First of all my utmost respect to the organizers of the conference for putting up such a great event. Given the fact that it was the first one I can only give my biggest kudos to the iStrategy crew.

See the web as a marketplace, not as a marketing instrument!

One of the primary things I have taken away from the event is that hardly any organization pays attention to what their website visitors experience once they have arrived. And even though this event was promoted solely around social media strategy, thus of course perceiving all the social media channels as marketing instruments, I can only repeat what I stated in the MeetTheBoss.tv interview: Please try to put yourself not only into the situation of the customer, but also move forward and start seeing the web as a marketplace, not only as a mean of marketing.

In my interview (for those that had to depart early or didn’t manage to make it to this great event at all) I stated a pretty plastic example; that what is being done now compares to running the energizer bunny through the city, catching everyone’s attention.

Those people will definitely visit your store, but if there is no sales staff there to engage with them your products can have all the value proposition they want and no one will buy, thus rendering the marketing efforts invested in this campaign(s) obsolete.

Wikipedia describes a market as “any structure that allows buyers and sellers to exchange any type of goods, services and information” and this is where you have to go people… the level of the web are customer centric web presentations allowing both customer initiated and proactive engagement from the side of organization running this web operation.

Real time website analytics, backed by behavioral targeting will allow you to pinpoint interested visitors, mark them as prospects and allow your sales staff to directly speak to them through a chat window which will appear on the visitors screen.

Just to give you an insight: I have been experimenting with proactive customer engagement instruments for the past 5 months and have seen two extreme results:

1. Once you initiate the chat window on your visitors screen roughly 40% immediately shut it and leave your site because they perceive their privacy to be invaded and they have never seen something like this before. Due to the fact that I see this kind of interaction to spread magnificently in the next months because of its simplicity however, I think that this rate will drastically reduce over the next 18 months.

2. The other 60% accept the chat request simply because you introduce yourself to them on the fact that you have seen their interest in the specific product/page they’re currently viewing and giving them the opportunity to ask questions they may have in context to this product. Questions which they would have not asked if you would have made them access the contact form (if you offer points of contact at all).

For those of you who would have expected the all healing solution in the post: I’m sorry to disappoint you at this point, but it’s not out there simply because your organization is too unique starting at the vertical you’re in and ending with factors like the mindset inside your company or enterprise and how willing the employees are to embrace new things or how keen they are to engage others.

Utilizing social media as an instrument for internal communication!

Social media has so much more to offer than what it’s primarily being (mis)used for by the companies out there today.

Another very interesting aspect is the internal usage to gain and preserve intellectual property, preventing/reducing the risk of – for instance – re-initiation of projects which have been worked on prior reducing process faults and costs resulting thereof.

An internal blog made available to the whole organization can not only enable horizontal communication which will allow you to spread innovative ideas immediately (and improve them through the discussions which inevitably are going to happen over time) but also catch other ideas for improvement of processes and organizational purposes.

As I have pointed out above, there is no all curing prescription drug which will take care of all your needs. And nor is Microsoft’s Sharepoint!!!1

Corporate Online Reputation Management (CORM)

Nothing is as bad as leaving something uncommented. And why should you? I have just recently found out that pretty much none of the fortune 500 companies of the world listen to what is being said about them on Twitter.

While I could understand that not all channels can be monitored (which is also a lie) Twitter is one of the “hottest” portals.

Don’t see it as negative energy being spread about you on the web but see it as an opportunity to engage with a customer, thus strengthening your relationship with them. Don’t believe me? Well, give it a try. It works, trust me. John McCrea does a magnificent job with it on Plaxo, so why shouldn’t you or Lufthansa, or Bose, or Allianz Global Investors?

Beside the fact that you directly engage with the customer however, you can catch a lot of FREE!!! (That’s the thing without paying millions for people collecting market intelligence for you) customer feedback. Not only what your customers think about your products but also where you should go to have a look for more info about you which you may have not been able to assess which may be stashed in a third party discussion board, blog, etc. Oh yeah, did I mention that THIS INFORMATION IS FREE?

BOTTOM LINE!

