Got your MOO cards yet?

These days it's increasingly hip to be geeky. If you really want to make a statement about how web 2.0 centric you are, you put your commitment to humanising business, personalisation, niche marketing, and social networking right on your business card. And you do it in a format that deliberately bucks the boring uniformity and conformity of ordinary everyday business cards.

How? You have a batch of MOO cards made up for you, printed in a “widescreen” 70x28 millimetre size, with a range of colour photographs on the back that reflect your personal interests or passions.



MOO cards started out with people who spend a lot of their private time in the 3D virtual world of Second Life, allowing them to put screen shots of their alter-ego online avatars on the back of their calling cards. A simple viral concept, the craze spread rapidly, and now it seems everyone in the web world is doing it.

How do you get your own MOO cards? Online, of course, from www.moo.com

No longer limited to Second Life images, you can upload your own photographs or choose from thousands already available at their site. MOO’s online tools let you easily crop your photos to get the best effect. You order packs of 100 cards with as many as 100 different images per pack, for only US$20, and they will ship anywhere in the world.

Not only do MOO cards say a lot about your cutting-edge geekiness, they present an opportunity to promote your interests – or your business – in a way that regular business cards cannot. Because there is a distinctly casual and “fun” element to MOO cards, you can put photos of your your product, or your service in action without risking looking tacky.

There's another advantage, at least while MOO cards are relatively new. Ordinary business cards get stuffed in a pocket and forgotten. MOO cards are not only ice-breakers for your own first encounters, they get shown to other people long after you have gone.

Social Networks for KLM Passengers and Business Travellers

Loyalty programmes are invariably about a company trying to create a relationship with a customer, with the primary motivations being to secure repeat business and cross-sell services. That’s so web 1.0. These days, the objective is not so much to form a company-customer relationship as to facilitate customer-customer networking relationships with the company providing the context.

There is probably no industry in which loyalty programmes are so widespread as travel, so when a major airline starts trying to get social networks working for its frequent flyers, it may be the first sign of a significant evolution. Not surprisingly it is the Dutch, who gave us the compact cassette and the CD, who were the first to move in this innovative direction.

KLM is the first airline in the world to build online social networking communities for its customers. Aimed primarily at frequent business travelers, and currently centered on specific destinations and activities, KLM’s communities connect people with common travel interests. Its first two destination communities, KLM Club Africa and KLM Club China, and its first activity community, Flying Blue Golf Club, are at the moment available only by invitation.





The benefit of belonging is that members of the networks can get to meet and share experiences with people working in similar markets, facilitating connections that might otherwise never happen. Members also get access to services such as translation, travel advice, or legal assistance provided by KLM business partners. And the networks are not exclusively online: face-to-face networking events take place regularly in he destination zones, as well as back home in the Netherlands.

Members of the golfing network (ever meet anyone from the Netherlands who doesn’t love golf?) can use the community to create profiles of their playing ability, arrange to play with other members who are going to be in the same place, and even use frequent flyer miles to pay for games or buy golf equipment.

It is a fairly bold move by KLM to try to unite its customers. Most airlines prefer to keep customers at bay with a divide-and-conquer mentality. But KLM has a good product and an already very loyal customer base. What KLM has done is leverage and lock in that loyalty not by offering “me-too” benefits like more comfortable seats or better in-flight entertainment, but by offering a unique service of potentially great personal value which other airlines might find harder to mimic.

In a similar vein, a new company called PairUp is offering to help travelers (on any airline) to connect face-to-face with fellow travelers with whom they may already have an online connection. PairUp members uploading their contacts list (from Outlook, or whatever their e-mail or contact management tool is). When they schedule a flight or participation in a conference, they put their flight and accommodation information in the system.

The system shows them people in their list whose uploaded travel details coincide with theirs, and lets them pick the contacts that they are interested in getting together with. The system is not exclusively for use by vaguely connected people – it can be used as a coordination tool by colleagues who need to share travel plans.



PairUp also provides a version of its tool to event managers, allowing convention organizers to offer a pairing-up service directly to people who register for their event. Anyone who has participated in major conferences where you struggle to find out who is attending, then battle to track down the people you want to talk with, can see the benefits of such a tool.

Using buses to get rural areas online

At the other end of the bandwidth spectrum, rural villagers in India, Rwanda, Cambodia, and Paraguay with no landline connection to the web are getting online using a fleet of wi-fi equipped buses and motorcycles. The vehicles do the rounds, visiting each village several times a day, and connect with the local village computer(s) via an antenna.

It’s not real live internet – essentially the vehicles update their web databases in the city before going back out to share the updates with the villagers – but it brings them those aspects of the web that really matter. Villagers can request specific content, which is available on the next visit, a sort of time-shifted web surfing.


The founder of the United Villages initiative Amir Hassan told BBC News that in addition to delivering and collecting e-mails from the villages, the buses satisfy limited online interests, at least for now. "They want to know the cricket scores, they want to see the new Aishwarya Rai photos, and they want to hear a sample of the latest Bollywood tunes."

The system also enables e-commerce for products like fertiliser, pesticides, books and medicine. The wi-fi bus is used not only to facilitate the order, but to deliver the products.

Online Businesses Beat Offline Businesses in Customer Satisfaction

One of the prerequisites of successful online business is a commitment to customer satisfaction. The online customer simply doesn’t take the kind of abuse, disregard, or obfuscation that the offline customer is often resigned to. Online customers can go elsewhere at the click of a button; off-line businesses often perceive their customers to be captive because of the difficulty of going elsewhere, which can lead to habitually poor service by offline businesses.

