Twitter For Business?

Twitter for business?

Lets start by covering what Twitter is, then we will check out the different ways Twitter can be used, followed by ways to implement your fresh knowledge to create value for your business.

So exactly what is Twitter?

Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters displayed on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Senders can restrict delivery to those in their circle of friends or, by default, allow open access. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, SMS,  or external applications (like the Twitter iPhone app).If you want to group conversations or categorize tweets, then consider using hashtags. These are words or phrases prefixed with a ‘#’. A search for “beer” would turn up all messages that included the word beer, a search for #beerfest2009 would turn up all tweets that included the hashtag ‘beerfest2009’ in the tweet. So when you want to track tweets about your brand, ask people to insert a hashtag (one that you create – remember that the hashtag must be unique in order to distinguish the relevant tweets from noise)

[flashvideo file=http://b6-videos.s3.amazonaws.com/twitter-how-to.flv /]

The first step is to create a Twitter account, this is fairly easy process, and you will end up with an account for your marketing campaign at Twitter like this: http://twitter.com/box_online. Remember to create separate accounts whose names are related to the product/service you are going to promote, even if you have a personal Twitter account. This will look more professional in the long run to have a dedicated following comprised exclusively of the target audience and will allow you to keep your personal account for your more quirky personal tweets (i.e., individual posts to Twitter).

Customize the profile. Once the account has been created, tweak the profile details to make it attractive to the target audience. Add an original logo, match the color of the profile with that of the logo, include keywords about the product/service to be promoted, add pictures and bits of information which are interesting and usable and fill in all the sidebar information.

Put badges on the website. Putting badges on the website and the web pages related to the promotion will allow the visitors to the website to follow you on Twitter. Twittercounter and Twittergrader badges are recommended for this purpose.

Seek followers. This is the most important aspect of Twitter, whether you are doing it for personal reasons or for a marketing advantage. Web marketers seek quality followers from the business vertical in which they are promoting their product or service. This can be done by going through the profiles and tweets posted by various followers and getting noticed by contributing to their conversations.

Jump in and reply to interesting @-reply tweets, which are public conversations between two users. [If they expect a conversation to be private, they should be “direct messaging” (DM) each other instead.] Check out both parties and “follow” them if they interest you. If you follow someone with, say, 10,000 followers and reply to his/her posts meaningfully for long enough, chances are good that he/she will start to reply to you and start following you.

Retweeting means forwarding someone else’s tweet to your own follower list. Proper retweeting can go a long way in gaining invaluable followers who are very popular themselves. Credit your Tweet source by adding their @ tag; e.g., when Box_Online, whom you follow, sends out, “Great new productivity site at http://b6group.com/,” retweet it to your list as “RT @Box_Online: Great new productivity site at http://b6group.com.” If you have characters to spare, you can spell out ReTweet. If someone with 10,000 followers retweets your posts, their followers may retweet your post and so on, with the potential for massive exposure.

A Break-Down of Tweet Topics During A Recent Event: WordPress WordCamp SF

Does It Actually Work?
Here are some examples of companies that are using Twitter in various methods.
@DellOutlet : Sales : Additional sales channel to sell refurbished products.
@HomeDepot : Marketing : Allows people to get more information on the products that they needed or wanted.
@JetBlue : Customer Service : 600,000 followers to let Customers know about upgrades, delays etc…
@IBM / Sun : B2B :  for events, and new product launches.
Do this:
@JeffreyHayzlett : CMO Kodak
@DellOutlet : Not always pitching… talking about adding value, they also follow their other brands.
@CNN : Strong bio, links back to the site, follow the followers
@IBM : Events, B2B group, partner channels, design group… if you are in the
design business, you are not going to know about IBM Design… you will
search for IBM.. and via Twitter you will find it if the brands are
also followed on the IBM Tweet.
@DunkinDonuts : Good logo, good following, offering feedback for not having shops in a given state.
@ScottMonty  : Personal dialog.
@zappos: Taken their brand and presorted it for you, provides insight into
behind the scenes ops, used as a contest & feedback mechanism to
better involve and serve customers.
Not this:
@ FujifilmInkjet : No dialog
@ofc : Same 5 posts re-written 40 times selling products.
@GU : No bio, no links back to their main site.
@Microsoft : Zero posts.
@ Subway : No presence but the brand is one of the most talked about brands on Twitter.
@nissan : Dealerships are followed but no dialog, no persona, no spokesman.

Can You Implement A Twitter Strategy Now?

Your new Twitter account is a key to a successful online pull marketing campaign.  Using your new account can help you to research what people are saying about your brand or topics related to your business. Using API’s like Twittervision API, you can even figure out where people are talking about which topics. You can Tweet about your products and services to attract Consumer attention to your brand.  Once you have a solid following, its time to spread information and content in order to attract Consumers to your website where you can give them value and convert prospects into leads. Consider using tiny urls as a way to save space and lead Customers to content.  Twitter is an excellent medium to use for promoting company events, remember to create a hashtag (#) for your event that will not only inform Customers regarding event details, but also provide a forum for valuable feedback. Remember to post your press releases to keep Customers up to date.

If you have any questions, or would like to recieve a Twitter marketing process map, please feel free to contact us at anytime.

Will Pull Marketing Generate Leads?

If you know your prospects and have their contact details in your CRM system or database, well… pull marketing may not be the most effective method to use for increasing sales leads this month. That said, it could be a viable way for converting prospects into Customers using our Triangle of Trust process if you have some very compelling content to give away to your prospects as teasers.

