Currently amongst companies and enterprises, Twitter seems to have four philosophical camps. Firstly, there are those enterprises that don’t believe in its power, so they don’t use it at all. Secondly there are celebrity users, who because no one else compares in stature or ego to them, follow no one; they just treat the system like an advertising soap box for their various public offerings. Similarly, there are certain companies who ape the celebrity modus operandi and just update on their new products or services. Finally, there are those that do get it right, and understand that the real point is engagement!

And Ford Motor Company, under CEO Alan Mullaly, is one of them. It uses several different accounts to connect with its clients and fans of its many market segments. Ford try to ‘humanise’ the brand in their terms and they don’t use the sites to advertise as such. Links to some of Ford’s twitter sites are below.

FordTrucks

FordDriveOne

FordDriveGreen

FordCustService

FordMustang

FordRacing

So for those companies not already involved, is Twitter (micro blogging) the new marketing tool that they should engage with?  The probable answer lies with the industrial sector you work in, and the nature of customer your sector prescribes.

Already some large UK store groups such as Harrods, Sainsbury’s and Habitat, Sainsbury’s and Harrods are twittering away, whereas others like John Lewis and Tesco are not. The really crucial issue, though, is the total number of followers – today Sainsbury’s has 636 followers, Harrods barely 150. Is it worth the effort one wonders, but then Brad at Starbucks in Seattle has over 485,000 followers frothing with excitement, so is doing rather well.

By considering the concept of engagement, a key founding principle of Twitter, it leads into asking whether your company would rather have minimal interaction with its clents? Would you rather outsource customer service to Bangladesh or Vietnam where the criticising bunch of toadies can rant at someone who doesn’t understand a word of English?

Furthermore, another serious question to ask of yourself is whether you’re going to put in the effort to do it properly. Stephen Fry, probably the most famous and prolific tweeter of the UK with around 1 million followers is obsessional and produces 20 plus tweets a day. Do you want to go down that road? Of course not, but you do need to make a reasonable effort.

If you sell to consumers, then it’s worth considering, though if you sell insurance, probably not. If you’re selling cars, tweets could be used to sell some of your more hard-to-shift models, and your followers can negotiate online in return.  Purepages is shortly producing a simple questionnaire, the twitterfactor, to formulate a probable answer. Watch this space!

© Mike Phillips. IBM B1 WEEK53 wc28122009

Sources: Twitter.com, Hitwise, Silicon.com, Computer Weekly

This Purepages blog forms the basis of a new book to be published early in 2011 and is primarily focused at the fundraising departments of UK charities. However, there is no doubt that other types of not for profit organisation will also benefit from the techniques outlined. The text is spread over the next 10 months and examines and reviews the following techniques:-

1. Websites
• Generic needs
• About colours
• Basic mistakes regarding consumer usability
• Charity specific points and summary
2. Shopping Portals
• Affiliate Commission Systems
• Charity own products
• Auction sites
3. Viral Marketing
4. Database marketing
5. Electronic Events
6. Advertisements and Sponsorship
• On charity’s own website
• Other websites
7. Forums and Blogs
8. Social Media Networking
9. Business Networking
10. Electronic PR / News Items

1. WEBSITES

Though there are a myriad of ways to fundraise using the Internet, for most charities their website will be the most obvious and number one consideration. Sadly, however, this is a marketing tool that largely under performs for them, and for no really good reason. The most common stock answer given by charities when told that their site is pretty dire (as most are) is that there is a lack of funds. Lack of funds, however, should not equal lack of imagination. Given a reasonable age span of supporters, there will be many capable sub-thirty year olds within the supporter base who can produce, with the aid of one of the many design packages around on the market, something quite acceptable. And what are the four primary characteristics that make so many charity sites poor?
1. No clarity of communication or message: What does the charity really do and how is the money spent
2. Poor design: the site is a ‘hotch-potch’ of thoughts and aspirations usually cobbled up by the ‘committee’
3. Too much Information crammed onto the home page: Often the many disparate departments within a charity fight and squabble over homepage pixels.
4. Illogical navigation and user inter-operability

