement them where ever I get a chance to. As for the positioning of your business on Google Maps et. al.: Manually implement them there with what is now called Google Places. That way you’ll be registered for sure and have control over that entry. Hope I was able to help.

Knowledge management – increasing the value of your business

Since the term is pretty plastical: especially in the times we’re in now, where an employee’s stay in a company can very well last a few months only, it would be more than pesky to not only have to let the human resource go. But along with them goes the information they have ascertained while in your organization in – perhaps even paid position – and during the time your business has spent on training them. Worst case: they’re going to take it to your direct competitor.

Knowledge management can’t prevent people from leaving your organization but it can help you keep track of things worked out, thus conserving the intellectual property. And well organized intellectual property is worth millions to potential investors.

The implementation of knowledge management solutions requires a lot of know-how. The deployment of the system should be – regardless of the size of the organization – preceded by the creation of a requirements and specifications documentation upon which the vendor will be selected and which determines what optimizations have to be made to the setup of the system to ensure the maximization of the return of investment made towards the system.

Knowledge management can be useful even for one-man operations, especially in context to the ever growing demand of information involved in our day-to-day operations.

Make sure to talk to us before you start collecting knowledge that you’ll probably end up never finding again.

Does online advertising work with anything else than impulse products?

Upon my speech at the Joomla!Dag in Utrecht in 2008 – and afterwards – I talked to several people about CPC and their thoughts about it.

The bottom line was that CPC only – if at all – is successful for impulse products. Thus for products that are “small” in terms of not requiring and reading verbose introductions, are known to people, or are just affordable things.

When it comes to offering services that need a more in-depth demo, you better make sure to have interactivity in form of video, sales presentations and so forth to give your product the personal note and to make your organization seem “accessible” and transparent because a majority of customers shopping the web are still sceptic when it comes to purchasing costly merchandise over the web.

What has your experience been with online advertising campaigns and their results?

Customer-Self-Service without internet? T-Mobiles worst customer service ever

I think that yesterday marked my most interesting experience in terms of customer -service.

Because my DSL was down  I called Deutsche Telekom’s customer support.

While on hold (for 10 minutes) I was suggested to alternatively visit their website for help.

Now, generally I would have done so, simply because I don’t really appreciate hanging around on hold with some call center where the answers you get are quite doubtable by themselves – but how, without a connection to the internet because they screwed up?

To those who are just about to start defending their initiative: no, this was not a general hotline phone number but one dedicated to problems with DSL connections.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from Lars Hilse and all the people working with and for us to make the digital economy a better place on a daily basis.

True, this year was not one of the best years for a lot of us, yet most of our clients were able to maintain, some were even able to strengthen their position and profit from the financial crisis.

Initiated by the holiday season we are able to reflect on what has happened and focus on the primary commodity in life: TIME.

Other than money and other material aspects, time can’t be replaced once wasted.

From all of us here we hope that you get to spend some quality time with your loved ones and that your holidays will give you a some time to take a deep breath to get ready for the year that lies ahead of us.