June 18, 2010 Author: Brianna
Anyone who has not been living under a rock for the last few years is aware of the boom of social media. We’ve all been asked at one time or another if we are on Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. Likely you’ve got profiles on all three. And probably most have gotten invites to other platforms (if they don’t yet have other profiles on them) that maybe are a little less “mass.” Needless to say, managing social media profiles (and so many of them) can get daunting and overwhelming pretty quickly. Each takes time and each, in their own way, can become a time suck if you allow them to be.
So the biggest question on the table these days is “What’s the value of the time that you spend on social media?” Are you wasting time or creating value? Skeptics always press for the hard ROI number. They want to know what x hours on social media has returned for a company, a brand, or an individual. But is the transactional mindset the right one to be taking? I don’t think so.
I think we should be thinking a bit more broadly, focusing on the exponential benefits of connections rather than the transactional value of one. If we start to view these applications more for their net worth—the ability to foster communication and good will among people and companies–we start to truly see their value. Social media breaks down barriers of connection and access that allows us to showcase more of ourselves and become more authentic and trusted as a result. Trust leads to referrals and opportunities, which ultimately impacts the bottom line. And it all starts with the connection and the finding of common ground, which social media enables.
I’m personally interested to see how the issue of “monetization and social media” continues to develop. Will companies, brands and individuals focus on making the immediate dollar from the sale or will they redirect their methods to foster long-term sustainable relationships to create customers and partnerships for life? Would be interested in hearing your thoughts and your experiences with this.
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May 20, 2010 Author: Brianna
Have you noticed how the world just keeps getting smaller…or at least appears to be doing so? Technology is a powerhouse. It offers each of us more ways than ever to interact with people in our lives, from our family and friends to even creating relationships with people we’ve never met face-to-face on the other side of the world. All the “social” technologies play into this, from your basic email to networks, like Facebook and Orkut (in Brazil). But leading the charge must be Skype. It’s free and because of this it makes distance nonexistent, providing that you’ve got a solid internet connection.
As a adjunct faculty professor at ID, IIT this past semester, I utilized the offerings of Skype video conferencing extensively. My students at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design in Chicago collaborated intimately with a group of students from ESPM in Sao Paulo, Brazil, allowing each classroom the opportunity to receive cultural knowledge of the opposite country without the costly field trip expenses (thanks to Skype.)
The class was called Cross Cultural Research. The students used the slide show and video features of Skype to share with each other the differences between home securities in the two countries. The students would present to one another about things they were finding in their research, pulling out the insights that a home security company in the US might want to know, for instance, if wanting to expand its services to the Brazilian market.
Friendships were created and the students were excited about the knowledge they gained in the process.
Our use of Skype in the classroom was just featured in an eSchool New article about how Skype is fast becoming a module for expanded education opportunities in the classroom. Read here for the full feature article.
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May 17, 2010 Author: Andrea
It was a collaborative effort between our American and Brazilian teams. And here’s what each of us wanted to share with you:
-Adriano Galvao, VP, “Our new website offers a more refined and targeted content that differentiates us from market research and design companies, positioning us as an International Innovation Research and Strategy Consulting Firm. The content is solid because it is all based on past projects and exposure we were able to gain while working in the USA and abroad. Our ‘Services’ page shows just that with segmented services, ranging from research to strategic services that can help our clients pick and choose the best set of approaches to solve their problems.
The section ‘Our Process‘ now has a new graphic that quickly provides a high-level view of our approach, from Framing the Problem to Understanding the Current Situation to Translating Insights into Opportunities to Taking Targeted Action. The icons were meant to illustrate and to summarize what we do for those that have no time to read the entire page.”
-Vinicius Romualdo, web designer, “I created the icons used in the “Our Process” section. The new graphic illustrates Sylver’s process and also provides an easy and quick way to grasp what Sylver does and how it’s done.”
-Jeffrey Oelkers, graphic designer and photographer responsible for the new imagery, “Sylver Consulting concluded that their site’s imagery needed to better reflect their range of services and the impact they have for clients. We definitely wanted to provide a glimpse of some research processes at work but also depict how the data acquired is ultimately transformed into direction that clients can act on. Sylver delivers more than tables of data in a report after all, so we decided to go a step beyond.”
