www.thechair.gr

Imagine a hotel in the most central part of Athens just a few meters from the major historical and archeological sites. Access to traditional Athens and modern night clubs. On Piraeus street, one of the major streets in Athens.

Located in this central setting Athens Odeon will make your stay an unforgettably pleasant experience.

ChannelDoubler has revamped the hotel online presence with:

A brand new design, aesthetics and approach for Odeon Hotel.

The website was redesigned, photographed, developed by our team and enhanced with CMS.

All visitors can reach the hotel at: http://www.hotelodeon.gr/

I think one of the major problems individuals have, due to thousands of things they (probably) have to do every day is managing time. Or better, make the best usage of it. Luckily, once more, technology comes to rescue things, through RescueTime.com  . It is not a take screenshots while I am working kind of thing (like odesk) but it does really help you to see where time goes during the hour(s) you are in front of your “machine”.

It’s rather easy to make an account there (a paid one) and give it a try.

Actually, a desktop application is installed in your pc/laptop and after a few settings you realize that nothing significant happens. Until, the first alert! After that you start to realize for good how nice this application and web service is. For example if you have made correct settings and optimized what you consider work vs fooling around then you will start getting statistics about what you do everyday. For example: too much time in Outlook? There you see it. Too much time in Facebook? Is it for productive reasons? How much time does it take regarding the other things you work upon each day?

Did I mention the alerts? Oh, yes! There is one that says: What have you been doing since [xx:xx am?]. And it gives you a field to fill in with the info. Sounds simple? Well ,yes. Also, add to this an amount of segmented time slots and stats you get for what you do every day and you have excellent results on how was your day. I mean the actual truth.

This, if you are serious for productivity and don’t get angry when someone asks you what have you been doing, can help you a lot to straighten things with yourself and see where time goes.

The system understands computer activity (thus it pops messages when you don’t even browse). You can even set periods where no distractions will occur and you can get your stats via Google Analytics!!! You can even set alerts to buzz when you do nothing.

You can set user, groups by work sector and more!

Is it a service worth paying for? I think yes so far. It has proven good (don’t worry we are not the resellers, just wanted to help).

I recommend it as a good way to monitor things closely even if you only have to manage yourself.

Additionally, in ChannelDoubler we have time tracking software, developed by us, featured and tailored for our needs. We use it to fill in everything related with our activity, for projects, tasks, even thinking or reading/researching time. Such a solution can help someone to see every week/month and at the end of a period, where time actually goes and in what tasks. This helps management and production to find solutions to make things better or decide when it is time to hire someone and in what field exactly.

There is a wide talk regarding Bounce Rate indicators for Google Analytics. Actually, this is a very important factor which will show… “how many bounce from your page". Correct? Not! Bounce Rate Indicator(BRI) has to do not only with that because if we only see the number then it actually tells us nothing.

How come? Well, the best thing is to present some example.

Take this site for example: www.woman-on-top.gr . The Bounce Rate for this is: 1,6%. Amazing isn’t it? Also the traffic there is mostly from search engines. And it has some several 10ths of thousands visitors per month. Well, women mostly.

But, in order to see if the above 1,6% reflects on something valuable more factors need to be examined. For example. One cannot read the full article in the home page. The home page is only to display the latest list and some text to give an idea of the article (per post). The reader needs to click to see the full article in the final post page. This gives a very good result which eventually is translated to an accurate number for the Bounce Rate indicator. Thus, for this site we can say that the visitors do land there because they searched for content optimized for this site and the BRI is correct.

In another case, if we had another website/blog that presents the full article in the home page and thus has a big Bounce Rate indicator, this doesn’t necessarily means that the BRI is bad. Another number of factors need to be examined also to have a safe result. Like the general time visitors spent on the page (i.e. home page). If you have 5 new posts on a day or a large post and you see something like a small number of time spent on the page, then something is wrong and needs research. Even when the article has a few words but supplementary visual information for the visitor. Pay attention on how much you expect someone to sit there (average) and read the post(s). Simple math drive conclusions.

Also more factors need to be examined regarding the behavior of visitors throughout the website plus technology they have. Also, to see the download times for the page(s).

So, Bounce Rate Indicator is actually a good starting point to start digging for intelligence through Google Analytics. In any case, either the BRI is low or high it gives very good intelligence data on what to enhance, change.

