The new customer: impatient and demanding

I arrived just on time to see the first speaker: Gerry McGovern. In his first presentation “A new way of measuring success- completing customer top tasks”, Gerry was stressing the importance of making it easy for your visitors to do what they came for on your website, fast. In his witty and humorous presentation style he made it clear how marketers are often stupidly measuring volume, seniors still talk ‘hits’, don’t they?, instead of looking at conversions and completion of the so called top tasks. “The best sites are ugly, but they work” he stated, with examples such as Amazon or YouTube. On whatever page you land, you’ll quickly find what you’re looking for. If you are not offering quickly what the visitor came for, you lose. People see trough marketing blabla very quickly these days. Don’t waste their time with cheesy greetings or updates on how great your company is doing. He also coined the term ‘installation guide marketing”, because online, people skip the marketing and go straight to the practical stuff that shows them how something works or that offers at least practical objective information.

Second on was Brian Eisenberg, an online marketing authority, asking us whether we were ready for the new customer. Speed of business has increased considerably and the today’s customers are very demanding when it comes to dealing with their time. A good example was how a tweet of him to a local Hilton hotel (and the national account in cc) was only answered 14 hours later, “completely useless!”. He also invited the public to test their online audience and themselves with  question like “Can you tell in 140 characters why I should do business with you? and “Which 3 words do associate with X brand ? “. If you can’t answer the first one in 5 seconds, the customer in gone; if not less than 100 people of your audience bothers to answer the second question, why should you ?

Modern businesses are agile and adapt to this new speed of doing business. They are prepared to jump on the wagon of an (unexpected) event or trend with blogposts, video, infographs, etc. hopefully  from an original angle. They can respond fast, have a consistent message and  optimise touchpoints with customers, without thinking in terms of channels. In the end for a brand has only one face for the customer. 5 culture traits characterise companies that are able to create an environment where there’s room for this adaptation proces and hence to stand out: Customer intimate (ex. Amazon), remarkable (ex. Virgin), authentic (ex. Zappos), nimble (ex. Best Buy), test & tweak (ex. Google). Organisations who focus on these traits create a healthy learning culture.

SEO and SMO : it’s all about optimising and testing

Dave Chaffey talked about getting more out of your online channels. One of his points was  to do more “Remarketing“. E-mails triggered by behaviour or events, in particular to previously non-converters, often prove very lucrative thanks to higher than average conversion rates. This can go from a typical reminder e-mail to create sense of urgency, to an unexpected birthday mail with discount or a short personalized message to follow up a download or market event. Though he was not the only one, he stressed the important growth of mobile and the need to be even more relevant for people visiting from a mobile device.

Joost De Valck, which we all know from his SEO advice and dito plugin for Wordpres, grabbed the audience after lunch and went into a detailed overview of techniques and tips to get make out of your rankings. Indeed, once your page has reached an acceptable place in Google, it’s the small things that make the difference between a 3rd or 2nd place and a 5% or 20% click through rate. An image of the author in SERPS for instance, which you can get too, star ratings of reviews or multiple meta descriptions to optimize for several keywords. Yoast also talked about branding in search. By working with breadcrumbs on your site for example, your domain (brand) will  stand out more; as Google shows these, instead of your url. Testing, 2 weeks at the time, with titles and descriptions, is the only way to find out what works for you.

An afternoon of optimising landing pages

In his second presentation of the day Brian Eisenberg explained us how to optimize landing pages. An obvious need, as he stated that on average 92$ is spend on getting people to websites but only $1 to convert them, resulting in a substantial loss. An obvious example are Adwords linking to homepages. In the conversion journey ‘Scent‘ is very important. You have to take the visitor by his hand and guide him to where you want him to be. This means delivering the promise that’s in the clicking the link and keeping the message, as well as the look & feel, consistent throughout the process.In his book he says the following:

“If you interrupt your scent trail, you leave your customer stranded. The path she was following becomes a dead end. Where’s she supposed to go? Do you really want to trust that she’s motivated enough to continue on her own? When it comes to scent trails, dropping the ball is one of the leading causes of abandonment!” (more about Scent on monetate.com)

Also noted that  that stock photography kills conversion rates.