- Gregg P. Gantwarg, President + CEO, Virtual Edge Collaborative, Sylver Consulting’s marketing firm, “We were tasked with the objective to help Sylver Consulting overhaul its existing website in an effort to reposition the company’s expanded capabilities, evolved messaging and newly available industry-focused imagery. Virtual Edge Collaborative’s participation included consultation, strategy, project management, creative direction, design, programming, copywriting and organic search engine optimization. The new website takes Sylver Consulting’s online presence and overall marketing to a whole new level. It was an honor and pleasure to be associated with yet another successful endeavor with our friends at Sylver.”
-As Sylver’s Communications Specialist, I was responsible for the revision of both Portuguese and English versions and also oversaw the Portuguese translation. I’m really happy with the new content in both languages. It was a team effort, between myself, our English-Portuguese translator Maria da Graça Nobre Mendes and our VP Adriano Galvão. We were very thorough during the entire process and determined to make the Portuguese version as refined, descriptive and accessible as the English original. I feel that we’ve accomplished that.
-And Sylver’s President, Brianna Sylver, also wants to chime in here. “I’m really proud of how we leveraged all of the teams’ talents to take our site to the next level. I feel it illustrates who we’ve become as an organization in the last years and love that it’s a collection of all of our efforts.”
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May 17, 2010 Author: Brianna
Not only do we ‘talk the talk’ here at Sylver Consulting, we also ‘walk the walk’. As part of our services to our clients, we help them with the implementation of their marketing endeavors. Keeping a website fresh and updated is one of the things we recommend to our clients. Of course, we haven’t always taken our own advice and that’s precisely the purpose of this post.
As a market grows, your consumer base grows along with it. Sometimes the way you’re positioning your services in the virtual realm are no longer relevant or in line with what’s happening “off line,” especially in channels that don’t get updated daily, like a website.
Or sometimes the design and layout of your website can become stale and a bit cookie cutter. It might simply be a style that just doesn’t grab the eye and interest of potential clients. Maybe it’s too “generic” looking, inadvertently undermining your credibility amongst your target market?
We’ve been guilty as charged on all the above for a long time now. Come this week, we’re taking a step towards remedying that situation. Soon our online and offline presences will be a bit more aligned and more accurate to where we’ve grown to in the last years. I’m excited to share that with you all, so stay tuned…
But, in the meantime, maybe you can learn from our mistakes. Is it time to think about updating your company website? Here are a few reasons it might be valuable to do so:
• Search engines constantly change the criteria for the rules of operation. By not updating and taking into account the rules being followed by search engines today, it becomes likely that your website will no longer be picked up in the search engine listings. We all want to rank high on Google, right?
• Over time, links can become inactive and malfunction. There’s nothing like a redesign to make sure all the parts and pieces get looked at and reviewed thoroughly.
• Your customers’ tastes in colors, fonts and website design layout are constantly changing. It’s not important that we all run to emulate the latest technology. But, it is important that we recognize trends in how people might want to relate to our brand and give them opportunities to do that.
• Photographs within the website should be the most current to reflect your business in the present time. What do they say…an image speaks a thousand words?
• New technology may be available to upgrade your website to more modern standards.
• Fresh information on a regular basis encourages visitors to return to your site often.
Watch for the unveiling of fresh design! Coming soon to a computer near you!
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May 10, 2010 Author: Andrea
Back in January I wrote a post about a 7-week class Brianna was going to teach at the Institute of Design (ID), IIT called “Cross Cultural Research”.
The class was an experiment involving students from IIT’s Institute of Design in Chicago, IL and a team of students at ESPM in São Paulo, Brazil.
Brianna was the project leader in Chicago and Ellen Kiss, professor at ESPM, led the group in São Paulo, Brazil.
Check out some highlights of the class in this new video.
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May 6, 2010 Author: Andrea
On May 11, Brianna will be moderating a discussion about Cross Cultural Research at IIT’s Design Institute’s 2010 Design Research Conference (DRC).
The panel will discuss the importance of cultural awareness when introducing a new product or service to a foreign market.
Brianna will share her expertise on this type of research, which is best utilized to determine which product(s) to extend to a new market and how to position them there. Cross Cultural Research can also be leveraged to help organizations understand which product features need to be adapted for the new market or how to capitalize on local traditions and cultural values within the new market to define new growth ventures for an organization.
It’s worth mentioning that Brianna is one of the original founders of the conference, previously called AWF, “About, With and For”.
