How teenagers – and adults – consume media

This is the unabridged, non-edited version of an article published at bnet.co.uk
The Morgan Stanley report entitled “media and the Internet, how teenagers consume media” is one of the most striking examples of instant information circulation on a global scale. Matthew Robinson — a 15 year-old trainee who was asked to put together a report on how his peers were using the media — no longer needs to work on his online reputation. In a flash, his report was on everyone’s lips (on everyone’s desktop rather) and widely used as a perfect representation of generation Y usage of media and – especially – the Internet.

On the contrary, the fact that a survey of one might be considered a representative sample of a 60 million population is a rather tale-telling instance of how adults, and not teenagers, have become used to consume the media. Call me old-fashioned, but I think I can highlight a few issues with regard to how information is handled in this report.

1. This report is often taken at face value as in this review by the Guardian, with no analysis or questioning of anything that is said in the report,
   
2. Teens are different from adults, but does that mean that their tastes/behaviours won’t change?
   
3. Marketing has taught teenagers to behave as consumers, hence their feeling – more acquired than innate – that they are a race apart. But in fact they aren’t. Teenagers are but adults to be, and should be treated as such, not revered as if youth was meant to be eternal,
   
4. Generation Y – a definition so broad it means nothing – is said to be more IT and especially Internet savvy than their predecessors. As a matter of fact, an in-depth (and confidential) survey carried out by Orange amongst a sample of 15 year-olds a couple of years ago showed that this is not quite true. Teenagers are actually better at using certain technologies such as instant messaging and they practice multi-tasking heavily – not forcibly a good thing
   the Guardian says – but aren’t more au fait with IT than their elders and when they hit trouble, they tend to call … their parents to the rescue,
   
5. Most real bloggers aren’t teenagers, and many of them are in the 40-50+ range; I can testify,
   
6. As a consequence of the above, Twitter is also used by the same people who use it mostly to publicise their content and share resources with their network and also a surrogate instant messaging system between members of that network,
   
7. As a result too, Twitter is indeed a tool for grown-ups and in that, I do believe Matthew Robson is right. Just because teenagers don’t use it now doesn’t make it less interesting however,
   
8. (a mere assumption I admit but it seems) the style of this report has little to do with teenage counterculture and a lot to do with Morgan Stanley,
   
9. This report is assuming that enterprises should fear teenagers who will join their ranks in the coming years. However:
   
   1. By the time they do, they won’t be teenagers anymore, some of them will even have children,
      
   2. By then, most of them will have learnt how to behave in the enterprise world,
      
   3. When Mr Robson hits the job market, that is in approximately 10 years from now enterprises will also have evolved by dint of user pressure, young and old, who want greater freedom in the workplace and have even bought their own technology to bypass corporate rules (a concept known as BYOC),
      
10. Lastly, may I venture to ask who Matthew Robson is anyway? I wasn’t really able to trace him, even in facebook which I guess cannot be regarded as 19^th century technology. So, despite my introductory comment, he might yet have to work on his online reputation, unless this too is an old-fashioned concept.
    

What makes “information” stand out from “data” and cyber babble? Information occurs any time resources are cross checked, double-checked, and when investigations have taken place. Information also happens when authors’ identities have been disclosed (even The Economist’s editors can be traced through the online media directory complete with pictures and contact details).

Don’t be mistaken, and don’t blame the Internet for the fact that adults – and later generation Y who are in fact just adults to be – can no longer tell the difference between information and noise. Blame the people who use the Internet instead.

 

Selling Corporate Blogging To Your Boss? Don’t Mention ROI!

important notice: this is the unabridged version of a post published at Bnet.co.uk

One is often told that getting the buy-in for a Social Media initiative requires some solid ROI calculation. One would have to weigh the pros and cons, how much it costs, try and evaluate the effort which is required, measure it and translate it into pounds, shillings and pence. And profit should also come into play, since it is deemed inappropriate for a new project to be set up without a clear definition of how much revenue it brings.

It is indeed a well known fact of Corporate culture that no IT project has ever been implemented without delivering great benefits… well, maybe not. And another well known fact is that, similarly, all systems which have led to losses in productivity should be banned… well, maybe not either.

Let’s take email as an example. We have already described at length the pitfalls in which many corporate email users are falling and how to preserve your productivity and lifestyle by better using email. Yet, email is also responsible for stress, and waste of time and money and effort. On average, Managers spend 40% of their time doing email according to the authors of the Hamster Revolution. I’m not mentioning examples of those who spend 100% of their time on this but I know a few who do. Yet, despite all these productivity issues, the requirement for email is not questioned, barring a few exceptions such as IBM’s 2.0 expert Luis Suarez who declared war on e-mail and almost succeeded (lucky him!).

So is ROI a valid way of showing how useful Social Media can be?

My take is the following:

1. One doesn’t engage in a Social Media project because it brings profit but because it enables one to do things in different ways and that these ways – listening, adapting, innovation – are beneficial to the brand, to your ecosystem, your image, and above all, the well-being of your clients, partners etc.
2. One doesn’t need to spend too much time on understanding how much Social Media will cost because the fact is that it doesn’t cost that much, and it may even cost too little (I have seen many a project valued because of the cash it sank, not the one it never generated),
3. It is very difficult to measure precisely what tangible profits can be achieved from using Social Media, although there has been examples with many SMBC members,
4. User generated content is also a major source of production of high quality content which can then be used in many instances such as client-facing meetings and lead generation. And God knows content is expensive. Any one video could cost from €1,000 to €15,000 but I have seen some instances in which a very talented consultant generated 8 videos worth at least €6,000 each for… nothing. Thousands of views later, he helped the company save approximately €50,000. In the past 12 months, my assessment of the money that was saved by fostering user generated content (UGC) in the past twelve months is in the regions of €200,000 if I include all the top quality articles which all our users have produced and the 1000+ comments which they have generated, some of which have even helped us improve dramatically some of our services,
5. Eventually, my prime advice to those who’d like to spread the word about how Social Media can help a brand engage in passionate discussions would be to suggest to them that they speak to their boss about it and ask him/her to write things for the company blog. I did this and guess what: I never had the ROI question anymore because he understood immediately that he too could spread the word across about his own pet subject (Green IT) and that was – as he himself admitted – invaluable.

Maybe the final reason for not falling into the ROI trap is that ROI is often used by execs to get rid of subjects they don’t like even though there may be no other rational reasons for them to do so.