Folks, if you need new business from potential Customers that are currently unknown to you… pull marketing can be a highly effective weapon in your arsenal. Many people have asked us to present a list of best practices when they need more leads for their business so we collected a few of the best tips and posted them here for your review – hope it helps to answer some of your questions. If you’d like more concrete information or a customized process map, just get in touch with our sales team by filling out this form. Just to be sure that we are on the same page, please understand that it is essential to integrate push marketing techniques to support your pull marketing efforts. This helps to ensure that your brand’s buzz generates leads that you can convert into sales.  A good pull campaign will:

• engage your audience in a dialogue
• compile consumer data
• build and maintain trust
• provide value to the Customer
• compile leads
• empower your Prospect and Customer
• provide an authoritative knowledge base about your brand or niche
• increase your search engine visibility
• give your Customer the tools they need to inform others about your product or brand

Here are a few action steps to get you started.

Establish your marketing objectives:

What exactly is your goal? What will you use to measure your success? Once you have established your optimal end result you can begins to lay out a road map of specific milestones which will help you to achieve your goal in a timely fashion.

Master your keywords:

Which search terms do you want maximum visibility for? B6 Group has developed a set of processes to create first page search results in Google, Bing, Yahoo and other engines for virtually any long tail keyword. Always consider optimizing the ‘buying terms’ (those keywords that carry the highest potential for commercial intent). Positioning articles, pages and lenses for a wide variety of buying terms is an effective step in each campaign. For example; instead of focusing on “widget”, strive to target phrases such as “widget price”, “cheapest widget” or “buy widget”. Microsoft has an effective tool for measuring terms with commercial intent here.

Know your PPC

Get very familiar with driving traffic for low cost using PPC. In order to achieve this objective, you will need to achieve a high quality score on your landing page which means that the page your PPC ad points to must be highly relevant to the keywords in your Ad and it helps if the keyword is also included in your URL, your title tag and even your domain name.

Empower your Customers:

A well run campaign will give consumers the tools that they need to send your brand “viral”. If you gain your Customer’s trust and provided them with value, they will not hesitate to spread the word. Integrate your brand with social media services such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Digg or Squidoo.  The key value to your brand in this category is that you are giving the Customer an opportunity to do your marketing for you, as well as providing valuable feedback and metrics.

Video:

Videos are useful in two primary ways. First, a video allows you to provide value to your Customer. Information always has value and a video is the most effective way to transmit your message. Secondly, a video that is hosted on Youtube, Google Video or metacafe is an excellent vehicle for traffic generation. Next time you check out a YouTube video, click the link under the user avatar and chances are you will wind up on a sales page.

Social Bookmarking:

Always distribute links to your blog posts, web pages, press releases and videos to social bookmarking services such as StumbleUpon, del.ic.us, reddit to name a few.

Interaction:

Get out there an begin a dialog, learn how to tweet, set up accounts on facebook, twitter and other social networking sites in the name of your business or your product and then personally develop the dialog with your target market. You can search for prospects, interact with them directly and even pitch them in real time but be careful… social media is extremely powerful and can have lasting results on your brand image so be prepared before you cross the line. If you always act with your Customer’s best interests in mind, you should do just fine. An examples of how to do it right can be found here.

Link Building:

Link building will increase your search engine rank and increase your online visibility. We can organize a unique linking system that is proven to place your website among the first page results for all major search engines. One easy method of gaining search visibility is to swap links with the owners of other websites, or include a url with comments wherever possible. Remember that on-site linking with good quality, long tail anchor text is equally important to off-site linking from other sites and article directories. Try to focus on optimizing each page for one single keyword and you can expect to experience a real boost in SERP rankings.

If you have specific questions or wish us to prepare a quote to help you with one of your projects, you can always reach us with questions.  Remember that an effective pull marketing campaign is only effective if it is thoroughly planned and executed in a professional manner.  A really effective pull marketing campaign requires months of planning and years of daily maintenance and execution.

Push and Pull?

One significant marketing trend in recent years has been the growing use of pull marketing techniques and channels.  Outsell, Inc., a media research firm, recently estimated that U.S. marketers will spend $65 billion in 2009 on their websites, which are constructed for the purpose of pulling Customers.  MediaPost recently reported that U.S. spending on search engine marketing (another pull marketing technique) will grow from $12.2 billion in 2008 to $22.4 billion in 2013.

Strictly speaking, pull marketing refers to marketing communications that are initiated by the prospective Customer.  In a general sense pull marketing is a distinct approach to marketing that relies heavily on engaging or informational communications to engage with potential Customers.  The single most important characteristic of good pull marketing communications is that the content is not overtly promotional.  The primary focus of most pull marketing efforts is on providing information that prospective Customers will consider to be valuable.  So for example, you might create a series of white papers, recorded webinars, articles or even micro-sites that address a concern your Customers have raised. We can show you how to efficiently discover your Customer’s concerns online and then deliver an ongoing stream of information to help both your Customers and Prospects get back in sync with your brand values and core messages.

The basic objective of pull marketing is to demonstrate your expertise and thereby establish your company as a credible and trusted source of information about a particular subject matter area. By doing this, you have provided the consumer with value even before they consider buying your product. When potential Customers go looking for solutions that fall within your area of expertise your company is more likely to receive favorable consideration because you have already established a bond of trust with the consumer.  Better yet, consumers who trust and value your content and products are more likely to use social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook to help build your buzz.

