Social Animals

Neither of my kids run an internet business.  They don’t run websites.  They aren’t interested in SEO (search engine optimization).

And yet when I google their names (just first name and last name), my daughter ranks #1 and my son is listed on the first page.

I suspect he’d rank higher if it weren’t for the fact that Jeff Winter is a relatively common name. There’s also a famous “voice over” person named Jeff Winter and a famous Premiere League Soccer Referee by the same name.

And yet, BOTH are on page 1.

Without even trying.

They did it just by using their Facebook accounts. If that doesn’t tell you that social media is a powerful way to be discovered by the search engines, then you’re living in the 1990s.

Don’t abandon tweaking your keywords, managing your link juice BUT start building and participating in online communities now before you’re lost in the crowd.  Social media allows your brand message to spread virally and the search engine rankings will take care of themselves.

The next generation simply takes it for granted.

Perhaps we should too.

Is Anyone Considering Windows 7 for Business?

This is a question I’ve been asking myself for some time now.  PC Magazine has an article of the pros and cons of a Windows 7 upgrade decision.

After reading it, I can’t imagine anyone making the decision to upgrade.

We’ll be sticking with XP for the foreseeable future and when someone needs a new PC, they’ll run XP from terminal services. We’re getting out of the PC upgrade business.  Too much effort for too little gain.

Crush It!

Just spent the past 3 hours devouring Gary Vaynerchuk’s new book, entitled Crush It! Tomorrow I’m going to lock our marketing department in the boardroom and read it to them aloud.

While the book is targeted at entrepreneurs, I think that established companies like ours can use many of the tips in this book to help make the the transition from traditional marketing tools to social media, trust building and permission marketing.

Tweet This

Today Guy Kawasaki posted a presentation outline on Twitter Marketing. It was just too good not to pass along.

Did You Know? 4.0

It’s amazing how quickly these stats go out of date. For instance the current number of iPhone apps is >85,000. Still interesting to watch, though.

If PowerPoint and MindMap had a child…

It would be called Prezi. Prezi is an online service which allows you to mindmap out the ideas you want to communicate, then link them in a logical order after the fact.

Here’s an example of how it’s done..

Repurpose! Repurpose! Repurpose!

Last Friday a friend reminded me of one of the essential axioms of web content.  Repurpose it!

If your content is video or audio (podcast), make sure you transcribe it.  Content rich conversations aren’t crawled by search engines (yet).

Even if no one reads the transcription, the content keywords could lead customers to your site.

Thanks Gene.

Theater of the Mind

Yesterday Seth Godin gave a shout out to RadioLab, an outstanding NPR radio production. I hope his tribe follows the link and donates generously to keep their efforts going.

I took the time to listen to one show and can assure you that I’ll return for more.  In the age of the internet it’s amazing how well the podcast/radio medium hold up.

The quality of the production and the genre reminded me of a favorite Uncle, who many decades ago, used to write, produce and present a weekly 15 minute radio show on the CBC, called The Rod and Charles Show. Thanks to the interwebs, a quick Google search retrieved a couple of shows.

Here’s one example from radiolovers.com.

Rod & Charles were doing some outstanding work back in the dark ages.  Uncle Charles passed away several years ago.  It was good to hear his voice once again.

I guess we all have a permanent legacy thanks to the web.

Getting Your Hooks In

In my former life, I’ve worked for a major Canadian Bank and a major North American insurance company.  The one thing that both these companies had in common was a basic understanding of how they could increase customer loyalty.

For the bank, one way was to encourage customers to sign up for automatic payroll deposits and automated bill paying.  For a small fee, customers could bring their bills into the bank and we’d setup an automatic debit from whatever account they’d designate.  No more late fees EVER.  No need to write a check.  It took the burden off our customers to remember to pay the bill, make sure they had a stamp etc etc.  It was a convenience for them and a small (service fee) moneymaker for the Bank.

But it was far more than that.  This service provided customer value on its face, but was far more beneficial for the bank because it was a huge barrier to change.

If one of our tellers was having a bad day and ticked off a customer, the customer had to think long and hard about packing up shop and moving across the street to a competitor because we were already paying his bills for him.  This isn’t to say that you can abandon customer service – of course not.  But we found that customers who trusted us to pay their bills were far more likely to become a long term customer than those who didn’t.

The insurance industry knows the same secret.  The more product lines they can sell you (home, car, motorcycle, life) the better the chances you’ll become a long term customer.  Even in the face of rising premiums on one line, multi-line customers were reluctant to move their business.

Apparently this is a well kept secret from a large financial services company I was speaking to last week.

We use this company for customer credit reporting.  At the moment, our accounting department purchases an annual subscription to allow us to log into a website and print off credit reports for prospective customers.  My radical idea was to automate this credit lookup into our quoting and order entry process.  Like FedEx or UPS, I wanted to be able to pass a number to our supplier, and have their systems return relevant information.

After three conversations with our sales rep, we determined that my idea was possible…

For an additional $13,000.  Per year.

To put things into perspective, that represents a 60% increase in our annual fee.  They wouldn’t provide us with any additional credit information – just automated access.

I was willing to spend the time to integrate their service into our processes and they put up huge barriers to that.  They had an opportunity to “get their hooks in” and blew it.  Instead of breaking down information access barriers, they were putting them up.  Had they offerred this capability for free and we integrated this function into our systems, they would have created another internal advocate within their client organization.

Instead they took a pass.

Never miss a chance to get your hooks in.  New customers are just too hard to find.

Weigh in! Is your company using social media?