Yes, the iStrategy is definitely worthwhile, especially to those organizations which have not undergone any efforts of implementing social media into their marketing strategy. (IMPORTANT: the marketing strategy is only ONE PART of what you should do. Don’t forget the: the objective of social media marketing is to drive customers to you. Don’t make the mistake and leave alone in your desolate virtual warehouse, a. k. a. your website!)

Should you join the next one? Pretty much so.

The value proposition is there, loud and clear and it will most likely give you important insights into the market (and hey, I’m probably going to speak there).

And if you don’t learn anything there is still the possibility to network with some really big people there from several industries.

Even if I repeat myself: there is no golden rule. The more individual your strategy is the more authentic it will come across. Copying is not really the solution. But copying for inspiration and then making it better definitely is an idea to pursue.

For any questions you may have please comment them to this post and/or use my contact info to reach out to me. Or follow @lars_hilse on twitter.

Germany’s government was offered to buy records of the Swiss subsidiary of the British HSBC.

These records, which were offered for 2.5 million EUR,  contain data about German citizens who have placed money in Switzerland to avoid taxes.

The database was definitely illegally acquired, supposedly offered by a former IT specialist with HSBC who now lives anonymously in southern France and whose identity is being withheld by French authorities.

France, to which similar data has been offered in the past, denies Switzerland’s request to give up the suspect for prosecution.

Of course withholding taxes is a crime, yet the ethical indifference whether a Government should buy stolen data to profit from it, thus encouraging cyber terrorism is more than worth a thorough discussion.

The biggest threat is on the INSIDE

10 years ago you would have had a good chance of catching your employee walking out the door with a batch of files. Today all a person needs to put your entire organization at stake is an inexpensive thumb drive which will allow them to steal and expose a pretty significant amount of your organizations data – if not all of it – because everything is stored, archived and managed electronically, most of the time for convenience sake. This also makes it convenient for thieves.

Increasing the risk is that you are hardly able to buy computers without USB ports anymore, yet you can deactivate them by using software, minimizing the first and most obvious risk.

However, first thing’s first and the most obvious thing is that most organizations grant their employees free access to all of their files.

This risk can be reduced by deploying an MLSEC, or multi level security guideline giving them access to the files they need to work with and only allowing them access to these files for the duration they actually need them. You may have heard the data classification terms Top Secret, Secret, and “need to know” basis before in movies. This is exactly what is being described therein.

One measure which is more of a deterrent than an actual preemptive measure is logging file access, meaning that each and every file access is logged to their ID including time, date and what they did with it. True, this will not keep them from taking the files but presents a barrier for some to breach knowing that they’re being scrutinized.

These – and other, more individual measures – were implemented by me in a large, US based law firm upon one employee taking important case files with them.

More info on the whole topic and how it can help your organization is available upon personal request.

Since the term is pretty plastical: especially in the times we’re in now, where an employee’s stay in a company can very well last a few months only, it would be more than pesky to not only have to let the human resource go. But along with them goes the information they have ascertained while in your organization in – perhaps even paid position – and during the time your business has spent on training them. Worst case: they’re going to take it to your direct competitor.

Knowledge management can’t prevent people from leaving your organization but it can help you keep track of things worked out, thus conserving the intellectual property. And well organized intellectual property is worth millions to potential investors.

The implementation of knowledge management solutions requires a lot of know-how. The deployment of the system should be – regardless of the size of the organization – preceded by the creation of a requirements and specifications documentation upon which the vendor will be selected and which determines what optimizations have to be made to the setup of the system to ensure the maximization of the return of investment made towards the system.

Knowledge management can be useful even for one-man operations, especially in context to the ever growing demand of information involved in our day-to-day operations.

Make sure to talk to us before you start collecting knowledge that you’ll probably end up never finding again.

Upon my speech at the Joomla!Dag in Utrecht in 2008 – and afterwards – I talked to several people about CPC and their thoughts about it.

The bottom line was that CPC only – if at all – is successful for impulse products. Thus for products that are “small” in terms of not requiring and reading verbose introductions, are known to people, or are just affordable things.

When it comes to offering services that need a more in-depth demo, you better make sure to have interactivity in form of video, sales presentations and so forth to give your product the personal note and to make your organization seem “accessible” and transparent because a majority of customers shopping the web are still sceptic when it comes to purchasing costly merchandise over the web.

