Entries by Henrik Müller-Hansen

A McKinsey survey of marketing executives conclude that companies, around the globe, now more actively include online tools as essential components of their marketing strategies. However, the executives also point out that they use digital tools less frequent than their importance actually suggest. Main reasons for a less active role in the online community than actually preferred are:

• Internal knowledge level about social networking (blogging, forums, expert groups) and online marketing is too low
• The marketing executives for these multinational companies conclude that their marketing agencies lack the capabilities required in order to effectively use the digital marketing tools available.
• Absence of meaningful metrics. (what gets measured gets done...)

“Numbers never lie, liars do numbers…” That was me saying that, based on my personal experience. Keep this in mind when someone present statistics to you. Despite my healthy scepticism to statistics, here comes some interesting numbers from the McKinsey’s Survey - In 2010 respondents expect that a third of their products or services will be purchased on the Internet! The worlds largest multinational companies now start to direct their marketing machinery towards a more active role on the Internet - things will happen.

The Power of Social-networking!
If you have ever worked with social networking, you know the immense power of blogs, release of online articles, user forums and much more. Economist released an article this week - "Social-networking and video-sharing sites are booming" - in which they state that YouTube has more than 200 copycats only in China (10% of these are backed by venture capital). Here is China's response to YouTube - Todou.

How do you get started with Social-networking?
Well, that's actually a good topic for my next blog, but until then take a look at this Keyword tool supported by Aroon Wall. In Aaron's Keyword tool you type in any word and out comes a VERY info-heavy table with links to all blogs, articles, tagging, forums, news about this subject. Your challenge is now to identify the discussion groups and topics that you want to actively contribute to. You will quickly find that this type of active engagement, not only improves your knowledge about customers, suppliers and investors but you also regain some of the control you feel that you lost with the explosion of social networking.

I will give another example; try Serph and type in your company name. Serph will, within seconds, provide users with a list to all blogs, user forums and you have it, that display what customer all over the world have to say about your services and your brand – pretty intriguing and energizing!

Executives interviewed by McKinsey comments on the Social-networking trend
”Collaborative tools such as blogs, wikis, and social networks are being used in advertising, product development, and customer service. At the simplest level, for instance, 22 percent of the respondents say that their companies host user forums for customers to help one another. Just over a third of all survey respondents—and just over half of those whose companies advertise online—say that their companies use some kind of collaborative or interactive tool to advertise. About 22 percent are using these tools for customer retention, which fits into the common understanding that they help build relationships between customers and companies. More interestingly, nearly as many respondents, 19 percent, use collaborative tools primarily for brand building. The enthusiasm for experimenting with these tools is clear: more than a third of the respondents don’t know what marketing objective their investments in collaboration and interactivity serve, yet some 15 percent of companies’ online-advertising budgets go to such tools.”

All decisions you take in business are faced with basic uncertainty, effective managers approach problems by interlocking probabilities. Your primary goal should be to gather accurate business information and scrutinize it carefully.

The former US Treasury Secretary and Goldman Sachs executive Robert E. Rubin wrote in his memoirs "Once you've internalised the concept that you can't prove anything in absolute terms, life becomes all the more about odds, chances, and trade-offs. In a world without provable truths, the only way to refine the probabilities that remain is through greater knowledge and understanding".

Rule # 1: Your greatest joy is experienced when speaking to the customers.

Rule # 2: Never listen to your organisation - listen to your customers
Concerns about ongoing business operations and recommendations for product development that arise from within an organization, is a poor estimator of your customers actual problems or concerns. That's why you should take sales meetings with existing and potential customers every week, and do this on your own... you will learn more. In addition, if you decide to outsource your customer service you should continue to take customer service calls every week. Ideas from within your company, that often generate little customer value, will thereby have a harder time passing through the gates of your management team.

Rule # 3: Understand to 100% why your customers purchase your product/service
Understanding what value / uniqueness your product bring to the market should be obvious for all employees of a company, but it's not..... Spending time listening to your customers will generate better decisions, within areas such as marketing and product development. At a Wimbledon tournament, the former CEO of Rolex, Andre Heiniger, got a question from a friend - “How is the watch business doing?" Mr Heiniger's response was -"I do not know - Rolex is not in the watch business we are in the luxury business”. This is understanding your customers and your products! Mark McCormack, author of "What they don't teach you at Harvard Business School", calls this insight - "Marketability" - understanding your products / services uniqueness and position.

Rule # 4: Delight the customer as much as the consumer
Make sure you not only reach out to the customer purchasing your product, but spend time talking to the actual consumer of it. A customer purchase your product or service, while the consumer makes use of it - You mission is to make both of them love you! To many companies spend way to much time focusing on sales, sales & sales (this is great for anyone who learns to benefit from this fact). Sure, focusing on sales is a must, but focusing on the consumers is a prerequisite for continues success and growth of your company. A company that is very focused on this, and that vividly spreads this mindset to it's employees, is Procter & Gamble. Your relationship with customers is initiated by the consumer but prolonged only by the contented customer.

Here is a great 2 min article on how you should work with link building

This article takes you through what quality content is and how you can leverage on your unique quality content in your link building work.

The Author:
Roger Montti lives in San Francisco & specializes in site reviews and site audits, as well as link development.

All accounting and financial statements are based on the two concepts of credit & debit.

Wait... doing complicated stuff

Still reading... ok then we are two

The Basics:
Debit = An entry that increases an asset or decreases a liability
Credit =An entry that increases a liability or decreases an asset

All companies use the "double-entry system", meaning that every credit entry is followed by a corresponding debit entry, thereby always keeping the balance between asset and liability accounts.

Income and expenses are transferred into the Profit & Loss (P&L account), reflecting the operative results, dividends etc.

• Income entries equals additions to Surplus and therefore they appear as credit or liability
• Expense entries are actually deductions from Surplus, appearing as debit or asset accounts.

= The total of all debit and credit accounts must be equal to the total of all credit balances.