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.

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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These times have been replaced by a potential grave danger to your organizations reputation.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.

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“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.

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I want to grant you an insight into the possibilities which eBusiness holds in store and how you can utilize them.

Last week we looked at my favorite chapter “learning marketing from the porn industry” which really generated a lot of buzz to my inbox.

This week we’re going to have a look at how you can reduce your customer service costs significantly by implementing instruments for customer self help.

As the internet evolves so do the habits associated to it. One of these habits is that people will search on the web before they will call customer support most of the times because the questions they will have occur outside of regular business hours.

The obvious effect this will have on your business strategy is that it reduces your costs for both pre-sales and post-sales customer support if you manage to direct them to your online solution.

The fact no business development consultant or CEO will ever realize is that it will seriously enhance your websites visibility on the internet also because of the amount of input that is being generated around your products and services on your own website.

The quantity of this user-generated content will supersede anything you and your organization can produce in that amount of time.

Further it will be helpful to your customers because they will find workarounds, which you can integrate or include in your future releases of manuals, guides, etc.

Your customers may also find glitches and other minor faults in your products, which you can then avoid in further production.

Your next question will probably be how to create a FAQ, wiki, blog, etc.?

A section for frequently asked questions (FAQ) is the easiest thing and can consist of a simple page on your corporate web presentation.

When setting it up go ahead and scroll through your past emails, tickets submitted by phone, and ask your team to give you a list of questions which have been presented to them most frequently.

Sort them by the times they have been asked and then write a comprehensive and idiot-proof answer for this specific FAQ page.

Now that that is done, let’s go and save money with email queries you get.

As an email comes in, there are some words included in the mail, which can be highlighted to indicate what problem your customer has.

There are several software solutions out there which take care of this for you – some of them are even free.

So if a person submits a question as a support case, you have certain words highlighted and these will indicate that they have a problem with an issue which you have on the FAQ section of your website.

Now all you have to do is direct them there with an auto-responder email.

And this is where it saves you money because you reduce the duration for answering this email from a few minutes down to a few seconds, which will enable your staff to take care of a higher amount of trouble tickets in the same amount of time.

You can thus reduce personnel and save money.

Next let’s deal the pesky callers who have problems.

A short while back it would have been considered rude to ask a person to search the web for a problem.

But the times have changed and you can even “sell” searching your website as something better then calling you up.

If you have a product which people may have problems with, have a thorough documentation that goes along with it available on the web.

You will also have want to have similar publications at hand for reoccurring problems your customer care staff is confronted with regularly.

Your call center staff can then direct the incoming caller to this specific page on your website.

The call time will have reduced because they don’t have to explain the process or procedure a thousandth time, and the customer is happy because they have the solution ready on their screen.

As you can see, you only have to be a bit creative in projecting portals like this one onto the web platform.

But it is definitely possible to significantly reduce the costs for customer care without risking reputation or losing only one customer.

If you are interested in the details on how to evaluate and execute these plans my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) is available for purchase.

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The chapter “Customer Information Management” is the last one in the book and so we will close this reoccurring series with this one as well:

Information management has always been crucial to business strategy and learning to determine its value always underestimated.

One of these things constantly neglected is customer relationship management (CRM) and the information included therein.

The information has always been around and has been taken more of less seriously by the company owners even though it is very important to the success of a business.

This is immediate information and its value lies within the possibility of increasing sales simply by utilizing the information we hold about our customers.

The first and foremost important information are their contact details with which we can establish points of contact. These contact details would be – in order of costs involved in contacting – postal address, phone, and email.

Email, as pointed out above, will be the cheapest and thus most effective form of contact. Yet mailings are always a hard way to go because your customers have to opt-in or give their permission to be mailed.

The emails you send them should not consist of direct sales pitches, but rather of sales pitches hidden inside seemingly valuable information you give them for free.

You have to gain their trust on the signup page for the newsletter, and you have to explicitly point out that you will not spam, harass, or otherwise misuse their email address. Plus of course, you have to mention what differentiates YOUR newsletter from all the other ones, of which most are “evil”.

This will increase your chances that they will send this email they got from you to a friend who will then again sign up for your newsletter because it’s information their being fed with instead of sales pitches (of which they probably get hundreds a week).