 

Joe Bloggs still puzzled over blogs

The question stunned me I must admit. While walking down the aisle of the yearly event of the Confederation of French Industry Medef – equivalent to CBI – I was getting ready for a session of live blogging in front of a panel of ex ministers, worldwide banking experts, and other celebrities such as former Poland’s premier Lech Walensa when a seated person stopped me by putting her hand on my arm. “Tell me”, she said while eyeing my “blogger” badge which signalled that I was one of the 50+ Internet experts invited by the confederation in order to cover the event, “what is a blogger?”

I must admit that I must have looked pretty flabbergasted. As the media is awash with blog reports and web reviews, and even mainstream Hollywood films like the recent State of Play feature blogs as a main contender in the online/offline press battle, I had surmised that blogging was an established fact of modern life. Let’s face the fact readers, it is not! Joe public still doesn’t know what it is about, or not quite.

Blogging is still exotic to many, and not just across the Channel. Judging by the frequent questions I have on the same lines in England and even in the United States, I can assure you that we are not there yet. So how long will it take for everyone to understand? Judging by what happened with core Internet activities, one started talking about the information superhighway as it was then known in England as early as 1994 but things only took off seriously towards the end of the 1990’s.

Will blogging follow the same trajectory? Maybe it just won’t happen like that. It is highly probable that people will all use blogs/microblogs (such as the outstanding Posterous service) and other Social Media gadgets even before they understand the weird names we have given them. To a large extent, this is what this Social Media revolution is all about, i.e. forgetting about the buzz-words and just going ahead with it.

Yes Madam, you are right, not everybody knows what bloggers are, yet they are truly here to stay anyway.

 

5 tips for your b2b Social Media strategy

note: this piece was originally published on behalf of bnet at http://blogs.bnet.co.uk/sterling-performance/2009/09/23/five-tips-for-b2b-social-media-marketing/

Business brands using social media are starting to see the benefits. But are there any best practices they can use? Guessing that the average businessperson may not know where to start, George Krautzel and Bill Connfrom online agency Toolbox.com have issued a whitepaper on that subject. Here are some ideas:

1. Set objectives first. Don’t head on towards social media just because it’s hip. Who is your target audience and what are you trying to achieve. Are you using the right media outlets for the audience you want to reach?
2. Build a roadmap to engagement. Start advertising on social media platforms and then slowly engage in conversations. “Entry in social media can be as simple as advertising in an online community”, as Conn and Krautzel point out.
3. Examine the costs and benefits of building your own community, as opposed to tapping into existing communities.Building your own community is a lot more costly and exacting than joining an existing one that fits your needs.
4. Transparency is a must. A marketer has to say that he is a marketer, and that’s that. A comprehensive guide to disclosure, as it’s often called, courtesy of the Social Media Business Council. So-called Flogs (fake blogs) are a no-go area,
5. A good marketer listens to what is said about their brand. It’s inppropriate to control feedback, so you should be able to withstand criticism and use negative feedback to improve your service.

I agree with most of Toolbox.com’s advice, but I’d add a couple of caveats:

• Words like “campaign” and “targeting” aren’t really appropriate for social media, in my view.
• And whereas Toolbox advises you to get started with online advertising and then to learn how to engage in conversations, I’d do just the opposite. My ultimate best practice advice would be to ask permission and learn by doing, slowly but surely, one step at a time.

I’ll be picking this theme up in a post soon, but in the meantime, you can download the toolbox social media whitepaper here.

Let me know if you have any other tips to share.

 

popular myth about duplicate content debunked by Google

as stated in my previous SEO piece, there are quite a few myths flying around the Web and namely about what Google does and doesn’t with your data. Webpronews has this story about “duplicated content” and God knows there are many people tallking nonsense about that subject. A must-read:

[...] Greg begins by clearing up a popular myth about duplicate content, and that is that Google penalizes sites for having duplicate content. This is not the case. That’s not to say that duplicate content can’t have a negative impact on your rankings, but Google itself is not penalizing you for it. [...]

• read on at Webpronews

 

A Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) survival guide for marketing managers (part 2) – unabridged

note: this is part 2 of 2 in a series of articles on the subject of SEO and marketing, originally published at Bnet.co.uk. This piece is the unabridged version of the article.

10 steps for improving your SEO dramatically and simply

including a slideshare pictorial guide for SEO marketers (see bottom of article)

Important notice: it is reminded that this is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to SEO. All steps have been voluntarily simplified in order to help marketing managers, not to turn them into bespectacled anoraks. My method described here is simple, it is certainly not scientific, it is bound to make any SEO guru scream in dismay I’m sure, but I’ve tried it and it worked time and time again, so I believe there must be something good in it.

Step 1: define your SEO niche

Trying to be all things to all people is a bad thing in Marketing in general, but in web page optimisation it is a lethal mistake. First and foremost, one has to target a so-called SEO niche in order to be well positioned in search engines. Reaching number one rank is a nice to have but can rarely be achieved from day one. On the contrary, it is easier and more effective to aim at niches, one at a time for each page you want to index, and eventually, your ranking will improve.

1.       Target 3 keywords (or combination of). I don’t mean that one cannot index a page for more than 3 keywords, I have seen counterexamples. What I mean is

a.       It’s difficult to target more than 3 keywords from a resource viewpoint,

b.      If you want to be consistent, these keywords will have to be repeated all over your text, so imagine if you have 10 of them!

c.       Your website has probably more than one page so do use other pages to target other keywords, based on relevance (the more the keywords are repeated in the page the more relevant because it means that this page really is about that),

d.      Don’t try and spam search engines, their designers are really shrewd, so spamming a page with repeated keywords may sound very clever but I assure you it’s not plus your readers might not appreciate your style.

2.       Analyse popularity AND competition and focus on that KEI

a.       keyword popularity will tell you how much a keyword combination is sought after,

b.      competition will tell you how often your competitors have tried to use this combination of keywords for their own SEO,

c.       the right combination between a & b is called the Key Efficiency Indicator index (aka KEI), a very effective way of balancing the two factors,

d.      bringing realism using personal judgement is also advised. Some of the numbers given by some keyword generation tools (see last section about useful tools) will not make much sense unless you interpret them properly and eliminate irrelevant keywords. For instance, networks appears as if it were a relevant keyword for telcos but in fact it’s not because it’s too vague as it mostly refers to social networks. A simple search engine query will prove the point very quickly and therefore, the ambiguity can be removed by qualifying the keyword better (network security is more relevant for instance, etc.)

e.      each page can/must be indexed with a different strategy in mind. This is how you can ensure that different targets are reached from the same website.

note: “The Keyword Effectiveness Index (KEI) was developed by search engine guru Sumantra Roy. it compares the daily searches with the number of competing Web pages to pinpoint exactly which keywords are good enough so you can use them while optimizing your site.” (source: sitepoint)

Step 2: fine tune your page title

As said in our previous post about Internet content, good content shows in the title. Good SEO too, and this is rather obvious so I won’t expatiate.

