Business in dialogue

Last week I wrote a post where I briefly touched upon the point of the value and credibility of recommendations. Today I would like to add a story to this topic that I think is relevant for the discussion. Just now I read about a local restaurant in the Netherlands that calls out local students to fraud on comparison websites in order to fight the “terror of anonymous reviews”. They give away free bottles of Rosé wine to students who give two (non-anonymous) positive reviews on comparison websites.

Their rationale is that they comparison websites draw people that like to complaint. They say that they want people to tell them when they are unhappy about something so they can do something about it, but just complaining for the heck of it is in nobody’s interest. They felt that happy customers don’t have enough incentive to give reviews and they also want to show how easy it is to manipulate these kinds of websites.

Now, you can wonder whether these paid reviews will really affect your score or the attitude that people have towards your restaurant. When there is a commercial benefit for people to review or recommend, it usually loses its credibility. A review is not trustworthy when a company is telling the reviewer what to tell. Actions such as these can really hit a dent in the trust that people have in online reviews. The honest reviews of restaurant Manna have now turned completely worthless because if this, and their online score will be unreliable for a long time. And how does it affect the scores of other restaurants on the same site?

This was a public stunt. Everybody could read about it on their own website and they did it to show that “comparing sites are easy to influence and therefore unreliable”. They wanted to make the negative evaluation of their restaurant worthless by adding a lot of fake positive ones in to it. From a marketing perspective, I don’t think that they will get the results they were hoping for. People use and rely on these websites, it has become an important part of the decision process, and you make them feel stupid by saying it is all nonsense. What they should have done is finding the right response to their negative evaluations. Compensate or explain using the same social media, learn from the feedback they received and work on a more positive online brand sentiment.

Tags:   Online reviews · Recommendations1 Comment

Marketers are often reproached that they are not marketing themselves. Especially online, personal branding can be easy and effective but is often overlooked. When I asked a friend this morning why she didn’t had a profile picture on Facebook, she explained that she was looking for a job and realized that her crazy profile picture might work against her. And that’s true, it is very likely that possible employees will do a quick search on you on internet.

Where Facebook and other social media platforms can give employees a first impression, it is LinkedIn that is mostly used for professional purposes. It is the largest professional network on the net, with  more than 90 million users in 200 countries who conducted nearly two billion people searches last year. It is easy to find people, but then again, in order to stand out you need to keep your resume up-to-date and differentiated from the others. If you are a job seeker or not, it starts by completing your LinkedIn profile. There is a tool that helps you do that and increasing your findability at the same time.

Now, LinkedIn continues to make adjustments and improvements and one new added section is “skills”.  Sharlyn Lauby explains in her blog how you can optimize this new skill section in your LinkedIn profile. I will try to summarize the main points:

The new section helps you organize your skills and assets immediately after your education credentials. They will stand out more and show what a well-rounded job candidate you are. The new feature on LinkedIn allow you to use multiple keywords to describe your skills, making you more discoverable for a recruiter. He looks for specific set of skills, and when they match yours he will contact you. Therefore it important to list your true qualifications and skills and not list yourself as an expert in your field if you are not.

LinkedIn users, jobseekers and candidates are highly recommended to list their qualifications and skills in this section because this is where you can differentiate yourself from others. Even if you’re not looking for a job today, your LinkedIn profile serves as a professional introduction of your experience and expertise. LinkedIn profiles should be viewed as a personal marketing brochure to connect business professionals and create opportunities.

Apart from Skills, LinkedIn offers other sections as well. Take a look if they are relevant to you and your industry. Marketers, don’t forget about youself!

Tags:   LinkedIn · Personal Branding · SkillsNo Comments.

With almost everybody on social media, we are entering the maturity phase of social network platforms. When communicating with so many people at the same time, we receive a lot of information from the everyone in our network. Some of it is not even addressed to you but because you share each other’s network, you still receive them. And when using different social networking platforms, the stream of messages not related to you can become overwhelming.

After hearing a presentation of Hootsuite I got interested and made an account to monitor my online social networks. It helps me to see what people are writing on Facebook to me and to other people in my network, it gives you the opportunity to monitor certain  topics online (although not included in the free basic package) and follow your social media statistics. The same goes for my Twitter and LinkedIn account. For me personally it doesn’t offer that many advantages but I can definitely see great use for a company that is active on social media.

Now I just found out that LinkedIn has introduced Signal, a dashboard that helps you more structure your networks’ updates, tweets and discussions. It also offers a search option to search what is said about a topic within and without your network.

After a quick Google search I found out that Hootsuite is not the only company providing (free) social media monitoring tools. LinkedIn is starting to make it easier for you to organize your networks information and I am pretty sure that all other social networks are working on the same. They are all trying  to integrate the other platforms into their own and make it easier to monitor your online existence.

