How to value fans in the Age of social Media?

John Quelch says social media has a lot of marketing challenges and how to value followers is a big issue. Think in marketing terms, focus on strong ties and weak ties. You might think that strong close friends make the biggest marketing impact, but the study found that's not the case. Instead, it's the people you're more distant from who make the biggest impact.

The speaker | John he

(Professor at Harvard Business School, former dean of London Business School and associate Dean of China Europe International Business School)

Thank you very much for coming back on Sunday morning. For those of you who are entrepreneurs, or want to be entrepreneurs, I've prepared a special lecture for you today.

Many entrepreneurs do not have a well-defined final vision, so they are busy putting out fires and surviving every day.

Startup marketing, you have to plan

Today will start with the topic of startup marketing, including how you can survive and succeed. Startup marketing consists of four key areas that you must plan well:

Have the right target customers and end users;

Have the right products and services

To have a very good talent team, so that business ideas can be realized;

Have good partners, not distributors, but service partners such as accountants and lawyers.

So what is start-up marketing? ?

First, it is reverse engineering from vision to action

When Starbucks had only five stores, the founders had a vision to make Starbucks a third space in your life.

For entrepreneurs, start with the vision and reverse engineer the design backwards: see what actions are needed to realize the vision. Many entrepreneurs do not have a well-defined final vision, so they are busy putting out fires and surviving every day.

Second, fast cycles, low cost to conduct trials to provide evidence

Have a vision to think about, how to do some quick low-cost experiments to test the idea, to prove to partners, customers, etc., this is a very good vision. In other words, you need short-term achievements as evidence.

Third, joint development with forward-looking customers

Most clients are conservative and don't want to waste time with a new company. You have to find visionary clients who are willing to take a risk on you. They may be small, emerging customers, not good roots in the market you want to enter.

Fourth: Create a comprehensive roadmap for small steps

This includes creating product road maps, customer maps, partner road maps, and talent road maps. Entrepreneurs should have a one - or even three-year road map of how you want the company to progress along these four dimensions.

Take for example

In the late 1990s, John Osher invented the SpinBrush, a low-cost electric toothbrush. Because he saw a big gap in the market: $2 for a regular manual toothbrush, $50 for an electric one. But in between, there is no intermediate product.

He wanted to develop a toothbrush for something in between. He thought about the performance criteria for a successful new toothbrush:

Cleaning should be better than manual toothbrush, otherwise consumers will not pay a higher price;

The battery can be used for three months. If you have to change the battery every week, it will crash.

There are trial features in the packaging, people are willing to see how the toothbrush is turned after starting;

It retails for less than $6.

He positioned the new toothbrush as a better manual toothbrush rather than a cheaper electric one.

For consumers, it went from $2 to $6, not from $50 to $6. Because if it's the latter, the retailer will feel lost: consumers are paying $6 instead of $50. But now, consumers have gone from spending $2 to spending $6.

So entrepreneurs have to think not only about the end user, but also how to make the distributors more profitable, because you have to go through them to get the product to the end customer. Good positioning statements are very important when defining the competition. He eventually sold the company to Procter & Gamble for a total of $480 million.

You see, it's very simple because he has a lot of consumer insight, filling a gap in the market that no one else sees.

Here's another example

The founders of Intuit, a company called Intuit, discovered 20 years ago that many people were struggling to deal with their taxes by filling out an annual tax return and submitting it to the government.

Intuit was the first company to develop personal finance software, particularly for tax management, for both individuals and small businesses. But this nice package, I don't know where to sell it, nobody believes it works.

Sometimes your biggest problem is how to get distributors on board with your new product. They distribute a lot of stuff, and they don't have time to spend five hours checking whether your obscure product works.

Finally, he made a direct promise to consumers: If you buy the product and don't learn how to use it within six minutes, you'll get your money back and the product.

What else did they do that was different than the money back?

With the buyer's permission, follow the buyer to observe his first use process.

All company executives must spend two hours a month on technical support for customers, listening to their problems;

Doing customer service technical support is the only way to advance in the company;

Read the customer's letter out loud in front of all senior executives, either thanking or criticizing.

This makes 50 percent of their sales come from word of mouth and 20 percent from technical support referrals.

"The intersection between what customers really want and what technology can really do well -- that's where true greatness is found."

"Whatever we do, there are customers."

-- ScottCook, founder of Intuit