Social as the new SEO

The year 2009 might be remembered as the turning point for Internet as the social techniques – social media have become the new SEO for marketing websites.
Previously the black art of traditional SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) where
- Keywords, meta tags, description, internal links in the website
- The Page Rank defined by the importance of links
Ruled the game and were the measurement for the findability of any website.

Most of these parameters could be kept under control by the company or website owner. In most cases spending more money would mean higher SERP rankings.

Real-time and social media

Since the rise of Blogs, forums and Twitter the traditional SEO is no longer.

The democracy of the Internet is now more important:
The more people talk about your website, brand, products, solutions or services the higher you will rank.

The number of mentions on the Internet is taken as indicator of popularity and importance.
Even if people post negative reviews and comments about your brand or products, the ranking in search results will increase.

Additionally the real-time has become even more important as there is a war ongoing between Twitter, Bing and Google to present the most relevant and up-to-date (real-time) information in their searches.

Democracy of the Internet

On the other hand people both at home as consumers and in companies use the Internet to find solutions to their problems, demands or needs, will select possible brands or vendors on the Internet and could even make decisions for buying using the Internet.
All without any interference of company sales people!
Reviews, advices and comments on social media have become most important in purchase decisions in B2C and B2B.
This is the democracy of the Internet with the evolution to social media marketing.

These changes pose a tremendous problem for marketing and brand managers as they are no longer in control and throwing massive amounts of money on advertising will not show up in search engine results or even generate more interest from potential customers.
It is time to take a walk on the wild side of marketing: social media marketing.

The interruption-marketing using interruptive-advertising (display ads) are no longer the success formula as people get better in blocking them out. Still these marketing methods will stay in existence: direct mail, broadcast advertising (radio, tv), billboards, print advertising, …

Social media brings data overload

Disruptive change brings the new problem of figuring out how to leverage and use all the possible social techniques and social media available for reaching the potential customers. It is not just learning to use all the tools of social media as it is also about optimizing the social media techniques for customer awareness and customer acquisition.

Using social media is very time consuming as individual people need to be behind every statement or information that is published on the Internet.
Moreover as the produced and published amounts of information and data about a brand or product are becoming massive, it cannot be controlled by a company any more. It is data overload.

The damage control is even harder to do as just one person can publish negative information that will spread faster than positive news or information.

The challenges for marketing and brand managers just got almost impossible thanks to real-time social media that have become premium importance for Google, Bing and Twitter.

The disruptive social media will change your marketing for ever.

Content marketing is the new hype for attracting potential customers both in eCommerce and B2B.

Targeting audience with content marketing
Instead of presenting your market segment with interruptive impression-base advertising and unwanted post or emails, content marketing will attract the interested parties with content that is relevant and interesting for them.
This is like candy attracting many flies but not all flies are from the desired target audience.
Thus the content needs to be clear and relevant about the business or the offering and attracting the right kind of people. The headline plays an important role in this.
However do you know exactly what your target audience is and what they want to read about or what their (related problems are ?)

Even if you attract the right people the content needs to make them aware of your brand in order to remember it long afterwards.

Content needs getting found on search engines
You can put as much content on the Internet, but if it doesn’t get found in the search engines or no other links pointing to your content exist your content will stay unread.
Therefore the importance of the headline, the keywords and the first phrase that needs to be catchy too.

Just publishing written texts is no longer enough as people do want convenience and entertainment even for serious business: think video or at least presentations that create emotions or laughs.

Trust is a must
As trust is the most difficult to achieve on the Internet, having just one piece of content will not make you trustworthy or a trusted party. You mainly build trust by consistency, frequency, reliability and responsiveness.
Having a case study or client example helps to achieve credibility and trustworthiness.
The best is if your content gets appraised and referred by a third party: the more known the better.

Building awareness through content
The content needs to make people aware of your company, brands and solutions and in order to make it easy for them, there should be one item, one feature or benefit that they can easily remember and makes your offering irresistible.

If you can engage your content consumers by commenting or sending you emails, then you have moved an enormous step forward. Your potential customers are communicating with you.

Never forget the call to action:

At the end of the year many editors, gurus, consulting groups and agencies create content about trends and predictions for the next year. The real reason is probably to generate interest and get attention for their business.
Still, isn’t it strange that only at the Year End people take a look into the future?