The toolbox:

btbuckets.com ; websitetestingtools.com ; Graybit ; Wirify ;

Gerry McGovern continued on his elan of the morning and went on about being useful for searchers. That means optimizing for the searcher not the search engine. The right use of words both in advertising copy, keywords and language on landing page is crucial. Clear and detailed calls to action on buttons for instance seem to be working better than the vague ones. So not ‘learn more’ but “learn more about our 15 day free trial”. He also stressed to offer practical information, and not asking for more attention when people have already arrived where they need to be.

Defintely noted down that organising your website navigation based on your segmentation of customers is very challenging and thus often a bad idea.

Selling with Social media

According to Jeff Molendar selling through social media comes down to 3 things:

1. getting back to basics and use social media to solve customers problems.
2. Plan and design to change behaviour through social media.
3. Translate the needs you detected through ‘listening’ into tangible products and solutions.

More about Fusion Marketing Experience

–> see the on the live blog

–> search for #fusionmex on Twitter

via notes2self

Interesting fact: women aged 35 to 54 are the most active in mobile socialization.

Google Places

An obvious one to start with and probably also the first location based service for you to look at: Google Places. Google allows you to add your business to their extensive ‘Places’ database so that you’ll appear in both general and specific ‘Places’ search results with your business venue.  Places also appear as auto search suggestions in mobiles searches or might appear on Google maps. Place pages give you the option to add quite some information about your business, such as foto’s, video’s and opening hours, in addition to your website link, a description and up to 5 categories. Make good use of these options as they will play a role in your Places rankings and make it more likely for you to appear in general searches. For bars, hotels and restaurants 3rd party reviews from authority sites (e.g. Yelp or Tripadvisor) are also shown on the Places page and taken into account to give it a ranking in search results. Though your Place will probably generate traffic to your website, try to think of it as a separate entity. People searching from their mobile might not want to visit your site, but only need enough information to decide wether navigating to it or not.

Finally, Google now started to mix information from the web to describe in a couple terms what’s being sad about a particular place. This gives searches a clue what your business is about, based on what others say about it. This leads to believe that Google Places will more and more come to function as a recommendation engine fueled by user generated reviews and ratings with an important role to play in local search.

Foursquare

One of the first and original ‘check in’ location based services, fuelled by a gaming mechanism with points, mayorships and badges. The reach of this location based service is growing worldwide (10 million users) but still limited in Belgium. It offers opportunities nonetheless, in particular if you target the young and trendy. Check-ins are shared with friends on the network but often on other platforms like Twitter or Facebook as well. Other services started integrating the Foursquare API too, to include venue names in photo apps for example. Foursquare is more than some eyeballs on your venue name though. As a business owner you can claim your venue(s) and get acces to some extra features and analytics. New customers can be offered a ‘newbie’ welcome reduction to lure them in;  loyal customers  a giftvoucher after several check-ins to keep them coming back.  Such promotions are visible to nearby users as ‘specials’. Moreover, the analytics offer you a unique opportunity to  identify your best customers and stimulate their ambassadorship of your venue.

Conclusion: don’t wait for your customers to start using Foursquare, but convince them to do so yourself, with premium offers and privileged experiences.  (In the verification proces you can ask for window stickers)

 Gowalla

Gowalla was the first location based check-in service, but is currently lagging behind in popularity compared to Foursquare, despite a nicer UI design. It’s popularity varies per region though and it could be popular amongst your target group, so don’t neglect it. Claiming your business on Gowalla allows you to customize check-in messages or purchase a custom Passport stamp for your business. Users from their part, can award your venue with a particular ‘highlight’, such as ‘Best Cup of Coffee’ or ‘Best night out’. ‘Trips’ group several venues with a common theme ( e.g Stockholm Green Tour or London Pub crawl), being included in one could generate some traffic to your venue.

Tip: Search for nearby popular places (stations, squares)  or venues your target group would frequent (bars, stores) on Gowalla and Foursquare. Compare their number of check-ins to get an idea of their popularity amongst your target group and decide on which to focus. If not both anyway, as users can also  connect their foursquare account to their Gowalla account.