The effectiveness of traditional push marketing techniques is clearly declining. The fact is that people like you and me are bombarded with up to 3,000 advertisements each and every day! It’s a wonder that we are able to remember any of these ads. Sure, chances are still good that the ones that appeal to our sense of humor have at least a shot at our daily top 10 list but we have our own agenda today and we have access to the internet which means that we can PULL information that we need toward us when we need it.

The Internet has also contributed to the diminished effectiveness of traditional push marketing.  We have become confident that we can use the Web to find information about almost any product or service.  More importantly, we are confident that we can obtain that information whenever we want or need it. We rarely pay attention to marketing messages that aren’t relevant to our immediate interests or priorities.

Pull marketing is growing because marketers have recognized that their prospects are determined to control when and how they access marketing information.  Rather than fighting this mindset, savvy marketers are using pull marketing techniques to build credibility and trust enabling potential Customers to obtain the information that they want exactly when they want it.  We don’t believe that pull marketing will ever replace push, but it has become an essential strategy for many companies to reach out to those prospects that live by today’s social networking norms. 

Today’s most effective marketing programs are often a combination of push and pull.  For example, I frequently receive e-mails (push) that invite me to attend a Webinar (pull), watch a video (pull) or download a white paper (pull).

Are you ready to integrate pull marketing? Click here and let us know if we can help you set up a successful strategy.

What is Lateral Thinking and Do I Need It?

Two of the services we frequently use with our Clients are Idea Generation and Problem Solving. We approach both challenges with very different, process oriented methods but there is one thing that remains constant – Our ability to think laterally and come up with novel concepts by looking at situations in new and different ways. Many of our Clients are so deeply involved in an issue such as their daily business that they find it hard to change perspective and see things from an alternative angle. This is where we come in… we tend to see things that are ‘outside the box’.

Vertical thinking, also known as logical thinking, takes an idea and carries it forward. Lateral thinking, on the other hand, provokes fresh ideas and essentially changes the frame of reference in almost any situation. Vertical thinking tries to overcome problems by dealing with them head-on, lateral thinking attempts to bypass obstacles using a variety of different approaches.

In essence, Lateral thinking is a tool that helps us change our way of thinking about something often by modifying our perceptions.

With logical thinking you start out with certain given components and boundaries wrapped in a process. This is similar to the situation in chesswhere you start out with specific pieces and are expected to play by the rules. The issue is that in most real life situations, we can not use the chess model or logical thinking to solve problems because you don’t know what the pieces are, what they represent or how many pieces actually exist… knowing the rules is almost irrelevant to solving a problem or generating new ideas.

Throughout our lives we are handed several different rulebooks (cultural, social, business oriented etc). When we get these rulebooks we just assume that the components that the rulebooks refer to, simply exist and we tend to accept that certain boundaries and limitations are present because they were mentioned in the rulebook. Lateral thinking throws out the rules and assumptions as well as the boundaries and limitations so that we are free of our social, cultural, geographic and demographic bonds.

Lateral thinking focuses on changing some element to enable a new and fresh perspective of a given situation. Lateral thinking deals primarily with perception. By using lateral thinking techniques we can organize the external world into the pieces that we can then process. Perhaps more importantly, by observing lateral thinking in others we can generate new ideas and better understand how they perceive the world around them.

The brain is a self-organizing information system that forms asymmetric patterns. In such systems there is a mathematical need for moving across patterns. The tools and processes of lateral thinking are designed to achieve such lateral movement to accomplish a given result.

A famous person once said that you can’t dig a hole in a different place by digging the same hole deeper. Think about that for a moment… If you were driving in a car on the highway but your intended destination is behind you, driving faster while keeping the car on the same heading will not get you to your intended destination.

If you were to continue thinking about a problem or a solution in a given way, this may not be as useful as changing tact and trying something completely different. Additional effort in the same direction will not necessarily help you get the results you were after but applying some proven tools designed to turn the car around, may offer you options that you never knew existed. It’s a format of thinking ‘out of the box’ and our Clients believe that we are very good at it. It may be because we do it frequently.

If you have a challenging problem or need some new ideas, please, fill out our form and allow us to get in touch with you today.

Should Everything Be Free?

As we sell more and more iPhone Apps, we collect more and more feedback from both our Customers and people who think that everything on the iPhone should be free. At first we were dismayed by the prospect that an entire generation of people (many iPhone users) actually paid for the mobile phone but now expect software developers to design, code, test and launch applications for free given the efforts involved, the costs for the hardware and the coding tools etc. We initially wondered how we could possibly make it happen. Could software be offered for free?

On a bustling corner of Sao Paulo’s quita district, street vendors pitch the latest “tecnobrega” CDs, including a few by a hot band called Banda Calypso. Like CDs from most street vendors, these did not come from a record label. But neither are they illicit. They came directly from the band. Calypso distributes masters of its CDs and CD liner art to street vendor networks in towns where they plan to tour, with full agreement that the vendors will copy the CDs, sell them, and keep all the money. That’s OK, because selling discs isn’t Calypso’s main source of income. The band is really in the performance business – and business is good. Traveling from town to town this way, preceded by a wave of supercheap CDs, Calypso has filled its shows and paid for a private jet. Not a bad way to offer free software we thought.

