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November 28, 2006
October 27, 2006
Blog Business Summit: Cisco’s New Web 2.0 “ We Learn from Our Customers Everyday”
Posted by cytrevino under Blogging, Conferences, Marketing PR, Web 2.0Leave a Comment
Yesterday, Jeanette Gibson of Cisco’s new media group talked about the launch of their new Web 2.0 site on October 2. (See my post here about the site.) Why did Cisco add Web 2.0 features? They’ve recognized that there is a shift of power in the market, according to Jeanette. They are changing the way they communicate and collaborate. It’s clear that consumers now drive content. Cisco marketing launched the ‘human network theme’—and asked consumers to post their own pictures and share stories with Cisco about how the network has changed their lives. She said that they learn from their customers every day. (Very cool statement, right?)
Other key web site changes at Cisco:
- Press room contains lots of videos. They are exploring how to maintain interactivity with customers and partners on the site. For example, how to deploy video, click to talk and more.
- The ‘employee experience network’ internal blog, and wikis (project workspace/web site that all members can update) is place for employees to learn about new interactive communications and provide feedback.
- Customers want more personalization on web site. Cisco offers folders for customers to add info that they want to return to—favorite white papers, etc. (Doesn’t ‘favorite white papers’ sound like an oxymoron?)
- According to focus groups, personalization should also include the ability to post a sticky with notes about a piece of content, a great video and email to their boss, friend.
On how to measure results. (Isn’t measurement always a sticky-wicket?) Some of the ways Cisco is gauging how the new Web 2.0 features are working. Execs ask:
- Who are the influencers we want to reach? Are they blogging/talking about Cisco?
- What are the Alexa (site that shows traffic rating for web sites) results for key pages.
- How does info flow? They have to maintain a genuine dialog with each community. Cisco knows they cannot just shove messages out any longer.
- How well are they pulling in new and different people (A-list bloggers) into mix with traditional influencers (editors, analysts).
The Policy Blog is the top public Cisco blog. Visitors find more specific, targeted views on a blog. They get the opinion of someone inside Cisco—more interactive, not just a press release.
In the future, brochures could become more authentic, like a blog. And lose the spin.
They know they need to engage with customers honestly; with more openness and authenticity.
How can you engage more interactively with your customers, web site visitors?
October 26, 2006
A View From the Blog Business Summit- Microsoft’s Culture Change from Blogs to Community Building
Posted by cytrevino under Blogging, Conferences, Web 2.0Leave a Comment
The Blog Business Summit’s (in Seattle) first set of panelists today was Jeanette Gibson from Cisco, Corporate Communications and John Starkweather of Microsoft. They shared insights about how their companies were adopting the so-called new media—blogs, wikis (web sites that can be updated by web visitors), and podcasts, etc..
At Microsoft the openness started with their developers. Many of the rest of Microsoft had to be brought along. Even though everyone knows the internet makes it easy for geographically dispersed folks to talk to each other—it still had to sink into the majority of the rest of Microsoft how that really changes things (like company communications, marketing). You cannot just throw messages out there anymore. The challenges, he said, for the company was to how to be open and still preserve the intellectual property aspects of their tech-company traditions. The challenge for all companies is to be both open and closed, when engaging customers and influentials in the new social networking-world, especially blogging.
An example of how communities work and benefit business: Microsoft started the Mobius community, make up of online writers/bloggers that are passionate about mobile devices and gadgets. The community evolved on its own. Now it is loose moderator role that he plays. Microsoft benefits because the Mobius community-members provide specific things they would like the mobile platform to do. Microsoft has made feature and functionality changes, based on these community requests.
John Starkweather’s advice to companies:
- Take hard feedback.
- Listen. Change. Evolve.
And use new vehicles to reach people, think, small screens on handheld devices. He describes the Mobius community as one of Microsoft’s “…most valuable professional program. Members are very engaged and will share.”
How could your company benefit from more feedback and insights from customers and users? More from the Blog Business Summit later.
October 17, 2006
How to Save Millions on Advertising & Reach Ready-to-Buy Buyers: DriverTV
Posted by cytrevino under Advertising, Small Co. SuccessesLeave a Comment
One (of the many) advantages small companies have over big companies, like General Motors (at least they blog, see Fastlane executive GM blog here) and Toyota Motor Corp., are smaller, spent-more-wisely marketing budgets. Mega automakers spend millions on interruption (one-way, traditional advertising) marketing. Auto commercials have been shouting at us during prime time shows and sporting events since the advent of televsion. Few industries spend more on television and cable advertising than auto makers. Enter a new trend! An article from Wall St. Journal (9-1-06) (Requires $$ or 2-week free trial) demonstrates smart marketing-advertising by GM,
Toyota and others.