So, as we say, measure and analyze all!

As social media is spreading around and utilized as a concept to advance information for people, products, services and brands there are companies who dare to also fail with experimenting. Some of them, due to such actions, give feedback on what to avoid. Other times through white papers and case studies, other – loud enough – with what is heard for them.

An example for this can be Wall Mart. They engaged in Facebook tactics of socializing. Yet despite the usage of the concept of conversation (which social media is mostly about) they did very little in this area. Thus, the audience criticized it bad. Add to that wrong targeting, i.e. aiming to elder people while publishing content in Facebook which is for younger. Result: Very bad, as we read.

Another example shows a blunder in the combination of traditional and social media. A TV Channel in US, set up a huge billboard where they presented tweets as they were published. The billboard had a huge picture of 3 anchorman next to the tweets. So, at some point a newsflash gets tweeted in this TV Channel’s billboard saying: 3 Accused of Gang Rape in Monroeville. Well, imagine the complete picture with the photo of 3 anchorman and that tweet side by side.

Keeping on with examples we have another which choose to automate the process of communication through Twitter (yeah, like this can happen seriously). They have made a website and when someone in twitter mentioned the word “skittles” in Twitter, that tweet showed up in the website. Pretty techy you may say… Well, the result of it was that Skittle fans noticed this automatic “thing” and reacted to this lack of communication and “pretend marketing”. So what they did was to tweet in Twitter (of course) with messages full of profanity, which also included the word “skitter”. Thus, results popped up in the website also… The company reacted with removing the Twitter widget from that site(!!!) instead of engaging in actual communication. Bigger mistake.

Well, here is another story which is a good example. The company is Vodafone UK. Some employee posted some derogatory comments on homosexuals. The fuzz was big, but instead of Vodafone trying to call the whole case a breach of website or someone hacked us, they apologized for the behavior of this employee, to each twitter who complained about the original tweet. Also, fired the guilty one.

An example of timing is this one. Ever heard the story with BP and the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico? Well, BP did whatever she could investing in expensive advertisement, Facebook and Twitter activity also to show that they do everything they can. But, from what I have read the reaction came too late. So, timing is another crucial factor.

Another one comes from HabitatUK. One of their interns hash tagged in the Twitter effort of the company to promote their spring collection. He used tags related with news topics of that time. Some of them were ones related with the Iranian elections where 12 people were killed. So, imagine a campaign for new products to exploit such. The reaction in the ecosystem of Twitter was huge. They removed the tweets without apologizing and that put oil in the fire, resulting into huge negative promotion. Eventually, they had to apologize but the damage was already there.

Well, from all these we understand that the whole ecosystem is still about people and not of machines or automations. People need to be treated in virtual worlds like in the real world. Because, social media ecosystem is just a reflection of real people actions. Add to this the easiness with which a message can spread around the world and there you have immediate democracy (or not).

In our company we have discovered the Social Media as a buzz word several years ago. Actually we were not even a company, just a few professionals of the market working in other good (back then) companies. Though, through exchange of information, discussions, ideas, radical changes in personal and business life, and a strong beginning of friendship we decided to do something of our own.

So what’s new about all this

Actually the tricky part in all this was that we had to start from scratch when we decided to form a company. We had no clients. Not even one. We just knew companies with executives trusting us for “knowing the job” but that was all… Some of them became clients (one at first), others didn’t.

So we had to cope with the very challenge of how to attract clients, build up reputation (without clients), serve the client and the general “web community” out there, keep up with the fast pace of web, build an increasing and better client base, make synergies, produce our work and still have a life.

We noticed that our past reputation followed us. When we said that we were involved or build this and that project for large companies or organizations people sat down and listen to us. But, after a while we noticed that it was not our “past experience” which got the job, but that we actually knew what we were talking about. So, we were talking with clients through experience and not  by reading some material somewhere. Additionally to that was the very fact that we cared for each project separately. We wanted the client to have results and have the best for his goals. Of course, all the different aspects of having a business continuously kicked in…

Making new clients

We examined our assets. These were:

1. No budget for marketing (leaflets, google adwords, printed advertisement or participating in magazines, etc).
2. We had no clients. No one knew us as a team/company. Our website had a low pagerank due to… nobody visited this site, no links of ours where in client’s websites, etc,  due to… nobody knew us. You can see the problem there.
3. We had laptops, desktops, internet connection and some nice stationary. That was all. Ah, and some desks. And suits.
4. Also we had knowledge of the capabilities of the medium called “internet” and “web”.
5. We had good will, determination and this perception that we can offer something good to business out there if just somebody would let us do it and learn that we existed.