The IIT Institute of Design’s 9th Annual Design Research Conference (DRC) will be held at the Spertus Institute in downtown Chicago on May 10-12, 2010.
To know more about this year’s DRC conference, go to: http://www.designresearchconference.org
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April 27, 2010 Author: Brianna
Since the first product or service was sold, an effective sales and marketing campaign became a necessity. How these items were advertised could make or break the future of that particular product. Certainly, in the case of similar products, it is the one that positively influences the most consumers that will sell the most products. Sounds like an easy enough formula, right?
Maybe not.
Today, there are so many outlets through which a company can reach its potential customers that it is sometimes difficult to decide which will be the most effective route. In truth, there is a degree of risk involved with whichever advertising method(s) are chosen. To add to this variety, is the prominence of cloud computing and factoring in how much influence this will have on consumer decisions. Social media swept on the scene several years ago but has grown at a frenzied pace since the advent of the likes of Facebook and Twitter. It has almost become socially crippling to admit that you do not have a Facebook page or that you don’t Twitter! Not surprisingly then, companies have started to insert their own presence in these mediums and leverage these platforms to increase customer loyalty to their brand. With the simple click of the “Like” button, a customer can not only let you know how they feel, but also let everyone in their list know how they feel about your company. The question is: Is it working? It’s still a bit early to tell.
According to a recent report published by Razorfish (click here for the full report), companies have a long way to go to consider social media as an effective method of influence for consumers. There are certainly a few companies that are doing very well in this atmosphere; it is not without calculated effort and dedicated interaction with their audience. A key factor in success of any social media campaign or presence seems to be trust. With this in mind, to use these outlets effectively, organizations are going to need a clear focus on what they hope to accomplish, who they wish to reach, and how they are going to make it all happen. As this graphic shows, the possibilities for interaction with customers are plentiful so lack of direction will only serve to minimize potential impact.
Graphic Designed by Brian Solis
This will certainly be a trend worth watching and making further analysis as the social marketplace continues to grow and more and more companies take advantage of the exposure that this medium affords them. In the meantime, Sylver Consulting is proud to announce that you can now find us on Facebook. We will definitely be watching this phenomenon unfold from inside AND out.
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April 20, 2010 Author: Brianna
I’ve recently come across a great report called “The Consumer’s Voice–Can Your Company Hear It?” It’s a benchmarking study that Boston Consulting Group (BCG) conducted in the spring of 2009 to analyze best practices and gaps in companies’ capabilities for doing consumer insights. Forty global companies–each with at least $1.5 billion in sales and many exceeding $10 billion–participated. The full 30+-page report can be downloaded here. It’s worth the read, as there’s lots of great learning to be gained from the knowledge presented, even for those companies who might consider themselves experts at obtaining and retrieving maximum value from their consumer insights programs.
There are a couple insights presented in this report that are particularly worth a call out, as I repeatedly see companies making these mistakes, and as a result, are failing to reap the most value from the consumer research they do invest in.
Obstruction #1: Companies fail to find balance in the amount of money spent on tactical, reactive research versus strategic-focused studies.
BCG looked at the market research budgets that the 40 participating companies in their benchmarking study had. They then correlated this information between spending as a percentage of sales and the quality of consumer insight. The critical drivers to improving consumer insights was less about spending more money and more about spending on different types of research, finding a better balance of tactical and strategic work.
I often see companies spend way too much of their overall consumer insights budgets focused on narrowly scoped projects. These are those studies where the outcomes have a shelf live of days, where they’re trying to learn which advertisement is better comparatively to others or which feature sets are most desirable for a new product, for instance. Too many of these closer in projects, without the balance of some more strategic, broader scoped initiatives can result in companies gaining a very myopic viewpoint of their business.
If interested in this question of how to spend your market research dollars more wisely, I’d encourage you to check out an article I wrote on the topic, published last May 2009.
Obstruction #2: Companies treat consumer insights as an “order taking“ function versus embracing it as a source of competitive advantage.
In the report, BCG presents the following taxonomy for making sense of how consumer insights functions can be integrated into organizations.
