Netconcepts

Managing Your Brand in Online Forums: Damage Control

Stephan Spencer — Thu, 15 Oct 1998 00:00:00 +0000

Discussion forums in the forms of Usenet “newsgroups”, email-based “lists” and Web site “virtual communities” can be a powerful tool for branding. However,
seldom are companies really “in control” of these online forums. The tide can
quickly turn against your company: one solitary message triggering a flood of
negative comments from disgruntled users. One doesn’t have to be “on the Net”
to suffer the effects of negative branding on online communities. In one of
the most powerful demonstrations of the influence that Usenet wields over large
corporations, the “Pentium bug” P.R. fiasco stemmed from a college math professor’s
posting to several discussion groups that he discovered a calculation flaw in
Intel’s Pentium chip. Learn proactive and reactive techniques for dealing with
negative posts, how innocent company postings can backfire, participating vs.
moderating.

Turning Content, Consumers, and Competitors into Competitive Advantage

Stephan Spencer — Wed, 23 Sep 1998 00:00:00 +0000

Birdseye strives to find new and innovative ways to help consumers plan tonight’s dinner (our primary marketing objective). To this end, we’ve taken some common online marketing strategies — content aggregation, virtual communities, and personalization — and applied them in rather unconventional (and, we’re happy to say, successful) ways.

We’ll discuss how we:

aggregate content through our Worldwide Recipe Search Engine
personalize content through our Personal Recipe Box and Personal Shopping List
create virtual communities through our Recipe Exchange and newsgroups

One-To-One Marketing to the Extreme: Personalizing Your Site To Each User

Stephan Spencer — Mon, 28 Apr 1997 00:00:00 +0000

World Wide Web marketing is about one-to-one marketing of value-added services and information to the Internet user. One can market on the Internet most effectively by catering to the individual through customization. A number of high-profile companies on the Web are offering such “personalized” web sites, including InfoSeek (”InfoSeek Personal”), Ziff-Davis (”Personal View”), Bank of America (”Build Your Own Bank”), Amazon.com (”Personal Notification Service”), Netscape (”My Page”), and Microsoft Network (”Custom Start Page”), to name a few.

Personalizing your web site to each user gives you the opportunity to deliver a tailored message to an infinite number of target markets. Your web site can change based on the user’s buying and surfing habits, his past usage of your site, his demographics, his relationship to your company, and a multitude of other attributes which you could collect from your users online or cull from your corporate legacy databases. For example, imagine a customer who is surfing an online computer catalog and purchases a pack of floppy disks. Two weeks later he returns to the site and finds that floppy disks are “On Sale” that week. What he doesn’t realize is that he is the only person receiving the sale price, based on his recent purchasing patterns.

This type of “mass customization” makes a user’s visit more efficient and productive, thus saving him time and money. It encourages customer self-service. By catering to individual needs on a personal level, you foster self-reliance and lower support costs. Personalization also makes it possible to track visitors and correlate web site usage data with customer profiles. So not only does such a strategy allow you to do targeted value-added marketing, but also the user profiles and patterns that you collect will provide invaluable data for your marketing departments!

This in-depth, half-day workshop, is specifically designed for non-technical marketing and customer service professionals. We will:

Explore basic concepts, terms, practices, and directions
Examine closely a number of successful personalized web sites and analyze, in detail, the characteristics of their success
Illustrate exactly how these companies are creating a personalized experience for each user, thus creating satisfied
customers and ultimately reducing costs, and most importantly…
Show you how to apply these techniques to your own online marketing and sales venture