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How to Make Your Brand Like Chocolate

How to Make Your Brand Like Chocolate

chocolateThe numbers are in and chocolate sales are up, sometimes to record levels, with the economic downturn.  Each of the major chocolate manufacturers in the U.S. (and major Swiss chocolate companies) are reporting growth in 2009.  What does that tell us?  Two things:

  1. When consumers can’t afford luxury items like plasma TVs and new cars, they replace those luxuries with chocolate. (Okay, that one might be a stretch, but #2 is more important anyway).
  2. When times get tough, consumers don’t give up comfort items.  In fact, they buy more of them!

So that leads us to this question — how can you leverage consumer buying habits during a recession?

The answer is simple — make your brand like chocolate. [Read more…] about How to Make Your Brand Like Chocolate

Being Extra Helpful

Getting users to think you are truly focused on customers / users can take a lot of work. Being extra helpful on the website can contribute to this. Even on a simple financial calendar, UBS offer:

  • Contact us links for each event (we haven’t seen that before)
  • An additional prompt for the user to think whether they have any questions with a link to an enquiry form
  • Guidance for how to use the calendar reminder functionality
  • A short, easy to remember url for the page e.g. www.ubs.com/calendar

We like this because:

Even if these features don’t get used much, it gives the user the strong feeling that UBS are trying to go the extra mile to be helpful to the website users.

See UBS Events

Seven Best Practices for Sustainability Websites | Part 1/2


Last November Two Tomorrows published their 2012 Tomorrow’s Value Research report.

It was a bit of an eye opener.

The drive for transparency, the report concluded, is distracting businesses from tackling issues and many risk losing sight of the overall sustainability picture.

A telling statistic is that only half the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) supersector members measured up to Two Tomorrows’ “leadership” criteria.  You would have expected these to be unanimously in the vanguard.

To try and galvanise the remaining companies, the report seized upon seven areas of best practices they had come across, which are repeated here with a website gloss on them.

[Read more…] about Seven Best Practices for Sustainability Websites | Part 1/2

Darling, you’ve changed

online surveyAfter breakfast this morning, my daughter asked me not to buy what has been her favourite brand of gluten free pains au chocolat any more. Apparently, they’ve changed the recipe, and she doesn’t like them any more.

Apart from the minor domestic issues (what to source instead?) this raises a big question in my mind.

For these products – products which are rare, if not unique, and for which the market is small but necessarily very loyal – why not ask for customer feedback, and make it easy to provide?

Without this feedback, the company has no idea why one of its loyal customers has gone, and it is missing out on an opportunity.

Yes, I know that the company no doubt believes the new recipe is an improvement (even if only in production costs not taste) and that there may be new customers gained who do like the new version. But in a relatively small market like this one, every customer counts.

It would be easy to add a feedback blog, or an online survey, so that customers could tell the company what they thought, and perhaps email customers after a recipe change asking for feedback (even better if you can target those who buy that particular product), with a link to the blog/survey.

I saw a different gluten free manufacturer on Twitter this morning, asking people for their opinions on gluten free lunchtime options. It can be done…

Many corporate websites now ask for feedback, usually via a popup survey request – occasionally via a link in a sidebar. Although many people may click the No Thanks button, anyone who feels strongly has the opportunity to respond – and that in itself may assuage some of the irritation felt towards the brand.

What are you doing to get feedback from users when you make a change?

Should Social Networking Sites Make Money?

Popular social media sites like MySpace, Facebook and YouTube are appearing everywhere over the Internet, buzzing with people who want to make personal connections, business connections and political connections. The direction of Web 2.0 is accelerating quickly towards social media and the phenomenal impact that it has on media relations and business.

Social networking sites are striving daily to become well-respected members of the media world and in many ways they are, although a few isolated incidents can give them a bad name. For example, social stalkers on sites like FaceBook and MySpace can discourage people from becoming members and exploring other business-related opportunities that the site can offer. In addition, the never fail multitudes of get-rich-quick schemes that clutter the average business person’s mailbox is also enough to make them (possibly) not want to sign up with sites like Sphinn and Marktd. If the average online entrepreneur doesn’t persevere and muddle through the distractions, they cannot see how much their business can benefit from social marketing and networking sites.

Twitter, an extremely popular and fast growing social networking site, in a news interview decided that they would not concentrate on monetizing their site. Instead, the owner, Biz Stone, decided that it would be in the best interest of the company to continue providing exceptional service to the micro-blogging community and worry about site monetization later.

