However, in times of flooded inboxes, you have to make the content you deliver individual and – most of all – exceptionally targeted towards every individual subscriber.

In one of our last assignments we were called by a client to present them with a solution for their decreasing opening rates.

We managed to increase the opening rate of their mailings from 22% to 74% by combining their email marketing software with an advanced analysis software provided by one of our partners.

You can download the entire case study with details about the solution here.

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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.

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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.

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The show airs on several stations in the United States and will be streamed here.

Feel free to ask questions on +1 303 872 0503 or post your question on Twitter @rcrn .

Airtime is 3 P.M. eastern, noon pacific.

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While last week we touched the topic of corporate online reputation management, this week we’re going to focus on a more technical topic called “search engine optimization” and why it’s so important to understand it.

So here we go:

I guess you are familiar with the fact that Google has become the most used search engine in the world with far over 40% market share in and over 1 billion searches submitted daily.

What you may be wondering about is why your company’s website does not show up on the search results for certain search terms and what you can do to influence this to show up before your competitors.

The practice involved here is referred to as search engine optimization, short SEO. Actually it is not a practice but more of a science that relies on the try and error principle.

A lot of search engine specialists have evolved from nowhere and proclaimed to have understood Google and their algorithms, which is partially true.

Only partially because a lot of them are complete idiots who will try to draw money out of your pocket for doing close to nothing in regards to making your company appear first on the Google search result for the query of your companies name.

This is complete bullshit because if you submit an explicit search for your company name on any search engine you have to show up first.

If not, you have seriously done something wrong choosing your web design firm who should have created the site in a search engine friendly manner.

Search engine optimization means understanding Google and learning by doing because their search methods are almost as secret as the recipe for Coca Cola.

If Google were to reveal their algorithms and the search techniques they use it would not only diminish their market position but also open the gates for everyone to influence search results, which would have a disastrous outcome.

So why should you optimize your website for Google and co.?

Simple: the return of investment (ROI) of your website increases with the amount of business you draw from it.

This requires you to have a certain amount of visitors to it, which will convert from prospects to leads to business, which consequence means more business generated from it. And hey, you have already invested lots of money into the design of the site itself, so why not make this investment worthwhile?

While we’re at it: you should immediately dispose of the thought that you will be on the first search result for every term you wish to have. It’s not going to happen simply because there are other competitors of yours on the web who will have had a similar idea and it’s going to be hard and cost intensive to replace their positioning with your own.

You should rather seek innovative ways to reposition yourself for search terms, which are not as frequently used, but therefore increase the number of search terms.

Logically, this will get you higher positioning for these terms.

Since you’re not going to go for the one big fish, but plenty of little ones, you’ll not starve and don’t have to waste your breath trying to keep up with the big guys.

Note: Please do not try SEO yourself since it’s highly unlikely you will get the same results that a professional firm will be able to achieve for you.

Like I have mentioned a couple of times before it is inevitable that you combine all efforts to really get the most out of your eBusiness campaign. And eventhough my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) may sound like the howto guide on achieving market leadership it simply isn’t.

This book shows you strategic approaches analyzing the current situation and how you can execute plans which have derived from your analysis.

Stay tuned until next week when we’re going to lay hands on our last topic “Customer Information Management (CRM)”.

So long,

Lars

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My editor (not the one that disappeared ) called this a true eye opener and upon  the idea founded the company Online Reputation Management, which I am a part of.

It is truly amazing how many people are unaware of how fast bad news can spread about a company online. And how fast it can endanger the whole brand and image.

So here we go on to the chapter “Corporate Online  Reputation Management”:

Remember the good old days when – if negative news were published by a credible newspaper – you would contact your legal counsel and tell them to take the appropriate measures, which would consist of a restraining order or something of that nature?

These times have been replaced by a potential grave danger to your organizations reputation. A danger you can’t counter with the conventional methodologies utilized back then because its nature is not conventional either.

The threat I am talking about is called social media and can ruin your reputation in a matter of days.

It was in early 2008 and a tool called Twitter at the brink of its breakthrough when I first mentioned what is today known as corporate reputation management.

Back then I closed the link by suggesting that upon negative news popping up about an organization on the web, one assigned person will take action by immediately contacting the person complaining, regardless if their complaint was legitimate or not.

To illustrate this process with an example let’s just say that one of your clients is dissatisfied with the service provided by your organization and boasts out a complaint about that on the web.

Now, this can be through their blog in the best case because you have time to react and they can remove or alter that entry when your reputation management staff picked up on and resolved the issue together with the client.

Worse would be if they published their opinion on highly frequented places like micro-blogging platforms where the viral effect is way more likely to take effect simply because they can’t be stopped and even if the clients problem is solved, the good news are unlikely to pick up with the same magnitude.

