Using Myspace to Market Locally
Source: unknown
The Galveston Daily News (reg required) had an interesting article recently about Island Bicycle Co. was using MySpace to market to its customers locally. Kudos to Kevin at Buzznetworker for finding this story.
I often hear people complain that MySpace traffic is bad traffic as it doesn’t convert, and you cannot use it to effectively market to locally. Well the Island Bicycle Co. debunks both of those myths.
MySpace offers a lot of potential for small businesses according to Carlon Haas, Austin-based Internet marketing expert and president of Brave New Marketing:
“Marketing through MySpace is becoming one of the best ways to guerrilla market these days…“Using the search tool on MySpace, you can get demographic information by ZIP code. It has all the targeting of an expensive direct mail campaign at zero the cost.”
Jeff Neilson, who is the owner of Island Bicycle Co. first thought of using MySpace just as a guerrilla marketing tool. But after a MySpace search and found that 22,000 people that used MySpace lived within 10 miles of his store, Jeff realized that he had a great marketing opportunity.
The Island Bicycle Co. MySpace strategy is simple according to Jeff:
“Every day I send out 20 friend requests. With the kids’ market, because of our logo, they tend to grab it quick. They like it, they want a bike and (the logo) looks good on their front page Once a week I’ll send out a blurb announcing a bike special or telling people that new bikes have come in. That goes out to all my friends.”
The success of the marketing campaign can be seen in the bottom line. Last week Island Bicycle Co. sold three bikes to people who said they found the shop through MySpace. For a small business, that is a lot of sales.
As Harish Rao, CEO of online community building firm EchoDitto puts it:
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )“As business owners, we look for any way in which we can connect with our prospects and our clients. The beauty about MySpace is that it allows businesses to be able to do that kind of thing. People feel like they have a personal relationship with you or your company.
POP Goes the Classroom
By Kathy Chin Leong, Continental
At the University of Southern California, recent grads Jenova Chen and Kellee Santiago are practically celebrities. Last year, these young legends earned their master of fine arts degrees in interactive media, a.k.a. video games, and immediately inked a three-game development deal with Sony Computer Entertainment America. No doubt, Chen, 25, and Santiago, 28, are happy campers, or more precisely, happier gamers, in this cyber rags to riches story.
“It’s a dream come true, definitely,” says Santiago, who also holds a BFA in theater from New York University. “My parents are supportive. I think they are happy I didn’t become an actress. ”
Video games – along with movies, TV shows, and rock music – are all part of what’s called pop culture, which Robert Thompson, a professor of media and popular culture at Syracuse University, defines as “all the stuff we consume for entertainment by choice, instead of by assignment.” Before 1970, few universities would have considered mainstream entertainment a bona fide subject for academic study, but now pop culture is weaving its way into college curricula everywhere. Even academicians are on board.
“[Pop culture] is part of our American experience,” Thompson says. “We should not shy away from it, but let it illuminate us and see what it says about us as a country.”
New Divisions
Tracy Fullerton, an assistant professor at USC’s School of Cinema-Television, expected flak after the school launched the Interactive Media Division (IMD) for graduate students in 2002. But she says USC faculty members have embraced the IMD, and USC is one of the few schools in the nation that offers both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in interactive entertainment.
“This department gives students an opportunity to make games about different subjects, and we emphasize personal experience and innovation,” Fullerton says. One IMD student, formerly a medic in Iraq, created a simulation game based on his tour of duty.
Chen’s goal was to create a different type of game genre, and together with Santiago and a handful of classmates in the program, he did. The result was an online business, ThatGameCompany.com, and a game called Cloud, which features a little boy who can fly through clouds. The game caught Sony’s attention when it received more than 600,000 downloads and started winning awards in the game industry.
A few states away, comic art is the pop culture phenomenon that inspired a new degree program at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design – students can earn a bachelor of fine arts in the subject. This year, the Fulbright Program, the federal government’s premier scholarship organization, awarded a fellowship to MCAD professor Frenchy Lunning to travel to Japan to study the comic art style known as manga.