The University of Michigan and ForeSee Results have just released the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which shows that customer satisfaction with e-commerce now surpasses that of offline business by 11.6 percent.

The Customer Satisfaction Index is a 100-point scale, and on that scale e-commerce scored an average of 80 against off-line businesses average of 68.4. Online retail scored 83 as opposed to offline retail’s score of 74.

Of course it is not necessarily a complacent attitude in offline businesses that is at the root of the problem. Online businesses have a major advantage in both information and flexibility. They are able to get really good insights into each and every customer’s behaviour and preferences, and can tailor a customer experience in a way that is so much more focused than any offline business could manage. Imagine trying to train, for instance, every in-store sales rep at HiFi Corporation to actually know and understand the products they are selling, and to develop the skills needed to understand the needs of every customer they deal with. Well, OK, that’s not so difficult. Maybe it is all down to management attitude after all.

Web 2.0 has played a big role in elevating online customer service. The ability to see multiple views of products, read and write actual consumer reviews, and seek out and provide peer recommendations has added tremendously to the enthusiasm with which consumers do business online. The transparency that Web 2.0 provides is a vital driver of the web as a window-shopping medium. Try to find out in-store exactly what the make, model, performance, strengths and weaknesses are of say the range of plasma TVs on the shelves, and you come away with snippets of information that may or may not be true. Online retailers encourage comparison shopping, and go to great lengths to provide extensive product information. Offline businesses often see informed customers as a threat; online businesses know that informed customers are an opportunity.

Of course, not all offline businesses do a bad job. In the US, many major stores have risen to the challenge and provide superb customer experiences. Multi-channel businesses like the giant bookstore chain Barnes and Noble have integrated online and offline services that pushed them up the Consumer Satisfaction Index to a score of 88, a little higher than Amazon.com.

Clothes shopping 2.0

As the passion for mash-ups and social networking goes mainstream, it was inevitable that shopping for clothes online would start to get more interesting. A number of shopping sites are popping up that let you do more than shop at one brand or one store, but let you put together outfits from components and accessories being sold across many different stores. And it would not be 2.0 if the opportunity for consumers to share ideas, experiences, and recommendations were not also part of the mix.

One site that is creating a buzz right now is FashMatch. FashMatch is a social networking site where visitors can put together various combinations of clothing from different designers, and exchange their combinations and recommendations with other shoppers online. And it has a very user-friendly visual format.



Shoppers can search in a number of different ways (say by price or by style), and can then look for “matches” to see what other shoppers have combined with the item that they are considering. In effect, you get to see what other people are wearing, or at least what they think looks good. A voting system lets visitors express their opinions of other people's outfits -- possibly a introducing a whole new level in peer pressure.



When you have put together the outfit you want, FashMatch helps you buy it from the various designer stores from which you have chosen the items.

Jeep's Comic Book Competition Seeks Consumer Generated Content

In an attempt be more appealing to a younger more environment-conscious consumer, DaimlerChrysler have systematically been rolling out smaller and smaller models in their Jeep range over the past few years. Their latest and cheapest model, the Jeep Patriot, is using some web 2.0 thinking to generate buzz: DaimlerChrysler are asking fans to create a comic book that features the car, if not as the hero, as a key character in the storyline. How’s that for leveraging user generated content?




Together with Marvel Comics, of Spider-Man and X-Men fame, Jeep is inviting budding comic authors to enter “The Patriot Factor” competition and submit story lines for the pending comic book. Marvel’s artists have jump-started the project, posting the first few pages at PatriotAdventure.com

Jeep’s ad agency, Organic, believes that the consumer-generated content approach will help them get exposure in their target demographic which is younger, male, first-time car buyers. They are also pushing the Patriot through social networks and video games, though there is as yet no mention of making it available in Second Life, the virtual world now so popular with marketers. (GM’s Pontiac, Toyota’s Scion, and Nissan’s Sentra have been selling virtual cars there for some time).

The winning entries will get author credits in actual comic books to be drawn and published by Marvel later in the year.

The Best Marketing Blogs

If you are active in the online marketing field, one of the best ways to stay on top of new developments and emerging ideas is to read the more popular blogs that discuss specific aspects that interest you, or to read the often less popular blogs of thought leaders in the field.

Finding those blogs is a process of search and elimination, but since this is the “collaborative web” there’s plenty of advice out there.

A good starting point is Todd Adrlik’s list of the Power 150 Marketing Blogs that he compiled by creating a novel evaluation approach that incorporates the popularity rankings of each blog awarded by a number of different sources. By comparing various indices such as the number of subscribers to each blog as registered by Bloglines, Google’s PageRank, Technorati’s ranking, and some more or less subjective personal criteria, he produced his list of the top 150 marketing blogs in America.

To read each one of these could take you a while, but they are probably all worth a look at least once. Most people will find that they do not have the time to read many blogs on a regular basis, so the trick is to treat a list such as this like a bookshelf in a bookstore: skim through each one when you can and shortlist a few that appeal to you. Then come back and dig deeper into the shortlist, and decide which you want to follow in depth on a daily or weekly basis, and which are worth skimming through every month or so.

You can make this process easier by subscribing to the content of each blog in a feed reader such as Google’s Reader, so it comes to you in one place, rather than you having to go out to each blog to get the latest entries. We’ll cover how to choose and set up an RSS feed reader in the near future.