Customer engagement is all about engaging your customers with your company or brand and it can lead to increased order values, customer loyalty and word of mouth recommendation.

Given that a recession is around the corner or already upon us, keeping customers is something that any well minded company should be focusing a lot of attention on.

Yet, in a survey reported in Brand Republic last week it was revealed that just 51% of companies have placed greater emphasis on customer engagement as a result of the economic crisis. 

The survey uncovered that those planning investment in new customer engagement strategies planned to spend their organisations’ money on a range of techniques, including many so called ‘Web 2.0’ areas such as blogging, user generated content and feedback and review systems to name a few. 

These services offer great ways to engage your customers. Blogs give you the opportunity to share wisdom or advice with your audience. User generated content allows your customers to create value with your organisation. And feedback / reviews offer that word of mouth recommendation to your goods or services.

Implementing these types of strategies can vary in cost and other resources; however, the investment can be more than worth it if it results in better relationships with your customers.  

So where do you start?

Have a look around at what the competition are doing. Start with the market leaders and work your way down to your own level (presuming you’re not one of the market leaders). What do you see as innovative? What would your customers react well to? How can you see their ideas working for you? 

Once you have the basic research sit down and brainstorm some of your own ideas. Put it all together and look at the resources you have to hand; money, time, personnel and skills. 

Perform a basic cost to return analysis – run each customer engagement idea through this process, determining whether the benefits to be had, match or exceed the investment required. 

This may sound difficult to ascertain when looking at customer engagement but there are ways to get a basic idea. Here are some questions you should ask yourself when evaluating any potential changes:

What is the average order value? – Can you make changes that will lead to greater order values? How much greater would you expect order values to be after making any change?

How long do you usually retain a client for? How valuable is the average client over that period? If you retain a customer what value would you be retaining in the business? 

How many customers do you normally lose? What target would you set on retaining customers after any changes? How much value would the retained clients bring you?

What does it cost to gain each new client in the first place? How much is your marketing, advertising and PR spend compared to the number of customers acquired? What would the value of keeping clients be over acquiring new ones?

Armed with the information you can make informed choices on the customer engagement strategy that is best for your business. However, remember this is an evolutionary process and should not stop there. Record your progress and ensure that you tweak your strategy regularly to ensure the best results. 

If you would like help or advice on preparing your customer engagement strategy or implementing and integrating blogging, user content or feedback systems please call and speak to Aren on 01872 555933 or send an email using the contact form provided.

The key to success in more troubling times is to work hard to attract a larger share of the market followed by aggressive retention strategies to ensure that you retain those new customers.

With the rise of digital marketing, and the growth of online tools such as social media and social networking sites, there are now many opportunities for businesses to promote their business without breaking the bank.

Areas covered in this section include:

• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• The Rise of the Blog
• Email Marketing
• Social Networking including Facebook Pages, Advertising and Networking

A weblog, or blog for short, is a website with regular posts or entries offering commentary, descriptions of events, advice or other materials on a regular basis. They can work for a business on a number of levels.

Firstly, they provide companies with an area to post regularly updated information as it becomes available in a way that traditional static websites just wouldn’t allow. This can be extremely helpful in building a dialogue with your market and will help optimise your site by proving to Google that you are keeping your site up to date and using lots of those lovely keywords and phrases you identified earlier. What’s more, many blog systems are geared up for anyone to use, thus you won’t need the help of your web developer every time you need to make an update.

Secondly, blogs become a means to open up conversation with your customers or potential customers. Many allow for comments to be made by the people accessing them, enabling them to interact with you and your organisation on a whole new level; posing questions, offering up testimonials or adding insight to your post.
If you don’t fancy writing or managing your own blog it maybe worth considering bringing in a professional blog writer, copywriter or marketing agency to help. If you want to have a go yourself why not try WordPress, a simple, free package available here.

A free of charge service, Twitter allows you to keep customers or other interested parties abreast of information from you with options for them to respond online or via their mobile phone.

