Welcome to the Escape Blog

E-Consultancy cites a recent survey from Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) this morning - see image.

“79% of respondents saw Web 2.0 features such as blogs and social networks as a good way to increase revenues and reduce costs.”

The results did suggest that IT departments may struggle to implement any Web 2.0 solutions and this is something E-Consultancy highlighted as a potential stumbling block.

I would suggest that any bottleneck may actually come from management and marketing - why?

It’s Time To Lose Control!

Well, not lose control, rather let go of it a bit. The thing is, it’s already happening online but many companies still won’t embrace the web 2.0 culture.

Reputation management is important (especially with the viral nature online) but it can’t be controlled with a big stick.

Web 2.0 is a buzz word yes, but it does encapsulate a sea change in online participation. We all suddenly have a voice - including your customers - and you can’t necessarily control what they say.

Bad Plumber Leaves My Mouth Flowing

I recently tried to get a plumber to do some work at home. Two weeks on the trot the guy didn’t turn up to take a look at the job, despite the fact that I had to be at home early to ‘meet him’ both times.When I chased him (yes I had to chase him) he didn’t even seem sympathetic.

Am I going to use him? Of Course Not. Am I going to tell all my friends and people I meet locally who ‘isn’t’ a good plumber - damn right!

It may seem petty but I’m not alone. We all do it every day whether it’s at the water cooler, to our family over Sunday dinner. We make judgements on services or products and tell our friends and anyone who will listen. It just so happens that we now have blogs, forums and websites, etc. to moan about bad (and good) experiences - whether it be Tiscali or Lush.

Test yourself with this question:

What would you do if someone blogged something bad about you? Would you:

1. Threaten To sue them
2. Leave an angry comment
3. Embrace the author’s opinion and act on the fact that they may have a point. Work out what you could do about it and turn the negative into a positive PR exercise whilst getting some valuable customer feedback that may change a current business procedure to make your business eve better?

The thing is, people will say what they say anyway and the mass of voices tend to be so much louder - especially with social interaction through web 2.0 websites.

Yes, you do need the IT infrastructure to deliver some web 2.0 solutions - you also need the balls within an organisation to embrace the change first place. The point is though - before you worry how big your balls really are and if you can buy into social participation - you need to realise that it’s happening already - maybe without you!

Back by popular demand. We thought you didn’t want it until we got asked where it had gone…. so this week we have been mostly:

We’ve won a contract with Advanced Inc., a Canadian Company selling some wicked solutions into businesses for presentations. They create some amazing rooms with loads of gadgets. We will be developing their website and online marketing. According to Google, they are only just down the road 4305 miles away but their route was a bit dubious, especially number 34 in their directions.

Talking for winning, we also won a tender to produce the design and print for the First Wessex Annual report.

New design projects were also started for Hampshire County Council, Transactor Global Solutions, SIBEC UK, so our creative team have their heads down.

We also decided to redesign this blog, so watch this space.

Meanwhile, traffic was a pain yesterday for the blogging seminar when two accidents decimated the audience. We had some great comments though including, (I am blushing as I copy and paste):

"You have a sense of humour, you sounded pleasant and motivated, knowledgeable and honest about what you do………values that seem rare in individuals in today’s world."

We also delivered a giant puzzle as a project (case study coming up soon). Quality idea, well implemented and we took great delight in our Meeting room trying to put it together, we were running out of floor space.

Keep an eye out on the Escapee area of the website early next week - Laura starts in our studio and if you are even a little bit nosey, you can check out what she is really like with her top fives… more next week.

Marketing - it’s a funny old game. And, it’s a rapidly changing one.

As a person from a non-marketing background who fell into it, I love the power of analysing stats - whether it is web stats, e-mail marketing results, search engine stuff: I can’t get enough.

But, at the end of the day, it’s all about one main result (9 times out of ten): making more money. And as Jacqui Sanwell, our Operations Director said to me this morning regarding our business model:

"I’ve been analysing and looking at sales and cost statistics. A business gets better when it analyses itself, can see a flaw and takes immediate action to improve/rectify it. We also get to see what we are doing very well."

Using stats to spot the opportunity for change - not as a benchmark.

So, next time you analyse your web stats, for instance, patting yourself on the back for an increase in visitors to your website, ask yourself: "What was my real return?"

Viral marketing is something we all want to do, but maybe don’t have the budgets or forethought to engineer something worth being, well, viral. I mean, these things only work if other people buy into them.

Pronet cites an emarketer report about viral marketing with the title: Viral Marketing: What’s Hot and What’s Not, which highlighted the following values of different types of campaign:

One of the key summary points was the need to use a collaboration of tactics, rather than concentrate on just one. Perhaps that’s because different things float different people’s boats creating larger reach?

A client of ours highlighted a new viral campaign for Nivea Cellulite Cream this week on their beauty blog.

Within a day, someone from the agency had called to offer the blog author free products to test and comment on. Is she going to accept? Of course. Free products, free blog content articles. For Nivea, they get the word out there via influential bloggers.

As the lady from the agency (DPM Pulse)wrote to me:

"What we are interested in achieving, is having real people testing and writing about the product and feeding us back their real impressions, whatever they might be, good or bad. We want to know their thoughts. Does it work. Would they recommend it to friend?"

