BeConnected

Sales Genius Helps You Track Customer Interactions with Your Website

Sure you can have excellent stats and behavior tracking with your email newsletters but what about the follow-up emails that your sales staff sends to hot prospects and potential customers? Ever wish you could see if your prospects are visiting the web pages you are referring them to? Now you can with a new service that will track customer and prospect behavior based on the emails that you are sending. Give Sales Genius a try during the free trial period to see if it's going to be worth paying a monthly expense for the service.

SalesGenius™ is the first personal web analytics service that lets sales professionals instantly qualify sales prospects by tracking individual visits to corporate web sites, without any programming or IT involvement. The real-time Genius Tracker™ gives you immediate feedback about which sales leads have opened your e-mails and clicked through to your web site, so you can tell at a glance who is most interested.

Sales Genius

Technorati Tags: customer | customer communications | customer experience | customer insights | customer service | Sales Genius | sales

Tracking Your Customers or Competitors Website

Are you watching the websites of your customers and competitors? How do you know when the sites have changed? Feed Whip is one of a slew of services that track websites and can email you when the site changes.

This is especially useful for monitoring “what's new” pages or “new products” sections of websites. In addition to a business home page you may want to track team pages, personnel listings, specification pages or any other specific intelligence pages.

Tools like these help you stay current with your customers and competitors. It's the essence of customer intuition.

Feed Whip

Technorati Tags: customer | customer communications | customer insights | Feedwhip | intuition | tracking competitors | puppy

Geographic Customer Intuition: Census/Google Maps Mashup

We're all about the Customer Intuition here at BeConnected. Learning about your customers, their needs, behaviors and desires is so important for any business. For those addressing specific geographic areas when developing new locations, products, services or experiences understanding Census data is critical. Here's a cool tool that allows you to analyze Census data based on a one, three and five mile radius from a given location or address.

AnalyGIS: Census/Map

Technorati Tags: Census | customer | customer insights | intuition | Maps | demographics

PodZinger: Search Engine for Podcasts

I've blogged before about the tools that are out there to discover and monitor relevant discussions and media mentions of your product, business, competitors and customers. By now you should be aware and using tools like RSS, Google Alerts, Technorati Watchlists, the search tools in your newsreader and other customer intuition tools that may be appropriate to your work flow.

As new forms of communication and media distribution develop savvy developers create new tools to help users search and monitor these new messages. This is exactly the case with PodZinger a search engine for podcasts and video podcasts. Drop your keywords into the search box and specific occurrences of those terms are discovered and highlighted for your review. You can watch or listen to specific clips of the entire podcast. Nice.

If you are a technology company and you want to track mentions of your new product PodZinger is a great tool to track product names and measure the buzz across podcasts.

Technorati Tags: customer | customer insights | intuition | Podcast | Podcasting | PodZinger | search

Tom Peters' Blog on Defining Customers

Steve Yastrow over at tompeters.com has a simple definition of a customer:

Anyone whose actions affect your results.

Simple, succinct and broadly applicable. If we're talking about developing customer intuition and using tools to learn more about the background and happenings of our customers we better have a good definition. What do you think? Is this a good definition? Anything to add?

tompeters.com: Refine to Simplicity be sure to read the comments. Good stuff their too.

Technorati Tags: customer | customer insights | Steve Yastrow | Tom Peters

Track Your Comments with coComment

I have been telling you for a long time now that you need to use the available Web Tools like Technorati, Feedster and PubSub to discover and track the conversations about your customers, your company and your products in the blogosphere. Beyond just discovering conversations you should join the conversations with constructive comments that add value to the conversations. Discovering blog posts good and bad about your product and responding in an authentic and transparent way is good for your business. It shows that you are listening and responsive to the needs of customers.

The problem comes when their are dozens of posts and you begin leaving comments all over the blogosphere. How do you know when others comment in response? You don't want to spend a lot of time manually checking each post to see if there are new comments. There's a new tool to help you track your commenting activity. coComment is a new service that helps you track your comments and see when others add comments to posts you have commented on. The service is in a private beta but go ahead and request and invitation. It seems they are sending them out within hours of your request. Not only can you track conversations you are participating you can get an RSS feed of your comments for your RSS reader. The service doesn't support all blogging platforms yet but is promising.