Based on the insights that at any given time, only 5 million Americans are actively car shopping, a clever group decided to offer the auto buying experience a shot in the arm. The WSJ article talks about a buyer, Dave Adler, who was zeroing in a newSaturn Sky roadster, but still wanted to do some comparisons with competitive models. Instead of either spending hours visiting multiple showrooms to test drive, or logging onto a Web site, Adler grabbed his remote and switched on DriverTV. DriverTV is a cable television station that allows you to compare the capabilities of different cars via video on demand. The cable channel offers clips showing different car models driving down a stretch of road.
How cool is that? (Who knew television had some life left beyond serving as a platform for my TiVo and digital video recorder?)
October 15, 2006
Using Your Web Site to Start (More) Customer Conversations: Cisco.com
Posted by cytrevino under Blogging, Podcasting, Web 2.0[2] Comments
With the launch of its new web site on October 2, 2006, Cisco is taking a leadership role in showing businesses how to use a web site to get closer to customers, build communities and improve collaboration with those customer communities. These are three goals companies of all sizes can aspire to.
How is Cisco doing this? Well, the short answer is they are using the emerging, so-called Web 2.0 tools. Web 2.0 is the catch-phrase for new Internet capabilities that really do make it easier for all of us—especially businesses—to interact online in new, easier ways. Blogs, Podcasts (audio recordings), and Wikis (workspaces for online, group collaboration)are part of Web 2.0. The longer answer is, Cisco is simply taking advantage of some new Internet tools that many companies of all size can also tap into.
Some Some of the new features and capabilities Cisco has added to their site include: Networking Professionals Connection—this is an online forum where registered customers and users, can ask questions and post experiences and comments online about using Cisco’s products. Customers and users can then actually, answer each other’s questions. Hence, a ‘community’, or, user groups on steroids. And some of the ‘work’ can be accomplished by customers/users helping each other. It is not all on Cisco employees to answer every question—and there are a lot of them already!
Cisco also is hosting, Member Product Reviews (member refers to the fact, I think, that you must register in order to post questions and comments on these new web site sections). So think of user forums—right on Cisco’s corporate web site. And with all of the comments customers, users and other interested parties are allowed to make about using its products—after registering—you might ask why Cisco would need to maintain blogs. (After all, the networking giant is trying to build communities, and you cannot build a community without knowing who your members are, so you must register.) And more importantly, just how long will it take them to answer the questions?
If your company takes this approach, be sure to have your employees available to respond to the questions. I viewed some questions on the Cisco site that were posted on October 9 and not answered yet. See here for Discussion Forum on IP Telephony (Internet Protocol Telephony) where the red check mark indicates an answered question. As of this writing on 10-15-06, I see only a couple of red check marks. In the Ask the Experts section, you find 2-week long conversations where you can post questions to key Cisco engineers and product managers and have an “…opportunity to learn with…” their experts on various technical topics that relate to how products, solutions and technologies function.
There is much, much more. You should cruise Cisco.com to find all the nuggets. I applaud Cisco for its openness, and willingness to collaborate. Cisco always had lots of content on their site (they now even have ‘video datasheets’ for featured products). But now Cisco has extended the content and added true, two-way conversations among their experts and their customers.
How could your company participate? Well, it could be easier than you might think. Despite the fact that your web site budget is no where near Cisco’s, many of the web 2.0 technologies are within the reach of many smaller companies. For example, you could host a question and answer forum on your company’s (soon-to-be-launched) blog or make a 15-minute audio recording interviewing your employees about what was behind the development of a new product or service. You know, a conversation-starter. More on using new Web-based technologies to engage customers and prospects to come in future posts.
September 12, 2006
How to Win Business Using Blogging, Word of Mouth Marketing: 3 Mini-Case Studies
Posted by cytrevino under Blogging, Small Co. Successes, Word of MouthLeave a Comment
Three diverse companies that have had long-term and short-term success with word of mouth marketing are Jones Soda, Sprint/Nextel and Stormhoek Vinyards (a South African winery). Below is my summary of how they applied word of mouth marketing to grow. Maybe there are some parallel lessons for your company.