Step 3: implement keywords in the URL

Adding your keywords to your URL is also very effective as it will improve the search engine friendliness of your website. It also means generic keywords. Business people are always obsessed with their brand – and this is natural to an extent – but Internet visitors aren’t forcibly. What you have to do is get them to associate your brand with the good content that you are providing. It’s just the same objective but it works the other way round.

 

A Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) survival guide for marketing managers (part 1) – unabridged

note: this is the unabridged version of a post originally published at Bnet.co.uk

SEO is a serious marketing tool

Of all the topics surrounding the web, there is one which tops the list from a marketing point of view and it’s Search Engine Optimisation (aka SEO). It is indeed one of the most important levers for bringing traffic to a site. I can barely think of a Marketing manager I have bumped into in the past 18 months who isn’t obsessed with the fact that his products will or will not show in search engines. This is obviously a valid request and a lot of expectations are set on the improvement/optimisation of web pages to be more search-engine friendly, and a lot of pressure is put on web site owners like yours truly. There is nothing wrong with that though, I believe it all boils down to getting the right explanation across to our managers and explaining what SEO really is and isn’t about. In essence, it’s not about cheating; on the contrary, thinking that optimising your site for ‘free products’ when you sell expensive products is not only daft, it’s pointless. So I won’t take any of your time debating on whether SEO is cheating because it’s not. Or at least it’s not a side of the business that I’m interested in.

My conclusion is that education is at the heart of that matter and I have developed a little web owner survival kit in which I have included some of the fundamentals of SEO, to help Marketing managers and site owners with their daily task of improving their web content and better serve their visitors. This post and slideshare presentation will complement nicely our previous manual on the subject of Internet content.

Your SEO is more than just about  web pages: it’s a matter of strategy

My aim here is not to depict the complete picture of website optimisation. This would be an impossible task. Search engines vary their rules on a daily basis, and narrowing down our attention to Google only wouldn’t be sufficient to simplify our work. What I have attempted to do in this article is to focus on the fundamentals of search engine optimisation. I have used this canvas in the field and I have found it pretty effective in order to evangelise about SEO and get marketing managers to take ownership of this task, as a means, not only to improve their web pages, but mostly to improve how their products/services are presented: well, in essence I could sum it up by adding that improving your SEO will also help hone your marketing strategy, therefore killing two birds with one stone.

When Marketing managers come to see me about their web page SEO they often have grievances about the Internet, or the website or even the webmasters, but none of these are really to blame.

_ “I can’t see my products when I type ‘0800 numbers’” I was told by quite a few marketing managers (just change the keyword/product name, you’ll always get the same problem)

_ Ok, I replied, “but why isn’t your page named ‘0800 numbers’ then?”

_ “It’s normal he answered, we don’t call it that way internally!”

As a natural result, the name of a product which is only internal will never show outside the web because a website isn’t done for internal people, it’s meant for external visitors, who need to be addressed with their vocabulary, not yours. Actually, this means that the marketing manager in question is going to have to step into his visitors’ shoes and stop interpreting the world through his own cultural references. In essence, this is what marketing is all about, and it has nothing to do with the web.

part 2 of this SEO survival guide for Marketing managers will be about our 10 steps for improving your SEO dramatically and simply.

 

web 2.0 ethics enforced by NYC Attorney General

There are still people who doubt that Marketing accountability is a must. Golden rules for 2.0 including disclosure, transparency and openness are not ( repeat not) an option. For those people, here is the living proof that posting fake positive comments (a practice known as astroturfing) about one’s product on other people’s websites is a no-no:

ATTORNEY GENERAL CUOMO SECURES SETTLEMENT WITH PLASTIC SURGERY FRANCHISE THAT FLOODED INTERNET WITH FALSE POSITIVE REVIEWS

Cuomo’s deal is first case in nation against growing practice of “astroturfing” on Internet

’Lifestyle Lift’ Will Pay $300,000 in Penalties and Costs to New York State

NEW YORK, N.Y. (July 14, 2009) – Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo today announced a settlement with cosmetic surgery outfit Lifestyle Lift over the publishing of fake consumer reviews on the Internet.

Under the settlement, Lifestyle Lift will stop publishing anonymous positive reviews about the company to Internet message boards and other Web sites, and will pay $300,000 in penalties and costs to the State of New York. The case is believed to be the first in the nation aimed at combating “astroturfing,” a growing problem on the Internet.

Lifestyle Lift employees published positive reviews and comments about the company to trick Web-browsing consumers into believing that satisfied customers were posting their own stories. These tactics constitute deceptive commercial practices, false advertising, and fraudulent and illegal conduct under New York and federal consumer protection law. The settlement marks a strike against the growing practice of “astroturfing,” in which employees pose as independent consumers to post positive reviews and commentary to Web sites and Internet message boards about their own company.

• read on at http://www.oag.state.ny.us/media_center/2009/july/july14b_09.html

 

SMBC’s Bob Pearson: “Social Media is not for geeks, it is about direct conversations with your customers” (unabridged)

important notice: this is the unabridged version of an article which was originally published on the Sterling Performance blog by Bnet.co.uk

Bob Pearson, has just been appointed President of the newly rebranded Social Media Business Council (*) after a successful stint as Vice President, Communities and Conversations at Dell. Bob has been kind enough to agree to answer our few questions on behalf of our BNET readers. My focus in this interview will be on Bob Pearson’s experience, how he plans to use it in his new role, and about his plans for the expansion of the Social Media Business Council.

BNET: you successfully deployed social media initiatives on behalf of a worldwide high-tech company. Is social media only for geeks?

BP: No, social media is about having a conversation directly with your customers. It’s so important that companies take time to see the value in building a long-term relationship with their customers via social media. Many of the initial ideas may have started with “geeks”, who I certainly appreciate, but we live in a world today that has over 1.6 billion people online and more than 500,000 new people going online everyday for the first time in their lives. Social media is becoming mainstream for customers today and should start to become so for companies in the near future.

BNET: what are in your eyes and based on your experience the top three benefits which you, your previous employer and your clients derived from these social media initiatives?

BP: There are many benefits for companies, but gaining ideas, co-shaping your brand and unlocking the value of employees are certainly three important ones.