Technorati Tags: blog | corporate blogging | customer | customer communications | customer insights | Feedster | PubSub | coComment | Technorati

Luxury Hotels Using Technology to be Intuitive about Their Customers

Preferences it's all about knowing and adjusting to the preferences of their guests.

When regulars like Laurence Wiener check into the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in New York, they get more than a smile from the concierge and a mint on their pillow. Wiener's hotel room “knows” exactly how warm. It welcomes him with a personal message on his television. It even loads his most frequently dialed numbers onto the phone.

And the bellhop did not have to do a thing.

At the Mandarin and other high-end hotels, new computer systems which connect individual rooms to network servers can now keep track of guests' preferences and change the room conditions automatically.

These “smart” systems can learn whether a frequent guest likes the lights dimmed, the curtains closed or the room toasty warm. They can also personalize the electronics in the room so that the music of John Coltrane, for instance, greets jazz buffs when they enter their rooms. Meanwhile, sensors in refrigerators alert maids when the minibar is running low on Coca-Cola.

In the old days hotels relied on their staff to remember and make these adjustments to their customers experiences. People are a critical aspect of these smart hotels:

Smart networks rely largely on a user's preferences that hotels gather in various ways. Some guests, for example, fill out questionnaires before they arrive. At the Mandarin, housekeepers, bellboys and waiters took note of Wiener's preferences and updated the digital profile that the hotel keeps for each customer. Wiener, an anesthesiologist from Philadelphia, has stayed at the Mandarin 45 times the past two years when he was supervising the construction of his apartment in New York.

Trusted relationships are at the core here. Guests/customers need to trust a hotel to accept and benefit from these personalization systems. If you believe the motives of a hotel are to truly serve you better you are more willing to be open about personal preferences and information. If customers are concerned about the use of that information all the tech in the world will only scare off customers.

How is your business balancing the need to respond to customer preferences and assure them you can be trusted knowing their birthday and all that can be intuited from their purchase history.

International Herald Tribune: In 'smart' hotel rooms everything is just right

Related:
Hotel Forcasts the Weather
Find What Touches Customers

Technorati Tags: CRM | customer | customer insights | customer service | electronics | hotel | New York | Mandarin Oriental Hotel | telephone | television | travel | trend

Robert Scoble Wakes a Monster

Microsoft technical evangelist and prominent blogger Robert Scoble was invited to speak to Monster Cable about blogs and blogging. Monster is aware of the marketing challenge they have. Their site does not show up very well on search engines. They were unaware that the blogosphere is talking about Monster and boy will they get an earful when they tune into the conversation. Monster products are not well liked. A good blogging strategy might be able to stop the bleeding and perhaps turn the tide. Read the comments on Robert's post to get an idea of the tone of public opinion of Monster products.

I dare say that more and more companies are waking up to the fact that they need to be listening to what blogs are saying about their companies. At the same time corporations are at a loss for how to effectively use blogs for positive PR and crisis response. It's a delicate balancing act that requires experienced hands. A good reason to consider outsourcing your blog design, management and content creation. BeTuitive can help with all that.

Scobleizer: Visit to Monster Cable

Technorati Tags: WOMM | blog | PR | PR Crisis | Monster Cable | Robert Scoble | Scobleizer | word of mouth | BeTuitive | outsourcing

Two Things

This month's review for the BeTuitive Business Book Club is up over at the BeTuitive Blog. Another good review, Susan.

I also want to remind you to go ahead and add yourself to the map of BeConnected readers on Frappr.

Technorati Tags: BeConnected | BeTuitive | blog | book | book club | book review | customer insights | Frappr | mapping | maps

Newsletter Reader Maps with Frappr

Here's a nice tool for mapping customers, readers, vendor locations, retailers, etc. Frappr is a free tool that let's users set up groups and members can add themselves quickly and easily.

If you are publishing a blog or a e-newsletter consider setting up a map of your own and asking your readers to add themselves and give you a shout out on this google maps based tool. Very fun.

To see just how easy and fun this is click over and add yourself to the new map of BeConnected readers.

Why map your readers? Next time you travel to St. Louis, San Francisco or Sandusky you'll know you have friends there that might buy you a beer. They might also prove to be excellent local resources.

Technorati Tags: B2B | BeConnected | customer | customer communications | customer insights | email | emarketing | mapping | newsletter | Frappr