Back at ground zero, our developers were asking for their paychecks and our freelancers were requiring payment for Apps that had just been accepted for launch. We can’t blame them for wanting money after all, they need to eat too but, this same generation of gotta-haves want to get paid for their time and yet expect most things that they need to be free – someone is going to have to pay for all this free stuff if you read your college ECON 101 textbook it’s likely to define economics as “the social science of choice under scarcity.” The entire field is built on studying trade-offs and how they’re made. Milton Friedman himself reminded us time and time again that “there’s no such thing as a free lunch. But Friedman was wrong in two ways. First, a free lunch doesn’t necessarily mean the food is being given away or that you’ll pay for it later, it could just mean that someone else is picking up the tab. Money is not the only scarcity in the world today… the other items include time and reputation. if you build on reputation, you gain respect especially in the troughs of a given niche market. If you increase attention you can actually build a business as you convert from reputation to traffic and traffic as many of us in this digital age know, can be converted into cash. There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities – and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later. This ‘free mentality’ shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in Euros, Dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

How a company presents an offer for a product today differs in many ways from the past in that the price of each individual component is often determined by using psychology, not cost. Your mobile phone company may not make money on your monthly minutes – it keeps that fee low because it knows that will be the first thing you will compare when picking a carrier – thus another component, your data volume and your monthly voice mail fee is pure profit to the carrier. So you see ads for free phones but I have yet to encounter free calling plans.

You get the pipes for free but the water passing through those pipes is expensive. So, what are we to do about our dilemma? Many of our target prospects want something for free and yet our developers need to eat. If we were to offer a free ‘lite’ version, then we would encounter higher dev costs and support costs but the idea has crossed our mind.

Wait, there is another way… How about building real value into your offering so that people won’t mind spending some spare change if an App helps them do something that they wanted to do before but were not able. If an App were to focus on leveraging those scarce resources that we listed a few paragraphs above such as helping a user to save time, gain respect or save money – the App would pay for itself and that, in essence, is currently our favorite model of ‘free’.

What’s in a Name?

What makes a good name for a business? I mean, what’s really in a name? There has been much psychological research into the process of naming a company and even more investigation into names that helped propel a firm into the Fortune 500 stratosphere. In this article we are going to explore a few of the best methods known and outline the process we use for our Clients at the same time. Up to now, this was a highly confidential document kept in our vaults because we have used it in the past to create some very compelling brands for our Clients.

Generally speaking, there are four key similarities that winning brand names have in common. The number of syllables in the name, the visual appearance, the meaning or implied meaning of the word or phrase and the linguistic elements that make the name memorable and easy to speak when communicating it to others.

Let’s start with syllables – a good name should have an absolute maximum of 4 syllables in order to make it easy to remember and pronounce, examples here include APple, AMaZON, iPHONE, GOOgle, YAhoo SWISSair etc.

The next similarity all winning names have in common have to do with their visual appearance – for businesses where the name needs to be communicated primarily in writing, words which form visually interesting shapes help to anchor the success of the name. Examples that come to mind include: Google, Apple, Sony, Oracle, Levis.

Meaning – having words which have specific meaning, implied meaning, double meaning or evoke certain thoughts or emotions in a person are said to be powerful in generating a strong, memorable name for your company. This does not always need to be an obvious or business descriptive meaning but can be based around controversy; Virgin is a great example of this and so is Big Ass Fans and RedBull.

Lastly, let’s review the most complex of these similarities – linguistic elements such as plosives and fricatives. Plosives are sounds formed when airflow to the vocal tract is stopped. Words that use P, T and K are good examples. Fricative sibilants cause us to roll our tongue. Examples include ‘s’ and ‘z’. When words use both plosives and fricative consonants the word tends to have a stronger and more memorable impact on both the speaker and the listener. Examples include Prozac, Microsoft, Kodak and Pepsi.

So with a bit of the psychology presented, how do you create a really great brand name?

For folks with no time to spare and a dream of running an online businesses that have a flair for something different and exciting in the web 2.0 space, check out this site, it is loads of fun!

For those of you with your feet more solidly planted on the ground, there are a few ways forward. One is to use a dictionary, a search engine, a thesaurus and a healthy dose of imagination to brainstorm your way to the idea brand name… this is what most people do until they get a bit frustrated and basically run out of time or patience (whichever occurs first). At BoxOnline, we prefer a process oriented approach because it opens the team up to new trains of thought that allow participants to really think out of the box. The net result is a bigger list with much more diversity and a strong focus on the product, the Customers who will pay for the product and the industry in focus.

When the list has been prepared, our team of analysts use resources such as The National Business Register to check each idea against registered business names, domain names, limited companies and trademarks. There are other such resources as well and this is an important step prior to presenting executives with a list of viable candidates.

Many of our Clients claim that they don’t have the time or the money to invest in something like a name generation workshop. They believe that they can do it on their own and, to this we politely offer our best wishes because during the past 20 years we have held 400 name generation workshops and we deliver results for our Clients. In fact, we even guarantee our Clients that we will find a winning name that is still available for registration or we will refund your money… it’s that simple.

If the name of your business and the image it conveys to your Prospects and Customers is important to you, then let’s sit down to establish the strongest possible brand in a structured best practice workshop.

The process oriented approach to developing a brand name for your business takes a lot more time and effort that reviewing a word list or playing around with the dotomator but the results are usually very rewarding and lasting.