Tags:   Monitoring · Monitoring tools · Social Media1 Comment

Recommendations and reviews influence the decision behavior and businesses make smart use of it. By making it easy for the online consumer, they are likely to rate, rank, review, ‘send a friend’, ‘Like’ and  become the companies best promoter. But how valuable and credible are these recommendations?

Because the majority of creators and reviewers are motivated altruistic reasons, consumers have learned to assess, trust and use their peers’ opinion. Business 2 Community nicely captures how consumers look for reliable Word of Mouth with different sources depending on their need and the phase of the decision making process. A Dutch marketing blog mentions a research by Stefan that showed the importance for recommendations being based on experience and including a critical element.

Tools such as ‘Likes’ are therefore less credible, because there is no room for any critical note. 70 % of the respondents felt that ‘Likes’ are used too much and 42 % says they don’t even notice the ‘Likes’ of their friends.

To come back to the article on B2C, it assumes that online consumers are capable of finding their own source. ‘Likes might be overrated as a recommendation tool, the wisdom of the crowds can work great for creating awareness and arouse peoples network. For products with more informational purchase motives, marketers might want to focus more on the in dept review sites. So I guess for every marketing strategy there is a different use of social media tools that fits best.

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In 2007 Radiohead introduced their new album In Rainbows online and made it directly available for anyone to download it for free. Instead of letting their fans pay $9.99 for the album on iTunes or $14.99 they asked them to pay whatever it was worth to them. On average people paid $6, in the US even $8. Radiohead became the school example for a successful pay-want-you-want pricing strategy. Yet, with the introduction of their new album The King of Limbs they choose not to use the pay-what-you-want strategy anymore.

Pay what you want (PWYW) is defined by Kim, Natter and Spann (2009) as an innovative pricing model in which buyer’s control over the price setting is at a maximum level; that is, the buyer can set any price above or equal to zero, and the seller cannot reject it. Their research showed that people were willing to pay 86% of their internal reference price (what they think the product  normally costs). Personally I am a big fan of type of strategies such as PWYW and NYOP (Name-Your-Own-Price) where there the power is no longer just at the sellers side. And it makes sense. Why not take the risk giving something away instead of throwing it away. A small return is always better than nothing, like they know very well in the tourism industry.

I couldn’t find any good data to really dig into the Radiohead case but I wonder why they have chosen for another pricing strategy. One argument could be that many people didn’t pay anything at all when they downloaded the CD but you have to ask yourself whether these people would have bought the album in the first place. Kim et al. (2009) show that some sort of relation seems necessary in order for this strategy to be profitable. I think the music industry is one industry where these strong ties are there and where this strategy should be able to flourish. The artist has a much bigger range when he offers his album for free, reaching people that would otherwise might not have bought the album (creating potential fans) and building a relationship of trust with their loyal fans that are willing to pay for the artists effort and creativity. When anybody knows a good business case on this please share it with us!

Tags:   PWYWNo Comments.

Emarketer came out with a report of what metrics CMO’s worldwide used in 2010 and will use in 2011 to measure the value of social media marketing activities. Not surprisingly, ‘site traffic’ is still the most important measure for social marketing success in 2011, followed by ‘conversion’. When going through the list you see that the success is more and more being measured in terms of interaction, conversion and revenue. Also we are almost up to that point were every CMO uses some kind of metric to keep track of its online success.

When going over the different metrics, there are some important results that are possibly overlooked by the CMO’s. When talking about social media, I think about the conversation with en between your customers. Sure, a conversation can lead to more visitors on your site, number of contributors or number of fans.  But aren’t we overlooking something. The point of having a conversation is to have a better understanding of your customer. What is on their mind? Can you help them with it? So it mainly comes down to listening. USAF Blog created a social media triage that can be used as a basic hand guide on how to respond to your customer (after listening to them). The triage shows that it is possible to add value to a positive message that you receive. Shouldn’t this be a metric? Because here is where the marketer can really make a difference.

But don’t feel too proud about yourself after receiving positive feedback just yet. A study of Morel (2000) showed that of every 100 customers that bought your product, 33 of them are dissatisfied, of whom 10 will complain which leads to satisfaction in 6 cases. I don’t believe this study takes into account that social media takes away many of the barriers to complaint, but it still shows that in general you know only 4 of the 27 (out of a 100) customers which are dissatisfied. Now, social media seems to be the answer to it. And I think that companies such as Get Satisfaction would agree. They build online communities that enable productive conversations between companies and their customers. So why is there no metric for measuring successfully resolving customers issues and complaints. You’re not only working on customer satisfaction but also on the image of your brand and your service. Isn’t that much more valuable to a CMO than the amount of people that visit your website? Maybe these metrics are already used and mentioned in the ‘other’ category, but let’s hope that this category will be a bit bigger next year!