Jones Soda (their complete story is here) began as a beverage distributor in the late 1980s and by 1996 had established its own unique brand, in an industry full of Coke-and-Pepsi behemoths. In the words of the founder and CEO Peter van Stolk, “The big guys spill more soda in a day than we sell.” Jones Soda built their popular brand from the ground up, getting to know their customers (teens and young adults) and selling soda at Xtreme sports events, tattoo parlors and independent music stores. They created passionate fans—even using customers’ own photos on their unique soda bottle labels. Jones Soda is now available at national retailers such as Panera, Barnes & Noble, and Target and has expanded into a successful online music store, MyJonesMusic.com. And it all started with word-of-mouth, grassroots marketing.
Sprint/Nextel recently launched the Sprint Ambassador program. The company leveraged the blogosphere by offering a free phone and six months service to about 400 bloggers. The result was 389,000 hits on Google, said David Dickey, Sprint online and interactive advertising manager. “We have more than dipped our toes in the space now,” he said, according to www.DMNews.com Sprint experienced the risk of the lack of control that is typical in word-of-mouth marketing.
Mr. Dickey said that the effort generated both positive and negative feedback on the brand. Sprint’s experience demonstrates that businesses must prepare themselves for anything and define specific success metrics before beginning word of mouth marketing. Word of mouth requires that marketers and business owners keep a close watch on what is said about their brand and how the conversation impacts the specific initiative.
Stormhoek Vineyards is a South African winery that wanted to increase sales of their wines in England and France. They knew that had to do something to make them stand out in a cluttered market. So last year they turned to Hugh Macleod, a well-known European blogger and artist known for cartoons that are drawn on the back of business cards.
Macleod set up a program where he offered a free bottle of Stormhoek wine to the first 100 bloggers each in England and France who contacted him. In order to receive a free bottle the bloggers had to be of legal drinking age, been actively blogging for at least three months and live in either England or France. They were not required to talk about the wine.
What happened was that they did, indeed, talk about the wine and as a result created enormous buzz in the industry. All the talk stimulated sales and the result was that Stormhoek doubled its sales within a year. They have embraced blogging and WOM. If you follow the link to their site you’ll see that it is not a traditional web site but in blog format. Total cost, $400 of blogging software and whatever they paid Macleod. We are sure it was significantly less than the ad budgets ofNapa
Valley vintners who attempt to grow market share.
Here is a blog post from a U.K. blogger talking about Stormhoek’s rapid, international growth stimulated in large part from their use of blogs & established bloggers.
Lessons learned:
1. Use blogging to reach your market and grow your business.
2. Reach out (respectfully) to bloggers with good followings in your target market. Make a create offer to get them engaged with your products or service.
3. Take action based on the feedback from the blogosphere. It is gold. It is some of the most cost-effective market research you will ever obtain.
September 5, 2006
The ‘New’ Marketing PR Drives Sales Leads
Posted by cytrevino under Marketing PR, Public Relations, Small Co. SuccessesLeave a Comment
B2B Marketing Trends has an excellent article that summarizes good public relations news for small business selling to businesses.
According to B2B Marketing, today:
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More than 30 million Americans a month use Yahoo! News and Google News, according to Nielsen/Net ratings from 2004.
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More than 70 percent of Americans use a search engine news portal
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And 84 percent use a search engine to find information, products and services
Small businesses can take advantage of the lowly press release and tap the best of both worlds—marketing and public relations. In the old economy, businesses were subject to the whims of major media outlets (journalists/reporters and editors) in order to get coverage. Now the new, new press release can help you generate website visits and sales leads.
You can use any of the wire services to distribute the release. I like PRWeb. They provide educational webinars and their staff is always available to answer questions.) Key to driving web visitors and sales leads, is using keywords and embedding hyperlinks that your prospects are likely to use when searching for products and services.
The B2B Marketing Trends’ article highlights a success story:
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It’s easy to measure successes in marketing PR campaigns – you either generate sales leads or you don’t. Leade Health, a provider of health coaching services and an HRmarketer.com client, measures its success in Web traffic and search engine visibility, both of which generate tangible leads. They consider media placements a means to an end.
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Since the company started sending marketing press releases in early 2006, Web site traffic has jumped considerably – a recent white paper announcement netted 400 downloads. Another key metric for Leade Health is SEO success; Leade’s goal was to appear on Google’s front page when potential customers entered targeted keyword phrases. Releases contained relevant words and phrases, which were included as hyperlinks back to the company’s Web site. Before Marketing PR campaigns, the firm was not even in Google’s top 100. Today, a search for “health coaching” finds the company squarely on page one.