Social media provides an amazing window into how customers think and what they want. For example, why conduct a focus group with 10 people in a single location when you can build an idea community, ala Dell or Starbucks and receive thousands of ideas and listen to customers discuss them over months? For companies, it’s also important to co-shape your brand and reputation with your customers online. If you conduct strong analytics and you know where your products are being reviewed, you’ll find that a large brand may have as many as 5,000 conversations about itself every day. Ask yourself how many of those conversations you’re participating in or knowledgable of? If you’re not, you’re outsourcing your brand. Powerful thought.

I’ve also seen how social media inside a company enables employees to share their thinking and, quite frankly, let you know if they agree with the direction of the company via their comments or, in some cases, their silence.

BNET: what were the three main successful drivers behind your successful implementation of social media?

BP: I’ve heard people say “make the R small and the I big in ROI”. I like that advice. Social media does not have to cost a lot of money to try. What you need are some courage and a willingness to engage directly with your customers. I like asking people “how many customers do you actually speak with every day”? For too many people in companies, the answer is zero.

Here are three key drivers: #1 – know where conversations are occurring about your brand #2 – have clear rules of the road in how you will conduct social media, including an online policy and #3 – realize that customers want to hear from you, they do not want to hear from “the company”, so personalize your approach. The new formula is “Brand + Personality”.

BNET: how big and how successful is the Blog Council and what sort of a club is it?

BP: Social media is becoming a new discipline within companies that impacts all employees and all departments. As a result, it’s very important for leaders in social media to have a private place to share best practices and learn from each other in real time. There is no better person to learn from then a peer who is figuring out the same thing in a different industry.

The result is the formation of the Blog Council, which now has 60 of the world’s leading brands as members, such as Orange, McDonald’s, Starbucks, Intel, Microsoft and Coca Cola.

BNET: are all companies entitled to join the blog Council, or do they have to meet certain criteria?

BP: The Blog Council is for larger companies, generally over 5,000 employees. The key is that members are actively seeking to improve in social media. We want members who want to learn by asking their peers questions, share ideas and do it all in an “ego-less” environment.

BNET: what are your plans for the development of the Blog Council? Is there anything you’d like to share with our readers? A scoop maybe?

BP: Well, it’s fair to say that our name was ready for a change. In fact, we just changed our name to the Social Media Business Council and you can find us at www.socialmedia.org.

BNET: some of the “bloggers blogging about bloggers” to put it in the words of Andy Sernovitz are sometimes critical of the blog Council, what would you like to say to them?

BP: We welcome everyone’s opinion. We’re focused on building social media as a discipline and helping our members achieve success. It’s all about the conversation and we hope everyone will share how they think we can do better (as an organization and for our members).

BNET: there has been points made by Forrester’s Josh Bernoff and also Seth Godin (in his Meatball Sundae opus) that social media wasn’t for all big companies. What is your opinion about that?

BP: I respect the body of work of both Josh and Seth very much, but I could not disagree more with this particular comment. Social media is for every company that wants to improve how it interacts with its employees and its customers. Internally, a company has a major opportunity to unlock intellectual capital of its employees or gain their ideas more quickly to improve products. Externally, we are scratching the surface on how we can empower customers. Imagine opening up new B2B channels between major companies to communicate more effectively, for example.

I’ve worked inside three Fortune 500 companies and have met with many others, so I’m quite sure of the opportunity ahead of us for companies of all sizes.

BNET: Is the blog Council only about corporate blogging or does it cover a much broader spectrum?

BP: The Blog Council is about social media and how it is utilized to improve communications with employees and customers. Social media represents the most direct way to have a conversation and, in many respects, the most powerful way to learn, share and build relationships. The leading companies of the world are embracing social media and learning how to utilize it effectively. Not every company understands the significance of social media today, but that’s normal for any transformation. They will with time.

Thanks Bob for answering our questions very openly. Our Bnet readers interested in knowing more about the the Social Media Business Council can connect to http://socialmedia.org

(*) note: For the sake of disclosure, it needs to be pointed out that the author is also a member of the Social Media Business Council in which he is the Orange representative.

 

Blogcouncil is dead, long live Social Media Business Council!

Of course, we knew already about it, but it’s been made public only recently that the late Blog Council has changed its name to Social Media Business Council (aka SMBC). We are very pleased to be able to relay that information (note: I am a proud member of smbc) and we wish our friend Bob (picture below) and the whole council a lot of successful un-conferences and blogwell meetings.

The aim of the name change is I believe obvious, that is to say to send a clear message to the business community – and the social media community – that social media isn’t just about Corporate blogging, it’s about a much broader range of subjects and tools including micro-blogging, social networking and others. This however – I can almost hear a few giggles here and there – that Corporate blogging is over and that we made a mistake by promoting Corporate blogging. Nothing could be more false. It means that Corporate blogging is one of the tools – and a powerful one at that – and that it cannot stand on its own without a few others on the side.

For your benefit, here’s the press announcement made by the Blog C… sorry, the Social Media Business Council

Blog Council becomes the Social Media Business Council, moves to SocialMedia.org

Posted by on June 30, 2009

Big news from all of us here at GasPedal and the newly renamed Blog Council: Our community for social media leaders at large companies has officially changed its name to the Social Media Business Council and has moved from BlogCouncil.org to SocialMedia.org. Here’s the press release with more details:

Chicago, IL — The Blog Council, a community of social media leaders at large companies, has officially changed its name to the Social Media Business Council and will call SocialMedia.org its new online home.

“Every day, our members share advice on how to build successful, scalable and self-sufficient social media programs,” said Andy Sernovitz, CEO of the Social Media Business Council and its parent company, GasPedal. “This new name and domain better reflect the wide range of issues our community focuses on.”

The name change was a collaborative effort, with members sharing dozens of name suggestions before selecting Social Media Business Council through a vote at Member Meeting 4 in New York City.

• read more on the blog of the Social Media Business Council

note: picture courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/hyku/ on Flickr, this picture was made available by its author under the Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic creative common licence.

 

media-aces: evangelising about Corporate social media in Europe

http://media-aces.org blog now open

Media-aces.org is the blog which will underpin our new club of European social media enterprise experts. This isn’t just another blog about web 2.0, but the platform which we will use in order to evangelise about social media and how important it is in the business world.

