I haven’t written a post or tweeted for quite a while and since I have a lot of time now I’ll first let you know why I have been absence for so long:

1. I wrote my bachelor thesis, which I handed in and already received a quite satisfactory grade for it.

2. I prepared and took my final exams, which I all passed… thanks.. thanks … he he

3. I graduated and thereafter needed to do some heavy celebrating.

That means I have my bachelor degree now and am searching for a job – worldwide. I experienced, that it is not that easy. The reasons for that are not only the still lingering economic crisis, but also my need for something truly challenging. After 3 years of studying, a lot of books, a lot of exams and projects I am very eager to put my full strength into a job. I guess that’s how almost every student feels after their graduation. Don’t you think?

Meanwhile did I apply for German unemployment benefit to finance this – hopefully short – transition phase. I can tell you, that the German governmental support system is pretty good, but also complicated. I feel like I filled out at least 50 pages of forms and I spoke to about 10 different clerks, just to get it all in order.

But this also has it’s upsides: I can help out my mum at home and spend some time with my family. I just hope that it won’t be too long before I can show my paces!

My thesis should supply students with the knowledge to differentiate themselves on the global job market. The difficulty is to get into contact with the HR department of the desired companies, that’s why I identified the HR managers as the target group of the Online Self-Marketing activities. As a next step within the Online Self-Marketing cycle the student has to make out the characteristics of their target group. HR managers of one firm use different strategies when it comes to searching personnel to the HR managers of another firm. I identified two types of HR managers when it comes to the usage of the internet:

What are the reasons for this? Ask yourself these questions and you can find out which type the human resource manager you’d like to contact belongs to!

• Are specially skilled and highly experienced experts needed?
• Does the company belong to the web 2.0 industry?
• Does the firm have high affinity to the internet and it’s services?
• Does the company have difficulties in finding suitable candidates?
• Is it rather small or unknown firm? (as a result can only generate a low number of applicants?)

If you answered most of this questions with YES  your target group consists of Type A HR managers.

BUT

• Is it a well-known company and as a result generates tons of applicants interested in a job?
• Is it a rather traditional firm with low or no affinity to the internet and it’s services?
• Does the company have a sufficient supply of applicants for posted job offers?

If you answered these questions with YES your target group consists of Type B HR managers.

Now you know your target group and can choose and appropriate marketing strategy in the next step of Online Self-Marketing. And no worries, there also will be a strategy helping you with a rather heterogeneous target group, which consists of both types of HR managers.

If you think about it, this differentiation in HR managers can be applied to customers as well.

Will Twitter or Facebook win their battle for dominance and survival? How will the internet influence our life in 2010? Are you prepared for the future? These questions not only need to be asked in connection with the looming year 2010, but are required to be continuously considered, since The Web 2.0 is characterized as especially dynamic. That’s why it’s so hard to make predictions about future developments. That’s the reason why online marketing wants a system that guarantees the observation of their environment just like the management cycle.

In my thesis I developed a system like a circuit which is based on common management practices and traditional strategic marketing procedures. Within this cycle the Online Self-marketer can continually improve his online presence and by that guarantee sustainable development. I included several control methods by which it will be possible to evaluate the efforts made.

In Online Self-Marketing the most important aim is to achieve a positive online self-presentation. Every internet user should think positive of the person presented on the personal website or in the network profile. Since I wrote my thesis in the perspective of the student, the second important aim is the contact to an employee of an HR department, which is crucial for acquiring the “dream job” after graduation. The third important aim is the personal aim, which will differ from person to person. The student usually is interested in a certain industry, for example can it be an aim to become an expert for B2B Marketing in the oil business.

Around these aims flows the self-marketing cycle, all steps needed to continuously improve the online presentation. Naturally you need to start with the actual state analysis. According to traditional marketing you conduct a strategic audit observing the environment (PESTLE) and the internal situation. This includes not only the current period of recession, the personal characteristics but also the legal situation. After all this information has been gathered, they should be used to perform a SWOT analysis.

