Extendance: High-Tech Business Experts Blog

Entries from February 2008

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Thursday, February 28. 2008

Does the Long Tail Matter for High-Tech B2B firms?

Chris Anderson's hit article in "Wired", and the emerging book, "The Long Tail" provide a great analysis of how the Web has changed many consumer businesses. Taking Amazon and iTunes as prime examples, he shows that the Pareto Principle

(80% of your business from 20% of your product lines) has changed for many consumer businesses on the net, and that it now pays to focus on providing "something for everyone". In other words, the focus changes from the "short head" to the "long tail".

Short head (green) - high sales per line, few lines; Long tail (yellow), few sales per line, many lines.

Anderson explains that the pre-Web world consigned us to buying the best of a very limited offering - we bought what we could get, rather than what we wanted. Now we have the information and the opportunity to buy what we really wanted all along. As consumers, we are now much more in a classical "perfect market", in which the buyer has complete information and a free choice of supplier, than ever before.

But does the same principle apply to high-tech businesses? Should we take the long tail more seriously? There is one obvious point of difference from Anderson's examples, which are of entertainment content to consumers, where individual taste is paramount, and investment, inventory and marketing costs per item are minimal for large businesses. In high-tech companies these costs are much higher, and the features of the most popular products are much more a matter of technical superiority, and much less one of personal taste.

But the long tail still raises some important questions for high-tech firms to think about:

1. "Potential customers might have highly individual requirements. Are we reaching them all?"
- You don't want to risk confusing core customers. But are you missing out on others? Could you reach out to different companies or buyer personae using targeted offerings that do not undermine or divert resources from your core market?

2. "Can we maintain an extended product or service range without excessive cost?"
- That could mean supplying and supporting "legacy" versions of software, for example, through and beyond new product launches, for customers that cannot afford, or do not need or want the updated line. To what extent is this possible (if at all) without affecting support cost, new product sales and brand image?

3. "Do we stand out and are we easy to find?"
- For B2B companies, this is probably the most important issue. The idea is to refine search keywords beyond the obvious single words to include a variety of likely phrases or synonyms that prospects might use. Not to compete with a hundred others that uses the same generic keywords. However, using longer key phrases risks invisibility - so can you find the right ones (e.g. by checking with contacts which search phrases they use, experiment, and maybe using an SEO specialist)?

Posted by Adrian McDermott at 19:24 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Monday, February 25. 2008

The bad use of jargon words in B2B news releases - do you make the same mistakes?

If you read this blog regularly, you will have noticed that we often have an issue with bad use of marketing communications language.

Now I came across a statistic in the excellent book The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott. He put a list of jargon phrases together and had the occurrences in news releases analyzed by Factiva from Dow Jones (www.factiva.com). This Lab then analyzed how often these phrases occurred in news releases published in North America between January 1 and September 30, 2006. The news release wires included the "who's who" in the market, namely Business Wire, Canada NewsWire, CCNMatthews, CommWeb.com, Market Wire, Moody's, PR Newswire, and PrimeNewswire. Of the 388,000 news releases published in these nine months, over 74,000 of them contained at least one of the jargon phrases. Here they are:

next generation, 9,895 uses
flexible, robust, world class, scalable and easy to use, each over 5,000 uses
cutting edge, mission critical, market leading, industry standard, turnkey and groundbreaking, between 2,000 and 5,000 uses
interoperable, best of breed, and user friendly, each over 1,000 uses in news releases.

I guess you got nervous now since the exact same words are in your news releases as well: Maybe time to rethink your PR communications as well?

The ultimate acid test comes now. Substitute in your news releases your company name with that of the competition. Does the text still make sense? If so, you have a clear case of where the opportunity to communicate something unique for your company in the news release has not been used. Too bad. Fortunately, your competition is practically always doing the same too, so not quite so bad after all. Quite strange, though, that nearly everybody seems to waste money in this way!

Posted by Ralf Haller in Product Marketing at 13:50 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: David Meerman Scott, jargon in PR, New Rules of Marketing and PR, press release writing

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Thursday, February 21. 2008

Why website interactivity must be genuine

A number of times recently I have come across websites that offer fake social interactivity. Pages are billed with keywords like "group", "community" or "club", and you confidently expect something that offers the kind of dialog offered by their real-world equivalent. Clicking for the sake of curiosity, though, you find either more company news, special offers, or some edited testimonials and questions. Every time I see this, I wonder how customers are going to react. I mean, how they will feel if you ask them to a party, and then when they get there tell them to keep quiet while you talk about yourself?

What I imagine happening is that marketing partners or employees are told the company needs some kind of social networking feature. Then, when individual options are discussed, they look like too much work for little return (blog, wiki) or too open (online forum). Companies decide instead to play it safe and use the "feature" to include marketing content that didn't make it onto the home page. Making the marketing department, and the management, happy - even though customers are disappointed!

But social interactivity is a genuinely useful tool. It means essentially two things - creating open dialog and sharing useful information. One thing that doesn't belong in the picture is company information. It's just bad form to start a conversation by talking about yourself. The choice of medium is important, but it's the underlying aim that is crucial. If there is a genuine desire to open up the communication, this will make itself clear. But, if your company and product info are not promoted, where is the value? The answer is that it is indirect. Customer relationships are improved through active involvement, and your expertise, trustworthiness and intellectual leadership are implicit. In the case of innovation factories, customers can actually contribute to your expertise and product development, too!

