Nowadays, e-business has become unimaginable complicated; it has totally broken the ideas of sales in traditional mind.

In this e-business world, how customers gain shopping and product exchanging information has greatly affect the survival and development of companies. To companies, whose products are used to compare with yours? Which indexes do customers use to make the comparison? What is the result? How do they express their feeling and opinion? Behind all these questions there is very important information companies need to know: whether the knowledge and responses from the customers really agree with the expectations or the intensions of companies when they provide these services or products.

In order to face the new challenges, it is necessary to conduct the new ideas and put new tools into practise. But there are some basic concepts never change from the beginning to the end. One of them is “Three W” principle, which means Who, Where and What.

Where: Where are our customers? Which websites do they visit frequently, which functions and services are they using?

Who: In all these important sites, who is the “key person” to affect the products reputation in the groups?

What: What kind of topics or what kind of way of communication can attract more people in the web world?

Customers may always visit portal sites to obtain daily needed services, including free Email, instant messaging, auction, online shopping, reading the latest news etc…. However when it regards to brands, produces or service using experience, majority of customers prefer to check through certain websites, forums, blogs or Youtube video sharing channel with related topics. Moreover, search engine is another tool people can use to find the target websites through key word search. When there is no clear direction and customers just want to see around, search engine can provide more choices.

After knowing customers’ online habits of using the Internet services, then we need to do our best to draw close to out target. We need to put more efforts on conducting their action following our expectation. For example, few days ago, a famous watch company released a new intelligent touch watch. Before the product was put into the market, the company hold a “web users sharing and experience meeting” first and the newest information about this watch was given to those“web shopping pioneers”. Through them, the seeds of future reputation were planted in the web world.

When these industry experts and shopping pioneers come back the communities they are familiar with, they will start to plan the seeds very effectively. Some may open new topics, some may post the articles in their blogs to share their experience, and others may answer the questions of the web users in their Q&A section. They can make the atmosphere and attract more and more people to pay attention to this issue. There is no better publicity than seeing the news like “great expect” “new product recommend” “product trial sharing” everywhere in the web world. Before the mass advertisements were released, the web reputation has already been built up and the image of new products has been perfectly made.

In this changeable e-business world, whether you can manage the key person, location, topics and tendency effectively will decide wether your company has adequate competence to survive, develop and response market change in this new age.

Edited By Vicky Yin