• read on at http://media-aces.org

 

6 steps to valuable Internet content (unabridged)

6 steps to valuable Internet Content

important notice: this is the unabridged version of a post first published on bnet.co.uk

After a decade and a half of evangelisation by the likes of Seth Godin (re his book entitled: Permission Marketing) and those who followed in his footsteps, Marketers are now finally waking up to the idea that pre-formatted communications aren’t the right way to engage with customers (re Forrester’s Laura Ramos’s report on why Marketers, even in B2B have to get to grips with a new communications paradigm). So now is the time to hone these story-telling skills in your Marketing department and write valuable content for the Web. But what do I mean by valuable content? I mean content that brings value to your visitors, which could possibly initiate discussions, questions and comments (I’m talking about articulate comments, not cyber-babble).

In this article, I have expressed my views about writing for the web (also summed up in a creative commons slideshare presentation per below), based on what I have been able to implement successfully in the field over the past 15 years, in order to find out how that can be done:

Step 1: the idea that web text has to be terse is not a good idea

It is often said that people don’t read on screens and that as a consequence you shouldn’t write long pages and keep long stories short. There are several reasons why this is not relevant:

• If your site is performing well, most of your visits will come from search engines, not from your own links (based on my experience, I would say that ballpark figures range from 40 to 70+% of readers coming from search engines, 70% being applicable to pure content-orientated websites). And text-related search results won’t show pages with no text,
• It is true that people don’t read in the same way on the Internet (see step 3), but it is false to say that they don’t read anything on screens. Besides, when content is good they will probably print it out in order to read it offline. After all, this will not be counted as an additional visit but it is as if not more important than online reading,
• Search engines are fond of text, and indexing is based on keywords, not images, and certainly not hot air. One of the key success factors for your SEO (i.e. search engine optimisation; we’ll get back to this subject in a future post) is that the keywords your visitors will be searching for will be present in your pages more than once. If your text is too short and doesn’t comprise these keywords, it is bound to remain the Internet’s best kept secret,
• A good story doesn’t depend on its length, but on the author’s ability to retain the attention of his readers. Otherwise, many a classic novel would have been banned due to excessive length and numerous repetitions.

To sum it up in a few words, if your text is too concise, it won’t be seen by your visitors because most chances are that they will never even land on your page (QED).

Step 2: spice up your text with images, not the other way round

(note: that is to say if your website isn’t about paintings or photography or luxury goods )

I have often found that people are mesmerised by pictures. Yet, there are a few problems associated with this:

• First and foremost, you might see the pictures but search engines won’t. OK, Google has an image option but the way that images are indexed on Google is dependent on the text that surrounds them (amongst other elements we’ll describe in a post dedicated to search engine optimisation),
• Flash animations aren’t really a good idea. Since the 1990’s I have seen several cyclical trends with regard to Flash technology. Every once in a while, a flurry of flash-based websites will crop up and then disappear because they are mostly irrelevant, unmaintainable and above all unseen by search engines. There are statements all over the Web mantioning that flash animations are indexed but this is only partially true. Lastly, visitors hate flash animations, if I judge by all the comments I see in the surveys I carried out on the subject. I would recommend that you use flash technology only when it’s really needed, for high-end luxury products for instance, or art-related websites, and also for interactive presentations/applications which bring actual value-add to the visit process,
• Large pictures placed on a web page tend to kill the text around and below them (more details on pictures and eye-tracking here). All the eye-tracking tests I have seen performed on this particular subject tend to converge and even e-commerce websites are falling prey to this kind of issues. When asked to click a promotional link for instance, users usually avoid clicking on the large banners that have been installed for that purpose – even very visibly – on the web page. At best they will see that an animation is moving but they will seldom read it and click it. Is this a valid explanation for the very poor ratios delivered by advertising banners? This remains an open question.

Step 3: hypertext, hypertext, hypertext

What Sir Tim Berners Lee has to be remembered for is not the Internet (which was created in the 1960’s) but the http protocol which enables html pages (themselves an evolution of the sgml publication language) to contain rich text for online publication. Most of our readers will probably not know that the ‘ht’ in http is an abbreviation for hypertext, i.e. the ability to transform a text into a hot link which will take you to another page/image/etc. called a URL (unique resource location). Without html, the web wouldn’t exist, so I fail to understand why so many communications and media professionals still want to build websites in which there are no links.

As a consequence, when creating a new web page, one should immediately think about not just adding links to it, but actually shaping the content around those links.

Jakob Nielsen – probably the world’s most revered web usability expert – is proving the point on his page (http://useit.com) on which no images exist but in which all the text of the home page is made of links. Internal links, external links, links to videos, glossaries, resources, partners, podcasts etc. the list of possibilities is endless. And all link-less websites should be ditched immediately.

The web is not a place for a cut and paste from your Corporate paper brochures, there is no value for your visitors in doing that, and they won’t come back to your website if you do this.

Step 4: Good content shows in the title

Often I see product managers coming to me with requests about their web page and when talking to them I realise that they haven’t really thought of the people who will be visiting these pages. They keep their minds focused on their product names but they fail to ask themselves two important questions:

1. What is the generic terminology for my product vs the product name which net users will only use if they know it,
2. What is the problem that my product is trying to solve (Michael Bosworth would have used the term ‘painpoint’) which I could describe here (see step 6 for details).

And most of the time, I can tell from the title of the page that these elements, and possibly many other Marketing aspects which have nothing to do with the web, have been overlooked.

So working on the title of your page is a good place to start your Internet Marketing work for shaping web content. Please note that a good title is usually made of a combination of three keywords separated with hyphens or commas.

(note: As understanding SEO means knowing how to search for information, I would recommend that you read this article about information tracking on the Internet).

Step 5: Keywords mean a lot

Once a good title has been found, one can start working on the keywords that we would like to see indexed by Google. If those keywords are nowhere to be found in the page, then you stand absolutely no chance of being indexed properly by Google and other search engines (keyword tracking tool available here, courtesy of Google).

A keyword is a combination of words, in which the order will matter (as an aside, foreigners using accented words will face another challenge, for accented words are indexed separately from non-accented ones. e.g. “café” is not identical to “cafe” for a search engine).

And keywords mean a lot, not just about what you are describing, but about what net users are searching, the problems they have, the solutions they are looking for and even who they are. Keywords will tell you a lot about your users/visitors.

