Tag Archives: facebook

Can YouTube really increase sales?

I have a confession to make. I’ve been resisting the YouTube revolution. I know it’s hard to believe as some people think of me as the Social Media Guy. My son loves doing searches on YouTube for Pokemon episodes, and my wife searches for new recipes and cooking ideas on YouTube all the time. Maybe I am a Neanderthal in that when I search Google, I typically shy away from clicking on videos.

What I learned from YouTube expert Julie Perry of BLASTMedia, is that I am definitely missing the boat. Julie was a contributing author of Success Secrets of the Social Media Marketing Superstars. I recently attended a presentation she gave at the Marine Marketers of America meeting at the Miami Boat Show. Google paid $1.65B for YouTube for good reason. They’ve turned the most popular video sharing site into the second most popular search engine on the Internet behind their own flagship site. That’s larger than Yahoo!, Bing, AOL, and many others. Continue reading Can YouTube really increase sales?

This could happen to you (if you are lucky)

If your products and services are perfect, and every customer of yours is completely satisfied, then stop reading this now. For the rest of us, we need to be embrace the fact that consumers have never before had more power. Social media and online communities are something that we as marketers should view as an unprecedented opportunity rather than another channel to contend with.

In their book Groundswell, authors Charlene Li and John Bernoff explain it this way:

“Right now, your customers are writing about your products on blogs and re-cutting your commercials on YouTube. They’re defining you on Wikipedia and ganging up on you in social networking sites like Facebook. These are all elements of a social phenomenon — the groundswell — that has created a permanent, long-lasting shift in the way the world works. Most companies see it as a threat. You can see it as an opportunity.”

Our DockMaster business had a “close call” with this type of negative customer sentiment. Over the past five years we’ve been upgrading our 250 clients, some of them with 10 or more physical locations from a legacy “text-based” version of DockMaster to our Windows platform. I am happy to say that we have completed this task and I want to thank our customers for sticking with us through the transition. It was difficult for both them and us. Some of our customers had been using our text-based system for over 10-years. It is very difficult to transition from one way of doing things (keyboard entry) to another (mouse-driven navigation).

One of our customers was struggling with not only a DockMaster change, but also a change to their network infrastructure. The transition was painful for this customer and in the midst of the transition, the owner e-mailed me an image one of his employees created that mocked the DockMaster logo.

What struck me was the fact that someone took the time to create this image and pass it around their company as a show of their frustration. I envisioned it hanging on a wall with a bunch of darts stuck in it. This image was a painful, but insightful wake up call for me at two levels:

1. It gave me some insight into how difficult a system transition can be and our team needed to be more sensitive of this.

2. I thought to myself what if this gets out on the internet? How would this tarnish our brand?

The owner did me a great service by sending it to me. Back in 2007 when I received this feedback, I would never have imagined that I would be publishing this story. After all, I am the CEO of the company that makes DockMaster. Shouldn’t we always try to paint a rosy picture for the world to read or spin a story to our advantage? To all the other company managers reading this post: you can’t do that anymore. The world doesn’t want “rosy” or “spin”. They want the truth. This includes open, honest, engaging “conversations” with customers, suppliers and the public at large.

Good Energy Day

Today is 09/09/09 and a movement that got started on Facebook, as well as other places labeled it “Good Energy Day”. Rumor has it that NASA (either the Space Shuttle or the Int’l Space Station) is going to take a picture of earth on 09/09/09 at exactly 9:09:09 am. The question that was posed is: Do you think the earth would glow a little brighter if we all thought good thoughts or did well for one another at the same second?

I went on Snopes to see if this was some kind of hoax and couldn’t find anything about it. Regardless, it wouldn’t hurt to do what the promoters of this cause are asking us to do today:

– Wave and smile to a stranger
– Forgive someone
– Open the door for someone
– Pay the toll for someone behind you

Not bad advice…hoax or no hoax.