Social Media and International Trade

I have been developing a website for an international client this week. This client is a lovely Dutch lady, running a business in Spain that helps other Dutch folk settle and find work in Spain. A perfectly sensible business, Holland, a nation across the channel shares our dire weather and tens of thousands of them flee the weather to take advantage of the Iberian peninsula's endless summer. The website will be finished soon and it will go on the portfolio section of the New Reckless New Media website, due to be launched in September.

This whole process has made me think about how international the internet has made business. I think nothing of ordering something of Amazon US or buying some piece of tat from Chinese E Bay. On a larger scale, service based companies are looking to overseas markets as opportunities to sell virtual versions of their various services. We live in an age of international webinars, web based e-learning solutions and a number of social media events.

That's not to say that it is altogether easy to win international clients or to offer them a service similar to what you offer your local customers. In this case, although the client speaks perfect English, the website has to be in Dutch so simple things like the calendar function, something that we would usually have used an off the shelf application to implement needed to be hacked to represent Dutch names for months and days. Still these are not major obstacles and lessons that need to be learned if we are going to do more business with international clients. I am currently discussing doing a recruitment related website with a Lahore based company. We communicate with Skype and email but the time difference is a bit of an obstacle making our email discussions rather drawn out.

As a sales person, I intend to do all I can to increase my client base and at the moment it seems to me that there is an appetite out there for British Web Design. I am not going to suggest that I understand the reason for this for this phenomenon but it does seem that Social media has been the key to opening the door to international trade for Reckless New Media.

I am a big fan of linkedIn as a base for cultivating a powerful network of clients colleagues and prospects. I have found that a number of international leads have come from some of the groups that I belong to and naturally these leads open doors to further opportunities. Naturally I have a pretty organised approach to social media, I know why I am there and what I am looking for. That is not to say that I am mercenary in my posting as that is a major turn off. The great thing about social media is you get to communicate with people who ordinarily would have put the phone down on a cold call but are happy to engage in a discussion on how to better market their company on-line or how to generate more leads etc.

Twitter is also a favourite in our office. It is to some degree a recreational instrument in that we do have a lot of fun with it and the majority of our tweets do not have a commercial objective. They do however create a vibe or energy in the office and about our team. Outsiders who follow us, many of whom are customers and prospects get to know us better. What we watch on TV, what we like to eat and what we do on the weekend. I feel that this forges a link between us and is a form of virtual bonding, pre meeting small talk if you will.

I would really like to hear from readers what they have achieved for their business through social media. I would especially enjoy receiving any tips as to how I can help my clients grow their business through social media. As it is such a young phenomenon, there are new opportunities being presented nearly every day.

If you would like to chat with me about making social media a part of your marketing mix, I will be only too happy to hear from you. My email address is matthew@recklessnewmedia.com

Happy Socialising

How to feel the love on the Internet.

Fridays are good days for most people and I am no different. I find myself feeling quite irrepressible most Fridays. Every other week I attend a Friday morning breakfast networking group at the Ramada Hotel in Christleton. I hasten to add that Friday is the only day of the week I can see myself cheerfully getting up and out of the house for the 6:45 am meeting. Friday is also the day I get my graze.com box and is is a costly but very much enjoyed mid morning treat at the end of the week. graze.com's business model is perfect for an internet business. Following in the footsteps of web businesses trailblazer LOVEFILM, the subscription model is great for keeping your customers engaged.

There are a few sneaky tricks that both graze.com and LOVEFILM use to keep their customers even if they have been inclined to wander. In a very cosseting and friendly way, both have a number of steps to their unsubscribe process. Unlike so many obstructive services that make it complicated and clumsy to unsubscribe, these two warmly ask you if you are sure you want to leave, would you not rather take a cheaper price plan or perhaps a one month holiday. These phases of the process are done with care and a level of customer service (being provided virtually) that many a high street retailer would envy.

Lets have a look at the customer interaction model and see what makes it tick and why it makes customers like us stick.

The rating and suggestions functionality. This is a very powerful part of a user experience. If done well, it makes the customer feel like a loved member of the family and their favourite uncle has selected a movie that he is sure you would love to watch or your grandmother has carefully selected a box of health yet delicious treats just for you. Conversly if its done badly, it is alienating and foreign and a damning reflection of the company as a cheesy supermarket check out flashing KitKats and Mars bars at you and everyone else in the vague hope that you give in to cheap temptation.