In all cases the ideal outcome for everyone involved would be that the person who complained in the first place replaces what they have written with the story of how great your customer service is because they got back to them immediately.

Chances that this happens are fairly high because the people are – up until now – not used to this kind of behavior and reaction by support staff.

While back then it took a few hours the tools available today make information surrounding your organization available to you the instant they are published.

Through so-called real time search engines, to which you can submit searches and are informed the instant someone, somewhere says something about you, and this whole topic becomes even more interesting for you as an organization.

This immediate access allows you or your representatives to take immediate action against negative issues being published about you on the web.

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“Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) has become a major success and shown a lot of entrepreneurs and senior executives what eBusiness is about and which potential it holds. And I’m really happy about having made such a major contribution.

Last week we looked at how you can reduce costs for customer service. But what if something goes wrong with customer service and your customer shouts out negative news about your company on the web, thus endagering your reputation?

That’s what next weeks topic “Corporate Online Reputation Management” is going to be about.

Today we’re going to look at “What makes Corporate Blogging important”. The primary differentiator is that a “normal” website will have a static number of pages with content as opposed to a blog which has an ever increasing number. Where are the benefits?

See for yourself:

First of all let’s go ahead and describe the words included in this phrase. The first one, corporate, is pretty obvious. The second word will have definitely crossed your path in the past but you have not been able to associate it to anything for you meaningful.

The word blog derives from weblog, which is a web-based and very user-friendly portal where people can share their experiences, and their endeavors on the internet. Sort of like the captains log from Star Trek only it’s very easy and user friendly to publish on.

So it’s a place where you keep things you have discovered during your journeys through the web and share these interesting things with others.

The most significant thing about these web-based systems from a corporate point of view is that they are very search engine friendly, which means that the pages are very easy to index by our friends Google and co.

Another important thing to mention is that every blog post (synonym for log entry) you make will be rated by Google as a single page added to your corporate website.

So each and every time you publish something to our blog, it will be indexed by Google, people will (hopefully) search for this specific thing on the web, and visit your website as potential new leads or customers for your business, just because it popped up as the first search result.

I explicitly want to mention here that you only want to blog (write articles) about relevant issues regarding and in context to your business because otherwise you not only disappoint yourself but also your visitors.

The more relevant your content is, the higher the chances that your visitors will republish your post throughout the web on other blogs and websites which will increase your visibility both for search engines and for the human eye.

Now let’s sum up what we have learned: your blog will act like putting out the hook when you’re fishing because it will attract a lot of new relevant visitors (traffic) by drawing them to your online presence through relevant articles you have published therein.

Since you have an ever-increasing number of articles or posts, you will steadily increase your visibility on the web through relevant search terms or phrases.

For some successful blogs it is fair to say, that they have created a community around their corporate presentation on the web, significantly increasing the awareness of their brand.

So the people come to your site and read an explanation for a product or how it is associated to your business. In this article you raise their interest and they will buy your products or at least write you an email demanding to know more about your services.

The question you’re probably going to ask me is: what’s the price tag on this neat little thing that can get you rich? Well, it’s not as expensive as you’d have expected.

The creation of a blog should go along with a total re-haul of your website and will run something between $6000 and open-end, depending on how you want it done and how fancy it should look, feel and what you want to do with it.

My experience has been though, that you can easily calculate a return of investment of several 100% upon the thing going live and it having started the buzz on the web and your customers.

One more thing that might catch your attention: blogs and other systems bring along a nifty feature which is called Real Simple Syndication, or RSS. You may not be familiar with the term yourself, but many of your customers are going to be.

You can see whether a site is RSS capable through the orange symbol, which looks similar to that of a Wi-Fi hotspot or something along the line.

This RSS feed, as it’s called, allows your users to subscribe to your blog/news feed and will keep them updated on posts you have published which may either be relevant to their interests or news happening around your organization.

At the first view this feature may seem pretty unspectacular, but if you consider that a user who has subscribed to this feed (they can also do so via email) will automatically be notified of news, this offers a good point of contact for you to reach out and talk to them, offer them special deals, coupons – you get the picture.

Other than the outdated email newsletter, subscribing to an RSS feed leaves total control of the subscription in the hands of the user which will increase your subscription not only in the number of communication channels you offer them, but also because the trust in email newsletters has vanished for it was misused for such a long time.

Ok, this one was pretty technical. But as I have pointed out repeatedly: don’t try this at home because you could be setting yourself up for failure if you don’t know what you’re doing.

In next weeks chapter we will be looking at “Corporate Online Reputation Management” from “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ).

My editor called that chapter a real eye opener. So stay tuned and encourage your friends to join as this information is really new to most.

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I want to grant you an insight into the possibilities which eBusiness holds in store and how you can utilize them.

Last week we looked at my favorite chapter “learning marketing from the porn industry” which really generated a lot of buzz to my inbox.