A Spoonful of Sugar
According to Fred Turner, an associate professor of communication at Stanford University, high culture and pop culture are blurring, even in the more traditional fields of study. Now, he notes, one of the keys of career success is knowing how to critique pop culture and harness the new media. “It is the new social literacy,”” he says. “It is absolutely imperative we study [pop culture].”
The bonus: Courses that incorporate pop culture entice students to enroll. Last spring, when King’s College posted the course South Park and Philosophy, the classed filled to capacity rapidly, confirms Kyle Johnson, associate professor of philosophy at the Wilkes-Barre, PA., liberal arts college. In Johnson’s course, students spend Monday watching an episode of the adult cartoon that raises a specific topic, such as euthanasia. On Wednesday, Johnson and the class discuss one side of the moral argument. On Friday, they tackle the opposite side.
“The feedback I got in person (from students) last spring was very positive,” Johnson says. “They learned a lot, tested their boundaries and conventional opinions, and South Park made it easier to be interested.”
“In a way it’s a bait, but a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down,” says Bill Irwin, also a King’s College associate professor of philosophy and editor of The Simpson’s and Philosophy: The D’ oh! of Homer and Metallica and Philosophy: A Crash Course in Brain Surgery.
University of California at San Diego computer science professor Joe Pasquale would agree. He says the response to his class The Science of Casino Games has been overwhelming. “Whenever I offer this class, it immediately fills up,” he explains. “I am always asked to offer additional sections, which I generally do.” According to Pasquale, by playing Texas hold ’em in class, students are learning to apply probability theory. “I teach a very mathematical class,” he adds.
Apples in Haystacks
Professions that may have once appeared ho-hum are also getting a new lease on life thanks to pop culture. For example, colleges are churning out more forensic scientists than ever before due to the popularity of the CSI franchise. Prior to the show’s debut in 2000, few colleges offered degrees in that field. Now they are commonplace.
Meanwhile, the Korean soap opera craze is flooding age-old foreign language departments with enthusiastic attendees, and colleges are reporting that they are adding more classes in Asian studies. John Duncan, chair of the department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California-Los Angeles, estimates that the number of students seeking to learn Korean, Japanese, and Chinese has doubled during the past five years.
When the university hosted a 10-day workshop on modern Korea, more than half the enrollees reported that they signed up because of their interest in Korean TV and movies, reports Duncan. He’s confident that as Asia grows as an economic power, high enrollment numbers will continue for a long time.
“Korean is hot because of pop culture, but five years from now there will be pop culture from China,” he says. Even if it’s the result of a fad, Duncan believes this boost in student interest is a positive.
Professor Lunning of MCAD puts it this way: “Suppose a student becomes an anime fan, finds out he wants to learn Japanese, and goes into Asian studies and then art history. If the lollipop leads to the apple, isn’t that what we want?”
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )The Art of Blogging
Written by The Great Ganesha
Published January 31, 2007
For the last half-decade or so, a slow but steady transition has been taking place as web pages on the Internet move from the confines of the static page to a dynamic, interactive medium. Blogging has been at the forefront of these changes. Bloggers catalogue the changes and blogs showcase them as they venture into a heretofore unknown medium.
Blogging is in its embryonic stages and has not completely defined itself. It is also the case that it is several things all at once and so defies categorization. Its etymological roots are easy to explain — it is short for weblog. Some early bloggers split the word ‘weblog’ unconventionally into ‘we blog’, and a new word entered into the English language lexicon — a word, incidentally, that was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year for 2004. So by definition, a blog is an online log, a diary, a catalogue of one’s thoughts. Not unlike our thoughts, the types of blogs run the gamut from the political to the poetic; from the perverse to the picturesque.
Andrew Sullivan – a now-famous political blogger and journalist for Time magazine – describes a blog as “somewhere between writing a column and talk radio.” A blog could be as base as daytime television or as stimulating as an in-depth PBS documentary. A blog is a journalistic report of an event, a well-thought-out opinion piece, the errant ramblings of an old man, or the dull journaling of a teenager’s daily activities.
While it is easy to label blogs as extensions of newspaper or other journalistic media, this falls prey to shaping the unknown into what is familiar. Yes, there are several similarities, but there are more differences. This categorization also partly follows from the fact that it is mainly the political blogs which have ascended from the underground into the mainstream media. But it is the ones that go unnoticed by the mainstream that are the most intriguing.