We all know that change is the only constant in life and in business. Change doesn’t wait to appear little before New Year. Change happens just any moment throughout the whole year.
If a major event should happen in January then the predictions of December could be completely wrong – outdated in just one month.

Instead of spotting trends and making predictions at Year End, it should be a year around activity not just for decision makers and company management, but also for marketing and sales. Maybe especially marketing and sales, as both are exposed to changes in the market influencing their business almost immediately.

Therefore:
Embrace the future every day. Spot trends throughout the year for your own benefit.

Enjoy these presentations on trends and predictions for 2010.
Use whatever trend suits you most or best:

Season greetings

We all send out Christmas and New Years cards with our best wishes to all our contacts in order to maintain the relationship with people and companies. Companies (clients, suppliers and consultants) and people we know from different business opportunities and partnerships in the hope for new opportunities.

Socially accepted spam

Probably you will be also sending out cards or emails to contacts you haven’t spoken, seen or even heard from since a long time.
In these cases the goal of sending Season Greeting cards is more for re-contacting the lost relation instead of bringing the Season Greetings.
The hope is when the receiver gets your card or email; he will remember or recall you or your company. It is likely he will visit the company website and regain interest in pour products or solutions or just remember you during his next purchase.
This type of Season Greeting cards or emails are a form of spam as you aren’t using opt-in lists, but it is apparently socially allowed?
In any case it a major opportunity to present the company with its products or services to the potential customers and partners again, but you have to do it subtle.

Getting noticed

In order to get noticed amongst all the Season Greetings cards and emails that people receive yours needs to stand out:
- In case of a card: the envelope and the card itself can be remarkable: colors, shape or picture
- In case of an email the challenge is tougher to achieve

In order to have your email noticed, starts with the subject line, which requires a lot of creativity as the same words are used in all Season Greetings emails and cannot be offensive or challenging. Be creative and use your imagination.
As the receiver of the card might have forgotten all about you but not about your company, having the brand name in the subject will help as he only sees your name in his inbox.
Alternatively you could put the domain name (www.domainname.com) of your company or product in the subject. This has the advantage after opening the email, the link is apparent above your message, which is easy to click on.

The content of the email can be an image or text.
The problem with images is that it becomes a hassle to add on a personal comment note, a link or even make your name visible below the image. Small images are better.
In all cases avoid images or movies which are too large (Mb) as they will not pass many email systems or people will not even open them as they are afraid of viruses.
Still by sending out Season Greetings cards or email to ‘lost contacts’, you have the opportunity to get in contact again and even generate leads and obtain business.

Our Seasons’ Greeting email

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9 Methods to increase your relationship with online relations for lead generation
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19 Methods for building trust and credibility for online buying
9 Methods for market research on no budget

Originating as a project company

Many software companies have started out as project companies specialized in a specific field of information technology or a business vertical. Even Oracle.
In order to keep their operational costs low they try to re-use their software code for different projects just developing the necessary specific additional code for each project.

Eventually the software becomes more fully fledged, mature and having almost all possible functions and features for a certain target market.
The step from a project company to a product company seems evident and simple, but that isn’t.

Less is more

The first hurdle is to decide what functions and features from the large set of available subroutines and applications to include. What does the market really want and what has been developed on demand for a certain customer. The more functions and features that are included into the product(s), the more maintenance and support costs.

The sales cycle differences

A project company is in the typical cycle of:
- Finding a deal
- Winning the deal
- Developing the necessary additional code
- Partial invoicing throughout the project – and getting paid during the project
- Delivering the project
- Keeping a revenue stream for additional services for each customer

Whereas a product company has a sales cycle of:
- Marketing
- Selling
- Invoicing
- Maintenance invoices

The changes in organization

The morphing from a project company to a product company requires many changes:
- Marketing needs to promote products instead of services, which is a change of mind
- The website needs to market and explain the products instead of a vague capability description
- Marketing and sales team needs to generate much more leads
- Sales cycles will be shorter
- Sales will need to adapt to the fact customer changes are no longer possible
- Sales will need to close more deals as prices are lower
- Development needs to maintain the product over many years
- Product architects need to design for growing the product and keep it maintainable
- Product management is new and needs to develop the product plan
- Product marketing is required too for specific promotion of the product
- Accounting needs to change their revenue recognition too: less complicated
- Maintenance revenue is lower and fixed
- No or little revenue from system engineers on site

Dealing with the change?