Are you ready to have a look behind the curtain?
The first step is gathering enough relevant information. Below are many of the questions we ask in our data gathering phase of the workshop. If the team, the timing and the element of creativity are all positive… we usually produce a list of 10 to 20 viable names which then need to be checked and cross checked to ensure that they are not yet trademarked or registered to another business before we begin exploring or confirming domain availability.

Name Development Process

Understanding Your Purpose and Your Product

The word “product” refers to whatever you are naming, whether it’s an object, a person, a company, a service, a piece of intellectual property, an event, or an abstract idea. Sometimes product and company will both be used to clarify the meaning.

“Customer” refers to whomever you want the name to attract.

Save every name you think of, regardless of quality. A poor name may become the kernel of an outstanding name.

Begin brainstorming the name itself.

Consider the four most important issues in creating a memorable name:
the purpose of the name
the nature of the product
the nature of the person you want to impress and
the impression you want to make.

Here’s the first set of questions to get you launched into our process approach:

How convinced are you that this project is worth the effort?
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What is the expected lifespan of the name, and what does this imply for the amount of time and money you should devote to it?
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What would you gain or lose by delaying the project; and how long might you delay it?
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What are your personal feelings about the project?
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If your feelings are less than enthusiastic: what is the reason, and what would it take to change your mind?
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What if you were to quit the project now?
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Who else is involved in the naming:
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Who else may be working on this name–or on other names for the same organization? How about pooling resources?
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Who will decide upon the name, and when?
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HOW will the decision be made? Do you still need to decide how to decide?
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How much research of reserved and registered names are you expected to do before submitting your recommendations?
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At this point, does everyone agree on the importance, the required resources, the division of labor, and the final deadline?
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If not: what are the differences? How should they be resolved?
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IF YOU ARE CHANGING A NAME: [Consider the next 13 questions. Otherwise skip to “DEFINING THE PURPOSE OF THE NAME.”]

Why was the current name selected? (What impression was the name supposed to convey? Was the selection arbitrary or political?)
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What are your reasons for changing the name?
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How sure are you that a change is justified?
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Could it be that a winning name has simply become boring to people within the organization?
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What are the dangers of weakening the market position held by the current name?
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What if you change a component of the marketing formula OTHER THAN the name?
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redesign the package–size, shape, material, graphics
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target to a different customer
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change the method of distribution
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What if you REVITALIZE the name, rather than risk losing what it has gained?
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modernize the visual image of the name and the logo
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modernize the sound of the name or the sounds associated with it
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update the people/things/activities associated with the name
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DEFINING THE PURPOSE OF THE NAME:

Are you seeking a name with local appeal, regional appeal, national appeal, international appeal, or a combination of these?
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As part of your total marketing effort, what do you want the name to DO?
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help position a new product in people’s minds
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help position a new company in people’s minds
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help position a new company along with its primary product
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help revitalize/reposition a mature or lagging product
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help revitalize/reposition a mature or lagging company
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help overcome a damaged reputation
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help entice people to attend an event
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What type of person do you want the name to impress or attract?
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What thought have you given to the FIRST IMPRESSION you want the name to make? (What do you think it should immediately imply or immediately bring to mind?)
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What thought have you given to the TYPE of brand name/trade name/service mark you’re seeking?
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coined, arbitrary, fanciful: Bic, Kodak, Pringles, Tic Tac
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coined, suggestive: Cheerios, Crayola, Jif, Kleenex, Polaroid, Purex, Rice-A-Roni, Ziploc
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real, arbitrary, fanciful: Birds Eye, Carnation, Corvette
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real, suggestive: Airstream, Bronco, Budget Gourmet, Grape Nuts, Janitor in a Drum, Midas, Safeway, Tiger Paw
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real, descriptive: Jiffy Lube, Murphy’s Oil Soap, Tender Vittles
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If this is a technical product for a scientific/technical market: what if you choose a friendly, nontechnical name?
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If you’re positioning a company along with its primary product: should their names be similar? Which one should you focus on now?
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If the product creates a new product category: should you concentrate first on a name for the category, or first on a name for the product?
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If this is one item in a product line: what thought have you given to creating, maintaining, or preventing similarity among names?
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UNDERSTANDING THE PRODUCT:

What is the CORE IDEA behind the product you are naming? (What is the customer to expect from the product? What is the promise? What miracle does the product perform?)
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Which words that pinpoint the CORE IDEA offer clues for a name?
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What total package of benefits does the user of the product receive?
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What does the product help a person save, gain, improve, achieve, or enjoy?
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What new or different expression of the good life does it provide?
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What fear does the product reduce?
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What loss does the product prevent?
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What is the ONE KEY BENEFIT, and how might it be expressed in the name?
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What are you really selling? (For example: soap, or cleaning power? Fax machines, or speed of information?)
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What important problem or difficulty does the customer often face, for which this product would be a help or solution?
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What name might suggest an answer for the problem?
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What is most interesting about the USE of this product? Imagine the name expressing:
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what the product is doing; the reason it’s being used
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the unique way it’s being used
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the special time when it’s being used
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the important place where it’s being used
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something else the person can do while using it
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What desirable aspect of product DESIGN might be reflected in the name?
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convenience, accessibility, maneuverability, ease of operation
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durability, longevity, reliability, repairability
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elegance, beauty, grace, color, style
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practicality, comfort, economy
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shape, size, weight, portability
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speed, power, strength
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versatility, adaptability, flexibility
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association with an historical period or with the future
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association with a country/continent/geographic area
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association with a particular group of people
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What distinct or unusual SENSORY PERCEPTION is associated with the product? Is it so essential that it warrants expression in the name?
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What sight, sound, taste/flavor, odor, or texture?
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When the product is handled or experienced, what “feel” does it have, and how might you convey this feeling in a name? (such as well balanced, delicate, sturdy, snappy, smooth, responsive)
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What other intangibles are associated with this product or with this KIND of product? Is one of them strong enough to center your thoughts about a name?
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fantasy, whimsy, escape from the ordinary
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friendship, love, romance
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insight, understanding, higher awareness
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joy, fun, happiness, cheer
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loyalty, devotion, admiration, respect
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progress, improvement
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quality, rarity, excellence
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safety, protection
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status, prestige, success
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thrills, excitement, adventure
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trendiness, timeliness, agelessness
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What ACTIVITY is synonymous with this product? What images do you associate with the activity?
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What MOTION or RHYTHM is peculiar to this product, and what does it suggest for an attention-getting name?
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For varieties of movements, see the IdeaBank Topical Category called action/motion/movement/rhythm.
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What CHANGE or EFFECT does the product bring about? How might the name of the product point to this desired result? (as in Downy fabric softener and Perma Soft shampoo)
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What special effect does the product have on people?
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Does the product decrease, minimize, or eliminate something?
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Does it increase, expand, maximize?
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Does it attract or bring together?
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Does it energize, invigorate, activate, embolden?
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Does it promote, enable, empower?
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Does it save, keep, preserve?
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Does it strengthen, fortify, reinforce?
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Does it serve as a catalyst to transform or convert something into something else?
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Does it transform itself? Does it create something new?
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What value does this product add to an existing product or service?
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What if the name communicated the value added?
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Because you want your customer to think “this is my kind of product,” what words could you use as metaphors of its character?
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aggressive, competitive, fierce, intense
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calm, tranquil, serene
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cheerful, cheery, optimistic
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capable, competent, qualified, skillful, proficient
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charismatic, persuasive, irresistible, compelling
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comical, funny, witty, clever, entertaining
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friendly, kindly, comforting, likable, tactful, loving, helpful
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honest, genuine, dependable, predictable, trustworthy
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smart, bright, intelligent, brilliant, knowing, wise
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smooth, sophisticated, suave, urbane, first-class
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splendid, incomparable, peerless, superb
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strong, confident, forceful, persistent
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If the product could talk: what words would it use to describe itself? How would it describe its own identity?
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Imagine listening to what the product is trying to tell you. What is it saying about the name it would like to have?
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DISTILLING YOUR MESSAGE:

To summarize your analysis: what position do you want this product to occupy in the customer’s mind? (Where, in people’s thoughts about the product category, do you want THIS PRODUCT to be?)
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To achieve this position, which focus should your message take?
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suggest what the product is or does
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suggest the main benefit of using the product
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suggest both its purpose and its main benefit
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If you’ve not yet distilled the essence of the name: should you try harder, or should you consider an ARBITRARY name?
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If you do select an arbitrary name: should it be coined, or should it be a real word? Does that matter?
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Should it be fanciful? Or suggestive of the product?
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What should be the TONE, including the SOUND, of the name? (What would be inviting? What tone would be in tune with the customer?)
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assertive, forceful, commanding, take-charge, leader-like
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brilliant, sparkling, twinkly, shiny, bright
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chic, sophisticated, subtle, elegant, honeyed, moneyed, smooth
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classic, ageless, timeless, eternal
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exquisite, lovely, beauteous, handsome, rare
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intelligent, intellectual, educated
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flamboyant, reckless, creative, risk-taking
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futuristic, modern, forward-looking
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helpful, cooperative, sympathetic, soothing, gentle
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macho, competitive, military, rugged, burly, bullish
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mysterious, intriguing
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nostalgic, sentimental, hearkening to the past
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outdoorsy, woodsy, nautical, environmental
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patriotic, nationalistic
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powerful, potent, lusty, healthy, robust
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practical, reasonable, no-nonsense, businesslike
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quick, crisp
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romantic, flirtatious, passionate, risque
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scientific, technical. high-tech
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warm, homey, comfortable, steady, down to earth, protective
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whimsical, light, flighty, humorous, merry, happy, joking, jolly
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young, trendy, upbeat, vibrant, energetic
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zippy, zingy, tangy, hot
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SUMMARY:
You have now addressed the basic issues in naming:
the purpose of the name
the nature of the product
the nature of the person you want to reach and
the impression you want to make

The next step would be either continue brainstorming with
questions about the Customer – Competition – Market or
use questions from our Name Generation Techniques.

If you still need a good name for your product, please do get in touch with us and let us know how we might be able to help?

Is Problem Solving Worth It?

A growing number of people around the world claim to be ‘electro-sensitive’, in other words physically responsive to the electromagnetic fields that surround electronic devices such as mobile phones. In fact, Sweden has recently recognized such sensitivity as a disability, and will pay for the dwellings of sufferers to be screened from the world’s electronic smog.

This is a superb example of a knee jerk reaction rather than the result of an effective problem solving process. It is unfortunate that the kind and caring politicians who sponsored the subsidy in Sweden preferred to throw money at the unknown cause rather than actually investigate it and apply some form of process to identify the most probable cause for the sensitivity.

