earthfaves – I love this place – news related to recommendation marketing, word-of-mouth marketing, marketing with social media and earthfaves.com

Inbound Marketing is a new book written by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot.  It deals with Social Media Optimization, SMO – the actions business owners and marketers need to take to make sure that potential customers run into, interact and communicate with their brand as often as possible to win more customers that wy. As Brian Solis put it:

“Inbound Marketing refers to the act of consumers discovering your brand through various forms of online media, without your direct engagement necessarily. Inbound marketing serves as the bridge between those seeking information, direction and insight and those willing to provide guidance and support. ”

Our basic rules for SMO for your company to build up relationships to customers that create new business:

1. Create as many social media presences as possible to be able to establish meaningful dialogue and collaborative relationships with your customers and prospects – everywhere they are. But remember: you need the people, employees, to do this right, don’t even dare to start if you don’t have them!

2. Use niche networks to centralize your different assets and to distribute them through embeds in your website, in your social media presences and in your e-mails: videos at youtube, ppts at slideshare, pictures at flickr…

3. Leverage your existing customer base: don’t miss a chance to ask your customers and web site users to become your friends at myspace, your fans at facebook, your followers at twitter, your favers (i.e. your brand advocates that recommend you with their written testimonials (”why i love this place”) to their social circles and other web users) at earthfaves.

4. Create content on a daily/weekly basis that can easily be shared by your contacts through social media, web sites, e-mail – write blog articles, create movies, make pictures, create presentations – and, if your business relates to it, recommend exceptional places to at earthfaves.

SMO is the new SEO. If you have more promoters/advocates than your competition you win market share. So start now with SMO.

Hey, next success – we made it to the finals of the Gründermarkt at Forum Kiedrich in Wiesbaden! Markus and Daniel went there to present earthfaves in a 5-minute pitch, people loved it. The whole event was great and we made many interesting contacts for the future.

“When companies think of WOM, many times they will create attention-grabbing stunts to get noticed. That stunt may create buzz, but the buzz doesn’t last. It’s a one and done blip of marketing gimmickry. A longer-lasting way to create buzz is to foster advocacy relationships with customers. Which leads me to an important WOM TRUTH:  “Buzz doesn’t Create Advocates. Advocates Create Buzz.” John Moore, WOMMA. Read the whole interview in the Zuberance blog.

“If you still ask, “how much traffic is there,” or “what’s the CPM?” you’re not getting it. Are you buying momentary attention or are you investing in a long term asset?” Seth Godin, read his article “The platform vs. the eyeballs” here.

Our conclusions:

1.  As a business owner, you must find elegant ways to energize your brand advocates to spread the positive word about you – forever, everywhere.

2 . You need tools to identify advocates, maximize their positive customer content, multiply positive, honest testimonials and display them in all the best places to generate revenue.

3. You need to urgently find effective ways to incorporate the customer into your business plan to positively affect brand quality, loyalty, advocacy and revenue.

4. You need to discover ways how to aggregate, analyze, and organize advocate input to provide a better brand experience to customers and partners.

5. You need people in your team who constantly talk to, discuss with, support, thank and reward advocates.

We will offer the tools for all that. Soon. Stay tuned.

Today, Yanni and Arno (University of Trier, Diplom-Wirtschaftsinformatik) leave us. Our twins Heiko and Olli, also studying at the university of Trier, also Diplom-Wirtschaftsinformatik (not sure how this translates perfectly, I guess it is “Business Information Systems”), will stay for another two weeks. Thanks to you all, you did a great job and we had a great time!

Some days ago we had the great chance to pitch to 20 investors at Rhein-Neckar Technology Ventures, an elevator pitch competition in Mannheim, here you can see some images. Normen and Markus went to pitch. After two hours of talking non-stop, we knew we did a good job as we received the business cards of several business angels which meant: “send us more information, this sounds very interesting”. In the last months after reaching the MiniSeedcamp und V.I.R. Sprungbrett finals in Berlin, we bootstrapped our product and our business plan, we are almost done with it, so get ready for earthfaves, we will launch soon and then we will see how powerful honest positive word-of-mouth really is!

According to a recent report from Nielsen Online, users of Social Media are increasingly utilizing their Social Networks to navigate the Web. The researchers at Nielsen – one of the world’s leading suppliers of marketing and media information –  found that almost 20% of social consumers are using the networks as their “core navigation and information discovery tool”.

Instead of using search engines like Google or portals such as Yahoo! or MSN, these consumers are looking for content within social networks and are clicking from there. While the majority is still using Google and Co., 20% anyway is a significant figure. And with social media usage continuing to increase, we can only expect this figure to grow! For instance metrics firm Hitwise found that overall visits to social networks have increased by more than 60% within the last year, with the over 55 year old users increasing their social networking time by 77%.

