Steve Jobs dies at age 56 – Will Apple die as well?

I woke up this morning hearing the news that Steve Jobs, who in August had resigned as Apple’s CEO, had passed tonight of cancer.

It was clear then, that Apple would be lacking a vibrant personality, which became clear on the rather dull presentation of the iPhone 4S on Tuesday.

Seeing Tim Cook try his best to fill the room with similar emotion while announcing both the iPhone 4S and the iOS 5, was kind of depressing and it was obvious that it was not Steve Jobs.

History has revealed how much Apple relied on Steve Jobs when he was kicked out of Apple by Scully in 1985 and the company went into a struggle for innovation.

The question may be asked, whether or not History will repeat itself?

I sure hope that the lifeless and comparingly uncharismatic presentation of the iPhone 4S and iOS5 on Tuesday was not an indicator of what we will see happening to Apple.

Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs – and I hope you chose your successors wisely, so that your legacy may be carried forth in dignity.

What are the best tactics for effecting customer-centric change?

Customer centric approaches are what I’d refer to as web 3.0. You may want to have a look at the video on the left for that.

In context to web related issues and sales it would resemble a community based approach towards customer self help, multi-media product descriptions and presentations, and proactive service instruments on modern websites.

How much navigation on PPC or organic landing pages used for lead conversion?

I am currently exploring the back to the roots thang…

Do you remember when we had frames in websites and the menu was CONSTANTLY visible?

This is what my people have solved through divs and CSS somehow.

Reason is that pages are becoming longer and longer because of the amount of content that has to be conveyed.

From a usability aspect (people don’t like to scroll 10 pages up to get to the menu) I had the idea of taking the route pointed out above and gave that to my designers who did a pretty nifty job with it, as I think.

I wrote about the topic in a white paper called “Web Trends 2010″ – You can download it in the section called “Publications”.

Be Local or Global in Web 2.0?

When you have the chance, be local with the local marketing instruments and be global with the internet.

This way it’ll allow you to catch both markets and it will free you of domestic market instabilities your domestic market may encounter in the future.

If your domestic economy goes bust, chances are the others will continue to thrive – at least for a while.

You can use this to your advantage because you’ll still earn money off of the other countries and when your own economy is back up and running you can reset your focus there.

Triple Email-Marketing Opening-Rate from 22% to 74%: A Case Study

E-Mail marketing still represents a major segment of the entire marketing strategy of any professional organization.

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.

Weekend Reading: Free White Paper for Web 3.0 and Customer Centric Internet Platforms

I published this white paper to outline the definition of Web 3.0 which resembles a customer centric approach on internet platforms.

Here is an excerpt from the Table of Contents:

Step 1: Attracting (the right) people to your website ………………………………………………………….. 6
1.1 Speaking to over 2 billion prospects …………………………………………………………………… 6
1.2 Social Media Marketing……………………………………………………………………………………….. 6
1.2.1 Facebook …………………………………………………………………………………………………… 6
1.2.2 LinkedIn ……………………………………………………………………………………………………. 7
1.2.3 Twitter ……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 8
1.3 Corporate Online Reputation Management ……………………………………………………………….. 9
1.4 Search Engine Optimization …………………………………………………………………………………10
1.4.1 The technical aspect …………………………………………………………………………………….10
1.4.2 The Keywords and Content …………………………………………………………………………….10
1.4.3 Your Competition …………………………………………………………………………………………11
1.4.4 Mobile Search Placement ……………………………………………………………………………….11
1.5 Email Marketing ……………………………………………………………………………………………….11
1.6. Mobile Marketing ……………………………………………………………………………………………..12
1.7 Search Engine Marketing & Paid Inclusion………………………………………………………………..12
1.8 Offline Marketing and the internet …………………………………………………………………………13
1.8.1 Offline Advertising ……………………………………………………………………………………….13
1.8.2 Event Marketing ………………………………………………………………………………………….13
Step 2: Your Website…………………………………………………………………………………………………15
2.1 Advanced Web & User Interface Design …………………………………………………………………..15
2.1.1 Accessibility ……………………………………………………………………………………………….15
2.1.2 Mobile Devices ……………………………………………………………………………………………16
2.1.3 Navigation and Menus …………………………………………………………………………………..17
2.1.4 Search Ability on your site ……………………………………………………………………………..17
2.2 User Experience ……………………………………………………………………………………………….18
2.3 Web Analytics ………………………………………………………………………………………………….18
2.4 Proactive Website Visitor Engagement…………………………………………………………………….19
2.5 Corporate Blogging ……………………………………………………………………………………………19
2.6 The Community Aspect of Your Website ………………………………………………………………….19
Step 3: Your Customer Relationship and Knowledge Management ………………………………………….20
Step 4: The Community Metric in your Strategy ………………………………………………………………..21
Free Market Research ……………………………………………………………………………………………..21
Improving Your Products & Services (crowdsourcing) ………………………………………………………22

Have fun reading over the weekend and make sure to call me on Monday to call so that we can make YOU a digital economy leader

DOWNLOAD HERE

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.

BOOK MONDAY: Search Engine Optimization

Here we go for another Book Monday in which I reveal excerpts from my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) which was recently published.

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