Step 6: Creating valuable content

So now that we have taken all first 5 steps into account, it is now possible for us to work on building valuable content for our web pages and to focus on our visitors. We can split the latter into 3 different categories:

1. Your client/visitor understands his/her problem, and has identified a solution: detailed, straightforward product/solutions descriptions should be made available to address this requirement. Diagrams should be plentiful, descriptions should be clear, technical terms defined in a glossary. Interactive applications can also be developed so as to facilitate clients’ choices and search when there are many devices for instance,
2. Your client/visitor knows he has a problem but isn’t aware that a solution exists, in which case his/her point of entry will be the focus on the problem via a search engine. Your buyer or influencer will browse the web in order to find information relevant to his/her problem and he/she will use the keywords that are relevant to this particular problem. Putting yourself in the shoes of your client/visitor will help you guess what these keywords could be,
3. Your client/buyer doesn’t even know that he/she has a problem, let alone that a solution exists and that you are selling it. Attracting buyers and influencers of that kind to your website will require more effort than just shifting your boxes. Most ICT vendors know this situation, since type 3 customers are probably the most numerous, and it’s often dubbed evangelisation. Evangelisation is when you have to prove to your client that this solution he/she hadn’t thought about is bound to solve a problem he/she didn’t know he/she had. And the best way to do that is to demonstrate the problem, either through ROI analysis, consulting, or even what is called opportunity assessments (engagements in which clients are shown that a problem exists and that solutions can be found). Your website can also act as an opportunity assessment (see outsourcing example available here) if you build your pages in order to target this population and demonstrate that the problem exists. Those pages will mostly be aimed at the ecosystem of your clients, and your content will have to be usable by this ecosystem (namely by consultants) who can in their turn use it to advise their clients.

 

near real-life 3D avatars: killer application or virtual scarecrow?

3D animations from photos by motion portrait

We have already covered the subject of 3D avatars aka IVA’s (Intelligent Virtual Agents) for business on this blog.

Motion Portrait in Japan is taking this one step further with the ability to turn a 2D picture into a fully-fledged 3D intelligent animation. The result is awesome and can be seen on their home page at  http://www.motionportrait.com/e/. If you refresh that page you’ll see different versions of the same avatar, with different accessories (fuzzy-haired wig, moustache and thick eyebrows,  spectacles or plain 3D animation).

Very impressive indeed, and also a bit weird to a certain extent in so far as it is very close to a real person and therefore very strange. Motion Portrait also offer manga-style IVA’s or other formats. Their IVA’s aren’t just made for web pages but can be adapted for mobile phones, TV programmes and game consoles.

 

Blogwell #3 presentation by Nokia’s Molly Schonthal

  
Blogwell in NYC (photo by Yann Gourvennec)

The second blogwell presentation at Blogwell #3 which took place on April 29 in NYC, was that of Molly Schonthal from Nokia, who is in charge of social media for the Finnish cell phone manufacturer in the US, and also one of our representatives of the blog Council.

Molly’s presentation was truly outstanding, there were so many questions and answers at the end of the presentation that I’ve had a hard time trying to keep track of them all, but a good many of them will be transcribed in this post anyway.

The presentation was entitled “from broadcast to social media”. And it started with references to Tara Hunt’s latest book, “the Whuffie factor”, on which we have already had an opportunity to comment on this very blog (click here for an interview of Tara Hunt about her new book).

Molly insisted on the fact that “what is difficult for a big company is ‘listening’, participating openly and respectfully.” It might in fact sound to be an obvious thing to do, but it’s not always for a large organisation, for it is so easy to be concentrated on one’s internal organisational issues and forget about one’s clients. So what are the changes as a big organisation is facing when trying to engage in different kinds of relationships with its customers and ecosystem?

1.  One has to think, Molly says, not in terms of technological adoption, but of “psychological adoption”. Web 2.0, she says, is not difficult from a technical point of view, and it can be set up in a matter of seconds. But working with communities can take a lot longer than that.

2.  Her second point is just about that, when she says that “building networks take time”. And, “it does not follow the principles of normal press relations”. She even coined the phrase “social release” which she opposed to press release. What it takes is actually creating messages that are relevant to influencers. And to stop and listen and engage. And she also insisted upon the fact that collaboration is about “cross functional interactions which are at the heart of success”.

What Molly and Nokia’s teams have been able to achieve in the field of social media is just awesome. Here are just a few examples which I have been able to catch up on the catch on the fly:

1. Nokia encouraged the widespread adoption of 2.0 tools internally,
2. Nokia developed what they called an “infopedia” internally. This is some sort of Wikipedia, but it is internal. It was actually instrumental in getting Nokia employees to understand what a wiki is what a blog is etc.,
3. Nokia also created a blog hub: all internal blog content was focussed in one place that is to say that access is granted to what employees are talking about, sharing thoughts and ideas,
4. An internal webTV was also created, which is some sort of youtube which enables employees to upload, invent and discuss,
5. externally, blogs have also been rolled out, therefore enabling conversations about Nokia products. They also created a platform called “blogbites”, which enables them to generate three-minute podcasts from existing text.”

Engaging with influencers is also a very important item on the Nokia agenda, and they are engaging with them on events, such as SXSW09.

Molly also insisted on what she called the blogger test centre tour which actually consisted in sending bloggers to two different countries. The stories were published in leading blogs such as Gizmodo, Techcrunch, the BBC etc. A 500,000 audience reach was achieved for that event in 2 geographical areas (the UK and Australia).

As a conclusion Molly insisted upon the fact that one had to allow company culture to evolve, beyond “PowerPoint slides with bullets in them”. (Reminiscent of an article I published a long time ago with the help of Giancarlo, and which was entitled PowerPointitis)

questions and answers

1. how are you selecting bloggers for your events?

Few people can be admitted in the test centre. Loads of explanations about temperatures were given (Nokia phones had to resist all kinds of temperatures, perform the lowest to the highest). The Nokia lab folks were also very excited about the idea and about the ability to interact with real people. The way that Nokia organised this was very straightforward. All Nokia had to do was to “invite them and be nice with them”.

2. measurements?

It is very hard to track results back to sales, Molly says. They do do some monitoring at Nokia, and then look at the number of people and followers (Nokia has more than 500 followers on twitter). Another question was, “how did you convince managers?” Molly responded to that: “our company understands the value of social media”, which is great support what she and her teams are doing at Nokia across the world for social media. She also insisted that social media produces soft numbers, which do not have to be linked to sales automatically.

3. what is the hardest thing?

The most difficult thing according to Molly Schonthal is to “listen well all the time”. It is hard to get an e-mail from a blogger/influencer, she says, because it always has to be taken as an emergency. “One has to stop,” she adds, it’s a “personal challenge”. Raising expectations is an issue (a phrase which I heard often times pronounced during this blogwell session). Planning is also a major issue: “one has to avoid formatting” she adds (mainly on twitter)

4. what are your worries about accountability?