The questions are:
- Can top-management cope with these changes?
- Can middle-management live with the different attitude?
- Can the company bear the weight of the additional functions that are created?
- Can marketing management steer product marketing?
- Can marketing generate enough leads?
- Can salesmen close enough deals?
- Can salesmen adapt to the different sales attitude or should a different type of salesmen be hired?

This and many more problems emerge while morphing from a project to a product company.

How well did your project company deal with the change into a product company?

The (brand) name when a new baby is to be born

Every once in a while a new product or service is defined, then created and developed: the new baby.
Somewhere during the course of this, the problem or the challenge of the naming emerges.

If the product is part or an extension of a family of products or solutions the naming can reflect this easily by a higher number or adding a superlative.
However if it is a complete new solution addressing a different problem then a new name needs to be selected and approved by management.
In order to give it a sense you can embed a characteristic or a feature of the product or the solution.
If not you can just create a well sounding brand name.

Should the name have an alphabetical advantage? Then let the first letter be an ‘A’ or even a ‘1′.

Lacking inspiration?

There are brand name generators available if you would be missing inspiration:
- Straight forward or more sophisticated
- Or even in Web 2.0 style.
- If you really don’t have any inspirations then find a variation on the brand name of the market leader.

Testing

After generating several alternatives then you should test for:
- Possible infringements with other well established brand names
- Is the name sticky ?
- Meaning of parts of the name
- Sounding: how does it sounds? Good or awkward or boring?
- Ease of pronunciation in your language
- Ease of pronunciation in foreign languages: you never know your reach
- Meaning in foreign languages: words do have different meanings in languages and in slang
- Possible associations with the name
- Lookup on Google
- Do a “Whois” lookup

Look-up warning

Still be carefull with searching on the Internet as there are pirates are out there who want to snap up your domain name before you have registered it.

We used to use a popular service that instantly shows if the domain name you type is free for a whole bunch of tld’s like .com, .net, .us. Ideal when brainstorming for domain names.
However, after a while we got the impression that names we liked started to get registered out of the blue.
Coincidence? Who knows.
Just to be safe, we did our checks using plain commandline whois on a Linux box from that day on.

The River of no return

All in all it is quite a challenge to come up with a good name and time is limited as development is moving ahead and launch in nearing. Moreover once settled for a brand name you and the company are likely stuck with it for a very long time as changing brand names is very expensive and can even cost the company customers.
Giving your baby a name is like in the River of no Return.

What was your worst and best naming experience?

When product management or company management is convinced they need a “Me too” product or solution, the company is doomed for failure.

In most cases most businesses or companies have one product or solution that generates the most revenue and the most profit.
In order to:
- Expand into other parts of the market or business
- Shield off competitors entering the customers
- Protect a part of the market
Decision makers will decide to resell or develop a “Me too” product or solution.

The “Me too” problems

The problem is multiple:
- Motivation can be or will be low due to lack of inspiration
- Engineering development time will be invested
- Purchase time will be spend on searching vendors
- Support needs to know the product requiring training
- Service needs to serve more products requiring training
- Product management needs to create supporting content
- Marketing spending is needed to promote it
- Sales needs to be trained to sell the product
- Partnerships will have a time to get partners supporting it
- Business development will seek new business opportunities that are likely not interested.
- Administration will have additional overhead costs due to the new product or solution

The management reaction increasing the spending

After one or two years being in business with the “Me too”, company management or the Board of Directors will match or compare the results with the profits realized with the main product or solution. The conclusion will be negative.
Management will urge to sell more of the “Me too” in order to recoup their investments, which will lead to:
- Public Relations will send out press releases that generate no real interest.
- Marketing will set up pointless campaigns to promote the “Me too”
- Lead generation will demand lots of efforts without much response
- Sales people will put much effort in it without much success.
- Partnerships will waste time to convince partners to support the “Me too”
- Business development will engage into conversations with companies for non-existent or non-feasible opportunities.

As capacity is a limited source in any company this is double waste of time and money as all people involved could have been working for the successful product or solution instead.
Focus is what counts in sales, marketing, partnerships and business development. There is no time to waste and competition is fierce even for a market leader.

In only a few cases the “Me too” will serve its’ purpose: keep competitors out of the customers. Even in those cases the ”Me too” will probably not be really profitable itself.