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Twitter has recently unveiled a number of advertising opportunities for marketers that are looking for new ways to reach out to their target customers. The website, that is used by 175 million users, offers three methods of advertising: 1) Promotion Tweets (that allow you to post tweets that can be seen by people who don’t follow you), 2) Promoted Accounts (that will show up in a user’s “Who to Follow” section on their Twitter homepage) and 3) Promoted Trends (that allows a company to place their product on top of the Twitter Trending List). (sourse: onlinebusinessblog)

Market research firm eMarketer expects Twitter to triple their advertising revenue this year up to $150 million and believe that most of this money will come from US companies. For the next year, they predict as much as $250 million in advertising revenues.

It is fair to say that there is a new titan is entering the battle field, competing with Facebook (550 million users) and MySpace (?). The last mentioned topped Twitter’s advertising income with $184 million, but are clearly struggling with decreasing revenues. Projected advertising sales are $156 million next year, versus $288 million this year. This lead to layoffs of about 50% of their workers worldwide on the grounds of efficiency.

Facebook has reached the position of most visited website but feels the competitors breath in their neck. They too are still trying to figure out what businessmodel works best for them by trying out new ways of advertising, such as sponsored stories.

Let’s see who plays the game the best and wins the advertisements in the long run.

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I shortly want to come back on the use of adwords, this time used for Google. Search engines are constantly trying to make your results more relevant to its user. At social marketing hub they explain ways how search engines make their results more personal and at wordstracker.com they talk about possible effects for you as an owner of a website. What I am wondering is how can I figure out what the organic search results of my potential customers are. We might not be in the same geographical place, they might even not be in the same geographical place, they probably have a different Query History too. So how do I know what comes up in their search results and on which place will I be? We can kind of influence what people see by using Adwords but why do you want to do that when you are in the top-3 of organic results. And are Googles advertisements also ordered by geographical relevance? That would help the the Adword campaign of local stores to be relevant to the people close around them but wouldn’t they miss out on a big piece of ‘potential customer’ pie just outside their radius? And what about online stores that now have to compete for advertising space with all the local brick&mortar companies in their category?

I think the personalization of search engines is a wonderful development for the user but raises questions for advertisers. Do you have the answer? Please respond below.

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Google is rapidly developping its AdWords program and one of the things, as described by Selles van Hayona to get the attention is by advertising on youtube. As the second largest search engine and part of Google it possible to extent your AdWord campain to Youtube. Use the same keywords, categories or even choose the movies yourself to increase conversion. Four possible ways to advertise on youtube are by (1) promoting your video between the search results, (2) using in-video overlay advertisement that float before the video that is watched, (3) using in-stream video ads that show a 15 or 30 second commercial before the requested movie starts and (4) placing a companion banner next to the video that is played.

Now the intrusive factor of an in-stream video ad for example should be taken into serious consideration. One way to work around this is to make the advertisement amusing using interactive video’s. A good example of the integration of a youtube video and advertisement is the ad campain from tipp-ex. May this be an inspiration.

Source: Frankwatching

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“The terror of T-mobile is funny. With every mistake they tell you sorry and refer you to the customer service. Waiting time 4 hours…”

It was this message that Dutch comedian Youp van ‘t Hek placed on his twitter after trying to solve his sons problems with an iPhone. Immediately, people recognized this problem started to respond with almost 4000 reactions. Within half an hour he received a phonecall from T-mobile that all problems would be solved immediately. When his son goes to the shop and again doesn’t get proper help he expresses his anger through twitter and is again called that everything will be solved. van ‘t Hek is fed up and declares war on the helpdeskterror. By this time, the estimated damage for telephone provider T-mobile is already between 200.000 and 300.000 euro. After writing a column about this in a national newspaper, he received thousands reactions of people that encounter similar problems with T-mobile or other big companies such as Ziggo, UPC and Vodafone. Van ‘t Hek invited everybody to mail him their experiences so that he can bundle it in a funny book.

This example shows the power of people finding others with similar issues via online social networks. All the individual complaints where now heard as this affair was discussed in many talk shows and online blogs. T-mobile apologized to van ‘t Hek for the mistakes that were made. T-mobile manages WOM by facilitating, moderating and participating in WOM using media like twitter. The lesson that can be learned from this case is that even if you have a pro-active and open WOM strategy the consumer can still meet and group together on other social platforms where you might not be aware about. Obviously, T-mobile also monitors its WOM adequately since van ‘t Hek received his first phonecall from T-mobile within an half hour but it was already too late. They could not get control over the situation anymore and the brand got damaged.

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