By being able to rate, recommend or slate a product, the customer is also empowered to engage with the host. The host then uses the customers activity to further refine their preferences and enhance the customer experience. As a result I have now seen all of the movies that Clint Eastwood has ever made as was my original intention but I was also introduced to a non Eastwood movie that somehow I had overlooked, "Once Apon a Time in the West". An epic movie that is now my absolute favourite thanks to a LOVE FILM referral.

Making good use of customer data is vital to the continued success of these companies and doubtless they pour over website statistics and visitor tracking to continually improve the customer journey and visitor conversion rate. Making good use of visitor statistics should not be left to the ground breaking internet entrepreneurial businesses. Any company that has a website can and should use visitor tracking. Google analytics is free and very powerful! I have no hesitation in encouraging any one responsible for their companies marketing activity to get conversant with it and unleash the power of the internet.

Getting a feel for visitor behaviour will enable you to establish which part's of your website are performing well and where you may need to freshen up your message. It is also a good way to track the effectiveness of your direct marketing messages. Tracking your performance month by month will enable you to identify long term trends that if used with a suitable marketing spend matrix could help you to save money on marketing or even better use it where and when it is most productive. Most of these point apply equally to on-line advertising through Pay Per Click but that is another matter.

Returning to the good example of LOVEFILM in recent months they have introduced the facility for members to view entire film online. To a subscriber, this feel like free content. To a movie lover its just heaven. Most of the movies that are available to "watch now" are older more quirky movies that have a cult following. Generally the type of movie that my wife gets annoyed if I try to make her sit through if I want to watch them in the living room with her.

This concept of free content took me back to something I read a few years ago in a Jeffrey Gitomer sales book. Jeffrey says that instead of trying to sell to your customers and prospects every time you see them, rather try and give them something of value. Or something that you have to give and they would value. The underlying truth here is that no one likes to be sold to but everyone like to buy things. If you can arrange things so that your customers come to you for free information, guidance and advice, the likelihood is that they will come to you to buy too. What is more there is a strong possibility they will feel good about it as you are now a vendor they can trust rather than a slick salesman that has liberated a few thousand of their precious pounds. Start thinking about what you can give away for free!

As an example, I would like to highlight the financial comparison websites such as moneysupermarket.com or comparethemeercat.com financial products are a very competitive market and brokers can be a bit dog eat dog and a little sly with their sales tactics. But with these heroes of on-line finance give you their expertise for free, not only do they regularly blog very sound consumer advices, they host financial forums and supply real answers to their customers needs free of charge, added to that they give people the freedom to choose the best solution for their needs and pockets. I never buy my insurance or arrange a credit card anywhere else

This has been my something free and I hope it has been informative. What is more, I hope it has been a special Friday treat for my lovely family of contacts, followers, colleagues and lastly but most importantly me customers.

To find out more about the work that I do visit www.recklessnewmedia.com or connect to me on LinkedIn.

Happy Friday Everybody

What is SEO

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

SEO is about driving more visitors to your website through organic search results. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing send out search bots into the vastness of the internet, to scan the billions of pages of content therein.

The first and most important element of SEO is to ensure that your website is build to W3C standards and as such is inviting and accommodating to the search bots. All of our websites are built to these standards so that they are the perfect basis to begin an SEO campaign.

SEO is not a mystery; there are no secrets and dark arts involved. SEO is all about getting good relevant content onto the internet and securing quality back links. This said, it is a time-consuming task and the more competitive the search terms related to your product, the more man-hours of SEO will be required to bring about results.

As effective as SEO is, it is not the quickest way to boost your visitor count. It takes 3 to 6 months of effort for an SEO campaign to start to show results and you would expect your campaign to pay for itself after one year. The good thing about SEO is that once your website has risen in the search listings, it takes a concerted effort by a competitor to remove it.

SEO is an investment in marketing your brand just as much as print or AV advertising and is most successful as part of a concerted campaign. The most attractive element of online marketing however is that fact that all visits are trackable through Google analytics so you can easily monitor the effectiveness of the campaign asses the quality of the new hits your campaign brings.