1.1 BASIC GENERIC NEEDS

If you want your charity to be successful online, your website should serve the needs of your supporters easily, utilizing messages and communications that are readily understood. And because the Internet is an ever evolving platform, you will need to constantly and consistently work at developing your offer too. The following aspects of website design are the basic generic building blocks of success, and they’re all important

1.1.1. Fast Loading
This is blatantly obvious, but a concept that most charities fail to think about! The average patience threshold of today’s Web surfer is now below 10 seconds and falling, so if your home page does not load quickly, your supporters will surely click off and go elsewhere. Things that slow loading speeds down include:

a. Pictures can be huge files, often 3mb, so more pictures equals slower speeds. To ameliorate the effects of pictures, there are a number of tactics available:-

- Compress all pictures into .jpg, .png or .gif files
- Specify image dimensions (a x b pixels)
- Slice your images but avoid too many slices
- Don’t resize images within HTML
- Use the ALT tags correctly
- You can control graphic size by reducing the total number of colors used or “crunch” them using any of the popular GIF or JPEG crunching programs available (free programs include GIMP or Google’s PICASA)

b. Flash can be a big problem, if only for the fact that many users do not have it installed. Tactics to reduce flash problems include compressing or eliminating all unnecessary flash elements or using Javascript to implement a picture rotation system. Furthermore, although search engines are slowly increasing their flash readability, as with PDF files, they won’t follow the links and therefore never get past the homepage! Flash is generally accepted as being very negative for SEO purposes.

c. Cluttered Code . To reduce the problems associated with cluttered code, the following tactics are helpful

- Use CCS instead of images
- Convert from Table to CSS based layout
- Use external style sheets
- Remove unnecessary white space in HTML
- Use shorthand CSS
- Use relative links
- Specify the Doc type

d. Server congestion is an issue

- Reduce http requests from other sites
- Don’t use https:// unless necessary
- Upgrade your web server
- use a tier one provider
- Use Gzip compression to reduce HTML size
- Upgrade server memory

e. Database Design

- To maximize speed of download, separate content and database servers

f. Miscellaneous help points

- Use a loading progress indicator to reduce impatience in users
- Use AJAX instead of page refreshes
- Reduce size and number of cookies

1.1.2. Good Eye-Catching Design
Many of Andy Warhol’s pictures are justifiably revered for their relatively simple, but eye-catching designs. A website design is no different – make it cluttered and messy and no one will want to look at it for long.

Similarly, be careful when choosing colours to use – for example, red is used sparingly on the Net as it is difficult for colour blind people to recognize it. Remember also, that too many different colours make your text hard to read and look unprofessional – you’re not creating a crayoning book advert. Finally, there are number of protocols about colour on the Internet. For example, the use of coloured text to indicate links – blue is traditional, and to emphasize important concepts or points. For more about use of colours, please see the section following.

1.1.3. Logical and Simple Navigation
Your website should be easy to navigate, so don’t make your supporters click through tens and tens of irrelevant pages before you give them the information they need. If you make it easy for your visitors to move through your site, they’ll stay around much longer, and will be more likely to visit you again! Some basic points include

a. Logical site structure – categories, sections, and links in relevant positions
b. Show a list of locations you can use to browse the site
c. Show your current location
d. Always use a sitemap [covers as a back-up]

Similarly, good sites generally have navigation menus that remain in the same position throughout the site, though whilst every individual page need not necessarily contain a navigation menu or bar, it must contain a ‘home’ function or a small but readable crumb bar system. Users should not have to use the back button. Similarly excessive use of drop down menus is not helpful; other techniques using Javascript are preferable

Do not encourage any horizontal scrolling, or excessive pagination, and remember that a good designer should always link the site/company logo to the home page wherever that logo appears

1.1.4. Establish Credibility
Make sure your charity’s message is obvious because if visitors can’t readily understand what you’re about, they’ll go somewhere else. Does your charity name signal what you do? Is it an acronym such as the RNLI. Every aspect of your site should somehow contribute to your goal — be it to garner contributions, inform, or simply entertain!