There are photo blogs, on which amateur photographers post some of the most beautiful images; there are audio blogs where people post audio (also known as podcasts); there are blogs in which people who can barely speak English write the most lyrical prose, in English no less; and there are blogs focused on particular topics, usually started by people who are experts (sometimes real, at other times, self-imagined) in the field. The only universal statement that one can make about blogs is about their format: dated entries which are reverse-chronologically ordered and have a space for readers to comment on them.
At its best, blogging is an art. And just like any work of art, be it Nabokov’s Lolita or Cartier-Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, it can be subtle and expressive at once. A good blog post can stir up anger, elation, and grief. It appeals to everyone and can incite passionate discussion. Blogs can create trends or destroy them. Like art, a blog post has its roots in the banalities of everyday existence.
A good blogger can elevate the mundane, or debase the divine. A good blogger creates his own personal villains, orchestrates conflict, thus creating drama. A good blog post can be fiction, non-fiction, or somewhere in between, like a well-written op-ed piece, but written in less time and with less thought. No, that’s not a typo – less thinking is one of the things that sets blogging apart from any of the traditional media. The technology-enabled facility of quick publishing gives blog posts (and their responses) what can be loosely described as a stream of consciousness style. The immediacy creates a sense of intimacy with the audience, and motivates them to interact with the blogger.
This interactive aspect of a blog is what separates it from traditional writing. A blog post is incomplete without its comments – they are an integral part of it. Comments allow a blogger to clarify, argue, converse or just observe his audience. Unlike traditional works of art, comments enable a blogger to look inside his audience’s minds and digest and internalize what they are saying. This knowledge will, in turn, show up in the subsequent posts, where readers can comment again, and the cycle continues. This interaction makes blogging a largely synergistic activity and makes blogger and audience explicitly interdependent on one another. Of course, there is always interaction between artist and audience, but it is not nearly as intimate, and it is not incorporated into the artist’s work as quickly as with a blog.
By giving people the freedom to write about what they want, when they want, along with a more-or-less automatic readership, countless souls (including myself) have found their ‘inner writer’. Blogging is allowing people to create a new style of writing, with its own set of rules. As more and more people join the blogging bandwagon, it is increasingly difficult to ignore. As it gains more exposure, it is also difficult to ignore the fact that blogging, at its best, is indeed a unique art form.
what they are saying. This knowledge will, in turn, show up in the subsequent posts, where readers can comment again, and the cycle continues. This interaction makes blogging a largely synergistic activity and makes blogger and audience explicitly interdependent on one another. Of course, there is always interaction between artist and audience, but it is not nearly as intimate, and it is not incorporated into the artist’s work as quickly as with a blog.
Forrester is Advising Clients to Advertise on Social Networks
E-consultancy had an interesting post about Forrester Research who are advising clients that a recession is the time to be advertising on social networks. As Forrester put it:
Check out Interchanges Myspace Social applications in particular, such as communities and social networking sites, are cost-effective and have a measurable impact on prospects’ decisions in the consideration stage, which will be important to companies under recessionary pressures.
This is an interesting position for Forrester to take as social networks have not exactly been a boon for most advertisers. In their paper Forrester makes two points why this is a good time to switch your advertising dollars to social networks. The first point is:
“Well-designed social applications are effective. Social programs leverage the voice of the customer to get messages carried further than ad impressions. If your message resonates with consumers, their word-of-mouth is a more effective medium than any of the traditional media.”
Yes a successful viral campaign can be much more effective than a traditional campaign (see the Barack video for an example of this). But isn’t viral marketing simply successful word-of-mouth marketing? You can plan on having a campaign go viral, but unless the message resonates with the consumer (and that is a big if), your message will go nowhere. Social networks can be a conduit to helping your message go viral, but it needs a good message and product in order to be successful.
The second point is:
“They’re cheap. Advertising campaigns often run into millions of dollars. But Facebook pages and blogs are two examples of social programs that you can start for next to nothing. Even more sophisticated programs like a full-blown customer community typically don’t cost more than $50,000 to $300,000 to get going.”
