Chapter 2
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This is a text transcription of a discussion between Hamilton, John, Unni and Rajesh. Unni and Rajesh are our web design partners from Mumbai, India, www.pigtailpundits.com. Mumbai is the Indian name for the city of Bombay. What follows is our rants and raves regarding the state of the web and the implications for owners of small to medium sized businesses. . . John:
After people get their printed brochure, the next thing
they want is to sell the thing they sell over the web.
Or to have their clients be able to check their account
balance or track an order. And then they feel like okay, well,
that’s it. Hamilton:
There’s so much more, come on, we’re all tired of hearing
that the web is the single most significant communication medium to
come along in our lifetime. Is
that really it? I mean, is that where we all have evolved with our web sites? Unni:
For most, yes. But
the real value of the web for all of us is it gives us our voice –
it gives everyone their voice.
Look at email. It’s how most of us communicate, it accounts for 70% of the
use of the Internet. John:
What it means to me, email, is that it changes
relationships. This is a silly example, but before email, none of my clients
faxed jokes to me or called me to tell a joke.
It has opened up a whole new level of communication.
Simple, informal, quick.
Not a lot of companies really use email to its fullest
potential because they don’t really understand it.
And do you know why? Email
is basically thrown in with your web hosting.
It’s free. Nobody’s
making money on it so nobody’s helping companies learn how to use
it. Hamilton:
And here’s why that’s a great big marketing problem.
If you have 20 people sending email to customers and
prospects, you have 20 copywriters.
Twenty authors of your marketing message.
By default. Complete
with poor grammar and so many missed opportunities.
It’s easier to speak it than to write it.
Especially if you don’t know how to type.
Ad agencies aren’t talking to their clients about their
email. They should.
John’s right. Email
is this black hole because nobody can make money with it. John:
Oh, I don’t know, you and I harp on our clients enough
about it. Hamilton:
I know, but I’m saying for most companies it’s a real
lost opportunity. Rajesh:
I wonder how many sales are lost to poor use of email? Hamilton:
Lots. You know
the irony or the disconnect for me is all this money being spent on
customer relationship management software.
At least in the U.S. it has become very much of a priority
for companies to automate their sales function.
Plan, automate, track and manage customer and prospect
contacts. In many cases
it just makes a company more efficient at sending a mediocre
message. It’s like a
café owner thinking he needs to become more efficient serving his
hamburgers when he ought to be concentrating on serving better
hamburgers. A more
efficient flawed process is not a better process. Rajesh:
You say ‘relationships,’ that’s exactly what the
web is so good at and what few understand.
My grandfather started in the textile business 100 years ago.
He would bring goods to the marketplace every week. Over time he established relationships with his customers.
He was the factory, the distributor and the sales office.
The industrial revolution segmented those steps, so the
relationship building was the responsibility of the sales office.
Now, with the web, we’re back to my grandfather’s
marketplace, where the web forces all of us to be responsible for
building customer relationships again.
It can be difficult, especially, as John pointed out, if you
perceive your web site as a brochure. Hamilton: Right,
brochures don’t build relationships, although they may start one.
But our sites must do so much more.
And isn’t that where we are, transitioning from
“brochure-ware” to sites that provide information and start a
two-way communication? John:
I agree it is the same, the web forces us to be more like
your grandfather than we’ve ever been forced to do since the
machine age. But at the
same time it is very different.
We don’t have face-to-face real-time communication on the
web, at least not yet. You
have to accomplish it with discussion boards, encouraging people to
ask questions and. . . Hamilton:
And then answering them with good answers and doing it
fast. John:
Yeah, and more. Your
grandfather’s marketplace worked because people came, met,
connected, I imagine drank some coffee together, met their friends
and met other people interested in what they were interested in.
I’ll bet the camel drivers hung out together and talked
about camel driving techniques and what makes a good camel.
Or the early settlers in North America talked about their
cattle or crops or rain or something.
So, we need to create opportunities for people to talk to
each other, not just us, on our sites. As I sit here and
listen to what we’re saying I come away with what makes the
difference in terms of the web isn’t so much the micro ideas about
XML or Java or FLASH. . . Rajesh:
It’s the macro! John:
The focus, the objective, the strategy behind your site. Unni:
Remember one thing. Technology
is the facilitator. It’s
only the facilitator. The
web allows community, but it is not community.
