TreeWorks Blog

I’ve been at Netoo #3 yesterday. It was cool. We’ve talked about corporate blogs.

My point as the representative of a very custom services firm was that blogs have a signaling role and an important part in the human relations.They prepare the ground for discussion and establish the value compatibility with prospects.

What are the tools we use here at TW?

1. Knowledge base - Very important. Daily use. Based on wiki. We place there all the cool stuff we discover. But also cabs phone numbers. And work procedures. And documents. And standard emails. And working rules. It is cool that one can separate everything on name spaces, categories, subcategories. And that you can give full access to everybody without fearing that a document might be deleted. Because you can see the history of the document. And if you want you might use it for discussion on a certain subject.

2. Time/project tracking - A customed services firm counts the taxed hours. And calculates the progress of a project. And when the clients are stable ones and the evaluations of costs are made at the end of the month it is important to offer them a nice tracking and not, like they do in some restaurants, a piece of paper saying “15 persons table - 7 millions”. And it is good for the company too. Because one can calculate efficiencies, peoples’ occupying scale, client’s profitability, history of the activity of a team member or a department. We did this thing ourselves. And maybe we will also launch it next year as a product. It really makes sense.

3. CRM - We also did our mini-CRM. Unfortunately, we do not use too often. Probably because the CRM works in companies with many clients and with a relatively reduced value. In retail, for instance. Anyway, maybe we go public with this one too.

I now it has a cool function for monitoring the interaction of the user with the website. Meaning, if you send an email to someone, you can find out if it has been opened, how many times, if it has been forwarded, place some cookies and it will tell you if it has been re-opened, if the person entered the website, how many times and when. This works out fine for filtering the prospects. For example, you are a company that sells automobiles, you have a clients database, you send everyone an email to announce a new model. Then you can see who grabs the bite: who enters the website, who returns on the website, who checks out the prices. Who forwards the email and whether the persons who got the forwarded message enter the site. After that you can choose the most promising prospects. Offer them a test ride or some discounts.

4. Blog - Because we want to tell what we are doing here, how we see the things in this industry and the ideas that come our mind. Keep in contact with our clients. And bring new ones. Go out for a beer with them and discuss things. Because in big long term project, the relationship really counts. Maybe most of all things.

Ovidiu Petrescu, Ellen, Eric Case, Pedram Keyani all have something in common. That is the fact that they are Googlers. They are people who wake up in the morning and go to work at Google Inc. They all post on their personal blogs. The links can be found on the official Google blog.

The general impression is that any employee may write on the Google external blog: production managers, Dennis – the one who draws the Google Doodles or software engineers. That is also the impression the Tree blog leaves, isn’t it? =))

But a blog, especially an external one is rather like a communication window for the public; it needs care and competence to develop into an efficient tool.

This does not mean that the internal ones – that help the employees collaborate and develop their ideas – are meaningless. Here at Tree we do not have an internal blog (for we have already developed the telepathic communication inside the company). But if we had, Emil would be given the chance to post the Steaua football team anthem’s words and Ioana to post photos with the one and only Super Cat.

If we get back to the real purpose of the blog, there are a few things you can use to implement a blog that will help both you and your employees and, especially, your readers. First of all, you must not forget a blog is a communication tool, so the dialog has to be encourages (the comments and the contact page work in this direction). Secondly, you could use the new white paper about alternative communication tools – the blogs.

Certainly, blogs do not match every company’s profile, but they get better results in the search engines, grow the online visibility of your firm, are an alternative media form that offers a personalized voice to your company and create WoM marketing opportunities.

What do blogs really do? Allow the passing to Web 2.0. This meaning: they help you advance.

PS: Although the title may sound a senseless babbling, a flexible mind like my own can actually arrive at a coherent result.

Ionut spun his charmed twig and with two whiffles transformed the TreeWorks headquarters into a Fairyland. Bridi blew magical dust over us and transported everyone in the land where only friendly dragons exist. There where little frogs allow only attentive children to listen to their songs, where the dragon lights the stars and the bandmaster organizes concerts in the glade.

Almost synchronizing with Santa, the riped minds from Tree returned back to the childhood years, trying to remember the first school years and the confused letters, the meaningless numbers and the long studious afternoons. And because majority’s vote was against the wooden / plastic counting frame, we replaced it with garden full of magical beans. We have also decided that the ABC is a too cold, impersonal character, so we introduced the Inventor obsessed with noting everything he sees.