Just because it is inexpensive to advertise on social networks does not mean that the traffic you are buying is good. There is a reason why Stumble Upon lets you buy traffic at $.05 a click in even the most competitive markets. Social networks are notorious for providing advertisers with lots of ad impressions, very few clicks and even less conversions. One of the reasons for this is that users of social networks are not on social with a commercial intent. When I talk to my nieces who are heavy Facebook users, they all mention that they are never looking to buy something when they are on Facebook. They are there to socialize. They are blind to the ads.
It is akin to when you use Gmail. How many of you actually read the ads that go along with the email you are reading? You ignore the ads, because you are not looking to buy something. The same applies to broad based social advertising campaigns.
The only difference between a poorly executed cheap social marketing campaign and a poorly executed expensive marketing campaign is the amount of money that you spend.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Web Excellence -Why 3% of Web Sites Account for 95% of Online Sales-
As the ultimate free market, the web offers businesses in all industries an opportunity to touch potential clients that they would not be able to reach by any other promotional medium. With the increase in potential clients comes a great increase in competitors as well. The web offers your potential clients literally thousands of options from which to choose their products and services.
While in the general business world the 80/20 rule proves true, the web is a very different animal. According to a study conducted by the Internet focused business magazine WIRED “95% of all online dollars are spent with the 3% of web sites who do the best job attracting and converting clients.”
With this much competition on the web it is critically important to do things better than 95% of your competitors. The disparity of results achieved by companies with ‘great web strategies’ and those with simply ‘good web strategies’ can be likened to the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.
Attracting, converting, and retaining web based clients requires a well developed strategy of marketing tactics specifically focused on YOUR businesses potential client. Potential web clients are a finicky bunch. They will typically decide whether your site will help them achieve their goals in fewer than 6 seconds. If your web site does not catch their interest in these precious seconds they will simply return to their search engine of choice and move on to the next site.
Creating an effective web strategy is a laborious task. Good web development firms invest hundreds of hours into developing these strategies for their clients. At the core of these efforts is a well developed understanding of the psychology of web user behavior. This understanding is reached only through extensive research conducted in a number of ways including:
Online Surveys
Customer Interviews
Visual Scan Analysis
User Interface Analysis
Conversion Analysis
To achieve superior web results involved tedious focus on hundreds of details. The location of every individual item on your site is relevant. Although I can not go into this issue in detail in this article, I will offer a few examples.
Sites in which the company phone number appears in the top right hand corner in at least 14 font have a higher conversion rate than those in which a user must scroll to find a phone number.
E-Commerce sites that offer “Free Shipping” have an 89% greater chance of converting a client than those that charge for shipping.
68% of users will leave your site if they click on a “dead link”.
Sites that offer a web based contact option such as “live chat” have much higher conversion rate. I can not quote a specific number of this stat because it varies greatly by industry.
Before developing your web site, perform a research based “web user analysis”. This analysis should include the following:
An understanding of key short and long term company objectives as relates to your web site.
An analysis of YOUR client bases behaviors and tendencies. For example, the number one reason a personal financial services client uses his or her provider is because “they feel the provider has similar values to themselves”. On the web it is critical that your site create the feel needed to match potential clients’ emotional needs. This is the key objective of this analysis.
Understanding of general web user behavior. I discussed this earlier in the column. Too many companies make the costly mistake of taking this for granted.
An analysis of the ‘core usability issues’ related to your site.
These core understandings should be the cornerstone of your overall web strategy. From these concepts you will be able to develop content, capture tools, and a general web site ‘feel’ that will maximize your company’s ability to convert clients.
Above all else, remember that every item on your site should be completely focused on the user. If any item on your site is not achieving a specific purpose in your efforts to convert prospects then it is ‘dead space’. Dead space works against you because it frustrates your users and leads them to seek someone else’s site to fulfill their needs. Once they leave your site, only about 1 of every 45 will ever return. To put it another way, if you don’t promote your offerings on the web in a way that is friendly to users you are strengthening your competitors hand.