Google Latitude

Google Latitude is Google’s answer to previously mentioned check-in services. People can  ‘check in‘  into the Google Places mentioned above and leave a comment, a rating or a simple smiley. With a widget, it’s possible to show one’s location on a blog or website. Google’s alternative is generally less fun because it lacks the gaming element, but with the recent integration into Google+, it might gain popularity.  Also, the user generated ratings of Latitude impact the ranking of your Place in search results and the comments will show up on your Place page. In the US business are already able to create offers, enabling them to reward visitors for checking in. This feature is expected to be available in Europe in the months to come.

Facebook Places & Deals

Facebook has been closing in on Foursquare and Gowalla with the launch of Facebook Places and more recently Facebook Deals. The combination of both brings you to a similar setting as Foursquare, but with a much larger user base behind it. With Facebook Places you can claim your business just like in Foursquare. The questions feature allows you to interact with people connected to your Place/Page, good to collect feedback. In addition, Facebook Deals offers 4 possibilities to reward check-ins: Individual deals ,Friend deals, Loyalty deals and Charity deals. In Europe, this feature is currently only active in selected  countries. With 500 million, users, Facebook is defintely a player to watch in the location based domain and candidate to overtake Foursquare and Gowalla as it can speak to the masses. (Those masses are now massively buying smartphones as well).

Local business directories

Local business directories usually group all businesses from a certain region, subdivided in categories. As search engines understand that these directories are focused on a particular region or city , they will also associate your business to that region when listed in it. In Belgium for example, such directories are Handelsgids or Gouden gids (yellow pages) but often your sector organisation or city has a directory for itself where companies can add their coordinates and preferably a link. Search for ‘[yourcity] / [yoursector] directory’ to find some possibilities for your business.

Recommendation engines and local deals

 Many of the tools mentioned above partner with trusted and popular recommendation engines to offer a richer profile of a certain venue. Google Places includes reviews from Tripadvisor, Yelp or CityPlug (particularly relevant for Belgium) and Foursquare partners with several daily Deal sites to offer more ‘Specials’ to its users. Being present, and more important being well reviewed, on these recommendation sites is crucial,  though depends entirely on your own service. Having few control might be scary for a business owner, but remember most people are just being honest about their experience and that is yours to shape. Many engines also offer the owner a possibility of replying on  reviews. Make  sure to use that feature when possible, as it shows responsiveness and involvement from your side (and could rectify certain situations). Participating in locally focused deal sites and group buying initiatives could also improve your local visibilty.

Adwords with local extensions

In Adwords you can easily target advertisements to searchers from a particular country, region or city. But if you are specifically targetting mobile searchers with Adwords campaigns, it’s good to add what Google calls a ‘local extension’. It’s nothing more than your business address (or multiple venue addresses) and you can dynamically link it to your claimed Places. It’s usefull however, because the addres shows to local searchers who are in the proximity of your venue.

Microformats & the semantic web

To let search engines interpret certain data on websites, microformats were introduced in 2005. Microformats structure data (in the code) in such a way that the search engine knows what kind of data he’s reading. Microformats exist for contact information, recipes and events amongst others. Supposedly, if the search engine can interpret the contact information on your site, it also knows where to situate your business.  However, more recent programming languages such as HTML5 have better en less intensive methods to structure data. Go to microformats.org to generate your contact information in a microformat and insert it in your website.

Location based marketing for your business? Get in contact

Big or small? Choose a scalable solution.

Your website is a living creature, it will grow,  and with a bit of luck reproduce, as your business grows and expands to different markets. To be prepared for this, ask yourself how well the CMS of your choice is handling such expansion. Can it support different domains (e.g. .com, .eu, .co.uk) and multilingual sites ? Would such expansion be costly or require a premium licence fee? On a shorter term it’s important to know how easily you can manipulate the system yourself. Adding new pages, news items or  jobs is pretty standard but if you take your marketing seriously you also might want to change images, featured content and personalized offers on your homepage. Think about how user friendly this process should be and who in your company will be taking care of it.

To Open Source or not?