Some companies are offering SEO services at very low rates and they can indeed increase the number of visits your website gets. The difference is however the quality of those links. When one of our experienced SEO personnel takes on a project, we ensure that we deliver quality results by ensuring that all our blogging, back links and social media work is contextual and relevant. This means that the people who do visit your website are more likely to be interested in what is on your website than someone who was lead there by a low cost SEO company.

Beware too of companies that offer quick results through SEO. Using legitimate White Hat SEO techniques, there is just no way that you can move a new website rapidly up the search rankings. Anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to sell you SEO using Black Hat tactics that are dangerous, unethical and can get your website penalized and even ignored by the major search engines.

We strongly suggest to most of our clients that they engage in an SEO campaign. Even though it can seem expensive, it really is the best way to grow an online business. Think of it like this; a website sitting on its own on the internet is like a warehouse languishing in an industrial estate with no customers. There are two ways to increase traffic to the warehouse.

1. Advertise.

There is always a case to be made for advertising. If you have a product that people want to buy and you can give them a good reason to buy it from you then advertising will bring you some results. Similarly online advertising can drive people to your site.

However, much like that warehouse, you are likely going to have to use price as a compelling reason to get people to visit. Budget pricing is a tried and tested method of increasing sales. It is however better, especially for an SME to sell your service/products for the maximum the market will bear. Slashing your prices to catch people’s attention can also mean slashing your profit margins.

Advertising too is expensive and is difficult to measure. What if there was a way to use a very similar budget to increase footfall but also enable you to keep your pricing and your margins intact?

2. Optimise

If you wanted to get thousands of people to view your store or your products, you wouldn’t ask them all to come and visit you (advertising) you would go to them. This is the equivalent of opening a high street store as the outlet for your warehouse. It costs you a regular rent on your store but you get thousands upon thousands of visitors every day seeing your brand and visiting your store. Optimising your website is just like moving your website from an industrial estate onto the high street, where all the people are and want to be.

With years of experience in optimising websites for a host of industries, Reckless New Media should be your first port of call for online marketing. As part of a comprehensive marketing strategy, SEO is an invaluable tool and its value should not be underestimated.

Stuck In a Rut

Last Sunday, while a certain football match was being played, a quaint little television show, that some of you may have heard of, Top Gear, was on BBC2 and they were testing three super saloons, the gorgeous Maserati Quatroporte, the equally scrumptious Aston Martin Rapide and the not to put too fine a point on it frankly hideous Porsche Panemera. This undoubtedly impressive car has to be one of the ugliest and unresolved pieces of industrial design I have seen, possibly in my life. (thats not true, see Ssangyong Rodius ) Not far from where I live there is a used car dealership that has a Mansori modified example that they have been trying to dupe some style-less millionaire into parting with 165 000 of their hard earned Great British Pounds for. (Rather unsuccessfully as it has been sat there for nearly two months now.)

What gets me about the Porsche is where do they think their design language is going? They have a basic profile and a "family look" that have been around for sometime now and are firmly established in the sports cope market. Say what you want about the Porsche 911, Cayman and Boxter and I frequently do. Their design although admittedly long in the tooth is comfortable, easy on the eyes and to some, a real design classic. Where they are struggling is to incorporate their design language onto other body shapes. The accomplished but equally unattractive Cayenne is another example. Porsche have been unable to make an executive sedan or a large piece of agricultural machinery look like the diminutive 911. That isn't really so surprising, in fact I would like to be generous here and say that if they did manage to pull it off there should be some kind of Nobel Prize for auto styling and they should get it.

Porsche's closest competitor BMW, mercifully does not feel the need to make all of its cars look like the 7 series. For that matter no car designers do it; because its stupid! While all premium car makers have a distinct "family look" and an established design language which allows them to take elements of the design and introduce them across the entire range. This is sadly not something that Porsche GMBH have been able to do so they keep trying to get a flexible silicon mould of a 911 to fit over different sized vehicle platforms.

If an otherwise forward thinking and innovative company, with buckets of money to spend on development can get caught in such a deep hole then surely it can happen to any of us in our businesses. Perhaps when you think about it and do a little rooting about you may find some processes, policies or products that are labouring on outside of their original design spec and may even be damaging your business.