Are you doing the things that 95% of your competitors are not or are you settling for mediocrity? There is no middle ground on the web. If you do not understand your potential clients’ actions and tendencies one of your competitors will.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Optimizing Social Media Landing Pages
by Jason Mendez
Last week on Search Engine Land Neil Patel raised the idea of creating custom landing pages for Social Media. I’m all for it. I’ll try to build on Neil’s ideas and add my thoughts on optimizing this type of landing page.
SMO Success Metrics
One problem people have with Social Media Optimization (SMO) is not understanding what to measure. The problem I’ve faced is getting people to see the value in these metrics. What we know is that increased engagement generally leads to increased conversion (whatever you define it as).
Social Media Metrics
• Landing Exit %
• Subscriptions (RSS, Paid)
• Page Views (I like to see them per user)
• User actions (voting, commenting)
• Return Visits
• Total Referrer URLs
• Scoring
Scoring is a cool strategy we use at OTTO’s blog to give each action on the page a value, e.g. if a user views the most recent post that is worth five points. Viewing an older post may be worth seven points. A user comment may be worth ten points, etc. Create a page scorecard and run an A/B/C test. The score for each version gives you a great holistic view of the ultimate value of each design.
SMO Source Segmentation
To begin optimizing any landing page we must first take into consideration source traffic. We need to be able to recognize the URL so we can filter performance. This segmentation also will enable us to create highly targeted content based on a key factor that tells us something about the user, source.
I know that someone coming from Avinash’s blog to mine is highly interested in analytics. That’s a gold nugget for optimizing engagement. I have an entire category of analytic posts that I can target this user with to get them interested in my content, my feed and engaging with my site.
On the other hand, I get a decent amount of visitors from Search Engine Watch. These users are likely less interested in analytics and would be more interested in the bevy of SEM content I have to offer them. These sources help inform our strategies to wrap contextual relevance around the main content areas users are coming to the site to consume or participate in.
SMO Testing
Ideally we already have a baseline understanding of site performance. In any case all the landing page optimization ideas will need to be tested in a measured environment where we can see results of the control group against the tested elements. Even though my presumption was that SEW readers want to see the SEM content I have done enough tests to know that results are many times counter-intuitive. In fact, it is quite possible that SEW readers may prefer analytics content.
There are lots of other ways to optimize social media sites, especially blogs. Take the homepage of Search Engine Land as an example. Better to have a bunch of summaries or one single post with clear links to recent posts?
Currently I’m running a test on this blog to measure the amount of visits and/or page views before someone subscribes. My hypothesis is that it takes more than one visit and/or more than one page-view before users will add my feed. If this is true I can use that behavioral segment (second visit) to target content that will make it more likely they will be interested upon landing based on their first visit behavior.
Neil makes some great examples in his post about removing information that users will not respond to. I couldn’t agree more. In fact, here is a case study on it. However removing ads from social media will be difficult as more sites move to and rely on this model. A balance will need to be found. Testing is the only way to optimize this balance.
Delivering Contextual Relevance
The key to creating quality landing pages for Social Media, and any content driven site is delivering contextual relevance. If the user has arrived on the page they have expressed an interest or intent in consuming the content. They have not expressed an interest to consume more content nor have they expressed an interest in engaging in the site. This is what we want to optimize for. Ideally contextual relevance is delivered dynamically. If not, it can be delivered statically as long as we have the ability to change the content easily and based on data. Static delivery of content also works best when it is user controlled. Self-selection is a powerful optimization tool.
Take a look at the right rail of this blog. The BlogTribe widget is optimizing social media by delivering relevance. It works by looking at the articles that have been viewed across a number of like -minded blogs and adjusts the content so that it is contextually relevant based on a number of quantitative and qualitative insights into what is contextually relevant to this audience.
What is important is that relevant information be delivered. This means links and content merchandising. There a few ways to do this. For more detail I’ve written in the past about optimizing your content pages and my presentation last fall at OMMA on optimizing content, “When Every Page is a Landing Page” is below.
