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.

I hope you are as excited as I am about this chapter from my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ).

My editor (not the one that disappeared ) called this a true eye opener and upon  the idea founded the company Online Reputation Management, which I am a part of.

It is truly amazing how many people are unaware of how fast bad news can spread about a company online. And how fast it can endanger the whole brand and image.

So here we go on to the chapter “Corporate Online  Reputation Management”:

Remember the good old days when – if negative news were published by a credible newspaper – you would contact your legal counsel and tell them to take the appropriate measures, which would consist of a restraining order or something of that nature?

These times have been replaced by a potential grave danger to your organizations reputation. A danger you can’t counter with the conventional methodologies utilized back then because its nature is not conventional either.

The threat I am talking about is called social media and can ruin your reputation in a matter of days.

It was in early 2008 and a tool called Twitter at the brink of its breakthrough when I first mentioned what is today known as corporate reputation management.

Back then I closed the link by suggesting that upon negative news popping up about an organization on the web, one assigned person will take action by immediately contacting the person complaining, regardless if their complaint was legitimate or not.

To illustrate this process with an example let’s just say that one of your clients is dissatisfied with the service provided by your organization and boasts out a complaint about that on the web.

Now, this can be through their blog in the best case because you have time to react and they can remove or alter that entry when your reputation management staff picked up on and resolved the issue together with the client.

Worse would be if they published their opinion on highly frequented places like micro-blogging platforms where the viral effect is way more likely to take effect simply because they can’t be stopped and even if the clients problem is solved, the good news are unlikely to pick up with the same magnitude.

In all cases the ideal outcome for everyone involved would be that the person who complained in the first place replaces what they have written with the story of how great your customer service is because they got back to them immediately.

Chances that this happens are fairly high because the people are – up until now – not used to this kind of behavior and reaction by support staff.

While back then it took a few hours the tools available today make information surrounding your organization available to you the instant they are published.

Through so-called real time search engines, to which you can submit searches and are informed the instant someone, somewhere says something about you, and this whole topic becomes even more interesting for you as an organization.

This immediate access allows you or your representatives to take immediate action against negative issues being published about you on the web.

Wow, we’re getting close to the end already. Only three topics left and then we’ve got everything covered. Time flies when you’re having fun.

“Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) has become a major success and shown a lot of entrepreneurs and senior executives what eBusiness is about and which potential it holds. And I’m really happy about having made such a major contribution.

Last week we looked at how you can reduce costs for customer service. But what if something goes wrong with customer service and your customer shouts out negative news about your company on the web, thus endagering your reputation?

That’s what next weeks topic “Corporate Online Reputation Management” is going to be about.

Today we’re going to look at “What makes Corporate Blogging important”. The primary differentiator is that a “normal” website will have a static number of pages with content as opposed to a blog which has an ever increasing number. Where are the benefits?

See for yourself:

First of all let’s go ahead and describe the words included in this phrase. The first one, corporate, is pretty obvious. The second word will have definitely crossed your path in the past but you have not been able to associate it to anything for you meaningful.

The word blog derives from weblog, which is a web-based and very user-friendly portal where people can share their experiences, and their endeavors on the internet. Sort of like the captains log from Star Trek only it’s very easy and user friendly to publish on.

So it’s a place where you keep things you have discovered during your journeys through the web and share these interesting things with others.

The most significant thing about these web-based systems from a corporate point of view is that they are very search engine friendly, which means that the pages are very easy to index by our friends Google and co.

Another important thing to mention is that every blog post (synonym for log entry) you make will be rated by Google as a single page added to your corporate website.

So each and every time you publish something to our blog, it will be indexed by Google, people will (hopefully) search for this specific thing on the web, and visit your website as potential new leads or customers for your business, just because it popped up as the first search result.

I explicitly want to mention here that you only want to blog (write articles) about relevant issues regarding and in context to your business because otherwise you not only disappoint yourself but also your visitors.

The more relevant your content is, the higher the chances that your visitors will republish your post throughout the web on other blogs and websites which will increase your visibility both for search engines and for the human eye.

Now let’s sum up what we have learned: your blog will act like putting out the hook when you’re fishing because it will attract a lot of new relevant visitors (traffic) by drawing them to your online presence through relevant articles you have published therein.

Since you have an ever-increasing number of articles or posts, you will steadily increase your visibility on the web through relevant search terms or phrases.

