Chynamics - Dynamic China

AS mentioned in the last post, keeping abreast of what people are talking about you online is
pretty difficult.

There are zillions of websites and blogs out there, and you can't google and browse each one of them every day!

Wouldn't it be much easier to be notified every time someone says something about you or your business?

Thanks to Google Alerts, now you can do that.

Have a look at this video.

I hope you enjoy it.

As you might now, mto123.com manufactures promotional products from China and export it all over the globe.

One thing we struggle with constantly is how to advertise our business effectively and how to do it within our pretty reduced budget.

Exposure is something that we don't have, we earn (through delivering good services to our customers).

As such, communicating the most using the least bandwidth possible is crucial.

The single marketing tool to enable you to that is your Unique Selling Proposition.

Now, one thing we spent absolutely zero time doing in the beginning of the company was to think about "What's our Unique Selling Proposition".

The first person that came up with the USP idea was Rosser Reeves. He wrote a pretty famous book on called "Reality in Advertising". But I found a better resource for crafting a good USP. Stay with me and we will talk about it in a jiff.

Anyway, for a pair of years we just could not spend time crafting our USP.

The logical we used to justify the emotional reason (ignorance) for a poor USP was the constant focus on execution and building a services-oriented organization that would by design achieve high reorder rates.

The importance of the USP is obvious: it makes it easier for people to know what benefit you give them and hence makes it possible to retrieve your brand from their minds when they have a situation that requires the kind of benefit you deliver.

Anyway, I'd like to share with you 10 crucial points when designing your USP.
I got this from the excellent book "How to Write A Million Dollar USP" by William Bodri.

So, your million dollar USP...

1. It Boldly Telegraphs the Promise of Big Benefits for the Customer

2. It Claims You are Unique and Dramatically Different

3. Being Focused, It Doesn’t Try to Appeal to Everyone

4. It Addresses the Important, Relevant Customer Concerns

5. It is Short and Simple, Concise, Memorable and Easy to Communicate

6. Interesting or Exciting, it Grabs Attention

7. It has the Seal of Credibility since its Believability is Self-Evident

8. Persuasive, Motivating and Compelling, It Prompts Customers to Act

9. It Penetrates All Aspects of Your Business, Which Totally Support It

10. It Must be Economically Feasible so that it can Support a Business

Our USP used to be "Made To Order, Made For You", which basically misses ALL of the 10 points above.

Now we've changed it to "MTO123.com - Promotional Products, At Factory Prices, Straight From China", which is good but not good enough.

We will be changing that in the future I guess.

What about you. Have you thought about what is your USP lately?

Mindmaps - the silver bullet of personal productivity and collaboration

After a couple of weeks in Thailand, it's time to get this site back on track.

Let's talk about Mindmaps today.

I love mindmaps.

They are the best tool to summarize, share, collaborate and process information.

I use them to summarize books, control orders, store supplier details, set goals and what not.

Why do I like them?

Several reasons:

-Agility

Mindmaps are multidimensional. You have unlimited branches, with different levels of deepness and breadth. Jumping from topic to topic is extremely easy. Easier than browsing a bidimensional book.

-Ability to handle multiple formats

Good mind mapping software (I use Mind Manager) can easily handle multiple formats, pasted directly on each topic.

This is great to collect a bunch of disconnected information and organize it before getting it all processed and making meaning out of it.

You can imbbed all sorts of info in each topic, paste images directly from a browser, you can even display the contents of a folder straight from your hard drive right inside your map.

In the case of mind manager you can even link your Outlook messages to any topic, meaning you have a good way to concentrate emails according to the projects/topics they really belong to.

-Focus

Focus. The essence of achievement. Using mindmaps help you to hide everything else on your screen and focus on this one key crucial topic and making it as rich, deep and wide as it can be.

Great for brainstorming.

-Extensibility

Remember back in university when you ran out of space in the borders of your books? Not anymore. If you breakdown a book into a map (I do that often), it gets very easy to extend the information of a topic, and keep all related information within context.

I hope this gives you an idea of what you can achieve with Mind Maps.

If you are unfamiliar with Mindmaps, I've recorded a little video
of using some of the maps I created.

Click on the image to open the video on a new window.

Another example of what online mouth-to-mouth can do to your company.

Recently one of the users of ShanghaiExpat.com launched his new venture: Justbeer.cn.

The idea is pretty simple: import Australians favorite beers to Shanghai, where a massive and passionate number of Ozzies live.

As part of his campaign to launch Justbeer.cn, Mat asked us at MTO123.com to make a couple of shirts of Australia's funny character Reggie Reagan.

We made the shirts, Mat was pretty happy with the shirts, they were a success at the event.

Later, someone posted something on ShanghaiExpat.com about getting shirts printed.

Mat spotted the thread and posted his positive feedback about it. We later received an order from the original poster of this thread.

"Great. You got an order. End of story right?"

Wrong!

Later in the same week, a large university in Shanghai needed to get a bunch of urgent items done. After Googling for it, they found the exact same thread and, based on the feedback of MTO123.com in this thread, decided to place a pretty large order.

Now, THAT's the power of online mouth-to-mouth. If you are not monitoring or not talking to your customers online, you must start thinking about it. It's easier than you think, and the rules of engagement are pretty simple.

But that's a topic for another post.

And remember: if you need a cold one, order it online at Justbeer.cn.

As people spend a greater share of their time online, it's only natural to transfer part of our daily human interactions to the online world.

Mouth-to-mouth advertising is one key interaction that is turbocharged by the properties of the new media.

While a watercooler conversation dies on the spot, posts on message boards and blogs can live forever.

If you then add infinite capability to find information (Google), you finally have the possibility of instantly collecting a wide range of opinions to any given business.

This can help businesses in many ways:

1-Know strenghts and weaknesses: as people talk about your business, protected by anonimity, you will have a chance to dig really deep in their experiences and find out what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong.

2-Interact directly with customers: blogs and message boards are the perfect way to interact and be personal without being intimous. Many times in our website shanghaiexpat.com we saw users complaining or praising businesses in Shanghai. Managers that took the time to interact with users and either apologies for faux pas or thank for praise have instantly boosted their reputation.

Businesses that entered in denial mode created an avalanche of criticism (thanks anonimity!).

Businesses that ignored this opportunity lost a great chance to feel perceived as someone who actually cares about what the customer thinks. Something like losing the key to the suggestion box in the dark corner of the restaurant.

3-Protect your brand: people can be ruthless online (and offline too!). This is also magnified online, thanks for the protection a user name grants. By monitoring what people say about you, there is a chance you will be able to catch and manage destructive and undue criticism.

One thing stands out in the sum of experiences I had reading through thousands of posts in our message boards: we do live in the age of skepticism. People will tend to believe all of your actions have ulterior motives.

People tend to think businesses are faceless institutions focused solely on profit. And that's when we get back to being personal: when people know you personal, chances are they will be less skeptical about you.

Need an example?

In this post here, someone had a terrible experience in a restaurant. After a heated exchange and a mishandled initial attempt to handle the situation, the business owner created goodwill enough to make people understand that they ARE actually sorry.

The thread was locked by moderators so not to become a lynching (good move!) but, apparently the sincere efforts of the manager lead to a sort of apology from the original poster.

Will that make people go back to the business? Maybe not.

Will that make the business improve its standards? Most definitely. And that's a win by itself if you are focused on the long run.

Had the managers of the restaurant not intervened I could definitely see a snowball.

Ok, but how to keep track of what people talk about you online?

"That would be impossible! I don't have the time to check google or message boards all the time!"

We will get to that part.