“At the root of the changing nature of content discovery is the sheer amount of information that is available on the Web. If you want to learn more about the latest smartphone released into the market, your favorite search engine is sure to provide you with hundreds, if not thousands, of articles about the device,” writes Jon Gibs, Vice President of Media Analytics, Nielsen Online. “But with the increasing number of resources available, it’s difficult to know what you should believe or take at face value”. People tend to trust more and more “what their friends have to say and social media acts as an information filtration tool. This is key because [people] gravitate towards and believe what is shared with friends and family. If your friend creates or links to the content, then you are more likely to believe it and like it. And this thought plays out in the data.”

As mentioned in a previous post, this is exactly the direction we are heading at earthfaves: providing you with the ideal environment to exchange tips and recommendations for locations with the people you trust the most – your family, your friends, their friends, experts! We are working hard to improve our local search engine and to make it even easier to add your own “favorite places on earth” to the network, so that earthfaves will become your gateway to the web when it comes to finding recommended locations and destinations!

Lilli, Dmytro and Rick leave us today, so we took the chance to take some farewell pictures. They did an awesome job, Dymtro and Rick developed really cool tools you can use in a few weeks, Lilli did a great job in updating especially the Croatia content on earthfaves and supported Yanni with the creation of marketing documents. Thanks for the great time we had and take care!

Here is today’s team, from left to right – a really international SaarLorLuxPfalz Team:

Kiril Popov, originally from Bulgaria – Medieninformatik (FH Trier)
Xiaoyan Yao, originally from Shanghai – Finanzdienstleitungen (FH Kaiserslautern)
Daniel Stötzer, from Saarbrücken – Entwicklung
Dmytro Osmachka, originally from Ukraine – Kommunikationsinformatik (HTW Saarbrücken)
Ljiljana Zilic, originally from Croatia – Historisch orientierte Kulturwissenschaften (Universität des Saarlandes)
Normen Rosch, from St.Ingbert – Diplom-Sozialwissenschaften (Universität Koblenz-Landau)
Markus Schneider, from Saarbrücken – Produktmanagement
Frederick Klauss, from Forbach, France – Informatik (HTW Saarbrücken / Université Paul Verlaine – Metz, France)

Social tools, networks and services are becoming more and more important for companies to track what people and customers are saying about their services. It is crucial to find the right environments to get into conversations with customers to ensure a great reputation online and get more and more positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

The integration of customer feedback into marketing and product management processes ensures fast improvement cycles and helps a business to stay competitive. By fostering positive word-of-mouth online, businesses win market share and step ahead of their competition according to a study from The London School of Economics and Political Science published already in 2005.

Brian Solis and Jesse Thomas created the first conversation prism last year, now a French and a German one are available, too. These graphics give you an overview on the different kinds and niches, great job:

USA

France

Germany

Japan

China

earthfaves is not yet in their lists – we are soon releasing our first version to tell the world about. Yanni here in the office asked me “to which prism segment would you add earthfaves?”, and I think we’d need two new ones:

1. “Social Geo-Bookmarking” along with Google myMaps. The most striking added value of earthfaves for consumers is to find out which places your friends and their friends love.

2. “Customer Recommendations” where we are first movers. The most striking added value of earthfaves for business owners is that we enable business owners to build up their own community of satisfied customers while our tools maximize their positive word-of-mouth and spread it across the web.

I just ran into two amazing articles I want to share with you – they tell you why our earthfaves location recommendation friend network and social local search engine are pretty clever technologies we will need to make fast and clever decisions we won’t regret in the future:

1. “Where is everyone?” by baekdal.com – a great, easy to understand journey through the history of information

…and a really worthwhile outlook into the near future showing through which channels we receive reliable information.

Some striking sentences:

“..we are currently in the middle of the most drastic change since the invention of the newspaper…”

“News is no longer being reported by journalists, now it comes from everyone. And it is being reported directly from the source to you – bypassing the traditional media channels.”

“We are already seeing an increasing number of services on mobile phones, where you can get information for the area that you are in. E.g. instead of showing all the restaurants in the world, you will only get a list of the restaurants in your area. This is something that is going to explode into in the years to come. In the world where we have access to more information that we can consume, getting only the relevant parts is going to be a very important element.”

2. The Future of Search – Social Relevancy Rank by readwriteweb.com

In our world where everyone creates news, the sheer amount and complexity of data and information a person has to deal with is a lot more than it used to be back the old days. Therefore we will use our social contacts as trust filters. Google, Microsoft et al are already working on technologies that make this happen. The perfect information filter might look like this:

We already did it with our earthfaves “Social Trust Rank”TM algorithm. If you search our local seach engine for recommended places i.e. earthfaves, we rank the results according to so-called “social trust levels” – the more “trustworthy” a person is that gives a location recommendation, the higher up in the search results it appears. This ensures that you can quickly find the hotels in New York recommended by your friends, their friends and other people you can trust and make a well-informed, quick decision instead of wading through 1000s of advertised hotels on Google,  Expedia, Tripadvisor etc…trust friends instead of ads because this is what people do as studies show:

Recommendations from family and friends trump all other consumer touchpoints when it comes to influencing purchases, according to ZenithOptimedia. (AdAge, April, 2008)

Adult Internet users surveyed chose recommendations from friends as the one type of promotion they consider most worthwhile. (DoubleClick, May 2007)

86.9% of respondents said they would trust a friend’s recommendation over a review by a critic, while 83.8% said they would trust user reviews over a critic. (Marketing Sherpa, July 2007)

Build your own local recommendation search engine: sign up at earthfaves, add the places you love (to visit), tell your friends to do the same…then your search results will be “socially trust-ranked” like mine, see below, and you can be among the first to use a “social relevancy rank” local search engine.