Conclusion
When optimizing Social Media landing pages many of the same rules apply to Social Media as they do to retail, lead-gen, and especially media publishing. In fact, your Social site is a segment unto itself. One that is extremely valuable to marketers. Most importantly however, it will become more valuable to your visitors and users if you optimize it by delivering relevance on the landing.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Launching a Brand from Social Networks
Caitlin Brunell, daughter of football legend Mark Brunell, is the reigning Miss America’s Outstanding Teen, who just happens to have a pretty outstanding goal for herself. Caitlin started a charity called Caitlins Closet, an organization that supplies prom and pageant gowns to young ladies who may not have been able to attend formal events otherwise. “As my charity was born, so was a lifelong plan and commitment. I would strive to make sure that every girl in high school, regardless of social or economic status, would have the opportunity to attend her Prom, Homecoming or any other special event.”
When Interchanges.com signed on to create a Social Marketing campaign for Caitlin and her charity, they created a website and a Myspace page. The goal was to 
increase knowledge and donations of dresses on both sites. By requesting friends on the Myspace page, Caitlin could send out blogs, bulletins and information about her cause. Only 2 months later, her Myspace has almost 3,000 friends, whom comment and email her asking to help and to donate on a daily basis. We use her page to write blogs about Caitlin’s’ everyday life and the events revolving around her charity and the Miss America‘s Outstanding Teen program. Her fans and “friends” feel as if they are connected to her through this process, and her popularity is growing rapidly.
Recently, Caitlin has caught the attention of makeup and clothing line designers, and will soon launch her own line of jeans, dresses and makeup products. Her growing social network will help increase knowledge and demand for these, as well as offer discounts for dress donations to her charity. Her Myspace page has also generated buzz surrounding her good deeds, and a book deal is in the works for this year!
Through strategic social marketing plan the future of Miss Brunell is looking very bright, and she will continue to ensure other young women have the opportunity to live out a “bright” night, with a dress from Caitlins Closet.
Check out Caitlins myspace: www.myspace.com/caitlinscloset
Check out Caitlins website: www.caitlinscloset.org
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )What is Marketing Optimization? Testing, Targeting, and Behavior
Source: Unknown
It is the Year of Optimization. The recent acquisition of TouchClarity by Omniture is yet another confirmation of an intense surge in interest in technologies that make computers sell better to people.
But what in the world *is* optimization?
As a matter of disclosure I am not a PhD. My ADD is a strong inoculation against advanced scholarly pursuits.
However, I have the unique viewpoint of experience. I co-ran a company, Fort Point Partners, that was responsible for deploying a dazzling range of technology for companies like Nike, Best Buy, and about 50 other firms. We launched rules-based systems (ATG Scenario Server, e.Piphany), search systems (EasyAsk and Endeca) and more advanced segmentation and modeling software (LikeMinds, Personify, netPerceptions to name a few). We also ran a lot of tests.
Our goal was simple – make the computer capable as a salesperson. For us, optimization is a fancy word for making a selling process more relevant and engaging for your customer so that they make you more money. And the best optimization tool was one where a marketer could adapt and learn, but the machine did the work.
I see four major approaches to optimization that each have critical value for the marketer (I will use this space over the next week or so to go into more detail on each approach):
1. Experimentation – testing approaches including A/B, multivariate, Taguchi, optimal design and others. Showing different experiences to different control groups to determine a “winner” or “best recipe” based on conversion rate, revenue, or other outcome.
2. Targeting – also referred to as “rules-based optimization”. Defining explicit segments and rules for delivering content experience. These can be simple definitions like “show the iPod when our customer searches for “iPod” on Yahoo or very sophisticated behavioral segments.
3. Behavioral – applying AI or linear regression to prior data to determine predictive factors from data to drive the display of content.
4. Social – offloading the work of relevance to the community through ratings, reviews, tagging, or other forms of participation.
Take Google, for example. They are algorithm guys, right? They use a predictive model that is finely tuned to determine the elusive grail of “relevance” and their results are unbelievable. Yet they also use targeting and testing. True, they outsource the work of specifying the rules to us through keyword selection, bidding, and match type, but this is targeting at its finest. And they test regularly – evaluating different treatments of the SERPs.
So what is the best optimization approach? Optimization is just marketing with math. If your user base ratings improve the relevance of your search results, then do it! If testing helps to eliminate your CEO’s bias towards acres of copy, do it! The marketing “mix” for optimization is going to take time to get right, but will yield tasty morsels of revenue improvement every step of the way.