Molly says that Nokia never “discloses private information, earnings, confidential information etc.” But that in the long run, some “of that could happen with maturity” and that “Nokia’s people and managers are not hindered by fear”. (I take this opportunity to link back to the minutes of a previous blogwell session in San Jose which was facilitated by Ken Kaplan from Intel about fear and social media)

5. how do you handle comments?

“You cannot say you’re open and honest and stop people from saying things” Molly rightfully points out. So, you will have to assume that some of the comments won’t always be coming your way and you’ll have to take it like a man.

6. what is the difference between press and social media release?

Molly says that social media release comes with some video plus a bunch of pictures and multimedia files to download and text which is more appropriate for blogs. It is true that more and more packages such as these are made available on the market by agencies on behalf of big businesses.

8. what about smaller bloggers?

There is more than one approach, Molly says, and we hope to do it again with more folks.

9. responding to external comments?

Molly says that you have to ask yourself two questions:

• one: do you have to respond to it? The answer may not always be yes
• two: disclosure: “this is Molly from Nokia, and this is my personal opinion.” Is the phrase which should be used (I would also recommend that you go back to and these recommendations on disclosure)

 

Microsoft at blogwell 3 : listening in the social media era

The first presentation at BlogWell number three in New York, was that of Nestor Portillo, worldwide director of community and online support for Microsoft. There are hundreds of products and services at Microsoft, and by global operations, Microsoft means that it has direct presence in 80 countries. There are many forums in which one can answer questions and initiate conversations, and to be honest, this is not really new to Microsoft.

Internally, there are more than 5000 blogs at Microsoft already, which are aimed at tackling various subjects such as technology, products and services. Some are team blogs, some individual blogs some are Corporate blogs and so on and there are even blogs for some of Microsoft’s VP’s. Mr. Portillo was involved in social media three years ago are, which means actually working on blogs, twitter etc.

• read on at http://blogs.orange-business.com

 

why big business needs social media … under certain conditions

 

Kogart House in Andrassy Ut in Budapest - Digital Marketing Forum 2009

 

On May 5, 2009 I was invited to deliver a presentation at the Digital Marketing Forum in Budapest, Hungary. The seminar was chaired and facilitated by fellow LinkedIn networker, Marketing expert and professional presenter Davig Hughes (apparently an amateur surfboarder too). 

The presentation is also made available online at Slideshare.net:

 

 

Tara Hunt on Social Media: The Whuffie Factor

Tara Hunt (pic Lane Hartwell, all rights reserved)

Tara Hunt is a name that means a lot to Social Media experts but not only. Enterprise marketers are also – or should be – familiar with her earlier attempts at promoting a new form of marketing philosophy entitled Pinko Marketing, the aim of which was to prolong the work that had been initiated by the cluetrain manifesto team at the end of the 1990’s.

Beside her involvement in Barcamp and the coworking project, the San Francisco-based Canadian online marketer has got back to writing a new book The Whuffie Factor which is now available in the UK. I have asked Tara to present her new opus to our BNET readers in this interview.

Read on at http://blogs.orange-business.com

 

7 reasons why the business world hates social media

social media

note: this is an unabridged version of my article publihed on Bnet.co.uk

 In our previous article about social media, we have described the 8 reasons why managers love social media and we have also debunked a few commonplace myths. In this new instalment we’ll look at the flip side of corporate social media perception, the negative one, and we will also discuss the rationale behind each of these arguments.