What has your experience been with online advertising campaigns and their results?

I think that yesterday marked my most interesting experience in terms of customer -service.

Because my DSL was down  I called Deutsche Telekom’s customer support.

While on hold (for 10 minutes) I was suggested to alternatively visit their website for help.

Now, generally I would have done so, simply because I don’t really appreciate hanging around on hold with some call center where the answers you get are quite doubtable by themselves – but how, without a connection to the internet because they screwed up?

To those who are just about to start defending their initiative: no, this was not a general hotline phone number but one dedicated to problems with DSL connections.

Merry Christmas from Lars Hilse and all the people working with and for us to make the digital economy a better place on a daily basis.

True, this year was not one of the best years for a lot of us, yet most of our clients were able to maintain, some were even able to strengthen their position and profit from the financial crisis.

Initiated by the holiday season we are able to reflect on what has happened and focus on the primary commodity in life: TIME.

Other than money and other material aspects, time can’t be replaced once wasted.

From all of us here we hope that you get to spend some quality time with your loved ones and that your holidays will give you a some time to take a deep breath to get ready for the year that lies ahead of us.

Enterprise Content Management for internal communication, knowledge management and conservation of corporate intellectual property – yes, also for small and medium sized enterprises!

The nature of ECM or enterprise content management is – as the name reveals – to make data once worked on accessible to future projects in order for the organization to save money. At least if they’re not being misused for communication purposes dedicated to reaching out to the customers. There are better solutions out there for that.

One of the primary advantages should be that the access to information is easier than it would have been on paper.

While this proves to be true from a decentralization aspect and that the data is accessible even in the most remote branch office, a lot of organizations don’t or hardly dedicate time and budget on installing sufficient search servers in the system which make finding the information, once it’s been archived, easier or possible in the first place.

Another problem is presented to organizations through the lack of understanding by their team, who simply don’t acknowledge that value of adding search words when archiving the documents or – if forced to do so by the systems setup – will enter no more than rubbish just to get rid of the error message.

As to many problems I’m confronted with in my work there is no one-size-fits-all-solution out there; especially in context to the factor of human failure I’ve outlined above each situation is unique, as is the organization I work with.

However, some general advice would be that upon deployment of an ECM platform make sure that you’ve checked with the vendor and maybe with someone that knows their stuff around search engines (not necessarily your IT-staff) that the search engines included in the ECM are good enough to meet your needs.

Another important factor would be whether documents (PDF, Word files, etc.) can be search natively by the system and actually show up in search results. The alternative would be to mark the documents with keywords upon uploading them which bears the risk of employees not taking this seriously or important words not being included thus making the whole effort invested obsolete.

I’m thinking of dedicating a whole white paper to the whole corporate intellectual property management section in the future.

Let me know whether there is raised interest on this issue.

A few years ago it was the German media proclaimed that blogs had no future simply because they would give away too much information about the users and that they could not be kept private.

I have found my blog to be a most valuable platform – and so do my over 5000 subscribers.

Yesterday I was shocked to see that they haven’t learned and that the witch-hunt seems to continue: only with a different “witch”.

Now German media outlets, especially the Westdeutscher-Rundfunk (Government-related tv station), has repeatedly aired programs which totally falsify information in context to social networks.

Therein they stated that the information which people upload and enter on to social networks are indexed by search engines instead of the truth that they are only searchable if I the user decide that they should be.

A long line of arguments followed, totally torn out of context, but the primary indicators that this piece of “information” was not really true was that Facebook had 2 million members.

While this may be true for Germans registered on Facebook it was not mentioned by the network that they have a few million more.

If this trend of negative propaganda should continue I think a lot of German companies will endanger their competitiveness on the global markets as they have done with not embracing blogs. Most German companies could be doing better in terms of search engine score and public relations work if they were to utilize these and other great instruments out there.

Let’s see what the next trend in 2010 will be and what stories German media outlets will come up with to demonize those.

I’m going to be guest on a show called Internet Business Strategies.

The show airs on several stations in the United States and will be streamed here.

Feel free to ask questions on +1 303 872 0503 or post your question on Twitter @rcrn .

Airtime is 3 P.M. eastern, noon pacific.