Customer input from the social web.

Several months ago, I looked at some corporate initiatives to use social networking tools to interact with customers and learn what they have to say about a company’s products and services. I thought they were a bit pricy for midsize companies and predicted we would see lower cost options in the near future. The future is here.

SuggestionBox.com is currently in beta. It offers a simple, easy to use, online tool that makes it easy for customers to communicate their opinions, wants and needs and empowers companies to take action.

The pricing is right for midsize companies at $50/month or $495/year with a 30 day free trial and money back guarantee. The feature set is pretty basic on the “suggester” side. Anyone can make a suggestion or rate suggestions made by others. The company can respond to suggesters with a thank you or request for clarification. And each suggestion can be marked as implemented, coming soon, under review or filed away.

in a comment to my earlier post, an IdeaStorm manager suggested the power of their solution was on the back end. This may be so, but at $5 per user, this power requires a significantly larger investment.

Vivek Bhaskaran, CEO of Survey Analytics, developers of QuestionPro and IdeaScale commented on one of my earlier posts. He said, “I think the model of charging per user (or per idea) is NOT how we plan on marching down. We’ll have flat fee of anywhere between Free (yes), $15/Month and $199/Month.”

Here are some examples of who/how IdeaScale is being used:

www.askthespeaker.org (Politics)
www.choicehotels.ideascale.com (Large Biz)
www.buglabs.ideascale.com (Small Biz)

Should you advertise in a down economy?

Most of my clients own or manage midsize companies. Some are finding new opportunities and improving sales numbers during the current economic downturn. Others, not so much.

A few years ago, I developed a presentation that looks at advertising in a recession from the 30 thousand foot level. It asks a simple question: Why advertise in a down economy? This slide show walks you through the process I use in strategic planning sessions or workshops for CEOs and senior executives.

To view in full screen mode, click the SlideShare logo, then click the full screen icon on the slide show control bar. If you prefer a “flat” article, here’s a link that will help.

Also, here’s a post with questions the CEO of a midsize company should ask before cutting the marketing budget.

Does advertising really work?

This morning, Karen Renzi blogged about a discovery she made last week in the sketches of her 5-year-old daughter. In her words, “In the top is a “house” on blue, next a “fan” on pink, and last but not least, on the orange: Verizon. Ahh, the power of the brand: inspiring young minds everywhere.”

Ha! By the mid-80s, I’d been in the ad agency biz for several years. I was cynical about the effectiveness of my own snappy copy and “stunning” visuals. I figured I knew all the “tricks” so I couldn’t be tricked myself. Then, I found myself in a Home Depot one Saturday morning. A guy asked what I thought of the lawn mower we were both looking at. I didn’t have a clue, had never owned this kind of mower, didn’t even have a lawn. But there I was, telling this guy all about it… selling the thing like I was gonna get some huge commission if he took one home.

Yes, it’s a little scary that Karen’s little one is drawing Verizon’s logo on a Post-It note, but it’s harmless enough. At least she’s not selling lawn mowers at Home Depot based on deeply engrained subliminal messages from the advertising team at Toro… yet. :-)

Selling marketing services to entrepreneurs.

So, I’m reading Seth Godin’s blog about how to read a business book. He linked to the 800-CEO-read blog for May 16, 2008, What is Wrong With Business Books?! – Part II which quoted rather freely from the anonymous “Uncle Saul” at socaltech.com.

And I’m thinking, Seth Godin writes/sells books. I get why this is important to him, but it’s also important to marketing agencies, consultants and service providers who are selling to entrepreneurs.

Bottom line: know who you’re pitching before you make the pitch. Entrepreneurs are different from serial entrepreneurs, who are different from professional managers or second generation owners.

10 business problems you can solve on the internet.

Most of my clients own or manage midsize companies. Some are tech-savvy, others not so much. None are able to spend a great deal of time worrying about the details of their marketing programs, especially the design and operation of their company websites.

A few years ago, I developed a presentation that looks at web strategy from the 30 thousand foot level. It asks a simple question: What is the most important business problem you can solve on the internet? This slide show walks you through the process I use in strategic planning sessions or workshops for CEOs and marketing teams.

In an hour, the execs have a strategy they can communicate to techies and creatives.

What does this brand mean to you?

Since the name was trademarked in 1903, cubic dollars have been spent to build, support, expand, refine, and engrain the Pepsi-Cola brand in the mind of “cola” drinkers everywhere. It is reasonable to assume that near cubic dollars have been invested in marketing research to learn how effective the efforts to build, support, expand, refine, and engrain the brand have been. The results of this research have been, of course, proprietary. That was then, this is now….

What business are you in?

When I work with a coaching client, I ask a lot of questions starting with…

– What business are you in?
– What products do you sell?
– What services do you provide?

When a potential customer takes a look at your website, brochure, mailer, biz card…

– What do you want them to learn?
– What do you want them to think?
– What do you want them to feel?
– What do you want them to know?
– What do you want them to do?

When it comes to websites, I ask…

– What problem(s) does your website solve?
– … for whom?

When I get a sense of the answers from my client’s perspective, I ask…

– How would your marketing team answer these questions?
– How about your sales team?
– How would your customers answer them?
– How do you know?

If the answer to the last question is not convincing — and it almost never is — I suggest that we work on finding a way to get solid answers to these questions before we do anything else. It is rare for a CEO, sales manager, marketing director and a select group of customers to agree on a description of a business and its products/services, let alone the message(s) they are trying to communicate.

If you think it is time to make sure your company is strategically aligned, here are some real world tools from Kevin Connolly, marketing guy.

Analyzing the blogosphere.

OK, so maybe you have a budget for marketing research. Most of my small to midsize clients don’t, but larger companies do. Fine. Check out Umbria, recently acquired by the customer opinion folks at J.D. Power & Assoc.

Umbria focuses its marketing intelligence technology on social media—blogs, message boards, Usenet, and product review sites. They deliver data plus analysis of the potential effect of online conversations on brands, markets, consumers and trends.

Google Alert update.

A few days ago, I blogged about using Google Alerts to find out if somebody’s talking about you online. Google offers a zero cost, essentially passive way to monitor your online reputation, keep an eye on the competition, and create opportunities to touch customers when their names are mentioned.

Sad note: I got a Google Alert this morning that told me a customer’s mother had just passed away in another state. I’m on my way to pick up a card to send my condolences. Email just won’t work for some messages.

You might reasonably ask, what does this have to do with marketing? Well, if marketing is about relationships, and I believe it is, then driving to the Hallmark Store, writing a sincere note and dropping the card in the mail will help build an important marketing relationship. If not, who cares? It’s the right thing to do.

Keep your company’s message fresh.

Small to midsize companies struggle to keep their message fresh and their websites up to date. So do marketing coaches and other service providers. Fortunately, there are free tools that make it easy to get the word out. There may be dozens, but I want to talk about FeedBurner.

This morning, I wondered of I could use my blog posts to drive fresh content to the home page of my website. I had used FeedBurner to set up an RSS feed, so readers could subscribe to my blog. I wondered if they might have a way to deliver the feed to my website.

Five minutes of research tops and I found the answer. They call it BuzzBoost. In effect, it turns a portion of a webpage into an RSS reader. You click a few buttons, complete a couple data fields, and SAVE. When the BuzzBoost page refreshes, it gives you a little bit of html code to copy into your webpage. Here’s a link to my home page so you can see the result of my efforts.

Here’s how I did it…