In the Target State analysis the personal 3. AIM will be identified. The product market growth matrix by Ansoff or other tools can be used. The strategic portfolio analysis is only useful when a person already has more than one source of income, for example a normal job, a consulting business and the publishing of books.

Strategies are developed in the third step, instruments get selected in the fourth and after that all taken measures have to be controlled according to their effectiveness. All this I will describe in detail in future posts. Especially important is the connection between “control” and “actual state analysis”, where the end of the cycle flows into a new beginning. Only the consideration of the past failures and mistakes can help to form a more successful Self-Marketing in the future.

About a week ago an article of mine about Coca-Cola’s new Social Media Marketing Campaign was posted on the German site facebookmarketing.de. This site wrote on 21st of September that Coca-Cola was amongst the 5 most popular brands on facebook (rank 3). But considering that this company supplies 400 brands to 206 countries with 1,5 Billion servings per day, the roughly 3,7 Million fans appear as a small portion of a huge potential.

With it’s campaign “Expedition 206 – happiness goes around” Coca-Cola is joining all the other large companies trying to have a share in the social media buzz. The concept is that one team consisting of 3 “happiness ambassadors” travel the 206 countries where cola is supplied to in 365 days. I heard about it through a female friend of mine, who’s boyfriend Brendan is a member of the Team WOW! now competing against two other teams for the going on this mission. All three teams promote themselves with video clips on the Expedition website to convince the Internet user to vote for them. On 30th of October Team Sha-ba-ba-do brought up the rear with 21%, Team Wow was on second place with 37% and Team The Mix was leading the field with 42%.

But how does it work exactly?

The website depicts the teams and the videos as a decision making tool for the site visitors. After they informed themselves and chose a team they click the “Vote for this team” button and a window opens. The user is asked to choose a Social Media Application from these:

• Youtube
• Twitter
• Windows Live
• Orkut
• Facebook

It would be really interesting to know, what made the Coca-Cola marketing team choose these and not others. What criteria did they consider? In my opinion Cola aims at a global advertising impact, trying to convert customers to fans and give them the opportunity to communicate amongst each other. But does Coca-Cola look at all countries on earth? Did the marketing department realize how high the complexity of it’s target group really is?

Brendan, member of Team Wow! and currently living in China, did encounter problems vote catching. Scarcly anybody uses the Social Media Applications in Qingdao, a famous vacation spot in China. If you want to reach 206 countries (and more), you should know the applications ranking high (or number one) in users in those countries. I personnally do not believe you will start using an application just to be able to vote for a team on their website.

With more than 300 Million users facebook should and does play a key role in Coca-Cola’s Expedition 206 campaign. Besides casting a vote on the mission website you are able to do the same on facebook. Additionally are you requested to share that you voted on your FB wall or become a fan of Coca-Cola. But the campaign is far from being omnipresent on their facebook fan page. When a user is viewing the wall of the Cola-Page he is the tab for the campaign doesn’t show and if nobody would post anything on the wall about the campaign there won’t be any hint to it. A method of resolution would be repositioning the tab next to “info” or adding a note about the campaign to the profile picture.

Another point of criticism is that the campaign is lacking viral cross-linking. And some channels of the Internet are ignored. The videos of the teams aren’t shareable with social bookmarks. Only after I did search for the Expedition 206 on YouTube, I found their own channel, but except a link to their website in the information section of the channel there are no (click-able) links connecting those two web presences.

Aside from these details, one point is crucial: Nobody in my proximity had ever heard about Coca-Cola’s social media campaign. And if they did, it was because my friend sent a mass mail to her friends prompt them to vote for Brandon’s Team WOW!. There is still a lot left for their marketing team to do. Especially when it comes to using all of facebook’s potential: I did not see any adverts promoting the Expedition and including it in FB applications like “LivingSocial” would be another starting point.

Since I am writing my thesis, did I mention this once before?..he he.. I wanna let you know what the issues are I am tackling during the process.

