When it comes to making information available to your customers, there should be no limit. Your marketing activities should of course focus on the advantages of your products or services. But your customers are also looking for drawings, certificates, specifications, updates, spare parts and a lot more.
Your website is the ideal on-line warehouse where all this information can be made available in a structured and easy to access way.
The C word
In discussions about making information available to customers, people often start talking about competitors instead of customers.
Although they have no problem with making the information available to their customers, they don’t want their competitors to have the same information. We should not make life for competitors to easy by handing them the information on a silver plate, they say. Competitors might misuse the information to steel your customers and revenues.
Who matters more
If competitors want to get information about your products or services, they will get it. One way or another. It may take them some more energy and time if the information is not on your website. But don’t fool yourself. They will get the information anyhow.
On the other hand your customers will very much appreciate if the information they are looking for is readily available on your website. It makes life a lot easier for them and they will like you for that.
Now who is more important to you. A competitor that is disappointed because he cannot find the information his looking for on your website. Or a customer that thinks of you as a professional supplier that is good to do business with.
So please never use the C word, unless you are referring to Customers.
Last Monday I wrote about Change To Survive. Seth Godin gives a few more examples of companies that did not change and therefore did not survive in his todays post The Wordperfect Axiom.
Godin is also writing about Vook. Vook is a new innovation in reading that blends a well-written book, high-quality video and the power of the Internet into a single, complete story. At least that is what they say on their website Vook.com.
Although only future can tell whether Vook will be a success or not, Vook is another good example of a new platform that is threatening the existing business. Book publishers will now not only have to deal with e-books and readers, but also with Vook. That means less chance to survive. Unless they are able to adjust too.
More than 400 million active users. More than 1,5 million local businesses have active Pages on Facebook. More than 20 million people become fans of Pages each day. And about 70% of the Facebook users are outside the United States.
Here to stay
It is clear. Facebook is here to stay. The figures that Facebook has published are impressive. The platform is growing and it is growing fast. And with the growing number of users, the possibilities to use Facebook for your B2B marketing activities grow too. Therefore Facebook may well be the number one social media space for you.
According to Facebook more than 60 million people log in to 80.000 third party websites each month via Facebook Connect.
Email
Facebook is currently rewriting their message service. The result is expected to be a full featured webmail product. The system will support POP/IMAP, meaning that users will be able to configure it with any e-mail client, including Microsoft Outlook and Apple’s Mail applications.
The new email service will further improve the position of Facebook as one of the major social media platforms.
Rupert Murdoch the American media mogul wants people to pay for the news published on all News Corp owned news websites. Rupert dislikes digital platforms like Google that in his eyes steel contents and advertising revenues from him. Therefore he puts his contents behind pay-walls.
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has announced his company is working on “the newsroom of the future”. AOL hired more than 500 full-time journalists and will buy material from another 3.000 freelance contributors. The news will be available for free. Advertising will pay the costs for this news website.
You too
I am sure Tim is right and Rupert is wrong. Tim will survive because he is able to adapt to the changing media landscape. Rupert will not survive if he does not change too. For the single reason that the Ruperts in our world will never be able to survive as long as there are people like Tim.
You are probably not a newspaper publisher. But I am sure there will be a time you also have to change the way you are doing business. And you better make the right decision because otherwise somebody else will take over from you.
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