For some successful blogs it is fair to say, that they have created a community around their corporate presentation on the web, significantly increasing the awareness of their brand.

So the people come to your site and read an explanation for a product or how it is associated to your business. In this article you raise their interest and they will buy your products or at least write you an email demanding to know more about your services.

The question you’re probably going to ask me is: what’s the price tag on this neat little thing that can get you rich? Well, it’s not as expensive as you’d have expected.

The creation of a blog should go along with a total re-haul of your website and will run something between $6000 and open-end, depending on how you want it done and how fancy it should look, feel and what you want to do with it.

My experience has been though, that you can easily calculate a return of investment of several 100% upon the thing going live and it having started the buzz on the web and your customers.

One more thing that might catch your attention: blogs and other systems bring along a nifty feature which is called Real Simple Syndication, or RSS. You may not be familiar with the term yourself, but many of your customers are going to be.

You can see whether a site is RSS capable through the orange symbol, which looks similar to that of a Wi-Fi hotspot or something along the line.

This RSS feed, as it’s called, allows your users to subscribe to your blog/news feed and will keep them updated on posts you have published which may either be relevant to their interests or news happening around your organization.

At the first view this feature may seem pretty unspectacular, but if you consider that a user who has subscribed to this feed (they can also do so via email) will automatically be notified of news, this offers a good point of contact for you to reach out and talk to them, offer them special deals, coupons – you get the picture.

Other than the outdated email newsletter, subscribing to an RSS feed leaves total control of the subscription in the hands of the user which will increase your subscription not only in the number of communication channels you offer them, but also because the trust in email newsletters has vanished for it was misused for such a long time.

Ok, this one was pretty technical. But as I have pointed out repeatedly: don’t try this at home because you could be setting yourself up for failure if you don’t know what you’re doing.

In next weeks chapter we will be looking at “Corporate Online Reputation Management” from “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ).

My editor called that chapter a real eye opener. So stay tuned and encourage your friends to join as this information is really new to most.

Remember how last week I told you about website analytics? And the week before that about diversifying operational risk through web campaigns?

While we go through the chapters of my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) please keep in mind that you will not be able to achieve web leadership if you don’t combine all instruments I mention herein.

Every single one is important, yes. But only the combination of all of them alike will bring you the success your competitors are having.

Let’s move on to todays chapter, which is called “Taking your business from local to global for a few thousand bucks”:

Fifteen years ago it was mandatory to set up physical shop if you wanted to expand your business to another country; heck, even if you wanted to do business in another city or state.

You as a business owner are blessed with this situation in the current technological era.

And I say this in reference to the fact that you have the internet as a global and most cost-efficient market place, giving you access to 1.2 billion potential customers worldwide.

You further have the friendly logistic professionals in their purple/orange, brown, or yellow cars and planes who will bring your goods to any given destination on earth – if need be within 24 hours, sometimes even less than that. And that’s not all.

So what’s involved when taking your business international?

As I pointed out earlier you really have to sit down and do your homework.

For instance: different countries have different laws and legal issues, which can easily break your neck. Yes, I mean break your neck.

So figuring out whether you are allowed to export/ship your goods to the country you’re targeting is really helpful to know.

Another, probably the primary factor, is that you have to attract business in this country. Since you have decided to set up shop without a physical shop, we have to raise awareness of your products otherwise.

This can be most easily done through direct or indirect search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns.

While a direct SEO campaign will involve the translation of your complete website and the services and widgets it may include, an indirect SEO campaign will try to attract new customers or prospects to your services via so called link bait.

Let’s take an example: your website is available in the languages English and Spanish and you target the US domestic market with its 300 million citizens, a majority of those being potential customers to your business.

Beside that you are already reaching out to a significant part of the world’s population because those two are the most spoken languages.

Naturally though, hardly anyone from a country with a dominant language, for instance France, will submit their searches to Google in English or Spanish but in French, even though they speak English and/or Spanish fluently.

So what you do is an analysis of this countries habit in reference to entering search terms.

After having ascertained the results from this study, you will most likely want to go ahead and create bits and pieces of bait on the internet.

In our example these will be terms searched for by the world’s French speaking population.

So when someone submits a search query to Google in French, they will wind up not directly on your website, but on a website you have put bait on and which has a link – let’s call it the hook – back to your website.

This way, you’ll be able to attract this specific person to your website, products, or services in your native language without having to go through the hassle of translating your online presentation entirely, but can just profit from an indirect SEO campaign.

