Marketing Chuchi

Last night, our good friends over at Wuala hosted another Marketing Chuchi, complete with beer, spring rolls and ice-cream (thanks to Oona for organizing it all!). The star of the night was Philip who was presenting some findings of his master thesis. He had been working on Web and Social Web strategies for small and medium sized enterprises.

His general insights were that hardly any enterprises seem to have a real strategy, rather he got the impression (although he didn’t put it that way) that most enterprises are toying around on the Web, especially with Social Media and thus go through a learning by doing process. His open presentation quickly turned into an all-out discussion by the small crowd on how to measure success in Social Media usage as a Marketing tool and how to monitor your customers’ behavior.

As usual, different opinions collided head-on, but in a very well-spirited manner. It seems that there are few benchmarks and many different approaches on how to handle your customers online, but we all agreed that there is no way any enterprise, whether it sells socks or telecommunications products can ignore what is happening on the Web and must take control of the conversations happening there.

You’ll find more on the Marketing Chuchi on Amazee, and some pictures shot by our Michael on flickr.

Last night we held another round of the Marketing Chuchi, one of the almost famous startup events where we grill one of our own by scrutinizing the routines and helping them tighten the screws. This time it was Oona’s turn to burn.

She got a lot of steam, but she could very well take it. As a representative of Wuala, the online storage service, she has experienced a lot of change at her workplace over the last months because of Wuala’s merger with LaCie, the French hard drive manufacturer.

As a matter of fact, it resulted in very little change for the Marketing part, the main difference being that they now have to attend more business fairs. Some of the major changes were a redesign of the Wuala logo (which Oona said had reminded American customers of Arabic language!) to represent a more serious side towards more professional customers.

The overall findings of the evening were that Wuala will have to be aware that there is a difference between privacy and security, which it needs to exude in order to appear more serious. Which one of these two would be more important to the user, we couldn’t agree on, however.

Find all the pictures of last night’s Chuchi at flickr.

Tuesday evening we had a special marketing chuchi in the Amazee office. Andreas Von Gunten, a Salesforce CRM specialist from the company PARX, gave us an intro into CRMs. What is the benefit for a Web startup to use a CRM such as Salesforce? How can I manage my clients, users, press contacts, etc? What are the first steps to get going? How much does it cost?

Andreas himself summarized his presentation in a very informative blog post on his Salesforce blog (in German):
http://www.ueberforce.com/blog/salesforcecom-crm-fur-startups-amazee-mar...

My biggest take-away from the session was something Andreas pointed out that is actually quite obvious: Implementing a CRM is not just buying a software and using a tool. It's a decision to put the client in the center of the company's activities - all the time. I definitely know the next important tasks on my to do list!

Last night, the little startup self-help group called Marketing Chuchi went over to Berne to meet on the roof of Atizo’s office building. The hosts treated their guests to cool beer and hot Würstli while Miriam of CMS Box presented her case. We critizised, scrutinised and analysed till the moon was up. Funny sidenote: Every now and then Miriam was interrupted by thousands of cheering Young Boys fans, whose club was playing in a Euroleague qualifier (and unfortunately lost).

For more pictures of the event, please check the photo widget in this project.

Yesterday a couple of enthusiastic community managers met again on the occasion of our very informal Marketing & Community Chuchi.

A variety of topics has been discussed as for example:

* How to welcome new users to a platform
* How often to send notifications to users
* What content a good newsletter should provide
* How to use Twitter, social networks like Facebook and corporate blogs for community building purposes
* and many more …

It’s always a very interesting thing to share your experiences with people who work in different companies but are actually confronted with the same possibilities and difficulties as you are. So Matze and me (Amazee) have learned a lot from Oona (Wuala), Mirjam (cmsbox), Luc (Guzuu) and Franco (Collanos). And we hope they all did so as well!

Thanks for coming and see you next time! The date will be fixed asap and announced in this project.

Last night we had another Chuchi, this time with a special guest. Doodle's Tilman brought in Daniel Jörg of the mighty public relations agency Burson Marsteller. He talked about the dos and don'ts in the use of social media in Marketing and PR and shared some very valuable insights from his daily practice as a cross media consultant. Some of the things we learned:
– Participate in social media! They are talking about you anyway, so why not join?
– Just start. You'll learn the tricks of the trade as you go along;
– Be authentic: Your customers will notice if you are not;
– Listen and react to your customers' demands or you might end up in a pr desaster;
– There are so many ways to do it wrong – you need to have a plan;
– Innovative ideas aren't always good ideas (see the Skittles campaign).

Daniel concluded that online social media campaigns cannot and probably will not in the near future replace old school pr and advertising measures, but they complement these more and more. And that, therefore, ROI doesn't always spell Return Of Investment, but maybe rather Risk Of Ignoring.