Open source solutions are becoming more popular, and then we are not talking hobbyists. Companies, big and small, have embraced open source as a viable solution for web projects. WordPress and Drupal are definitely at the forefront of these thriving developer communities. Getting rid of expensive license fees seems attractive, nevertheless hidden development costs and dependence on developers has to be considered. The maturity of the companies’ IT department can play a role here. With in-house php / drupal developers it’s reasonable to manage everything yourself and further develop to your needs where the community would fail. For smaller companies this might mean depending on a 3rd party and that might not be worth the cost of a CMS with support and updates included. Of course the scale of the project plays a big role as well. WordPress is easy to use but has it’s limitations if you are looking to set up an e-commerce or multilingual site in the long run. It’s perfect for campaign and portfolio sites though and of course blogs. Drupal on the other hand is more robust and offers more possibilities to integrate product and customer databases, suited for e-commerce sites and more complex web projects. Usability might be more of an issue. Another exciting open source CMS is Umbraco, ( .Net based, comes with premium support if wanted).

Personalisation and segmentation on the Splinternet

On the web your geograpical reach is virtually unlimited. As a consequence you must be prepared to cater a lot of  different needs and expectations. Knowing your target audience is essential and means a whole lot more than translating your website in the audience’s mother tongue. Cultural differences mean that people value other aspects of your business and evaluate visual stimuli differently. Customizing landing pages according to culture is therefore a good idea. Segmentation options might be the strong point of licensed products. Current solutions ( such as Fatwire, Hybris or Ektron) commonly  offer possibilities to segment and customize content based on country, language, (entry) keyword, landing page, navigation path and allow integration with a variety of CRM and ERP packages. Spindoctor also developped a segmentation plugin for Umbraco.

Using data to create new services

Your website is a marketing, sales or service instrument, in one way or another, through sales or branding it must generate income. Your CMS, in combination with customer and product data, offers interesting opportunities to develop new services for your customers, solely based on data. Thinking creatively of possible data combinations could serve your customers better, without too much effort or investment.  Buyer profiles, e-mail lists, product information, web content, reviews etc. allow a tailored approach to various segments.  Throw stock information, location based services or mobile apps in the mix and you’ll realise the possiblities are endless. Make sure your system allows for integration with these various databases.

Creating use cases to guide your decision

As a company, you will sooner or later sit around the table with a CMS reseller or implementation partner. Now certainties exist to prepare for, and use cases happen to be a very effective preparation. In the end, it’s how you want to USE the system that matters the most. Unfortunately that’s often overshadowed by the bickering between the IT and Finance department. Use cases sketch scenario’s  end users will encounter whilst using the system. They point out which tasks have to be carried out, by whom and for what aim. (Similar profiling techniques are used to decide on the information architecture of the site from the visitors point). Additionally, it’s wise to specify which data and reports you want to get out of the system for marketing and sales purposes. Those data are valuable output and can be put to use in other systems to enrich customer data or analysed to spur innovation and optimization of the web presence.

Most of this post is based on insights acquired at the Content Management Forum 2011, in Brussels.

Resources and Solutions  :

- Fatwire (CMS)

- Ektron (CMS)

- Hybris (CMS)

- Spindoctor (segmentation plugin for Umbraco )

- Lyliproject.org

- Amazon Webservices

- WordPress (open source CMS )

- Drupal (open source CMS)

-Emagic (.Net CMS)

- Umbraco (Open source ASP.NET CMS )

- Magento (E-commerce)

It looks like a daunting task to try and resume 2 days of social media knowledge at the Enterprise Social 2.0 conference in Brussels (#es20), but I’ve done it before,  and the appreciation I got from the organisers is just irresistible. I therefore already abandon my intention to only blog in Dutch here, just for everybody to enjoy the laurels this conference deserves.

Several presentations from a variety of speakers, mostly practitioners and no guru’s, contained similar insights. It’s therefore useful to work around the main problems companies struggle with to truly implement social media in their daily marketing, customer service, PR and HR activities.