Although I very well know the power of conventional mailings and phone acquisitions, I will not go into further detail because these topics are not really web related and go too far off topic.

Down the line, and if your business is ever up for sale in case of a merger or acquisition, the amount of information you hold about your customers and competitors will significantly improve the position you will be negotiating from.

The reason for this is that buyer of your company will be able to get business started immediately instead of having to search for new prospects, buy new leads lists, etc.

Another important thing to mention is that measures like these will significantly increase customer loyalty to your brand.

This will make sales way easier to begin with because if your sales staff can prepare themselves for a sales talk by reading the customer’s purchase history, maybe even preferences, chances of closing the sale will skyrocket simply because the customer has a better feeling.

The reason I asked the question when your customer’s daughter is turning 18 in the tag-line is because of an assignment I had a while back.

A car dealership for luxury automobiles wanted to increase sales.

It’s not like they were struggling but the CRM (customer relationship management system) they had in place was not really able to handle all the information they needed to increase sales.

Amongst others, I had them add fields to their customer database, which would capture the names and birthdays of their customer’s kids because of an experience I had while on the contract.

The daughter of a loyal customer came waltzing in one day as we were in a meeting. She was the typical spoiled brat yet her father was a wealthy personality, as most of their customers were.

As she started to look around the most prized models this dealership had to offer, it struck me…

“Since most of their customers were of that social class, and it is fairly easy to get your hands on the information of their kids names and birthdays during a sales talk, why not use this opportunity, save this information in the CRM and do a follow up with a presents basket and the offer for a free test drive around the time the kid turns 18 and get their drivers license?”

And this is only one of the things I worked out for them with the consequence that they not only drastically increased sales but also went way up in terms of customer satisfaction, which made them the number one dealership in that country.

So you see that the customer relationship management is a very important aspect of generating (e-) business and can be integrated into simple and easy to use web platforms.

Of course, everyone would be doing it if it were that simple. And like almost everywhere, we have a bottleneck. In this case we have the problem of convincing the sales staff to feed the CRM with the information you need to get this whole system off the ground because there is no immediate increase of profit for them.

I hope that you’ve not only learned a lot and gotten the chance to obtain a copy of my book but also had some fun reading through the lines I put together.

I don’t want to conclude this post without mentioning again that you please don’t hastily try to put together a web campaign by yourself. The reason is obvious as it is simple: there are professionals like myself you have a profound amount of knowledge about the topics we have touched in the last couple of weeks and who can help you to achieve leadership or polepositions on the web.

It would take years for someone to acquire this knowledge and a few more years to figure out which instruments work together how.

This brings be to the closing words for this post: if you intend to start an eBusiness campaign keep in mind that the instruments we have learned about are only successful if they are fitted together properly. No one instrument is going to significantly boost your business.

In that context – and if you haven’t done so – please buy my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) and read it closely to boost your business.

Lars

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This implies that they really know their stuff when it comes to branding, search engine optimization (another topic appearing in a few weeks), search engine marketing, etc.

So here we go:

It’s sad but it’s true: if there is one industry on the planet that is fighting for market-share more than any other, it’s the porn industry.

Naturally they are the ones you want to look at when it comes to doing good search engine campaigns, link building, link popularity etc.

Yet the issue we will be focusing on is another impressive and innovative thing they have done to get the attention of the customers they want to sell their non-free products to.

If you do a bit of research on a specific sexual practice, kink, fetish, or whatever you will find out that a lot of the highest-ranking search results are forums or other internet communities containing user contributed content.

User contributed content attracts a lot of search engine traffic because 10000+ users registered on a website with a discussion forum, personals, pictures, etc. can generate a lot more content a day than you will ever be able to. And the best part is that this content is highly diversified and free.

The reason these pages rank so high is because they appear to be informative communities, which have nothing to do with any company trying to distribute products over the web. For non-observant people this is true.

But if you pay attention to the advertisements placed on this website, you will soon find out that most of the links, banners, and what not link to one specific provider of sexually explicit content over and over again.

Ok, let’s get away from the nasty section and move to the good side of life again and what you can learn from this practice.