The fear of customers damaging your reputation is unrealistic - people using facilities that you host are generally going to behave well. Joining up already shows a degree of loyalty and respect. If you have given a customer cause for complaint, that's an opportunity for you to demonstrate good customer service. If they misunderstand something about your products, that's a great chance to explain it better and share useful information with others. And in the unlikely event that a contributor abuses the medium, it's not you but they who look bad.

The question is simply, what kind of open communication do you want with your customers, and do you have the resources to do it right? How you answer those questions determines the medium you use. If the answer is, we want a feature but not real communication, you are just wasting resources. You need to look at how the web has changed things in the last few years. Information is so open now that buzzwords are of little value - it's now all about being accessible and authentic - the real danger lies in faking it!

Posted by Adrian McDermott in Online Marketing at 15:03 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Why women are by nature the better salesmen

While reading for the second time "The Definitive Book of Body Language" on a recent business trip to Italy, I had this thought which is backed by some of the book content that women are naturally better salesmen.

Why is that? Well, nothing is more helpful in sales than when you can truly read reactions of prospects and then adapt your interaction or conclude the right next steps. Think of it this way. How much time is wasted in sales talking to people who claim that they really like what you offer and, yes, would possibly like to do business with you. But then discussions drag on forever to the point where you simply notice there won't be any sales any time at all. People in general find it hard to say no, we don't want or don't need what you offer.If you could have only correctly judged the situation earlier, by e.g. properly reading their body language, lots of time and effort could have been saved. As the authors explains, women can read this simply better than men. Here some of the interesting facts:

When man lie, their body language can be obvious. Woman prefer to look busy as they lie.
Body language is easier to fake with men than with women because, overall, men aren't good readers of body language.
When a person's words and body language are in conflict, women ignore what is said.
From a man's perspective, saying that a woman has a good sense of humor doesn't mean she tells jokes; it means she laughs at his jokes (to laugh at others' jokes is often better in sales than thinking you need to constantly tell them!).
Women are better at reading emotions, and therefore better at manipulating others with an appropriate lie (OK, not my favorite skill but can be helpful some times in sales, too).
Women's wider peripheral vision lets them appear to be looking in one direction when they are, in fact, looking in another. This means that men keep getting caught looking at something while women not.

Posted by Ralf Haller in Business Development at 07:59 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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Saturday, February 16. 2008

How robust is the iPhone? Look at this test!

Posted by Ralf Haller in Tech Fun at 07:53 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Defined tags for this entry: iPhone

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Thursday, February 14. 2008

Mobile World Congress 2008 impressions

Attending this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, I was interested to see how things have evolved since they moved the event from Cannes three years ago.

While in the first year pretty much the whole event collapsed over lunchtime when the masses tried to get something from the totally overwhelmed and inefficiently operated food stands, things are much improved now. Although annoying service levels at some places - like the business center or the hourly meeting room organizations - can still be experienced. I guess we need to simply live with them.

On the positive side of things was the crowd control at the Fast Track lane that allowed pre-registered attendees to actually move relatively fast.

In terms of exhibitors, some companies did not show up this year and probably decided they could better invest their money elsewhere. I also expected Google to have a booth but once again they were only present with a meeting room in the hospitality suite area.

Nice move was to expand the exhibition further up the hill where e.g. T-Mobile International had a great tent installed where not only drinks and little snacks were free but also free Wifi access was provided. They filled this existing gap nicely - not offering this for free on the exhibition campus was IMHO a joke. I guess the organizers just tried to suck out more money from everybody. As I was told an internet connection cost 900 £ per day.

One trend seems for countries to sponsor exhibition space for their tech companies. This year they had Canada, Hungary, Scotland, Ireland, UK, Sweden, Norway, France, Israel and Spain stands. France appeared to be the biggest with many more companies, and on a larger space too, while Sweden looked to me as the most frequented one.

Technology-wise one can see that the industry is a bit lacking the BIG leap forward and, with the entrance of Apple's iPhone and probably also with Google's success in the US in getting an open access mobile network (see outcome of the recent FCC auction), "outsiders" are pushing things forward. Overall, the industry is optimistic and the memories of the self-inflicted financial disaster that most vendors and operators experienced due to the huge R&D and spectrum-license costs of UMTS seem to be slowly evaporating. Still, anyone who can show technology or solutions that allow operators or vendors to save costs and operate more efficiently will find an open ear. The "reduce churn, increase ARPU, lower cost talk" is real, even if it becomes quite boring after you have heard the exact same thing from the 200th or so company you talked to. Marketing needs to be more creative and use new tools to bring the message across. It is BTW not one message only but several for many buyer personas ,and this is what I personally took with me from this show, i.e. that only the companies who can talk to each one of their target customers ranging from techies all the way to the C-level will succeed. Who does not do this will join the companies that we have NOT seen anymore this year at the show, whatever happened to them...

Creativity can also be a quite personal taste as you can see with this company here. It got the attention of people at least, but I won't comment any further.