Leade Health followed the sage advice of David Meerman Scott, one of my favorite bloggers, Web Ink Now. Check out David’s smart, free e-Book, The New Rules of PR.
So, dust off that press release, enter your keywords and leverage the web! When should you send a press release? When you have a customer success story (testimonial) , when you have a new white paper or article, or any time you have a new solution for the biggest problems facing your customers.
August 31, 2006
How-To: 5 Tips to Becoming a Company Evangelist from a Small Company Evangelist
Posted by cytrevino under Customer EvangelistsLeave a Comment
WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) posted five tips on becoming a Company Evangelist for your company (dated 5-31-06). Below are Betsy Weber’s five tips.
Betsy Weber was a panelist at the June WOMBAT event (my post about event) in San Francisco. She is delightful and was helpful to everyone at our table—sharing her experiences as Chief Evangelist at the software company, TechSmith.
Betsy’s company makes SnagIt, a screen capture and recording software for individual and professional use. Sounds like a great new tool right? Well it is a great tool—however the product has been making it easier for folks to capture images for about 15 years. (Here is the link Betsy Weber’s Blog)
5 Tips from TechSmith’s Betsy Weber
“The way we look at it, word of mouth is not marketing. It’s building relationships and learning from each other,” says Betsy Weber, Chief Evangelist for TechSmith. “Word of mouth marketing is all about creating deep, authentic relationships and then bringing those conversations inside to TechSmith.”Here, Betsy shares her five tips on becoming a Company Evangelist.
Tip #1. Be a power listener
Listen as much as you talk (if not more). Then, bring those conversations with customers into your company so the user’s voice is heard. Keep the conversations going. Relate the feedback you hear to product teams, be the voice of the customer, and fight for what they want at your company.
Tip #2. Get out of the marketing department
This isn’t a marketing job. This isn’t to create sales. It’s about customer care and customer relationships. Dump the marketing lingo. Be transparent, open and honest. You have to be an extrovert and people person. It’s almost a way of life you’re either suited for it or you’re not.
Tip #3. Get your whole company onboard
It takes more than a Chief Evangelist to create customer evangelists. Every area that the customers interact with must be on board with creating customer evangelists. If one department fails to give outstanding service or gives the customer a negative experience the whole company is affected. Tip #4. Open the front door and be accessible
Give out your direct phone number and real email address. If you hide behind voicemail and an email alias you might miss a great opportunity. Give VIP tours and arrange for customer meet-ups. Customers will appreciate it and it can be a competitive advantage. (If you’re a gadget lover, you’ll be right at home, as you’ll need a BlackBerry or Treo to keep in touch with everyone.)
Tip #5. Have passion
You must love and believe in the products, and you have to be passionate about the people who use them. If you won’t, who will?
–end
So how soon will you begin your Company Evangelist role? If you have experiences blazing the Company Evangelist trail, I’d love to hear them.
August 14, 2006
How a Small Company Got a Big Image, Overnight: TheBeerBelly.com
Posted by cytrevino under Public Relations, Small Co. SuccessesLeave a Comment
We hear about overnight success stories of marketing and selling lots of products and services via the web, in a short time. In the new world of customers who are completely-in-charge of when they learn about and analyze new products and services it’s fun to find out exactly how some of these successes unfold. So at Small Company, Big Image, we like to share examples of companies that have gotten it right.
Under Development, Inc., with their new product, The Beer Belly, is a brand new company that did just that. I posted about the entrepreneur and his successful product launch here.
My partner, Jim Butz, recorded an interview with Under Development’s president, Brooks Lambert, and if you have 14 extra minutes you might want to listen to his success story. The audio file (Podcast) is here—you can listen on a PC, iPod or other MP3 player. You can download the file (download takes about 3 minutes to download on a high-speed Internet connection) and listen immediately, or save to listen later.
Brooks reached out, with a brand new product, brand new web site, and drew the attention of a very popular blog Gizmodo—The Gadget Guide—in November 2005. Hear how Gizmodo’s posting about TheBeerBelly got lots of media attention, CNN interviews and more and turbo charged sales, and still does.
Brooks is not only is an entrepreneur with a passion for designing products, he also volunteers in the Bay Area helping special needs kids experience surfing. He tells us how he combined his product design passion with helping out others. Enjoy!