The first one (some time ago now) was to clearly differentiate Self-marketing and Personal Branding. I started out by reading the book of Dan Schawbel about Personal Branding called “Me 2.0″, in this he gives a definition for Personal Branding:

“Personal branding describes the process by which individuals and entrepreneurs differentiate themselves and stand out from a crowd by identifying and articulating their unique value proposition, whether professional or personal, and then leverage it across platforms with a consistent message and image to achieve a specific goal. In this way, individuals can enhance their recognition as experts in their field, establish reputation and credibility, advance their careers, and build self-confidence.” p.4

Well, that’s a lot to digest. Let’s look at the definition of Self-marketing in contrast to that (the German Wikipedia supplies one):

“Self-marketing or Ego-Marketing are called all systematic and intentional approaches of commercialization / marketing oneself. This is realized by self-critically assigning all findings of Product and Service Marketing to the own persona.”

Since contrasting these two definitions not yet helped me much with the issue of seperating Personal Branding and Self-marketing conceptually, I  went to the library again to find more definitions of these two and maybe a book contrasting them.. but besides more definitions, I couldn’t find any book assigning importance to outlining this connection in detail OR in general.

Then finally I came to the conclusion that I have to plainly simplify the whole problem. So I dropped the “Self” of Self-Marketing and the “Personal” of Personal Branding and just studied the connection of Marketing and Branding. Then it hit me! Damn.. it’s so easy and I won’t blame you if you knew it all the way.

I opened a book called Internet-Marketing by Dave et al Chaffey and looked at the schema of the marketing mix. Branding is included as one part of the elements product and communication, which makes total sense.

In one way does Self-Marketing help you line out an extensive marketing concept and on the other hand does personal branding as a part of the whole, as a special tool, help you to better differentiate yourself from the other “products” and go deeper when it comes to product definition and the communication of it’s benefits. Intensify.

I could go on deduce correlations from this, but I just wanted to give you an idea about the things I am working on. Because in my opinion it’s not only important to understand how business works and suggest effective marketing measures, it is equally important to keep the big picture in mind. Know where each measure belongs ….well, that’s just me.

I mentioned once before that I am currently working on my bachelor thesis about Online Self-Marketing. After I was researching this topic for quite a while I am now beginning to write.

During this process I get assistance from the University of Applied Science Konstanz, where I am a student. And by  Jan Mittelstaedt, who offer his enthusiastic support, as the managing partner of Lorth Gessler Mittelstaed, an advertising agency supplying their customers with services from motion picture to corporate design.

This semester, besides the courses I am taking, I write this thesis focusing students, who I try to help with my work especially, but I do think my findings will also be applicable to others as well, since I am trying to describe strategies and tools for developing your personal online self-marketing plan.

If you haven’t noticed yet, you will now: Germany is voting their new parliament and with it the new chancellor tomorrow. At lot has been said and except that I think everybody should vote and by that be a part of democracy or get their “complaining-licence” I won’t  say anything regarding this matter.

I just wanted to give you some insight into the election campaign of SPD, because they sure know marketing! Not that I would vote them because of it, but they selected a very nice communication tool for reaching students.

This is what I saw when I left the university’s library Friday afternoon:

election campaign by SPD in Germany

Every single bicycle had been equipped with a rain cover by the SPD (social democratic party) or more precisely the SPD together with their organization for “young socialists” . This is perfect, because it not only serves their original purpose, pursue students to vote and vote for them, moreover it’s useful. Even when you won’t vote them you might just like to use the cover, since it is free. And by using it, it will be free advertising for the SPD.

Here some more pictures:

rain cover by SPD stating: tuition fees - bullshit (somewhat like that)

little blurry (sorry): Do not forget: Go Vote on Sunday!

Power distance is a concept introduced by Geert Hofstede, formerly professor of organisational anthropology and international management at the University of Limburg in the Netherlands. He was an employee at different companies including IBM and has brought about a paradigm change in intercultural studies with his book Culture’s Consequences: International Differences in Work-Related Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations.

Power distance is one of the four dimensions of cultural variation identified by Hofstede. He defines it as the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations (and similar systems) within a nation expect and accept that power is distributed unequally.