It’s those organizations that approach consumer insight as a source of competitive advantage (those in the #3 and #4 spots above) that are positioned to yield the most return from the studies that they embrace. In these organizations multiple departments and diverse functional roles are exposed to consumer insight, from R&D to the supply chain to distribution, along with the more usual suspects of marketing and sales. Market research is supported and championed in the C-suite. And knowledge gained about the organization’s customer is not generalized for all departments to use. Rather, detailed knowledge about the consumer is translated into specific targets per business unit or across the organization’s broader corporate portfolio.
It seems that there’s room for lots of improvement here. According to BCG’s findings, only 10% of the companies participating in the benchmarking study position consumer insights for competitive advantage. The majority of corporations are continuing to treat market research as “an order-taking function” and therefore significantly limit the value that the organization can yield from those studies supported.
If you’re wondering where your organization fits on the continuum of embracing market research as an order taking function versus a source of competitive advantage, check out p. 13 of BCG’s report. They have a short quiz you can take to find out.
The bottom line here is that quality consumer insights are valuable and effective at contributing to the growth and the profitability of organizations. It doesn’t have to cost a lot to be good at listening. It’s more that you need to be smart at knowing which levers to pull and how to align your resources corporate-wide to not only listen, but to hear and act on what your customers are telling you.
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April 13, 2010 Author: Andrea
I’ve been looking for a new coffee table for quite some time. The ones I liked were either too expensive or they didn’t look so great in person. Until last month I found the Modular Coffee Table at West Elm. I first saw it at their new store in Chicago in “natural”, but I didn’t like the color. Later I saw they would also offer it in “chestnut” and I knew then that I had found my new table. They didn’t have it for sale yet, I’d have to wait until mid-March. I marked the date on my calendar and the day arrived. I went to their website again and still the item was not for sale. That’s when I saw on the right corner of the screen a “LIVE HELP!” button.
I love those! I’ve solved several issues by chatting with customer service. I actually prefer this method of communication over having to call, be put on hold, etc.
So I clicked “live help.” They called me back within seconds. That’s when I realized that I wasn’t calling West Elm, but rather a company that provides that type of service for West Elm. The attendant was very polite and willing to help, but he couldn’t answer two quick questions I had: “When is it going to be available (the website now said March 23rd) and is it going to be available at stores or online only?”
When he couldn’t find the answers, he offered to call a store, and that’s when I politely declined and hung up. I could’ve called the store directly…but that defeated the purpose of using this service.
But, I wasn’t defeated yet. I waited until March 23 and called the store this time. Then a salesperson said: “No, it’s only available online. Would you like me to place an order for you?” So I thought, great, he’ll order it and I’ll pick it up. Then I asked “So I can pick it up at the store, right?” He replied: No, it’s only available for shipping”. And I asked, so I’ll have to pay for shipping plus a $30 delivery surcharge? “ He said, yes and I said no thanks. So I went back to where I started.
I know where they failed:
*they didn’t say upfront it would ONLY be available online;
*they didn’t provide their customer service with all the information to help me;
So, I ask you, how could they have made my experience better? I’ll still shop at West Elm, but I’ll buy my coffee table somewhere else.
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February 24, 2010 Author: Brianna
I fly a lot. And despite loyalty perks I still feel like I’m one cow among a herd being shepherded into the barn from the moment I get to the airport to the time I arrive at my destination. (For those that find the analogy strange, I grew up in rural American in a county that used to have more cows than people.)
So, given my distaste of the flying experience, it’s pretty remarkable when I say, “I want to fly Virgin America.” For the record, I never want to fly anywhere. I just want to go somewhere and getting on a plane is a means to an end. But, I really want to know the in-flight experience of Virgin America, at least once.
I hear such amazing stories about how the Virgin America flight crews create engaging, fun and exhilarating experiences in their air crafts. These stories come through multiple channels, the most recent being this past Sunday via a Twitter post. @AliBrown said:
On my first Virgin America flight - amazing plane, super service, tons of legroom in 1st, outlets for my laptop - I’m in love
This is an amazing recommendation for Virgin America. My interest is peaked once again…
So, how do they do it? How do they get people to want to fly Virgin? The answer…Virgin America addresses customer service systemically. And, as a result, they are an organization to learn from.
In an article entitled, “Virgin America’s Guide to Not to Screwing up Customer Service,” BNET author Jan Alexander shares the rigorous practices engaged by Virgin America to vet their flight crew talent. It’s an interesting article to read, one that makes you wonder if you, too, should be employing hiring processes that go beyond two-rounds of interviews.
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