No, please do not go ahead, cash out a life insurance and create a porn portal. You’re lacking the experience, trust me.

Furthermore, let’s not forget the fact that advertising postage stamps on a website for shoe fetish will hardly have the effect you’re going to be expecting.

So let’s stick with the example that you are a retailer for specific, rare, regionally limited postal stamps. We now go back to draining that life insurance of yours and creating a portal for philatelists where they can discuss insights, share information, maybe even find interesting people over the web in other parts of the world.

Since you’re a philatelist and not only a philanthropist, we will have to create an ROI somewhere along the line to make this whole thing worthwhile.

This we achieve by using any available free space to place links, banners, and other advertisements to your online presentation which will not only lead 100% relevant traffic to your shop.

Also, your relevance in Google’s view will significantly go up because the portal we have created is linked throughout the web on several other portals, websites, and blogs through articles your community users have generated for you (free) and other users have posted elsewhere (free). See the win-win-win-situation here?

Since you have links there to the online shop where you sell your stamps, you will gain visibility too and may end up higher in search results.

The fact that you advertise on this platform will in the near future lead to the fact that other people from related businesses will try to buy advertising space on this website which will again increase the demand of this platform and increase the return of investment of this venture even more.

Just a side note here, but an important one: since you officially have nothing to do with this portal you could not care less what the people do on this portal.

Interested? Keep in mind that in my book “Adding the ‘E’ to your Business Strategy” ( Ebook | Paper Version | Amazon Kindle ) I point out that it’s inevitable that you have to combine all efforts pointed out therein to really make your appearence on the web count.

If you have questions please feel free to discuss them here or ask them directly be contacting me.

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Amongst these documents are secret evacuation routes of the US chief executive, Barack Obama.

While it is unknown whether the documents are recent or not the question about the capabilities of government is the issue that comes to focus because it’s not the only exceptionally embarrassing failure of e-government and related issues.

A short while back the BBC published an article in which they wrote about an external consultancy who’d lost a memory stick with the data of “thousands of criminals”, and the list of mishaps goes on and on.

I got my personal take on how responsible governments are handling data of their citizens when I ordered my new passport a year ago which required to submit biometrical data, amongst others my fingerprint. When I stood up to put my finger on the reader I caught a glimpse of Microsoft Windows XP Home running on the machine that was obviously going to store my data. If that doesn’t give you a “high security feeling” then I don’t know what does.

In several talks I’ve had with government entities the one thing I’ve learned is that the citizens are very skeptical when it comes to using e-government platforms. And who’s going to blame them considering all of these disasters taking place repeatedly.

The primary issue which all governments should be working on is establishing trust to their platforms, followed by hiring usability consultants because e-government portals in most cases have another major flaw: missing usability and accessibility.

What is your take on applied e-government?

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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?

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Note: this blog will remain up and running as a supportive feature to display and post associated material such as images, downloadable files, etc., yet the primary shift is going into the direction of audio.

Reasons? Simple: we are constantly moving forward to a mobile society and it has just proven to be impractical to run around with a laptop infront of your eyes. Sound in your ears just seems to be the better alternative.

In this context: WELCOME TO THE   N-E-W   WEB TACTICIAN – of which this introductory episode features an overview of the topics addressed in the future and the direction this blog/podcast combo is going to go.

Have fun and support me by writing me suggestions for improvement.

No related posts.

Lars Hilse is a Web Strategist, Speaker, Entrepreneur and Author, based in Germany.

In addition to giving us his perspective on the social networking scene in Europe, Lars discusses a wide range of topics, including the importance of good Customer Relationship Management Systems and simple, rewarding User Experience and Interface Design.

Lars has also been successful in using a variety of Social Networking sites, such as Ecademy, LinkedIn, Xing, Ryze and SiliconIndia to generate business on a global basis.

In this interview, he shares some of the techniques he’s been using to raise awareness of his personal profile, skills and experience – and how this has resulted in key consulting projects with clients from around the world.

[podcast]http://connections.thepodcastnetwork.com/audio/tpn_connections_20080601_032_Lars_Hilse.mp3[/podcast]

My Podcast Alley feed! {pca-6c2b49c87d49ef8caa5f1dfe4e8a9b6c}

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