That practically means that in countries with high power distance (Asian, African, Latin American..), the employees expect the boss to give orders and they won’t criticise his desicions or give suggestions (among other characteristics). In countries with low power distance (North America, Netherlands…), the relationship between the boss and the inferior is more equal, the superior asks for his employees opinion and they more often call them on their mistakes.

In front of this background I thought about the experiences I had when researching on Asian Websites, which I did during my internship in Taipei. Those are the features on these websites, which could have been caused by the high power distance:

• organization charts – one person on the top
• message from the CEO prominently placed
• often absence of corporate blogs or any other envolvement of employees
• almost no pictures of “real” employees (as the people behind the brand)
• …

These are a few I thought are the most obvious. I’d like to know about your experiences surfing Asian websites!

It took me a while to apply the inter-cultural knowledge I have to the web. It was that difficult, because I had to wrap my head around a very obvious contradiction. But to explain what my problem was I need to give you some background knowledge first.

low-context vs. high-context

These are terms first used by E.T. Hall to describe an attribute of communication. In relation to this context is ‘the information that surrounds an event’ (Hall & Hall, 1990) The opposite of context is text, which is according to Hall ‘the coded explicit, transmitted part of the message’ (Hall, 1976).

To make this concept clear and accessible to you I’ll tell you a little story:
Karl from Germany is studying Chinese Culture together with Monika. When they invite their Chinese friends Ling and Nan over for dinner, Ling gives them a wrapped box. Karl takes the gift and says “Thanks”, but the moment he makes a move to unwrap it, Monika says: “Karl” and gives him a special look. Karl understands and puts the gift aside.

The text in this communication is “Thanks” and “Karl”, but the context is more interesting, because the context behind “Karl” is rather large. Monika and Karl share the same knowledge about Chinese culture, which includes the custom of Chinese to unwrap gifts only when their guests are gone, in order to hide their feelings concerning it. This is a method to protect their guest’s and their own “face“. So Monika actually reminded Karl of this principle by simply calling him by his name. A different person, which doesn’t share the context would not have been able to understand this message.
According to that cultures with high-context communication generally use less text and more context, for example Chinese or Asians. Cultures with low-context communications use more text than context.

That’s why you would expect the German website of Yahoo to have more text than the Chinese or Taiwanese one, which is not the fact. This is the contradiction I mentioned above and which threw me a curve.
Just now I was able to create a theory explaining WHY.

Since Germans are used to low-context communications they put their message across in an effective way using a certain amount of text. But Chinese are used to high-context, so since in the web, there is hardly any context, they try to make up for it by more text which leads to bigger websites than the ones of low-context cultures.

But here I have to state that this is only one possible explanation. Aside from culture which influences communication there are several factors which we shouldn’t forget. What kind of website are we dealing with here? How big is the target group they are focussing on? What characteristics does this target group have? And what goals is the company trying to achieve with the website.
I am just trying to give all this yet another angle.

Every time I view a Chinese website or a website using Chinese characters (traditional or simplified) I am overwhelmed by the amount of information depicted.

To demonstrate what I mean and analyze it I picked out the website of yahoo for Taiwan and the USA.

You can clearly see that the page of Yahoo USA is offering less information.
So what did Yahoo Taiwan do differently?

• the “sign in – field” is bigger and has more options
• advertising (acer, LG and a housing project)
• less news (above acer ad) and more shopping (shoes, mobile phones, cosmetic)
• when you view the page in your browser you’ll also notice that the Taiwanese site is longer
• less icons

(to only name a few)

I asked myself: Why do they do it that way?
Obviously their customers are different. Consequently does the difference between Chinese and Americans (please excuse my generalization here) dictate the way Yahoo sets up their websites.

And in general it’s a culture difference, because culture is:

“the system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts that the members of a society use to cope with their world and with one another, and which is transmitted from generation to generation through learning“ Bates DG, Plog F: Cultural Anthropology. New York, McGraw-Hill, 1990, p 7

If the members of a society use their culture as a “tool” to deal with the world, it is no wonder it should influence the design of websites online.  In the next few posts I will describe some aspects of culture, which are most influential for web design.