Your site needs to transparently promote your registered charity status. If visitors to your site suspect something untoward, they won’t trust you and therefore will not become benefactors! Believable testimonials and images help create trust. Generally the more information you give your visitors, the more secure they’re going to feel about giving to you.

1.1.5. Focus on Relevant, Fresh Content
Your website content [often called copy] must be up-to-date and relevant to your audience. If your site is primarily information based, then you need to be sure that you are adding new content on a regular basis. Why would your visitors come back if there is nothing new for them? Plus, you lose credibility when your information is old and out of date. Make regular changes to your site. They do not need to be drastic changes — for example, quote recent web statistics instead of those from 5 years ago, change your testimonials regularly and update your copy.

To ensure consistency of your written English, including syntax and grammar, it is best to have one copy writer. If you have several, like a newspaper, you will need a copy editor to review the disparate offerings. For example if one writer uses very formal language and another writer is heavy into slang, then the copy can become dysfunctional. An editor will ensure consistency of text.

1.1.6. Robust Design and Brand Consistency
Remember, that though a charity, you are still a brand in people’s eyes. Cadbury’s chocolate bars are titled with a particular font which has remained the same over several decades, as has the dark blue contents wrapper! So be sure that the look and design of your site is consistent.

Choose a back ground colour and stick with it. Choose link and text colours, and use them consistently throughout the site.

Always put your navigation buttons in the same position, whether along the side, or across the bottom of the page. Consistency of design will ensure that the experience at your site is a pleasant one. It will also let visitors know that they are still at your site, and haven’t linked off somewhere else!

All links should be relevant to the site and encourage people to click on them. They can either detract from your site, or contribute to it. Think creatively when developing your links!

1.1.7. Consider Database Marketing
Design the website so that you can capture your visitors email address on a permission given basis. Provide your visitors with at least one viable reason why they should give you their email addresses, such as a free newsletter, problem solving / readers questions section.

1.1.8. File Names
Use descriptive and meaningful file names. Your files names not only show up in the search engines, but also at the top of your visitor’s browser and in their bookmarks! Would you remember why you bookmarked a page that looked like this:

http://www.neatsite.com/cgi-bin/900wty/f862uz?5331a7qw334

Or would you be more likely to return to

http://www.neatsite.com/cgi-bin/Newsletter

1.1.9. Easy Contact
Make certain it is easy for visitors to contact you – ensure that they don’t have to click through myriads of pages for your contact details. Part of building credibility involves ensuring potential future supporters know exactly who you are, where you are and how they can contact you. Obvious transparency definitely pays dividends!

1.1.10. Structure for SEO
Design your website so that all pages within the site, not just the homepage, can be optimised.

In consumer products, however, that name or logo should be a psychological symbolisation of how people think about that particular business or product. The best brands create a special relationship with customers, based on intangible qualities that evoke strong emotional responses. In essence, a brand will be a durable, unique business identity (Hovis has been around since 1886), often protected by trademark and patents, and inter-twined with perceptions of high quality, personality, origin, and pleasurable experiences. The whole brand experience should be holistic – the whole should be greater than the sum of the parts.

So having spent time, creativity and resource developing a brand, what sort of benefits might be expected.

1. Building a brand helps customers shorten their decision-making process, by creating a perceived knowledge of what they are going to buy, before they buy it. Most people, for example don’t think long and hard before buying a Mars bar!

In a similar vein, great brand images and logos can create memorability which in turn, help shorten the decision making process. For example, BP’s flower logo indicates inter alia, good clean forecourt, most likely a well-stocked convenience store attached and, above all, quality petrol. FedEx’s purple and orange van livery suggests the ubiquitous and quiet understated efficiency of this global delivery company.