Thus once the company has made the decision to have a “Me too” the result to expect is a death spiral.

Innovate instead

Instead of creating, developing, marketing, lead generating and selling a “Me too” product, a company should try to develop an innovative product that the market really wants and is a leap forward using new technologies or a new approach.
In that case your company has a story to tell to the market.

How many “Me too” have you been through in your career ?
Has any been successful ?

Astonishing: In order to promote their Chrome browser in the UK, Google uses billboards and free newspapers.

Not just one small billboard, but many in medium to big sizes.

Not just a small advert in the free Metro newspaper for commuters of public transport in the UK (1.3mio people or more), but on the front and the back.

If on-line ads would be effective, we would have all seen on-line Chrome ads.
Have you seen any on-line ads for Chrome?

If Google uses mainly off-line advertising for promoting their products, giving the doubt of the effectiveness of on-line advertising, then why shouldn’t you start doubting about your on-line marketing campaign?

Any doubt about your on-line advertising? Apparently Google has.

Initially the main goals of conferences are to learn about new methods and techniques from colleagues and vendors and allowing you to reach out the experts in the matters in one location.

However for anyone in sales the content of the conference can be of a lesser importance as the main purpose of any salesman is selling.

What are the ideal characteristics of a conference for a salesman?
1.   Networking possibilities: the more the better
2.   Enough professional attendees
3.   Not too much people as you will have problems selecting and meeting with all of them
4.   Big tags in order to read company and name allowing selecting people and addressing with appropriate question.
5.   Walking lunch and dinner: sitting at a table is a waste of time as you can only address 3 to 4 people around you.
6.   Enjoyable environment: dark rooms and lobbies will sell less good
7.   Boring speakers can be a benefit as you could have more people to grab in the patio.
8.   Too boring speakers and they all go elsewhere (shopping?)
9.   No Wifi as else people on their portable will not be approcheable for a conversation
10. No Internet access booth in order to have people open for a conversation instead of waiting silently in lines
11. Things to complain about so it is easier to open a conversation
12. Reasonably priced else only a very select number of people will show up
13. Not near by a shopping centre in order to have people stay
14. Rain or freezing cold in order to have the attendance stay
15. Limited number of Vendors – if the number of vendors out number the others there is no lead generation possible.
16. Just long enough coffee breaks (15min) in order to have people stay on the conference or lobby (not hotel room)
17. Frequent coffee breaks (2 in the morning – 1 in the afternoon)
18. No heavy lunch: else people fall asleep in the conference room
19. Limited wine supply during lunch: if tipsy or drunk they don’t remember you or what you were trying to sell
20. Capability of stealing the attendee list before your competitor steals the list.
21. The dinner is a special environment in order to have the complete venue joining this event
22. The less people know each other the better: as salesmen you can talk to all
23. No adjacent trade show as it draws the attention to the trade show boots
24. No major sports event happening as people will watch the sports on TV-sets instead.
25. No major world crisis as it affects everybody and draws the attention to: TV, Internet, newspapers

Do you have any other suggestions or requirements on your conference whish list?

Reality TV series are hard

The horrifying phrase contestants of reality television series like Big Brother, Americas’ Next Top Model, Idol, The Apprentice, Runaway Project,… don’t want to hear is: “You Are Eliminated”.

As the build-up to the elimination is painstaking slow, the contestants are all nervous which leads to the eliminated person to show his emotions and express very openly preferably with tears.
Or even warn for a future revenge.
It is even better if one or two of the survivors also burst out in tears for their lost friend or companion.
The more sadness, aggression or anger the better for the TV Reality Show.

The B2B complex sale is harder

Every complex B2B sale is a similar elimination game with several rounds in the sales process.
The big differences with the reality TV-shows are:
- The salesmen can guess their competitors but don’t face them
- The salesmen never meet in front of the jury side by side
- The incomplete jury: the CEO decides but doesn’t participate in the meetings
- The elimination decision isn’t communicated that easily – salesmen need to inquire
- There is no drama involved
- The salesman has no place to show emotion or think of revenge
- The competition in reality TV shows takes a short time span (hours – sometimes days), whereas the sales cycle can take months and even years

Still “You are Eliminated” is a common happening in everyday life of the salesman and he will not express his anger or aggression towards the missed client.
Instead he will try to keep doors open and hoping for a next chance with this company.

How about your emotions when you loose a deal?