This tool can be extremely effective for publishing links, promotions and sound bites to your audience. The system can be integrated to display on your website, blog or other sites adding additional levels of updated content to each.

Within a sales team the Twitter system could be used to communicate with field sales operatives, with the tool allowing secure communications from one account to all subscribers, allowing them to respond directly to each others posts.

To set up your own Twitter account go to – www.twitter.com

With many companies, organisations and individuals generating new content all the time it is worth taking the time to see how each may improve the way you do business, research or networking online.

In this post I have attempted to catalogue some of the many sources I have found useful in my role researching and advising companies at uknetweb on the possibilities presented by Web 2.0.

Some of the links refer to other list blogs cataloging the best of the web, others are my own selections and some are link to directories I found useful when browsing the web.

Free Useful Software

Open Office – Why pay for MS Office when you can get most of the functionality for free with Open Office?

A suite of software with programs offering many of the functions found within the Microsoft Office Suite. Worth downloading and playing around with – it works across operating systems and platforms . (The Draw program is particularly useful for preparing flowcharts and process models.) If you’re interested how these programs are free – click here.

Open Workbench – Specifically for Project Managers

Similar to OpenOffice this is a program for Project Managers available as a Free Full Download. This neat little bit of software has all the functions to make a project run according to plan and timescales.

Free Online Applications and Downloads

Flock – Manage the Web 2.0 World

Already the subject of one of my past entries I am still loving the functionality of Flock, an alternative version of the Firefox browser system. The Flock browser brings together all of your social networks, bookmarking sites, picture sites, blogs, rss feeds and much much more.

WordPress – More than just a blog site!

WordPress is one of many free blogging systems available free of charge on the web. With loads of functionality in the hosted or download ble versions this great piece of open source content management software makes it easy to publish anything online. Try it out to see what I mean.

Slideshare.net – Get presenting to the World.

I first used Slideshare to publish a presentation given by my MD to a local Chamber of Commerce (click here to view – E-commerce 2008 and Beyond). I never intended Slideshare to be anything more than a convenient place to host presentations for interested parties to download; however, on the first morning after uploading we received 65 viewers from across the globe.

Ning.com – Host your own network

If you’re getting bored of using other social networking sites, Ning.com provides a great location to host your own network. Featuring many of the functions you’d expect to find on other social network sites, Ning gives you control over the name, content and style of your own network. Desktoptwo – The Desktop that travels with you. A handy little online environment featuring a range of online applications accessible through one secure online virtual desktop. Features 1gb of free storage.

The Best Lists

The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy — and Their Open Source Alternatives

The title says it all – Packed with links to useful software that gives you the opportunity to put two fingers up at our dear friend – the Big Mr.G.

25 Firefox Extensions to make you more productive

If you have switched to Firefox or Flock this list features a host of add-ons / extensions that make your day that little bit more productive. Warning: you might not like the results of MeeTimer – an add on that identifies where you spend your time online – splitting it into neat sections which include; ‘procrastination’.

ReadWriteWeb – List of Web 2.0 Lists

As it says this is a list of the best lists of Web 2.0 applications, this is a veritable list bonanza!

All Things Web 2.0 – Top 100 Top Rated

This is a link to a directory of the Top 100 (Top Rated) Web 2.0 resources. Navigate the site to find apps etc listed by top recommendations, number of users or category. Really useful site to keep up to date with the latest developments on Web 2.0.

I hope you find these useful. If you have any of your own suggestions please let me know and I’ll get them up here as soon as I can.

]]> http://www.uknetweb.com/2008/04/the-best-free-software-online-apps-and-lists-on-the-web-20/feed/ 0 http://www.uknetweb.com/2008/02/something-to-be-going-on-with/ http://www.uknetweb.com/2008/02/something-to-be-going-on-with/#comments Wed, 06 Feb 2008 06:13:43 +0000 Aren http://uknetweb.wordpress.com/?p=16 These last few days I have fallen a little bit quiet and I can put this down to 2 reasons. 1) I have been rather busy in my day to day work and 2) I couldn’t think of anything useful to say.