People are community. Hamilton:
We need to create a space, our web site, that encourages
people to gather. That
makes them want to come and hang out a while. John:
Sure, but here’s the quandary I think many of us are in.
All of us pretty much know that if we keep doing things the
same way, in 10 years we’ll be dead.
Our companies will be gone.
So we know we need to do it a different way – we can’t do
what we’re doing forever, we have maybe five or ten years.
But when we try to go and do it differently, it doesn’t
work for us. We spend
all this money putting up our web sites and then we put tracking
software on our site to track hits.
I always tell people if you need to go to your hit tracking
software to see how your site is doing, something’s wrong.
The phone is supposed to be ringing.
Orders are supposed to be flowing.
Emails are supposed to be coming.
If you want to know how your web site is affecting your
business, look at your sales. So, what are the
steps to building community online?
And I think even myself, even though you said the web allows
community, I think at the same time it prevents community.
Other than a discussion board that you can plug into your
site, it takes having a passion for whatever you do.
Here’s an example, www.pocketpcpassion.com.
There’s a guy who’s absolutely passionate about handheld
PCs. He has nothing for
sale and he’s just one guy. Yet,
I’ll bet you his site gets more hits than Microsoft’s handheld
PC site. In fact,
Microsoft now gives him space in their exhibit booth at certain
trade shows. He’s
probably responsible for more sales of these things than any other
site. Now, that
doesn’t mean you can’t sell stuff on your site to create a great
place to hang out. But
I think he succeeds because he creates a place for people to go,
learn and talk to each other. He isn’t necessarily the expert. He creates a place where a lot of expertise tends to collect.
Microsoft wouldn’t allow people to say half the things said
about their operating system or their partners’ products on their
site. Hamilton:
But they should. They’d
probably sell more stuff. Unni:
That’s unfortunate because it’s a new reality. Hamilton:
A new version of “If you don’t advertise, sales can’t
grow.” Unni:
Right. If you
don’t provide community, they’ll go elsewhere. Hamilton:
The result’s the same. Unni:
You must try to build community.
It may take a while, but it’s still the best route to
success. As an example, we have 2,500 people in our community, Pigtail
Pundits community, subscribing to our newsletter. John:
It’s a whole new way of thinking about how to communicate
with customers and prospects. Hamilton:
What a great opportunity to differentiate yourself!
But what about how we get people to our sites in the first
place? Unni:
We began to experiment with viral marketing a while ago for
our own site. We did
something called “feet,” where we took two pairs of feet in a
FLASH animation, a man and a woman, and it has sexual innuendo, but
in a tasteful manner. It’s
done very tastefully, very subtle, it’s a lot of fun.
Harmless really, but it’s very funny, they fall off the bed
and so on. And we just
sent it out to our friends. In
four months our hits went up by 60,000.
We did a couple punjas, or prayers, for some religious
festivals in India and sent them out.
And then we did “The Christmas Turkey” where a guy is
giving instructions how to cook a turkey for Christmas, and he gets
drunk and it’s really very funny.
A simple vector animation - a FLASH movie.
Again, we just sent it out.
From four such viral marketing attempts we have generated 1.2
million hits on our site over the past year.
On January 1 of this year we had 10,000 hits, just from these
funny things. Rajesh:
Now, say for this Christmas Turkey, you had an alcohol brand. You could put a little message at the end of the thing,
“Don’t over do it this season, but do have fun.”
And a friend sends it to a friend and so on. John:
You could also have a button that says if you want to be
notified when we send other fun stuff, please let me know.
Well that’s cool, but I think the hard part is you did that
and it worked well. But,
how do people do that kind of thing for themselves?
Have you seen elf bowling?
I’m an email guy and I’ve seen probably every stupid
email attachment there is. But
this one is really stupid. You
click on it and the machine stacks Santa’s elves like pins on a
bowling alley and the ball bowls them over.
But it’s so popular, that as Christmas approaches because
we administer email for some of our clients we start to hear
“Okay, get ready for the elf bowling email attachments.”
They clog entire systems. The dark side is
that if you allow people to download executable files from your site
and pass them along, it’s very likely that eventually they’ll
get infected on somebody’s site and YOUR thing will start
infecting people’s computers. A great thing to do
is expire them in 90 days. That
would be a protection. Unni:
Anyway, people interested in viral marketing could dream up
something funny and we could execute it for them and they could turn
it lose. Irreverent, fun, silly.
That’s what it needs to be. End
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