What we had to do

1. Build a website. This of course to say out loud what we were about. Our business was and is –bottom line- services to business to contribute to goal achievements. Ideas, technology, etc serve only for that. In short, help businesses make money.
2. Build and establish something tangible beyond a “client base”.
3. Build a client base
4. Expand but keep the costs controllable.
5. Build a good reputation even if this would cost us some business and income.
6. Establish a specific concept with which our client’s or perspective clients would say about us after they meet us. This was easy as we didn’t have to try to do it. It just came out naturally, because we just wanted to be useful to a client. Not simply sell Content Management Systems, or Design or Development or “e-marketing”. This was never our approach and still is not. We wanted to offer bigger value from the one we received. The times we kinda got smoother in this rule, this kicked back. Hard lessons come to establish hard truths.
7. Acquire more knowledge and find time to experiment more with new ideas and concepts.
8. Try, evaluate, drop, continue, develop some of our ideas. In a few words experiment and gain knowledge.
9. Listen, change, adopt, listen more to the whole market community. This involves professionals, clients and anyone of the ecosystem.
10. We wanted to NOT engage in any black hat marketing. Not due to fear of Google “Don’t Be Evil” code of conduct but due to our ethics.
11. Enhance web presence with simply seeing more clients. Thus we managed to see 100 different companies in a period of a few months and serve them with 100 tailor made proposals. This was our offline marketing.

What eventually happened

1. Carefully we used everything in the “web concept” to promote our company.
2. We participated in discussions, we sent out information for us and our expertise, always keeping in mind not to simply reproduce texts but to say something useful to each one.
3. Tested different models of how people listen and found out where we were not listening…
4. Establish our presence almost everywhere had any meaning to be “virtually” present. In some cases also physical present.
5. Communicated, listened to what others said, what others do.
6. Expanded on measuring things, drilling deeper in information and finding ideas.
7. Being proactive to what we call “community that matters”. However, still there is work towards that direction.
8. Distinguishing between “community offer” from “business build up”.
9. Still cared for our client’s needs.
10. Made long lasting synergies in various and different levels and kept the level of caring still high in almost all cases.
11. We maintain blogs in the way we find meaningful to have them.
12. Changed as persons and adopted new approaches in life and moved them in business.
13. We had to work with and try different models of doing our business. Either remotely or other.
14. To gain more knowledge we simply asked. Both clients and people “boiling” with ideas and concepts.
15. We still love what we do and we want to expand this to new levels and horizons.

What is the outcome of this?

1. Doubled our earnings last year.
2. We haven’t spent a single euro in advertisement of any kind. That’s not entirely true as we have spent some 500 euros in total all these years just to test waters in some areas only to prove that our gut feeling was right.
3. We are here for almost 7 years by keeping up building reputation, participating and caring and acquiring more business.
4. We still want to give back more to the community that help us all these years with knowledge, advices.
5. Client’s recommend us as “best value for money” and not as expensive/cheap/good/ etc. This was our goal from day one and still is.
6. To build and sustain a reputation like this one, is not a marketing effort. It has to be a reflection of people’s and associates philosophy and modus vivendi. Not simply modus operandi…
7. We still have the ability to change and adopt and find new interests.
8. Time IS money. It will be “paid” eventually and the best use of it is a must.

So, what the article title has to do with it?

It’s rather clear actually isn’t it? Advising about Social Media means that someone has done this for the benefit at least of his company and that this has worked with results. More experience in this specific sector was added but the principle remains the same. But, also:

1. A budget is good to have to speed up things and hire services. Like ours, for example.
2. Some elements remain unchangeable: Determination, Commitment, Necessity, Caring, Participation, Something Good to Offer.
3. Investment in people, community and contribution is far from any budget to establish long term value of any kind.
4. All models of advertisement are good if they aim to establish permanent things. Until of course these have to change…
5. Reputation build is reputation following you. Continuously.

Thanks for reading. For more just feel free to contact us.