The issue is that, time and again, studies of those claiming to be electro-sensitive show their ability to determine whether they are being exposed to a real electric field or a fake one is no better than chance. So, unless these sensitive people are lying about their symptoms, the most probable cause for the symptoms must be sought elsewhere.

In Germany at the University of Regensburg, Michael Landgrebe and Ulrich Frick think that the ‘elsewhere’ in question is in the brain and in a paper presented recently to the Royal Society in London, they describe an experiment which, they think, proves their point.

Dr Landgrebe and Dr Frick used a body scanner called a functional magnetic-resonance imager to see how people’s brains react to two different kinds of stimulus. Thirty participants, half of whom described themselves as electro-sensitive, were put in the imager and told that they would undergo a series of trials in which they would be exposed either to an active mobile phone or to a heating device called a thermode, whose temperature would be varied between the trials. The thermode was real. The mobile phone, however, was not.

The type of stimulus, be it the authentic heat source or the fake electromagnetic radiation, was announced before each exposure and the volunteers were asked to rate its unpleasantness on a five-point scale. In the case of heat, the two groups’ descriptions of their experiences were comparable. So, too, was their brain activity. However, when it came to the fake phone exposure, only the electro-sensitives described sensations such as prickling and even pain. Moreover, they showed neural activity to support these perceived sensations. Some of the same bits of their brains lit up as when they were exposed to high temperatures.

This suggests that electro-sensitivity, rather than being a response to electromagnetic stimulus, is akin to well-known psychosomatic disorders such as some sorts of tinnitus and chronic pain. A psychosomatic disorder is one in which the symptoms are real, but are induced by cognitive functions such as attitudes, beliefs and expectations rather than by direct external stimuli.

The paradoxical upshot of Dr Landgrebe’s and Dr Frick’s experiment is that mobile phones do indeed inflict real suffering on some unfortunate individuals. It is just that the electromagnetic radiation they emit has nothing whatsoever to do with it.

If you have a situation where actual results deviate from your expectations and the cause is not known… please do us all a favor and either apply our Problem Solving Methodology directly or contact us to do it for you.

Do Performance Reviews?

Most of us go through the process of performance reviews each year and this year I thought I’d try to share a few tips on making them more effective for all.

To start with, think about the following:
1. Journal your thoughts
Dedicate 4 pages for every member of your staff. Throughout the year note specific points on achievements, failures, Client feedback, project involvement and results, behavior within the team etc. I love to use a mind map for this sort of thing. So, if Autumn is the season for performance reviews, all you will need to do is whip out your mind map and create a summary for the discussion.

2. SWOT Analysis
This has always been a favorite tool for me. It is really nothing new but it sure is efficient. I typically use page 2 of the employee’s section in my journal to jot down the person’s strengths and weaknesses as they unfold during the year. Then I add to that the opportunities both inside and outside the firm in addition to the threats that I perceive relevant to this team member. I do the same SWOT for the firm as it applies to this employee such as the threat of losing this person to the competition or the opportunity to promote this person to run a new project should we land the big deal next quarter. It is very helpful in keeping my thoughts clear when decision time is upon us managers.

3. Review the Mantra and if you don’t have one… the mission statement will do. This element of the review relates performance to our company’s goals and with our company culture. One thing that I do is compare an employee’s performance with our mantra… Have they helped us to live up to our goals? How can they improve or do the goals need some adjusting? This is what I reserve page 3 of the journal for.

4. Management principles
I am asked once in a while to review a company’s management principles and rate management’s performance against these principles. This is such a ridiculous task since most managers have not memorized the principles and are expected to follow them. The real joke is that the principles are usually very honorable and inspiring but rarely if ever adhered to in the real workplace. These docs are handed to me with pride, but few managers are able to provide concrete examples of how they live up to such ideals in their daily business. How sad is that? My 2 cents… drop the ideals and get a grip on reality. Either write something that your people will use as helpful guidelines or simply stick to the mantra. End of story.

5. Client feedback
Each employee should have a folder or binder containing feedback from Clients. It serves as a reminder of good performance, gratitude and it inspires your people to keep over-delivering. I too keep a list on page 4 in my journal of every instance (that I am aware of) where Clients have provided me with feedback on my employee’s performance and whether it was positive, negative or neutral in each case. I can highly recommend this as it is usually a very real reminder of things that went right during the past year.

Since I have suffered through several ridiculous performance reviews in the past using standardized forms and the happy face vs sad face methodology which inevitably lead to more smiley faces than you can shake a stick at, I decided to ban such nonsense and get on with pissing people off when they need to hear the truth and delighting others when they over deliver and make my Clients happy – I don’t wait until the annual review, I offer my feedback on a job well done immediately.. OK, I am the first to admit… I offer my 2 cents when something goes wrong as well. After all, my goal is to over deliver and thus delight my Clients so that I can live by our mantra and help you to succeed.

SEO Lessons from the Field 1

This is the first of a series of posts we are going to publish on state of the art search engine optimization techniques to help you rank your site organically in the top search engines as high as possible for your top keyword phrases.

There are two main areas that search engines consider when they’re deciding how to rank your page and the first is what you publish on your page and how relevant that is to what people are actually searching for. We call these on-page elements. The good news is that you can optimize on-page elements easily. All you need to do is edit the text on your website.

The second thing the search engines look at is how popular your site is on the internet.

• How many other sites are linking to you?
• Do you have important authority sites linking to you?
• What text do such sites use to link to your site?