By taking this approach and only translating to the most dominant languages (as the buying power of these countries inhabitants will be higher), you’ll reach Europe’s 500+ million citizens and pretty much the rest of the world.

If you want to find out how you can make this plan happen for your organization please don’t hesitate to buy my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) where you will find out how you can analytize the current situation and make the right decisions.

Next week we’re going to move on my favorite chapter, “learning marketing from the porn industry”. That one is so exciting because the sleazy people really know their stuff when it comes to web marketing. So stay tuned people and make sure to tell your friends about me!

In my book, “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” I dedicated a chapter to online reputation management.

I stated therein that a single person with enough online influence can ruin your corporate reputation just by posting something on the social web.

It so occurred that companies became aware of that phenomenon and service providers popped up, which monitor the web 24/7 in search for negative news.

But not only service providers are taking care of this vital issues, but many companies try to achieve so themselves as Alaska Airlines proved in a very good way last week on Twitter.

An actor boasted out the complaint:

Hey @AlaskaAir you cant just cancel flights & then say, “Sorry”! & not help people get to their destination. Not cool. Fix yr planes, jerks.

complaint about a flight being cancelled which he was apparently booked on.

Note: this exploit was published on June 25th at 19:41 (CET – GMT+2).

Generally this would not have been a problem. But as you can see on the image, this user has an outreach to nearly one million people following him and his updates on the social stream.

Alaska Airlines, who apparently use a tool called CoTweet to intervene to cases like this on the social web, did not even take one minute to reply directly and openly to this complaint.

The consequence of them replying open resulted in their question showing up in context to the users profile so that followers or Wilson were able to monitor the discussion taking place and be impressed by the responsiveness which Alaska Airlines was displaying.

Their reply

@rainnwilson What’s the flight #?

took place online one minute later on June 25th at 19:42 (CET = GMT+2) and led to a discussion which could be followed publicly.

Because of the significant visibility of this user this incident could have easily led to a remarkable decrease of Alaska Air’s reputation.

But since they have done such a remarkle job on monitoring what is being said about them on the social web, especially on Twitter which is one of the largest and most frequented platforms, they were able to prevent worse things from happening.

What do yu think? Is online reputation management something you should dedicate more time to?

Although I officially started my web career in 2006 the internet and all associated to it has been my passion since I got my first connection to the world wide web.

The more skills and knowledge I ascertained about the internet, the more anger arose in me whenever I saw poor presentations on the web.

Yet it wasn’t particularly the anger at the presentations themselves but primarily the outcries of the owners who were desperate to earn money off these presentations looking like crap.

This presentation (CLICK) contains the most common errors made when creating a web campaign and solutions on how you can improve yours.

Among many others it addresses the topics

• search engine optimization,
• user interface design,
• the importance of web analytics,
• etc.

Happy easter holidays

Lars

When it comes to political elections I personally trust no one and – like pretty much always – base my opinion on the independent media sources, which are primarily internet based.

When I was looking into who was going to make the race in the US presidential elections I was upon my search on Google, directed to a German news site of a conceivably free television station.

I was presented with the result that McCain was supposed to have around 46% or the electoral votes as of October 18th.

Having been made aware of the Islandic project “If The World Could Vote“, which is in part managed by my good friend Hjortur Smarason, I also checked there, expecting that the results would be at least similar. The project, by the way, assumes that anyone of the over 6 billion citizens of the world could give their vote, electing the next president in the USA.

Rolling my cursor over the USA revealed a staggering 18,8% of the voters who had given their voice to McCain.

The initial question which arose was whether one of these sources had somehow miscalculated the information because of the massive discrepancy between the results found.

Investigating further sources on the mass media presented similar presentations of the percentages while looking more into the independent media scene showed a clear trend towards McCain’s opponent Obama.

Of course we have to consider that “only” a small minority of the US citizens had voted on the independent platform. Maybe these, apparent internet users, are the more educated because of their web access?

Have a nice weekend

Lars

as always, it depends on the budget. The most successful portals out there were not built on pre-packed solutions but are unique systems which focus solely on the group of people it was intended for.

Furthermore, you may want to invest a lot of time into determining what your group wants and how they want it conveyed to them. I am addressing issues like usability, etc.
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The simplest thing you can do is to setup a bulletin board system like pointed out earlier, which can be your first line customer service. This will allow you to participate in the discussion and the whole thread will lead to a solution.

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