2. Lowering the purchasing risk. So when someone feels under pressure to make a wise decision, he or she tends to choose the brand-name supplier over the no-name one. As the saying goes, “You’ll never be fired for buying IBM.” Similarly, buying PG Tips tea bags over a supermarket’s generally inferior own label bags will always work out a good decision.

3. Brands create and reward the confidence in a business, product or service by doing exactly what the customer already believes it will do. A can of Coke will refresh you and always taste great, year on year – it always delivers the expected emotional response.

4. Purchasing a branded product should evoke an emotional feeling in the customer. For example, Giorgio Armani makes his clients feel good about what they wear, feel good about buying clothes from his shops, and helps send out a positive fashion statement to the client’s peer group.

5. Good brands create loyalty which means consumers are more likely to buy that product or service again than competing brands. People who closely bond with a brand identity are not only more likely to repurchase what they bought, but also to buy related items or brand extensions of the same brand, to recommend the brand to others and to resist the lure of a competitor’s price cut.

6. Brand advertising can have latent and long lasting effects. Seeing your adverts regularly in newspapers or displayed on the sides of local buses can all be very positive. A consumer might not want your offer just now, but in the future when that need or desire occurs, your brand could well appear in the persons mind as the solution.

7. Brands command premium prices and therefore help generate greater turnover and profits.

8. Brands have the ability to spawn extensions such as KitKat and KitKat Orange. With a well-established brand, you can spread the respect you’ve earned to a related new product, service or location and more easily win acceptance of the newcomer. Most UK consumers have lost count on how many extensions the Virgin Group have launched.

9. Great brands can create greater company equity. Cadbury’s media defence against the current £10 billion hostile takeover manoeuvres from Kraft of the US (14.12.2009) is based primarily on a perceived undervaluation of the iconic Cadbury brands.

10. Lower marketing expenditure is possible. Although you must invest money to create a brand, once it’s created you can maintain it without having to tell the whole story about the brand every time you market it. For instance, a jingle or tune associated with a brand can be used on its own to generate excitement or interest. The James Bond Theme or Intel’s TV jingle are good examples.

Many vendors and analysts define cloud computing narrowly as an updated version of utility computing; in essence virtual servers available over the Internet running software programmes for clients that previously would have sat on their own server or PC.

Then again, this definition also largely describes SaaS, a type of cloud computing which delivers a single application through the browser to thousands of customers using a multitenant architecture. On the customer side, it means no upfront investment in servers or software licensing; on the provider side, with just one app to maintain, costs are low compared to conventional hosting. It’s similar to leasing a car rather than buying it outright. There are many examples of well-respected SaaS products in use; Salesforce.com, Netsuite and 5PM project management are among many.

However, as similar as they seem, SaaS definitely has the edge over cloud computing up to press. For example, customers with T-Mobile USA recently suffered significant data losses when files stored with the smartphone service and cloud provider, Sidekick, got lost during maintenance. Proponents of cloud computing such as Professor Katzenbeisser of the Technical University of Darmstadt in Germany, argue though that it’s not cloud computing at fault but a problem with the way the data is stored. A secure backup means saving data two or three times at different locations, which should be common practice. Anyone who wants to save data online can check with a provider about their practices, suggests Professor Katzenbeisser. But if a third party is subcontracted to do server maintenance, the possibility of mistakes increases.

With a SaaS product you will know where its’ all being run from, whereas with cloud computing data and programmes could be anywhere in the World. And with companies chasing improved profits it means boxes might be put into low cost centres like China, a country whose Internet rules and copyright laws are dubious at best.

A second point worthy of note is that PC hard drives are bigger and cheaper than ever -one terabyte is now fairly common. So maybe a hybrid of some self-storage plus known location SaaS is the best way forward. Leave the “fluffy stuff” to those who can afford to screw up without getting fired!