Corporate Eye

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Exhibits, Legacy and Issues

Exhibits, Legacy and Issues

netafim-legacyNetafim, an agricultural irrigation company, offers an interesting approach to corporate history with a dedicated legacy site. The site features a history and ‘future’ video, along with three museum-style exhibitions focusing on relevant topics. The website also showcases biographies, videos, and photos of key people (i.e. founders, investors, CEOs, etc.).

Netafim’s legacy site aids their marketability in two ways:

  1. It gives potential customers additional information about Netafim, as well as the history behind irrigation.
  2. It gives information about the company’s future plans, which may be beneficial to shareholders in the company.

Innovation and Audio

raytheon-audioRaytheon makes interesting use of audio to promote successes on their website. They offer soundbites of relevant noises, followed by explanation. The featured sounds are unusual, and won’t be familiar to visitors, so the explanations help to inform potential clients about some of Raytheon’s technology.

Raytheon’s soundbites are an innovative use of multimedia, support the idea of Raytheon as an innovative company, and add to the overall appeal of the site.

Below the Fold

mission-moreRaytheon, a defense contractor, offers an interesting approach to the fold on their website. Instead of the traditional format, a ‘more’ button  is fixed to the bottom of the display window. The button allows users to see content below the fold, simply by clicking the button. It scrolls down one windows-worth per click. The button is available for most sizes of browser windows; however, it does disappear on mobile-sized interfaces.

Raytheon’s ‘more’ button clearly shows that there is more to see below the fold, potentially avoiding the loss of website visitors looking for more information, who otherwise may have left the site.

Companies Failing in Data-Driven Customer Sales and Marketing Intelligence

big data bar chartTwo studies were released this week that tell similar stories about the state of data-driven sales and marketing intelligence. Long story short—enterprises are failing.

First, the Chief Marketing Office (CMO) Council released the results from its survey of 230 North American marketing executives at enterprise organizations of all sizes. Using a Customer Sales Intelligence Scorecard, the CMO Council ranked each organization using 10 measurements of “front-line sales enablement”, and enterprises only received passing grades in three of those factors.

Following are the grades from the CMO Council scorecard along with the number of marketing executives who indicated they are doing each of the things listed well. Take a look and see where enterprises are failing:

  • Effectiveness in accessing key account decision makers: Yes = 52%, Grade = C+
  • Total view of customer, business, and markets: Yes = 22%, Grade = D
  • Real-time delivery of sales intelligence and breaking news: Yes = 9%, Grade = F
  • Customer information accessibility to groups outside of sales: Yes = 37%, Grade = C-
  • Continuous updating of CRM systems by sales teams: Yes = 26%, Grade = C
  • Front line access to the right level of customer intelligence: Yes = 14%, Grade = F
  • Customer data accuracy, depth, and reliability: Yes = 16%, Grade = F
  • Remote, mobile user interface to customer data: Yes = 16%, Grade = F
  • Ability to do opportunistic and strategic contextual selling: Yes = 17%, Grade = D
  • Satisfaction with closure and conversion rates: Yes = 14%, Grade = D

Overall, the CMO Council gave enterprises a D- in customer sales intelligence and offered the following call to action:

Organizations must shift their cultures and platforms to become a market-sensing, alert enterprise, ready to capitalize on moments of opportunistic engagement. These universal customer sales intelligence systems must be at the ready with on-demand, real-time updates on key customer accounts. They should be filled with market news, social intelligence and aggregated customer account, service, and support details to enable all customer touch points to operate in unison and to access intelligence when and where is most opportune and through the right channel.

A second report released by Domo, 2013 Data-Driven Marketing Study, reveals that less than half of marketers believe they have sufficient access to the data they need to be successful, and at least 50% are not able to effectively calculate marketing return on investment.

Domo surveyed more than 300 marketers in management roles across a wide variety of industries and found:

  • 83% of marketers deliver reports via email.
  • 72% of marketers deliver reports during in-person meetings.
  • 87% of marketers rely on data to do their jobs.
  • 45% of marketers do not have access to the data they need to do their jobs.
  • 83% of of marketers are held accountable for ROI
  • 54% of marketers’ compensations are tied directly to ROI.
  • 77% of marketers do not have access to ROI data.
  • 89% of marketers believe it’s important to see all of their data in a single dashboard
  • 81% of marketers do not have access to a single dashboard to see all of their data.