For Anna we have prepared a princess who is waiting to try on her complete and coquette wardrobe and an entire collection of colorful butterflies. For Daniel we have a quiver full of arrows waiting to be pointed to playful balloons.

But what we wanted to announce is the discovery of the fact that our minds stayed close to the first school years. For me, for instance, school was associated with the bang of chestnuts on the asphalt and technology with the great HC 91. But no matter the common generation gaps, we realized that the most important attributes of childhood are those that also existed 10 or 20 years ago. Curiosity and innocence.

We may grow wise. But we stay young at the same time. And that is what we wish for you too.

PS: We mention that we are responsible for having drew some other young minds into this: Ana, Olga, Simona, Alin and Alin. To whom we thank for having played a role in the Fairyland.

When the design was made, the guys were thinking at Nicoleta Luciu (their hearts are broken since you’ve got married, Nicoleta, and Ionut will even tell his grandchildren about that time when he told you something funny and made you laught). The girls dreamt about Dan Bordeianu and Lucian Viziru while working for the programming. The result: the new AcasaTV website. I just hope we haven’t all been day dreaming.

Yesterday I was talking with Emil about changing our 4 gb ipods with the new 8 gb ones. (The ones with a hard disk have a too big size.) Ioana and Ionut were mocking us (they are the light shuffle users and that explains it all): Why would we need an 8 gb one for current stuff? My explanation: because I always want to listen to the album I have just deleted yesterday. Emil’s explanation: an audio-book has 600 megas; putting 3-4 audio books on an i pod barely leaves you any place for the music. I hove everyone agrees with me when I say that 4 gb is not enough.

My futuristic solution is this: heaping up on a central server with high speed access through wifi,wimax, widracs Everyone should have its own secured backed-up virtual space with different access levels. Even more, the state should offer every person at birth an incipient space, with the possibility of buying extra space if needed. This could gather public things (ID card, birth certificate, CV, diplomas, tax and interest returns), personal stuff that can be accessed by everyone (for instance photos, blogs etc.), personal stuff with access for different security levels (pictures from private events, contract drafts, personal conversations etc.) and very personal stuff with access only for the owner. With this – association of the file with the owner and not with the device – all DRM (Digital Rights Management) problems could be solved. The access system, however, would put most problems – in order to be both usable and safe. Some embedded stuff could exist, so that the social structure be respected: parents can verify the space of children until a certain age, married couples could share a certain space of intellectual property – in co-ownership and so on.

Of course, there would be some things to discuss about the legality of order organisms‘ access. Plus those of scripted protocols – RSA? Biometric security (retinal, vocal, digital marks) for a certain privacy level. There a lot of things to consider.

My point is: the future is for small hardware clients who can access heaped information centralized by wireless, plus a comunitary definition for the concept of information. In this kind of future there are two big winners: technological aggregates (like Google), quality content producers (from persons to production companies). Who is going to have problems? The distributors who base on their dominant position: I mean, what point is there in having a public television in a world where everybody composes its own informational menu. If one wants to support culture, education and so on, better give subventions for the content producers. But this is another talk and I must start my work day.

While reading these sentences I can choose to perform from one of these actions: read the e-mail, delete it or mark it as a spam.

I usually do not open the emails that come from unknown addresses or ones that have vague headlines. I do open emails from sites I have logged on, but not always follow their links and most of the times I take a glance at the content and that’s all. From time to time I get an email telling me I haven’t visited a specific website for some time and probably someone who manages the answers evaluation is wondering if I want to keep my account. Other times I order products online and after that I keep receiving offers or just events invitations.

Thus, day after day, I open and delete newsletters, latest products offers, news of order forms. It does not really mean so much for me, but it sure does for people who generate them.

B2C Internet Direct Mail Communication - direct, personalized, targeted - is more and more used. Because an email is less expensive than a letter, a print or a tv ad, the results of a campaign can be measured, the resources are limited and the messages can be customized for a specific target.

The questions you need to answer before implementing an internet direct mail campaign are:

• Who do you send the emails to?
• Where do you get the addresses from?
• What will be the format of the message?
• What about the content?
• How will you measure the results?

For instance, HTML email strengthens the message, but are preffered by the unexperienced users. That is why it is advisable to let the users choose their desired format. ROI (Return Of Investment) is an efficient method of measuring the results of a campaign. The rate may vary depending on the product, industry and target.

You can find the answers to all these questions, as well as how you can avoid being labeled as a spam generative here.