These are called off-page elements and we will address them in the next post on this topic.

On-page elements are important in determining your rankings but off-page elements are even more important. You’re unlikely to get to the #1 spot in Google, MSN or Yahoo purely because of your on-page elements, but they could mean the difference between being on page 3 or page 1 – So be sure to read Lesson 2 in this series for some off-page tips.

Here are a few critical on-page elements that you need to optimize in order to get reasonable organic listings for your keyword phrases.

Ensure that your <title> tags include the keyword phrase that you are optimizing for.

<title></title> tags indicate the title of your web page and gives the search engines a strong clue as to what a specific web page is about. This text appears on the very top of your browser window when you are on a given web page and this very same text is what the search engines will display in their organic listings as the clickable text link to your site. So, it’s really important that your <title> tags contain the keywords that you’re optimizing that particular page for.

For example:

If you wrote an article about how to read text faster, then the title of the page could be:

How to read text faster | Read Text Faster.

notice that I used the separator ‘|’ to boost the importance of my keywords for this page: this is an easy and natural way of doing it. You can use another separator if you wish, the idea is to present your keywords clearly for both users and search engine consumption.

Ensure that your <h1> tags include the keyword phrase that you are optimizing for.

Search engines read H1 tags first to find out what your page is about like headlines in a newspaper. If the search engine spiders discover your most important keywords in your <h1> tags, your page will be seen as more relevant for that search term and you will rank higher.

In your first 50 words of text be sure to include your keyword phrase.

Many search engines pay more attention to the first 50 words on a page than to the rest of the content on that page so be sure to include your keywords at least once within the first 50 words for each page you publish.

Keyword density: at least once in every 100 words of text on your page, incorporate your keywords and keyword phrases.

Your keywords need to appear a few times on your page integrated into the text but not more than 4 times for every 100 words. This is also known as 4% keyword density. If you go any higher than 4%, your site may be penalized for using a spam tactic.

Your internal site links need to include your keywords.

Search engines use the words in your link text (otherwise known as “anchor text”) to estimate the nature of the page you’re linking to. This can be used to your advantage in your on-page SEO efforts, giving your pages a little boost for your keywords.

We have many Clients who struggle to rank well in the search engines until they understand the importance of this tactic. Prior to working with us, they insisted on having a link on their site called ‘Home’. These people are actually optimizing their home page for the word “home” when they should be optimizing it for their main keyword instead! If they were to change the text “home” to “Read Faster Home”, or “Improve Reading Comprehension home”, they would give themselves a boost for “read faster” or “improve comprehension”. If your keyword for a page is “optimize your website”, then link to it from your menu using the text “optimize your website”, or “How to optimize your website”.

The same goes for all pages on your site. Don’t ever link to a page on your site using “Click here” unless you’d like to rank well for the phrase “click here”.

Original content means that visitors will spend more time on your site.

The search engines don’t want to display twenty sites with the same content. It doesn’t provide a good experience for their users. So you’ll find that many search engines have implemented “duplicate content penalties” for sites that seem to be displaying content very similar to content found on other website(s).

So what do you do if your content is the same as someone else’s?

This happens quite often, particularly if you’re using content from private label rights (PLR) articles, where hundreds of other people might be doing the same thing. The trick is to reword the article to make it unique. Shuffle the paragraphs, use synonyms, and try to change the article by at least 50%, and preferably more to be on the safe side.

Get the best quality content that you can for your site, because the search engines will also pay attention to how long people spend reading your pages. The longer visitors stay on your pages, the more relevant your site appears to the search engines for the keywords you have optimzed the page for. If visitors leave your site within a few seconds, the search engines may interpret this action as a poor fit for your keyword phrases. So try to write text that your visitors would be interested in and thus, try to increase the amount of time visitors spend on your site.

What Exactly is A PROBLEM?

People today, overuse and misuse the word ‘problem’ and it is becoming an issue for me because, here at BoxOnline, we use a tool to solve problems and this tool is very effective – but only when you actually have a real, genuine problem. So, when a Client says “I have a problem” we get all excited because we are trained and experienced problem solvers. The thing is most people say that they have a problem when what they mean is that they have an issue, a situation, a case where they believe that something has or will go wrong. So, what exactly is a problem?

A problem can be defined as a situation where you have all 3 of the following circumstances simultaneously:
1) You have a deviation from norm.
2) You do not know the cause of the deviation.
3) You must know the cause of the deviation in order to continue

Let’s clarify the above a bit better. When there is a deviation from norm, something unexpected occurred and when you do not know why this something occurred, it is likely that you do not know the most probable cause for the deviation. If your project is not able to continue after the unexpected something occurred then you need to repair the damage and the best way to repair something is to know what broke. Thus, if you do not know the cause for an unexpected deviation and you cannot move forward, you have a problem and we can start applying our honed problem solving techniques right away.

If, however one or two of the circumstances described above do not apply to your situation – YOU DO NOT HAVE AN ACTUAL PROBLEM. You have something else!

Analogy: You look at a board in the floor and spot a metal nail sticking out. You don’t want someone to trip over the nail or to cut their foot so you go get a tool to put the nail back where it belongs. Do you select a hammer or a screwdriver? That’s right, as soon as we have labeled a given situation “a problem”, we can reach for the appropriate tool to help identify what the most probable cause is or was. Then the cause can be dealt with and the process can move forward again. Any questions?