Did I mention it’s all about engaging people?

It’s a shame this project has been terminated because it is a great idea. Creating your own floor on a virtual building that gets taller and taller.

Perhaps it would have been better with outgoing links to add user value but these kind of creative ideas add ‘fun’, ‘cool’ and relevant interest to communities online.

Yes, it could be seen as slightly frivolous but you know what, cool is good, and even a business can afford to be cool.

This blog is created using Typepad but more recently, with the help of Steve, I have discovered Wordpress (so expect a change soon).

Now, being a non-techie, it is a bit more complicated than the ease of which Typepad works but with the wonderful world of plug-ins, oh so much more powerful.

My first attempt was an extension of my work with a client with a Beauty Blog for Men, using cutline (a wordpress theme from Chris Pearson) adapted ever so slightly - there’s no shame in using a template I like to think (if it works and is appropriate).

Over the past two weeks (and with some playing about) I have also loading some cool plug-ins to help me control my tagging (mainly titles and descriptions) to create blog posts  that also look nice in search results.

I also found this great article, some of which even makes sense to me: 10 Things I Do After A Fresh Wordpress install.

If you have the budget for a web design agency (I know a good one ), go for Wordpress , get a template designed and your hosting set-up and even get a little training if you need it… then, blog away.

So, I am doing a seminar today “Blogging For Business” and have spent the past two weeks creating a presentation. Yesterday I did a dry run with a couple of people I work with to make sure it all made sense and a couple of great questions came up, so it got me thinking about the questions I may face today, the biggest question of all of course being, “What’s the point of blogging?”

When I created the presentation, one word really stood out for me and I see it time and time again with all things web:

Engagement

Blogging is all about engagement. You can have all the latest fancy (and faddy) widgets on your blog but if you can’t engage people you are talking to yourself.

A recent report from E-Consultancy about the uptake of blogs for businesses highlights  that within the next 12 months 52% of companies will have their own blog.

That begs the question; can a business accept that a blog is not a direct sales tool? When bottom line is so important can business leaders buy-in to the fact that they have to engage with their audience, and that ain’t going to happen with hard sell. Let’s face it, we want to watch the TV programme, not the adverts.

So, as business bloggers we need to become programme makers and that takes great content: Something engaging.

Engaging People

Meanwhile, we also need to be engaging our readers to develop their loyalty. We can’t rely on them buying us, we need to make it happen by giving them a good reason. If you think about it, the relationship is already one-sided if all we are trying to do is sell. We need to put that on the back burner and take a longer term strategy for our blogs.

We can sell by ‘showing off’, proving that we know what we are talking about. A client said to me the other day that they find our website and blog ‘attractive’. She went on to say that if we can make ourselves attractive she had every faith that we could do the same for her business. A soft sell but so much more powerful: She has bought into us on that basis alone.

Engaging An Audience

Social networks and pushing traffic to your blog is also essential to expanding your reach. There are plenty of web sites out there and there are plenty of other people trying to do the same as us, but if we focus on our message, and focus on the quality of our content; we can then focus on the most appropriate social networking sites and engage THE most appropriate audience.

If your audience is not relevant, you may get them up-front but they will soon leave when they see there is no ‘fit’ with your message and their need.

Try this:

1. go to www.google.com
2. click on "maps"
3. click on "get directions"
4. type "New York" in the first box at the top
5. type "London" in the second box & click enter or get directions
6. scroll down to step #24

Does your brand deliver and if you think it does, to who’s expectation? Seth Godin talks about his Brand Formula:

[Prediction of what to expect] times [emotional power of that expectation].

If I encounter a brand and I don’t know what it means or does, it has
zero power. If I have an expectation of what an organization will do
for me, but I don’t care about that, no power.

Companies who deliver too much (so much that you don’t know what to expect) are creating confusion on expectation. Perhaps, with levels of customer service so poor in the UK, our expectations are reducing too far? Perhaps brand managers still think they can ‘create’ their way out of brand reputation?

The point is, there is so much more of an opportunity for you to actually stand out as a business as the moment - simply by aligning your message and delivering your service (or product) in accordance to your clients’ expectations.

Now, I don’t know too much about managing a big brand, I have trouble organising our small agency as our services have developed. How our business sells what we do in a world of misinformation, and how we deliver it, is important. Important for our reputation as we manage client expectation and deliver a great service.

But, if you are a small business (the big boys can take care of themselves) when is the last time you asked yourself these questions?

Even more important, when is the last time you asked your clients about who they think you are and what their expectations are? If their expectations don’t tally with what you think you should deliver, there is already a mismatch or, as I like to call it, an opportunity.

I wonder if you could imagine having a brand value of £33.1 bn ($66.4bn)?

The guys at Google can, according to the latest Brandz report (highlighted on BBC).

They overtake Microsoft as the number one most powerful online brand as the latest top ten reveals:

1. Google
2. General Electric
3. Microsoft
4. Coca-Cola
5. China Mobile
6. Marlboro
7. Wal-Mart
8. Citi
9. IBM
10. Toyota

"The Brandz Top 100 is compiled by the consultancy Millward Brown, which combines balance sheet values with consumer sentiment."

I wonder if Bill Gates and Steve Bulmer are eating their words yet?