We started Offermatica not because we discovered the magic algorithm that turned a computer into a selling machine, but because we found out that the keys to selling online were speed and control. Speed – because marketers had no time, so the machine was going to have to do the work. And Control, because the marketer still needed to be “in the loop”, either driving new ideas or removing crazy outcomes.
And remember this: Marketing is done by marketers. Machines just help us listen and aim better.
Business without Borders, Small Companies Can Go Global, Too
Dolly Penland, Correspondent
No longer does a company have to be a giant multi-national conglomerate to take advantage of the world marketplace. As technology has made physical location increasingly irrelevant, many more small businesses are finding they can do business globally just as well as they do locally. “Whether the client is located next door or on the other side of the world, we phone and e-mail regularly,” said Chris Patterson, CEO of Interchanges.com, a Web development and Internet marketing firm in Jacksonville that has created and launched Web sites for other companies internationally, such as in England and Canada, as well as companies located in North Florida.
Patterson says the company regularly gets inquiries from its Web site, but on Oct. 10, it got its first request for more information from Africa.
It was “from a gentleman named Sunday Ekozin in Nigeria. We followed up, and he said he’d like to meet us in person,” said Patterson. “I didn’t take it quite as seriously as I maybe should have. I said, ‘Sure, when you’re in town, here’s our address. Feel free to come and visit us.’ A week later my receptionist came into my office and said ‘Mr. Ekozin from Nigeria wants to speak with you.’ “The two companies inked a contract on Oct. 21.
Ekozin regularly travels around the globe for industry conferences and business meetings. “He had a conference for the mining industry and wanted to do business with someone here,” said Patterson.
“I find Interchanges.com on the Internet while browsing for Web site designer in the state of Florida,” said Ekozin, director of Geo-Mineral and Resources in Nigeria. The “Web site is so important and critical to me because this is the window to the world. We have [been] in international business for well over 10 years. All we do is to mine, process and export concentrates of mineral overseas and we continue to do just this.”
Nelson Bruton, Internet consultant with Interchanges.com, said that aside from the cool factor of working with someone on the other side of the ocean, it is just business as usual. “I was pretty fascinated by the fact that someone from the other side of the world was in our office days after finding us on the Internet,” he said. “Other than that, it was the normal analysis that I do, trying to understand what people are going after, their goals. Once we learn more, we then do our analysis on the search engines, and an industry analysis to find out what opportunities are available to them [on the Internet]. It took six weeks to develop [Ekozin’s] Web site. We e-mailed back and forth any questions and conversations. Any time something arose, we just let each other know. That was the easiest and most efficient way to communicate.”
Doing business without borders isn’t limited to tech firms. “Everybody who imports has a contact overseas,” said Robert Hampton, import broker with C. Martin Taylor Customs Broker Inc. in Jacksonville. “One local electronics company hired a full-time worker out of a factory in China, doing the shipping and finding sources and any contractual arrangements. Another client just hops on a plane and flies over and finds contacts that way.”
Hampton says importers who do business with contacts made strictly through the Internet do so cautiously. “People will make arrangements for overseas purchases through contacts they meet online, but generally these are small shipments.” An initial shipment is used to test the quality and reliability of the source. “Once they find out their reliability, they start placing larger orders. That’s the pattern I see. One box, then 10, then 100, then a small container and then larger containers as they build their business and determine the reliability of their sources overseas.”
Mary Combs, co-owner of Mary’s Imports with her husband, Phillip, and son, John, has been in the business for 15 years now. “I started buying a lot of furniture overseas and everybody who would come to my house would want to buy my furniture.”
Today, Mary’s Imports has two retail locations and four warehouses, selling to more than 300 wholesale and retail clients a day. The company imports and sells products from China, Indonesia, Egypt and Japan, as well as name-brand products made in America.
To find their wares, the Combses fly overseas twice a year. “I go all over China and all over Indonesia,” Mary Combs said. They use the same guides they have used in each country for years. “I go to a lot of flea markets in China. They have huge, huge flea markets in some of the small cities, but you have to go to out-of-the-way places. You can’t go to Hong Kong. It’s very expensive. You have to go to the out-of-the-way places.”
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