This week we’re going to have a look at how you can reduce your customer service costs significantly by implementing instruments for customer self help.

As the internet evolves so do the habits associated to it. One of these habits is that people will search on the web before they will call customer support most of the times because the questions they will have occur outside of regular business hours.

The obvious effect this will have on your business strategy is that it reduces your costs for both pre-sales and post-sales customer support if you manage to direct them to your online solution.

The fact no business development consultant or CEO will ever realize is that it will seriously enhance your websites visibility on the internet also because of the amount of input that is being generated around your products and services on your own website.

The quantity of this user-generated content will supersede anything you and your organization can produce in that amount of time.

Further it will be helpful to your customers because they will find workarounds, which you can integrate or include in your future releases of manuals, guides, etc.

Your customers may also find glitches and other minor faults in your products, which you can then avoid in further production.

Your next question will probably be how to create a FAQ, wiki, blog, etc.?

A section for frequently asked questions (FAQ) is the easiest thing and can consist of a simple page on your corporate web presentation.

When setting it up go ahead and scroll through your past emails, tickets submitted by phone, and ask your team to give you a list of questions which have been presented to them most frequently.

Sort them by the times they have been asked and then write a comprehensive and idiot-proof answer for this specific FAQ page.

Now that that is done, let’s go and save money with email queries you get.

As an email comes in, there are some words included in the mail, which can be highlighted to indicate what problem your customer has.

There are several software solutions out there which take care of this for you – some of them are even free.

So if a person submits a question as a support case, you have certain words highlighted and these will indicate that they have a problem with an issue which you have on the FAQ section of your website.

Now all you have to do is direct them there with an auto-responder email.

And this is where it saves you money because you reduce the duration for answering this email from a few minutes down to a few seconds, which will enable your staff to take care of a higher amount of trouble tickets in the same amount of time.

You can thus reduce personnel and save money.

Next let’s deal the pesky callers who have problems.

A short while back it would have been considered rude to ask a person to search the web for a problem.

But the times have changed and you can even “sell” searching your website as something better then calling you up.

If you have a product which people may have problems with, have a thorough documentation that goes along with it available on the web.

You will also have want to have similar publications at hand for reoccurring problems your customer care staff is confronted with regularly.

Your call center staff can then direct the incoming caller to this specific page on your website.

The call time will have reduced because they don’t have to explain the process or procedure a thousandth time, and the customer is happy because they have the solution ready on their screen.

As you can see, you only have to be a bit creative in projecting portals like this one onto the web platform.

But it is definitely possible to significantly reduce the costs for customer care without risking reputation or losing only one customer.

If you are interested in the details on how to evaluate and execute these plans my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) is available for purchase.

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The chapter “Customer Information Management” is the last one in the book and so we will close this reoccurring series with this one as well:

Information management has always been crucial to business strategy and learning to determine its value always underestimated.

One of these things constantly neglected is customer relationship management (CRM) and the information included therein.

The information has always been around and has been taken more of less seriously by the company owners even though it is very important to the success of a business.

This is immediate information and its value lies within the possibility of increasing sales simply by utilizing the information we hold about our customers.

The first and foremost important information are their contact details with which we can establish points of contact. These contact details would be – in order of costs involved in contacting – postal address, phone, and email.

Email, as pointed out above, will be the cheapest and thus most effective form of contact. Yet mailings are always a hard way to go because your customers have to opt-in or give their permission to be mailed.

The emails you send them should not consist of direct sales pitches, but rather of sales pitches hidden inside seemingly valuable information you give them for free.

You have to gain their trust on the signup page for the newsletter, and you have to explicitly point out that you will not spam, harass, or otherwise misuse their email address. Plus of course, you have to mention what differentiates YOUR newsletter from all the other ones, of which most are “evil”.

This will increase your chances that they will send this email they got from you to a friend who will then again sign up for your newsletter because it’s information their being fed with instead of sales pitches (of which they probably get hundreds a week).

Although I very well know the power of conventional mailings and phone acquisitions, I will not go into further detail because these topics are not really web related and go too far off topic.

Down the line, and if your business is ever up for sale in case of a merger or acquisition, the amount of information you hold about your customers and competitors will significantly improve the position you will be negotiating from.

The reason for this is that buyer of your company will be able to get business started immediately instead of having to search for new prospects, buy new leads lists, etc.

Another important thing to mention is that measures like these will significantly increase customer loyalty to your brand.

This will make sales way easier to begin with because if your sales staff can prepare themselves for a sales talk by reading the customer’s purchase history, maybe even preferences, chances of closing the sale will skyrocket simply because the customer has a better feeling.

The reason I asked the question when your customer’s daughter is turning 18 in the tag-line is because of an assignment I had a while back.

A car dealership for luxury automobiles wanted to increase sales.