• #1.  All these online conversations could be dangerous, we’ll be losing control”: it’s true that social media is about employees, clients, partners and members of all kinds of eco systems talking to one another. There is often that perception that these conversations might lead to the disparagement of the brand. Such discussions are often perceived negatively by managers, as if they didn’t feel quite sure about how reliable or likable their brand actually is. Hence they fail to assess and nurture brand loyalty through these discussions, although such discussions are often led by volunteers and afficionados. Also, in essence, this is what a brand is all about. A brand is what your clients “say about you when you’re not in the room” (probably by Jeff Bezos but the source is unclear and many versions of that quotation exist). And such discussions, good or bad, are bound to happen anyway, for social media (aka web 2.0) has made free expression available to all Internet users. Use social media to harness all these discussions rather than pretending you can prevent them. There are more opportunities than risks associated with it when you think about it. As Intel’s Ken Kaplan once declared at a 2008 Blogwell conference in San Jose : “social media is not something to fear but to embrace”,
• #2. “Social media is a legal minefield”: a good proportion of the managers who are opposed to social media are afraid of the potential risks associated with freeform comments and trackbacks (back links to your site from external blogs/social media sites). The latter are indeed perceived as a means of injecting external content within a company’s website and managers are afraid of legal consequences. Yet, to put it in the words of my own lawyer: “a legal advisor’s role is not to frighten but to protect. Above all, we are business partners” (I like this guy!). And we did find a solution for our social media initiatives, from a legal point of view: all our blogs and community sites have been placed under a separate legal entity which led us to shift the responsability from the main entity to another. Comments and TrackBack moderation is also a good idea which should not be overseen. The issue in this instance is about prevention, not irrational fears. And don’t forget that it’s a lot harder to address criticisms in traditional media. Comments can be moderated, unauthorised or – even better – give you an opportunity to respond,
• #3. Online negative buzz monitoring is often on most social media opponents’ radar screen too: I am flabbergasted by the ability of certain buzz monitoring software vendors who spread fear about the blogosphere around them to sell their wares. Often, if not always, the so-called Kryptonite Blogstorm example will be quoted. The very title sounds like a legend and indeed it is. The problem is that this example is grossly exaggerated. Traditional media influence can still be a lot more damaging than online media if you don’t take care. I can’t imagine the New York Times being treated as if it were a social media website. Once again, there is more opportunities than risk in social media (full story about what really happened is available here).
• #4. Managers don’t want their employees to be headhunted because of corporate blogging: so I heard one day an Exec tell me that it was out of the question that one of his most prominent consultant be seen on the Internet. I subsequently checked the blogger’s name on Google and immediately found him in LinkedIn as well as on his own personal blog. My reaction was then to encourage that blogger to blog for us. At least, now he is devoting his energy and time to promoting our company and its reputation. Besides, he knows that he is a valued employee of ours and that his work is acknowledged. One more reason to stay with us, and not leave!
• #5.  ”All that Internet stuff is not serious/businesslike, it’s just for techies”: with Internet usage penetration averaging 70% in the  UK (expressed in percentage of the total population, versus 48% in Europe, and the UK being outdone only by the nordics and the Netherlands), this is no longer true. Whereas in the 1990s, people believed that the Internet was made for train-spotters (see that picture taken from a 1996 AOL flyer), it is a sure bet nowadays that most web and social media users will be representative of the overall population. From a marketing point of view, each social media site has its target audiences. Social media is therefore a tool for doing business, as long as you are choosing the right platform for the right geography, population and/or business sector. For instance, facebook is pervasive in the UK but not in France where only top users and IT experts are logged in. LinkedIn is big in the UK but in German-speaking countries, only Xing is used, don’t even bother to invite someone on LinkedIn there, it is virtually never used. In France, Viadeo is by far the leading social network, but most IT pundits will want to be seen in LinkedIn and will snub Viadeo users. So this is complex and more segmented than it seems, and I haven’t even talked about LinkedIn groups which make it possible for you to target micro populations. Social media definitely is a business tool and a place to start networking and building partnerships,
• #6. “All that social networking stuff is a waste of (my) time”: Social networking is often getting media attention but what’s in it for business. Should business people allocate time to improve their networking skills on LinkedIn and the likes or should they consider spending more time doing proper business? The fact is that networking is the essence of business. It took me 4 years to build a serious network on LikendIn. What I mean by serious is the careful – not random – selection of new connections through their profile. And I don’t just mean people I knew and wanted to reconnect with. My purpose was to expand that network in order to increase the number of opportunities for my business activities. And I can’t count the number of opportunities leveraged by such tools, whether it meant presenting my work at a conference, or liaising with my peers, partnering with new companies or even buying new stuff I didn’t know anything about before (incidentally, my counterparts must have been able to sell things too in that process). Of course, some of these encounters were irrelevant but I’d rather focus on the positive side of things by just looking at all these interesting opportunities I was able to seize. Each time a new tool appears however, users are faced with the same problem and that is how to build (or re-build) a network of people first, before you can start reaping the benefits of such tools for business. The network of people is condition #1 for anything you do on social media platforms and it can be pretty much time-consuming mainly if you wish to target people one by one rather than inviting them all at random. As a conclusion Social media is not a waste of time unless you let yourself be driven by the tool (time-consuming tools like facebook or Twitter must be managed properly if you don’t want them to take up too much of your time). In essence, it’s not very different from what we went through at the beginning of the introduction of e-mail in the workplace. Managers started to oppose e-mail because they thought it could be a waste of time for them. But in essence, it was more of a status issue because their personal assistants used to filter all messages.
• #7. “There is no ROI in Social media and corporate blogging in particular”: this final counter argument I kept for the end of my list. As is often the case with innovations, sharp criticsms as well as very apt critical analysis of blogging initiatives such as the corporate blog report by Forrester’s Josh Bernoff are voiced. At that very time when people think they should give up (Gartner would call that moment the “trough of disillusionment”) i.e. when the hype dies away, there appears real opportunities to work on one’s ROI and reap the true benefits of the innovation in question (the “plateau of productivity” in Gartner speak). Social media is no exception to that rule. So why bother about Social media now? At times of “inflated expectations” (Gartner again) it’s hard to focus on ROI. Now that the crisis is making the ROI a must, here’s what we could add to that debate regarding social media in general and Corporate blogging in particular. 
  • Firstly the cost of investing in social media is really negligible. 
  • Secondly, the effort related to the production of the content within the framework of a blog initiative, for instance, is minimal too. In fact it does exist but it is diluted amongst the contributing experts. Social media is about user-generated content. This means that experts produce the effort as opposed to Internet managers spending vast amounts of our budget to get to the same – or even a slightly less impressive – result. And content does cost a lot of money. With user generated content I save hundreds of thousands of euros every year; what’s that for ROI?  Saying it’s free would be wrong though, but the main cost of it all is change management. And producing content is very expensive. 
  • Thirdly, now think about the benefits that we are getting from that effort: more motivated experts, better visibility for our brand, more efficient communications, direct debate between experts, and facilitation of the entire ecosystem, brand awareness and image improvement. The list is endless. 
  • At last, when I decided to ask my boss to write for the blog, I definitely solved the ROI issue because he suddenly understood that blogging enabled him to do things which were unthinkable before. What other initiative was available for him to write about his vision on Green IT to the whole world at a push of a button?

As a conclusion, social media offers so many new capabilities that it is worth making the effort to launch an initiative for your enterprise. Pitfalls exist – as with any kind of tool, be it IT or not – but there are ways to circumvent the problems so as to reap more benefits from this new way of communicating, more direct, more open, and geared towards direct open innovation with clients, partners and your ecosystem at large. If you manage to avoid misusing some of these tools and remained focussed on your business objectives, social media can then be a powerful ally to you marketing strategy. And don’t forget that rational answers to irrational fears exist too, so that you can focus on looking at the half-full glass of social marketing.

 

[En] Great customer service + Snapshots of Sony Style Space – Champs Elysées George V – Paris

A few still pics from the brand new Sony Style space in Paris, a stone’s throw from the Champs Elysées and conspicuously and strangely empty on a Saturday afternoon. Went to the Aftersales counter because I had lost one of the rubber ends of my earphones and couldn’t find a replacement. To my amazement I was given 2 free of charge and with a smile! Great customer service in a lavish, amazingly posh customer space. Individual demos in a demo room (2nd picture). The new all-in-one PCs by Sony are gorgeous and lightning fast. Sure to replace my existing PCV-V1 with one of them. If only mine could die faster, but it doesn’t it’s rock solid and still quick after 4 years.

http://visionarymarketing.com
http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com [En]
http://visionary.wordpress.com [Fr]

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Yann A Gourvennec

 

[En] Great customer service + Snapshots of Sony Style Space – Champs Elysées George V – Paris

A few still pics from the brand new Sony Style space in Paris, a stone’s throw from the Champs Elysées and conspicuously and strangely empty on a Saturday afternoon. Went to the Aftersales counter because I had lost one of the rubber ends of my earphones and couldn’t find a replacement. To my amazement I was given 2 free of charge and with a smile! Great customer service in a lavish, amazingly posh customer space. Individual demos in a demo room (2nd picture). The new all-in-one PCs by Sony are gorgeous and lightning fast. Sure to replace my existing PCV-V1 with one of them. If only mine could die faster, but it doesn’t it’s rock solid and still quick after 4 years.

http://visionarymarketing.com
http://visionarymarketing.wordpress.com [En]
http://visionary.wordpress.com [Fr]

See and download the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Yann A Gourvennec