Customer Listening Blog

3 ways to boost your brand website

Nice article in I-Media Connection today from Hemen Patel, my long time friend, and co-founder of crmmetrix, President, crmmetrix USA.

Three ways to boost your brand website:

Incorporate measurement tools so you can better manage your site

Avoid common design pitfalls, such as relying too heavily on Flash

Capitalize on consumer engagement and drive traffic where you want it most

To read the full article on I-Media Connection 

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Feedback from Esomar word of mouth measurement workshop

Last week I had the chance to run my second workshop on "word of mouth measurement and beyond" at the Esomar annual congress in Montreux (Switzerland). The first one was in Sweden earlier this year. The overall feedback seems to be really positive. With my old friend Pete Blackshaw from Nielsen Online that I invited to lead the workshop with me, we really had fun together sharing insights, views about the challenges and opportunities of measuring word of mouth.

We had a full room of nearly 20 people, all very engaged, the majority of them coming from the advertiser side, with a clear mandate: "understand word of mouth and its measurement to implement things in their companies". I really have the impression that things are coming together slowly but surely when it comes to setting up measurement systems for word of mouth in Europe. We are certainly far away from a market of $200M in the US growing 15% a year as recently reported by PQ Media, but the question becomes important enough for marketers to consider wom hot enough to start dedicating specific investment measurements. Let's see how things progress in the coming months...

Beyond word of mouth measurement, one of the key outcomes obviously is really to relate to LISTENING to consumers' conversations, this is the reason I personally started to be interested in the wom topic more than 5 years ago, a time I coined the expression "customer listening" thus the name of this blog... Things usually take more time than initially expected but It seems that things are coming slowly together. Let's see what the trend will be in Asia in 2010 where I should be running the same workshop at Esomar Asia Pacific event in April 2010. Check it out and register!   

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brand websites and long tail

A recent global rool out of p&g e-commerce caught my attention : "the consumer goods giant, is adding links to its brand websites in Europe that will direct shoppers to the portals of a range of major retailers selling its products, after a similar initiative helped boost online sales in the US", Warc reports...

Furthermore..."Joe Quinn, P&G's head of global ecommerce, said the broader application of this approach will occur "as fast as we can roll it out. It's just a matter of being able to work out the technology linkages with our retailers."... Quinn said P&G has "seen double-digit percentage growth over the last several years in regards to online sales," a development that is at least partly attributable to Where to Buy, which greatly simplifies the purchase process on the web.

"The uptick in sales is enough that we are rolling it out to all of our brands globally. There is a direct correlation to sales once you put in the convenience," he added.

More broadly, Quinn cited industry research which predicts that 5% of P&G's sales could come from the internet in the medium-to-long term, up from 1%, or $500 million (€350m; £308m), at present.

What I see here is a wonderful opportunity for marketers of all sizes to equally market their brands (big and small, and small ones specifically) to allow their audiences, their buyers to find them and buy them (thanks to the brand website!) even if there shelve space is diminishing in favor of bigger revenue brands...

What a great application of The Long Tail principle initially pushed by Chris Anderson, no?  

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