“At this point, given that we have plenty of money in the bank, it makes a lot more sense not to distract ourselves with trying to put the finishing touches on a revenue plan,” says the 34-year-old Stone, who founded Twitter with Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams in 2006.”     Full Story

Popular sites like Twitter need a business model and a revenue plan, don’t they? Are businesses going to start cropping up across the Internet with no public plan of action, no business model, no advertisers, no revenue model and no foreseeable way to continue doing business on the Internet? These questions have many bloggers baffled because in the world of blogging and content creation, there must be a way to sustain the business and that’s generally tied to a revenue stream. Advertising, product sales or course tutorials are some of the strategies that sites use to bring in revenue and keep their sites alive. Twitter currently does not do any (blatant) advertising, doesn’t charge members or participants, they don’t ask “sign-up” fees or referral links and the only way you hear about them is word-of-mouth. Yet, they are one (if not only) of the most powerful forms of social networking available today. The site is quite addictive (perhaps their strategy) an d easy to use because the platform only allows 140 characters maximum per blog entry. Links also count as part of the 140 characters so there is limited space to say what needs to be said. That’s the beauty of the system. You can deliver a business blurb, marketing link or re-direct people to your site in brief, succinct communications and make a profound impact. But in a business sense, it just makes sense to make money from something that is 1) growing, 2) widely used, 3) popular and 4) in demand. If Mr. Stone is not interested in Twitter making money, what is his goal?

Everyday, online companies strive towards achieving the type of traffic and following that Twitter has garnered. If they could secure half or even a fourth of the organic traffic that Twitter reigns in, do you think companies would pay for that opportunity?

Twitter provides a weekly statistical data on their current usage and member information. As of this date (August 4, 2008), Twitter shows that it has over 200,000 users and sees over 2,000,000 tweets per week. (Statistics)

After reading more about Biz Stone and the premise of Twitter, I can only speculate that perhaps Mr. Stone will present to the Twitter community at a much later date a business model and plan that will be so impactful and powerful that we cannot resist partaking in it, whatever that will be. Will we be charged for its use later? Will large organizations “sign-up” to allow their tweets to go out to the masses, touting their product or service? Will the average entrepreneur be able to have a twitter-page where they can showcase their wares while paying Twitter a small fee for the honor? Who knows what will happen. One thing for sure though is that Twitter has definitely developed an interesting way of doing business. If this future plan is well-developed and presented effectively, I would imagine that Twitter could invariably double or even triple its size in traffic and growth. Businesses will start to flock to the Twitter band-wagon to enjoy its successes. In the end, Twitter will have firmly been established in the social media circle and become a pattern for other sites to follow.

Hello JobDeck! Plus–Twitter Productivity

 

NYT JobDeck

I recently received this tweet from Skellie, one of my favorite idea sources:

Productivity in 11 words: One thing at a time. Most important thing first. Start now.

So–I promptly threw out my entire library of David Allen and Stephen Covey books, closed my Nozbe account, and trashed my Pomodoro.

Not really.  But I do recognize that if I followed the 11-word formula faithfully, I would resolve a lot of productivity problems.  And happily, this thought fit right in with a post I’d been planning on how to avoid the social media time trap.  Then I got a tweet about JobDeck, and everything fell into place!

TweetDeck is just one of the several good tools available for managing Twitter, but it’s the one I know best.  And it’s also the one that recently rolled out a special version for job-seekers.  JobDeck is essentially TweetDeck enhanced with built-in job search functionality, a special column for recruiting news, and a desklike appearance.  The New York Times Technology section offers a nice summary of the product.

In terms of productivity—having a dashboard like TweetDeck, where you can filter and organize many Twitter streams (as well as input from Facebook and LinkedIn), is a huge help if you really want to be involved in social media.  But TweetDeck can also increase the seduction factor by making you aware of just how much is going on in the Twitterverse every minute.  So you might want to browse Tim Ferriss’s article How to Use Twitter Without Twitter Owning You—5 Tips.  One tip (“Set alerts or blocks on Twitter usage”) discusses productivity aids like RescueTime.  I’m about to test-drive RescueTime and will review if it’s interesting.

I’m also trying out Mr.Tweet.  Basically, Mr.Tweet looks at your own followers/followees and recommends other Twitterers you might want to consider.  So far, Mr.Tweet has made some interesting suggestions—and the excellent interface shows how each one was derived, as well as providing individual profiles that include Twitter statistics and sample tweets.  It’s free, and worth a look, especially if you have a focused Twitter agenda and would like to quickly find high-value tweeters.

A final thought about Twitter and productivity.  I was a late adopter of Twitter, and I’m still figuring out how best to use it.  One key (for me anyway) has been finding people whose tweets alert me to things I want to know about.  Getting the most out of Twitter requires practice, but you can learn to scan various streams quickly and pick out just what’s relevant or intriguing, while letting the rest go by.

That’s from the perspective of using Twitter as an information source.  Using Twitter as a search tool has a whole different set of considerations, and there is not a better overview than Boolean Blackbelt’s How to Search Twitter for  Sourcing and Recruiting.