It’s not like they were struggling but the CRM (customer relationship management system) they had in place was not really able to handle all the information they needed to increase sales.

Amongst others, I had them add fields to their customer database, which would capture the names and birthdays of their customer’s kids because of an experience I had while on the contract.

The daughter of a loyal customer came waltzing in one day as we were in a meeting. She was the typical spoiled brat yet her father was a wealthy personality, as most of their customers were.

As she started to look around the most prized models this dealership had to offer, it struck me…

“Since most of their customers were of that social class, and it is fairly easy to get your hands on the information of their kids names and birthdays during a sales talk, why not use this opportunity, save this information in the CRM and do a follow up with a presents basket and the offer for a free test drive around the time the kid turns 18 and get their drivers license?”

And this is only one of the things I worked out for them with the consequence that they not only drastically increased sales but also went way up in terms of customer satisfaction, which made them the number one dealership in that country.

So you see that the customer relationship management is a very important aspect of generating (e-) business and can be integrated into simple and easy to use web platforms.

Of course, everyone would be doing it if it were that simple. And like almost everywhere, we have a bottleneck. In this case we have the problem of convincing the sales staff to feed the CRM with the information you need to get this whole system off the ground because there is no immediate increase of profit for them.

I hope that you’ve not only learned a lot and gotten the chance to obtain a copy of my book but also had some fun reading through the lines I put together.

I don’t want to conclude this post without mentioning again that you please don’t hastily try to put together a web campaign by yourself. The reason is obvious as it is simple: there are professionals like myself you have a profound amount of knowledge about the topics we have touched in the last couple of weeks and who can help you to achieve leadership or polepositions on the web.

It would take years for someone to acquire this knowledge and a few more years to figure out which instruments work together how.

This brings be to the closing words for this post: if you intend to start an eBusiness campaign keep in mind that the instruments we have learned about are only successful if they are fitted together properly. No one instrument is going to significantly boost your business.

In that context – and if you haven’t done so – please buy my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) and read it closely to boost your business.

Lars

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This implies that they really know their stuff when it comes to branding, search engine optimization (another topic appearing in a few weeks), search engine marketing, etc.

So here we go:

It’s sad but it’s true: if there is one industry on the planet that is fighting for market-share more than any other, it’s the porn industry.

Naturally they are the ones you want to look at when it comes to doing good search engine campaigns, link building, link popularity etc.

Yet the issue we will be focusing on is another impressive and innovative thing they have done to get the attention of the customers they want to sell their non-free products to.

If you do a bit of research on a specific sexual practice, kink, fetish, or whatever you will find out that a lot of the highest-ranking search results are forums or other internet communities containing user contributed content.

User contributed content attracts a lot of search engine traffic because 10000+ users registered on a website with a discussion forum, personals, pictures, etc. can generate a lot more content a day than you will ever be able to. And the best part is that this content is highly diversified and free.

The reason these pages rank so high is because they appear to be informative communities, which have nothing to do with any company trying to distribute products over the web. For non-observant people this is true.

But if you pay attention to the advertisements placed on this website, you will soon find out that most of the links, banners, and what not link to one specific provider of sexually explicit content over and over again.

Ok, let’s get away from the nasty section and move to the good side of life again and what you can learn from this practice.

No, please do not go ahead, cash out a life insurance and create a porn portal. You’re lacking the experience, trust me.

Furthermore, let’s not forget the fact that advertising postage stamps on a website for shoe fetish will hardly have the effect you’re going to be expecting.

So let’s stick with the example that you are a retailer for specific, rare, regionally limited postal stamps. We now go back to draining that life insurance of yours and creating a portal for philatelists where they can discuss insights, share information, maybe even find interesting people over the web in other parts of the world.

Since you’re a philatelist and not only a philanthropist, we will have to create an ROI somewhere along the line to make this whole thing worthwhile.

This we achieve by using any available free space to place links, banners, and other advertisements to your online presentation which will not only lead 100% relevant traffic to your shop.

Also, your relevance in Google’s view will significantly go up because the portal we have created is linked throughout the web on several other portals, websites, and blogs through articles your community users have generated for you (free) and other users have posted elsewhere (free). See the win-win-win-situation here?

Since you have links there to the online shop where you sell your stamps, you will gain visibility too and may end up higher in search results.

The fact that you advertise on this platform will in the near future lead to the fact that other people from related businesses will try to buy advertising space on this website which will again increase the demand of this platform and increase the return of investment of this venture even more.

Just a side note here, but an important one: since you officially have nothing to do with this portal you could not care less what the people do on this portal.

Interested? Keep in mind that in my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) I point out that it’s inevitable that you have to combine all efforts pointed out therein to really make your appearence on the web count.

If you have questions please feel free to discuss them here or ask them directly be contacting me.

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