The humans’ online adventure is still a rollercoaster ride with constant changes, twists and turns. Today 10 year old kids are building their own web sites, exchanging html codes with each other to spice up their appearance in the social networks.

 

You can today easily make great online creations without having a single clue about html. There are services like JAlbum where you can produce and publish your entire customized online photo albums, and now Yooba Studio where you can create and publish flash applications from small widgets to entire web sites without ever heard of basic web site terms like css or href.

 

The development can be compared with that in image editing. Not only going digital, any amateur can today adjust their photos automatically in software like Photoshop Elements, after a 30 minutes course in a digital photo magazine, to do what even was difficult for experts some years ago.

 

Before you know it, there will only be tools to create the most fabulous online creations. When the 10 year old kids become 18 they will since long time be bored with how websites are built today and haven’t only adopted the newest tools, but also started to build tools we haven’t heard about yet, to make it even easier to do magic.

 

So if you don’t see a dinosaur when you look in the mirror tonight, be sure that people will look like they have seen one when they meet you, one day in near future when you state that you know html.

Tags: html, flash, software as a service, jalbum, yooba studio

Tags: social media, social ambassadors, pr, branding, flash mob

Everyone knows that a recommendation from a friend beats a great commercial 8 days of the week. Anyone that is pleased with your product or service is a happy customer, willing to pay it forward. But how do you leverage the happy customer to become a social ambassador?

 

With the current status of social media, the happy customers have a lot more power and are also so much easier to identify. Those with the power are major bloggers, very active people in social networks, basically people that have lot of ears near, which have expressed love for your product or service

 

But how do you attract them? What do they want? Well, basically the same as anyone, to be seen and appreciated for who they are. There is also where you should meet them, on their level giving them love and support.

 

To do this effectively, you need to find a way to support your social ambassadors. Get a person responsible for setting up a network of them with the only task to keep them happy, like a social ambassador Santa Claus; never selling, only giving.

 

To start finding the ambassadors you should continuously check your social trawl to see what candidates there are, and add them to the network according to your capacity.

 

The more you know about your social ambassadors, the better response you are able to give them. Invite them to events, whether related to your products or not, give them tickets to a football game, a concert, some of the minor benefits that your employees get. Another important thing is also to support them at their arena, get active in their blog, and support their entire social network giving the ambassadors the credit.

 

With a troop of social ambassadors you can fast generate a lot of goodwill for your brand, while you at the same time keep them from leaning towards your competitors. So hire a Social Ambassador General today and start embracing your loving social ambassadors (formerly just known as happy customers).

Tags: branding, social ambassador, goodwill, social network

The change in the media landscape has been immense over the last decade. Internet came along to speed up the globalization and created forces that weren’t heard of before. The traditional media outlets have been challenged by millions of fast moving entities like blogs, sites and different social networks.

 

This challenges companies to shift their focus from only covering the major media streams, to also involve all this newly hatched tadpoles that grows to form strong communities.  That information is just as important for you and how you do your business. This also means that you need to find new ways to collect the information to find out what people are saying about your company, or your segment, and you need to cover it more regularly.

 

If you are still sitting there with your fishing rod waiting for the big fish, you need to check your social trawl to get the full picture. The social trawl might include some surprising creatures that can change the way you should steer your boat. Have you checked your social trawl today?

 

Tags: social media, marketing, blogs, media

So with the example of the IKEA catalogue in mind, how should you adjust your website to meet your customer to achieve the greatest results with individual marketing?

Well, basically the more you know about your customer the greater chance you have to succeed. From the obvious to know from which country he comes and language he speaks, to what is on the top of his mind when he lays eyes on your site next time.

Who is he? What has brought him to your site? What is he looking for? What could he also be looking for that you offer? What do you want out of his visit?

If you have a login on your site for the service you sell, it is very easy to keep track of every time a person logs in (if not, you can use cookies or similar). What pages/products has he been interested in before and what could he be looking for next time?

For a site selling electronics for instance, if a person has bought a camera through your site, he is most likely not interested in cameras next time. Whatever he comes looking for next, there is a good chance that he is interested in a tripod, external flash or an extra memory card, even though he doesn’t have that in mind when coming to your site. Providing him with that relevant information will generate more sales and give you a happier customer, while you keep on collecting personal information about him, for a new sale pitch next time he comes by.

What can you do meet my needs even better when I come to your site next time, whether I know what I want or not?

Tags: individual marketing, psychography, crm, seo, ikea

IKEA is one of the world’s major home products retailer. 70% of their annual marketing budget is the production and distribution of their yearly catalogue, showing their products at their best. IKEA pride themselves for publishing the catalogue in 55 editions in 36 countries, which is quite impressive, recently passing the Bible as the most published work in the world.

But when you receive the catalogue and the front page shows a teenager’s room with the latest style of furniture, how intrigued do you get if you are a 60 year old man cashing good from the last years’ real estate boom, with more money than you have time to spend, looking for a new couch?

There are of course other values IKEA is trying to sell with the catalogue, luring people to their warehouses, showing that you can find anything at IKEA, general branding etc. But what if you received a catalogue that was designed only for you, showing furniture that is your style or the style you are heading for, with suggestion of colors to match your existing walls? That would most likely make you more interested in running to IKEA to spend some of your serious cash.

Even though extreme, this example shows the importance of individual marketing. It is not so easy accomplished with a catalogue published in 27 languages, but on your website you can with small efforts increase the result significantly.

So, is your site a beautiful expensive IKEA catalogue or is it using the full potential of online marketing, meeting your potential customers each individually for greater sales? In Part 2 we will get into how you can get started…

Tags: ikea, online marketing, branding, individual marketing

Tags: google analytics, user behaviour

Hi, Pontus Edenberg here and I’m on the Yooba team to handle marketing. I have been working with international online marketing for 8 years and I will hopefully be able to share some experiences that can be useful to you.

Marketing online doesn’t only make your marketing more effective in the sense that you can contact a lot of more people with less effort. You can also personalize it in a way that makes it so much more appealing to the recipient. It is quite obvious but still rarely practiced to its full extent.

If you are selling a lot of different products it is easy to address the right product to the right recipient, but also if you only have one product the outcome could differ immensely depending on how you approach each individual customer. So the more you know about your customers, and use it correctly in your direct marketing, the more sales you will generate. But we will get back to how that can be done more in detail further on. Enjoy the ride!

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