We will improve the ranking in the future and add taste neighbors and influencers, btw.

Interesting findings from the eMarketer’s article “Trust Word-of-Mouth”: apart from “Service excellence”, “Building a trusting relationship” was the most important customer priority.

But how to build trust?

Recommendations from friends and relatives are a lot more effective than advertisements:

1. Only 10% of ad practitioners are trustworthy (Gallup, 2008)
2. Only 17% of all consumers trust ads (Myers, 2007)
3. Most trusted source:  friends, family, acquaintances (Brigde Ratings, 2007)
4. Most trusted source across all media: friends (TNS, 2009)

Word-of-mouth has the highest impact on restaurants: more than 50% said they are influenced by friend recommendations if it comes to choosing the right place to eat:

When it comes to influence others through recommendations, friends are 7 times more effective than bloggers:

So if you run a business, engaging your satisfied customers in spreading the word about your business is the most cost-effective means to advertise your products.

Als Ergebnis des Ideacamp 2009 haben 16 Experten diese 9 Thesen zur Zukunft des Tourismus im Internet skizziert und diskutiert:

1. Touristische Intermediäre werden sich nachhaltig verändern.

2. Kooperative Systeme und Netzwerke gewinnen an Bedeutung.

3. Von der Webseite zur Webpräsenz.

4. Touristische Marken sind nicht mehr alleine top-down steuerbar.

5. Digitale (touristische) Informationen werden durch intelligente Endgeräte allgegenwärtig und intuitiv verfügbar.

6. Vom GUI zum NUI – bedürfnisorientierte User Interfaces.

7. Vom aktiven Suchen zum assoziativen Finden.

8. Datenstrategien sind die Grundlage für den Onlinetourismus

9. Das Social Web verändert die Tourismuswirklichkeit

Hier gibt es mehr über die  Thesen als PDF.

Seit ein paar Tagen kann man sich die Studie „Social Media Company Monitor 2009″ kostenlos downloaden und damit erhält man auch den Beweis, dass man in Deutschland noch ganz am Anfang mit Social Media Marketing steht.
Ein paar interessante Details:

* 15% der Unternehmen steigern heute den Umsatz durch Einsatz von Social Media.
* 51 % der Unternehmen planen auch in Zukunft keinen Einsatz von Social Media.
* 75% der Unternehmen haben kein Blog, 12 % wissen nicht, was ein Blog ist.
* 40% der Entscheider haben kein Community Profil.

Hier downloaden.

Here’s the latest earthfaves report.

We were selected (among hundreds of applicants from all over Europe) to move on to the finals for Mini SeedCamp, Berlin on June 9th – a really well organized event, I must say. In the morning, the top 20 teams pitched their ideas (5 minute elevator format) – and after hearing all of them, we had a long afternoon of “roundtable” discussions with mentors (including various VCs, successful entrepreneurs, lawyers, etc.) and got some very valuable feedback from them all. The amount of contacts we made at SeedCamp was tremendous – business angels, VCs, experienced business owners – you name it! If you’re an entrepreneur, this is an event you definitely shouldn’t miss. TechCrunch Europe posted an article about all of the teams, and the winners circle. http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/06/09/seedcamp-berlin-so-which-startups-won/

Then on the June 18th, Markus pitched at “Sprungbrett 2009″ (LaunchPad 2009) – a competition for new online innovations for the tourism industry. Again, we were selected into the top 10! Another great experience – even more contacts to experts in the tourism industry – and even more proof that earthfaves is really moving forward!! More about the event here: http://www.tourismuszukunft.de/2009/06/das-sprungbrett-macht-grosse-spruenge/

Here we are, the new interns of earthfaves: Kathrin, Caroline, Denise, Daniel (one of our bosses), Yulia (me), Jose and Tatiana. Now it is a very international group, as we have German, Russian and Spanish interns. When Jose and me, Yulia, arrived, we didn’t speak any German, but we both speak some English.
We will never forget earthfaves, for me and Jose, this here is a great experience, not only for our professional development, also for improving our German. When we arrived, we could not understand any German, but our bosses and all interns helped us a lot. Now we know how business at earthfaves works, and this experience will be very useful for another job. I hope we will stay in contact after we go back to our countries!

Markus will perform live with his DJ project “The Robot Scientists” upcoming Saturday in Zurich, Switzerland, in the Stall 6. If you want to rock hard to vintage synth disco basslines, make sure you join the party!