Help your desk to Help

Social Meets IT - Using Online Communities to Reduce Help Desk Costs

Your customers represent a vast, untapped source of knowledge about your products and services.

Learn how you can leverage social media to tap into this dynamic "free" resource naturally.

View this webinar and learn how you can reduce Help Desk volume, provide support via less costly social, web, mobile and search channels, quickly spot trending issues, build stronger customer communities and improve customer satisfaction and retention with easy outcome-oriented access to user-generated content.

Register NOW!
Date: TOMORROW, Wednesday, August 8, 2012
Time: 2 pm ET | 11 am PT | 18:00 GMT
Sponsored by: Citrix

Radical modernization of the tourism industry is needed

We’ve to do something entirely different. The average tourist has been here several times but still we don’t know the people.

There is an urgent need to move into something that is completely new. Traditional tourism doesn’t work anymore.

We need a new kind of genius to move us from traditional tourism towards something that is entirely new.

Traditional attractions will still remain, but we’ve seen it so many times in so many other industries that the old big names are becoming history and the same will happen within tourism during the coming years.

Think about “ruotsinlaivat” – that was a big industry for several decades. Now, a trip to Sweden is commodity. Nobody buzzes about it. What did happen? Tax Free isn’t an incentive anymore. The same will happen with travels to Estonia from Finland. 

Strategy for Success

I wrote this 9/18/06 (September 18, 2006) 5:47 AM (early in the morning). What has changed since? The impact of Social Media? One and a half year later...

Mission, Vision and Goals

1. Define precisely what you want to accomplish
2. Create an inspiring vision and a mission statement that will work for you
3. Set effective goals that will propel you to action
4. I add creative collaboration and crowd-sourcing
   

Strategies for Marketing Success

1. Develop a long-term strategy for success
2. Targeting - find your business niche
3. Identify your Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
   
4. Plan your PR campaign, Internet visibility, Blogosphere
5. Adding Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, Wiki
   

Generating Leads and lead conversion

1. Create a system to attract your ideal customers
2. Generate leads through a customer education system (sounds old-fashioned)
   
3. Additional ways to get customers: digital storytelling, Internet presence
   
4. Understand the entire sales process: supply chain management
   
5. Learn to make presentations that sell
6. Telephone and Internet selling strategies
7. Develop consultative selling skills
8. Effective follow up system
9. Listen to customers
10. Prosumerism!
    

How to Keep Customers

1. How to satisfy your customers needs and requirements
2. Defining the life value of your customer
3. The "moments of truth" in your customer relationship process
4. How to stay in touch after the sale
5. Generate profitable added value sales

Time Management

1. What's important, what can be automated and what deleted?
2. Practical system for being in control of your time
3. Scheduling time for interruptions - urgent/non urgent and important/unimportant
4. Multipresence!
   

Advertising

1. Select right publication and media
2. Power of headlines
3. How to write to persuade
4. Create offers that make people respond
5. ABC of ad-testing and test marketing
6. Advertising price management
7. Dialog with customers and partners
   

Creating a support system

1. Your support system & how to build it
2. Hiring, partnering and keeping the best people
3. Form joint ventures and alliances
4. Creative Collaboration!

Why is Apple Cute?

"Apple’s been in the news quite a bit lately. Nowadays, Apple is a media darling. The critics like the company’s direction, and so does Wall Street. But it wasn’t always so. This summer marked the tenth anniversary of Apple’s lowest point–a time in 1996 when the company’s profits and products were hitting bottom. (Steve Jobs’s return to the company he founded was still a year away.)," Write's Pogue in his New York Times blog. Find more about the Apple blog here.

I can find parallels to the Apple Cinderella story here in Finland as well. Nokia wasn't the best of companies in the early 90's. Satama Interactive has been going through difficult times, but has received good publicity in the last weeks. Start-ups are very vulnerable in the early stages of development. We've been addicted with success stories and would like to read more and more about the good things. All companies go through good and bad times. All quarters aren't pure and linear growth in earnings, rising stock prices and new successful product launches. Companies need to live through the times they travel on the dark side of the moon.