Is your company effectively bridging the gap between collecting data and actually using it to drive ROI? If not, you’re already missing significant opportunities.

Image: Masbro

Twitter Goes Public and Stock Price Rises 73% on Day One

twitter mobile appTwitter started trading on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Thursday at $26, and by the end of the day, the share price climbed by 73% to close at $44.90. All of this and Twitter has yet to turn a profit.

The success story of Twitter, which isn’t even a decade old, hasn’t fully played out yet, but stockholders and brands are crossing their fingers. In honor of Twitter’s successful IPO, let’s take a look at some statistics that put the Twitterverse for brands into perspective.

First, from the Brands on Twitter 2013 report from Brandwatch:

  • More than 97% of major brands tweeted in 2013.
  • U.S. brands tweeted an average of 221 times per week and U.K. brands tweeted an average of 30 times per week in 2013.
  • 63% of brands have multiple Twitter accounts.

Next, here are some Twitter stats from HubSpot’s 2013 State of Inbound Marketing report:

  • 36% of all marketers have found a customer through Twitter in 2013.
  • 69% of brands use Twitter for broadcasting and engagement while 23% use it for broadcasting only.
  • The average brand has a four-person Twitter team.

Finally, here are some March 2013 statistics from Digiday that give you some more perspective about the Twitterverse:

  • The median number of brands that a Twitter user follows is six.
  • Mobile users are 78% more likely to retweet a brand.
  • Purchase intent increases by 58% after a Twitter user sees a promoted tweet.
  • Brand tweets with price in a whole dollar amount have a 12% higher click rate.
  • The engagement rate on Twitter ads is 1-3%.

And here is one more statistic that investors and brand marketers are likely to find interesting. According to calculations by AllThingsD, the cost for a brand to run a Promoted Trend on Twitter for one day in 2013 is $200,000.

Which brands rule on Twitter? According to the SocialBakers ranking which calculates both the number of Twitter users a brand profile follows and the number the brand profile is followed by to create a rating, the leaders are Samsung Mobile, Vine, and iTunes Music. If you only care about ranking brands based on number of followers, then TwitterCounter ranks YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter as the top three brands.

Only time will tell what the Twitter IPO will ultimately mean for brands. Many people are speculating, including Jennifer Polk, Research Director at Gartner who notes, “For the near term, we may see a slower pace of change, as Twitter works to avoid some public scrutiny or speculation.” In other words, Twitter’s not talking—yet.

What do you think?

Image: Hank Mitchell

Searching for The Magic

the-magic
What do you call that object you use to change the channels when you’re watching television?

In our house, we call it the pointy-click, which caused huge hilarity among the teens’ friends when this was revealed. It turned out, of course, that they all used different names for it… one called it the flicker-flacker, another called it the box, and so on. Personally, I think ‘pointy-click’ is very apt.

It didn’t seem as though anyone used an ‘official’ name (which is, I suppose, the remote control device), and there wasn’t much consistency in usage either.

This made me think about the words you’re using on your corporate website, especially in navigation. There’s a lot of scope for misunderstanding, or simply lack of comprehension, with the result that the visitor doesn’t achieve their goal in visiting. This might be because:

  • you’re using internal language on an external-facing site, so the word isn’t understood
  • you’re using industry terminology without explanation, and again, the word isn’t understood
  • you’re using jargon or catchphrases that aren’t comprehensible to someone not a native speaker of your language or familiar with your culture
  • your website visitor uses a different word to describe something – like our pointy-click example
  • the visitor just doesn’t know the word you’re using, any word for the thing they want to find, or even what it is they’re looking for
  • the website search requires an exact match, so doesn’t find the not-quite-right word the visitor searches for

These all have different solutions, from re-evaluating your search function to minor rewrites of content to avoid, for instance, sporting references. To help educate the visitor, you could consider adding footnotes to explain acronyms or abbreviations; glossaries of technical terms; or even something like a ‘for the new investor’ section as Credit Suisse and Novartis (among others) do.

Incidentally, I asked around at work, and other terms for the remote were revealed, including the dit-dit, and the magic. Now I like that… ‘Who’s got the magic?’