Convincing the board

Getting buy in from the upper echelons of the company is crucial  to succeed with social media, yet it seems one of the biggest hurdles to overcome for most companies and their social media evangelists. Not only you have to convince your board to get budget, you also have to inform your CEO that it would be great if he’d featured in your next YouTube video. At ABInbev they did just that using the youth argument. The youth’s higher propensity to drink and  loyalty to historical brand choices, combined with a great presence on social networks was convincing enough to get the ball rolling. It was only the beginning though, of a long (and according to Jef sometimes lonesome) road to truly ‘become digital’, as opposed to just ‘doing digital’. A few online product launches later they seem to do pretty well  as a digital company and apparently there will be much more to come by 2014, when the World Cup will be organised in Brazil…

 Educating internally and social media policies

Once a company starts engaging online it needs guidelines and education for it’s employees. At 3M for example (and many other companies actually), Yammer, an internal company twitter, is used to get employees familiar with what Twitter is all about and how it works. The engineers feeling comfortable with it can later move on to ‘the real thing’ and engage in online conversations with fellow experts and prospects. At ABInbev they have a digital lab to experiment and evangalise ‘digital’ throughout the company. Others attract outside help or rely on internal champions to organise social media trainings. However, leading by example and breaking through company barriers seem indispensable ingredients to make the social recipe work.

 Creating a consistent online presence internationally

Creating a consistent presence on social networks proves particularly difficult for large international organisations. Accounts are so easily created they are hard to control and local departments can interpret their use differently. Multinationals like Accor hotels or networked organisations like Médecins Sans Frontières had to put significant effort in rectifying situations that got out of hand. BT even had to chase down an ex-employee that owned the companies LinkedIn account.  Rather put your time in a nicely written social media guide, right?

Relinquishing brand control and losing brand ownership

Going social with your brand inevitably means handing over some of its control to your customers…and critics. A bitter pill to swallow for many brand managers. The way people talk about and interact with your brand will shape its perception both online and offline. The key here is to come up with good stories which your target group will recognize itself in. By giving the broader story (and values) of your brand, the fan base has something to build on, although they will still interpret it personally and fit it into their larger story. You give the clay, they will model it.

Engaging fans, empowering community members

Communities are hot, both in B2C and B2B. Wether it’s to investigate deeper customer needs, nurture leads, stimulate innovation or co-create, a well-managed community seems to do the trick. For this you do need somebody who knows how to handle a community, as much as the co-operation of your own (engineering) staff. Community members must be treated as co-creators, not respondents or ‘hot’ sales leads. If members don’t feel they get any value in exchange for their efforts in the community, they will abandon anyway. @Grahamhill firmly pleaded to start with mapping out the customer journey to understand this value exchange in the first place.

(customer journey map by Desonance )

My brand is being destroyed online, what now?

A crisis is the biggest fear but also the biggest opportunity to capitulate on the power of social media. If you’re not prepared when the shit hits the fan, you are one little (angry) bird for a bunch of hungry cats. However, if you’re prepared (and this is where your CEO kicks in on YouTube) it might be a good damage controller. The conditions are that you’d be transparent, honest, caring, credible…and fast. A lie is easily spotted these days and people don’t have patience.

The Toyota recall crisis was a very nice case in this perspective, as well as the ashcloud case by KLM. While thousands of travellers where stranded, KLM asked employees to volunteer for 4h shifts in a team that consisted of 4 Facebookers, 4 Tweeps and 4 rebookers to handle the requests of the passengers. It strengthened the company’s believe in social media and eventually led to their pretty amazing campaign KLM Surprise.

LEGO also had a good answer ready for a Facebook group with the sole aim to moan about how painful it is to step on a LEGO brick with bare feet. A funny video shows  the Head of Corporate Communications apologising for the harm but also coming up with a funny solution to the problem. This video could turn the negative brand sentiment into even more positive buzz online.

Measuring the ROI of social media

The holy grail is still to be able to measure the impact of all this conversations on the brand and sales. BMW was the only company that closed the circle by offering a design sketch to their ‘hot leads’ in the M-Power community, in return for an answer on the question ‘did you buy the car in the end ?’.That’s only possible on a small scale though and in B2B environments with few leads. Most companies understand it’s not enough to count likes and followers, and try to fit every possible measurment into broader KPI’s such as brand sentiment and engagement. Other common measurements are earned meadia value and earned audience reach to asses the succes of digital campaigns.

Know more?

Others also wrote about Enterprise Social 2.0:
Dutchcowboys
The conversation manager

or checkout the hashtag #es20 on Twitter.