Specifically from a design point of view, there are lots of very outdated logos and letterheads out there in the business world, not quite old enough (or good enough) to be retro. It is not always necessary to do a complete re-design, in fact it would be better to find the essence of your existing design and use that to create a new brand that evolves out of the old, moves the game along and uplifts your brand, that has doubtless received much investment over the years.

It is commonly accepted that you should regularly look at your web presence to ensure that you are getting the most from on-line media. Why not use the next opportunity to look at your branding too. Most good web agencies are also skilled at branding and graphic design and I am pretty sure that you will save a bit on the redesign if you are doing it as part of a web job.

I for my part am always happy to chat to a prospective customer about any aspect of their design and branding needs so feel free to get in touch.

And above all things, be considerate!

Whenever I go to public consultations or attend a workshop hosted by a local Council, Business Link, RDA or even the Department of Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) I get told that the public sector is prepared and eager to do business with SMEs and local business. I have read numerous articles and releases encouraging people like me to look for work with the nation’s biggest spender. As evidence of their munificence they (the various public sector bodies) provide us with some invitingly named web portals. Enter The Chest , Supply2Gov , Compete For.
Aside for the obviously unfriendly design and layout of all three, both supply2 and Compete For work pretty well although as an operation funded by our taxes, I find it staggering how often the Supply2 bunch try to get money off of me. Supply2 will give me free access to all opportunities in my sector within my local authority area. To date, not a single opportunity has arisen. A number however have presented themselves in neighbouring boroughs however I have to take out a rather costly subscription to get access to these. Also the councils maintain their heavy purchasing bureaucracy where I am sure they employ people whose only task is to obfuscate tender documentation so that only former public sector buyers can become successful public sector bid writers. This must be a result of some union decision to ensure the allocation of well paid bid writer positions in the private sector and healthy consultative opportunities for retiring buyers.
Rant over! The real reason for me bringing this up was one of the portals in particular got to me in a big way. To put it short it’s a pig to use! The Chest this is the worst case of over engineered non function that I have seen in my life, it reminds me of a Russian WW2 submarine, unattractive, unfriendly, robust and ineffective. Reigning this discussion in further; on the subject of design, most of us should be familiar with the concept of form following function. Many lazy designers or in some cases bad designers have used this as an excuse for creating a less than elegant product that does its job admirably. I can think of some business software I have used in the past as a fine example of this. In some cases this is viewed as sensible austerity, passing the savings in design time in to the consumer.
The concept of sensible austerity is a complete nonsense and I don’t think anyone is fooled. There are examples of this all around us. Take for example brown brick council houses, high-rise estates and some other relics of socialist Britain. These solutions offered comfortable living solutions to the destitute and those less well off but wrapped it all up in such an appealing facade that they literally exude waves of depression, squalor, debasement and various antisocial pathoses.
There do exist some very up market items that could be and sometimes are called Haute Couture that are in fact triumphs of form over function. In some cases these items are barely able to fulfil the function for which they were intended (I hesitate to use the word designed). In other instances the elaborate design does little or nothing to enhance the product and can in some cases hinder its most efficient utilisation in this case I reference the Lamborghini Reventon which is in no way more capable than the standard Murciélago on which it is based. These are rare items and usually have very little impact on the lives of anyone other than the select few who can afford to buy them.
What most people prefer is balance. Balance indicates thoughtfulness. Thoughtfulness gives people a sense of being important. If people think that corporations/institutions have given real consideration to their needs and desires that will impress them and generate brand loyalty, the type of brand loyalty that people like Apple, M&S and possibly your local butcher enjoy because of their customer first attitude. Good, not expensive or extravagant design is how you demonstrate that you care about your customers.
At Reckless New Media we always strive to give our customers a sense of wellbeing and the notion that their brand, their corporate identity and their future web sales are in good hands. The tool that we use to do this is consideration. We pay a lot of attention to our customers business; we look into the needs of their clients, their selling style and corporate culture so that we can understand their requirements. This we feel has enabled us to create a host of very effective websites that enable our customers to generate new business from the internet and to foster lasting relationships with their web based customers.
Can you think of any examples of good customer first branding and design? I would welcome your suggestions in the comments box.