While I have sat around wondering what the next blog should be I have learnt a couple of things that I thought justified maybe just a quick intermission blog to show I hadn’t fallen off that amazing balcony into the sea. (see ‘about uknetweb’)

The importance of regular new content

Without regular new content on your blog reader figures start to dwindle and before you know it you’re on here speaking to the word processor. I make regular visits to my stats page and have witnessed any figures I was developing disappeared (hopefully momentarily) in the time I have been absent.

If you’re starting on a blog my advice would be that you try and plan your next blog, or at least have an idea about what it might be about, some days in advance.

Don’t just fill the blog with any old junk

I could have probably filled the void in my blogs by ranting on about something, or talking about something else; however, I didn’t want to take my new blog off in strange directions. Why you might ask? Well for a couple of reasons I suppose (are you beginning to see a trend here?): this blog is my chance to share with others my ideas on a particular area and invite interesting discussion from it. If I start to ‘fill in’ with stuff that’s off the mark then the audience I was looking to attract might get bored and run away.

Secondly, I started off as a journalist and realise the importance of the reader. As a writer we have a responsibility to write to that audience. A responsibility to inform, entertain or educate them with content they are likely to appreciate. If we start writing badly or about stuff of no interest to anyone but ourselves are we being fair on that audience?

It’s quite possible that I might be on the wrong track here. Maybe blogs are different and I am needlessly ‘filling in’ just like I said I wouldn’t. I welcome any comments you have on that one.

While I have been away I found the following useful directory of Web 2.0 sites – check it out, you might find something new. click here

A dedicated user of the Mozilla Firefox system, I had my reservations of moving to yet another browser and all the issues in cross browser compatibility on badly developed sites I was sure to have.

On download, I found a browser well beyond my expectations and one that I believe enhances my online experience and my efficiency in carrying out research and networking online. Using the same image rendering as Firefox (according to my techie friends in the office), I don’t need to worry about any new browser compatibility issues at all.

So why do I recommend Flock?

Flock is, to use their words, ‘The Social Web Browser’. It has built in functions to make your social networking, blogging, RSS feed experience the best it can be.

When I want to see what’s happening on Facebook or Flickr, its all one click away with a simple bar down the side showing my friends pics and status. Notifications of waiting group requests, messages etc are shown at the top of the bar too.

When I want to blog I push the little quill and up pops a little window (I am writing this there now), write my blog and press publish to automatically upload to which ever site I have registered.

Through ‘My World’, a personal home screen a little like the iGoogle set up, I see my favorite sites and RSS feeds all in one place.

I could go on listing all the functions but I will leave you to find out the rest by downloading it and testing it. I am sure it has it’s downfalls too, I just haven’t found them yet. If you want to leave me a comment with positive or negative comments about Flock feel free. Happy Flocking!

Never one to miss an opportunity to test a new web application, I created a group for members of the network and referral organisation, the BNI, and joined a local business network created by friend, Alan Jones, for business people in the South West (UK).

So will sites such as Ning lead to the creation of ‘nethoods’, a trend prediction from Trend Watchers extraordinaire – Trendwatching.com, where smaller networks are likely to focus on small real life suburbs, villages or even streets as people search to merge life on and offline?

If you have your own social network why not include it in a comment on this blog? I have.
Visit BNI

My role within the company is to research emerging technologies, liaise with clients and potential clients, and manage some of the projects coming in.

I have started this blog to share some of our work with the world and help businesses locally or further afield tap into the many new tools emerging on the web. I will post as often as I can with links to great sites, information or tools for those interested in the internet, other emerging technologies or growing their business.I want to start by adding the following slideshow (available for download) which was a presentation we prepared for our local Chamber of Commerce featuring hundreds of embedded links to more info.

I am keen to hear any thoughts you have and welcome anyone to get in touch. You can find me on Skype, Facebook or Plaxo. (Click here for links through ‘About Aren’)

Aren