The Erasmus Centre of Entrepreneurship (ECE) has a monthly gathering of startups, investors, advisors and students of entrepreneurship: the Day@The Campus (video below). This time I was invited to introduce the buzzable framework and interact with the 120 attendants on how to create truly remarkable companies. Check out the slideshare in the title banner.

The most powerful moment was the mini hackathon: the group split up into teams that were ready to hack a company’s customer experience into something more remarkable. The results of just 4 minutes of unhindered business sculpting were astounding. Best question of the day:

“Doesn’t a disruptive message wear out ?”

Yes it does if it is only done for getting eyeballs, as in headlines. If the underlying story and experiences are strong, being disruptive goes much deeper.

The video below shows what happens during a Day@Campus…

Over the course of 3 hours, in a truly remarkable setting overlooking the former Eastern German part of Berlin, we dived in and explored how to fuel the success of companies active in affordable design furniture via customer experience services to platforms that help teach teachers.

“I totally loved the hackaton. With Willem’s probing and pushing, we came to a new and much clearer understanding of the customer experience we need to create. And we generated some really cool ideas on how to deliver it.” Max Maendler, Founder & CEO of Lehrerkolleg

It was a great occasion to test the ‘Why Mindmap’ and the Customer Experience ‘Hackathon’. I went home (2 days later, you gotta take advantage of the occasion to explore the city) with a bag full of stimulating compliments and constructive feedback.

Our session focused on optimizing the launch for a new product – a ‘snack’ cucumber – via an in-house word of mouth and trial program. This program will use ‘lead-users’ to try new green (and other colours) stuff and introduce it to friends and the world at large. Sounds familiar ? You got it, this is a private ‘Buzzer’ program. Concrete output of the session:

• A buzzable, inspiring name for the program and participants
• Flow and detailed steps of the engagement with the participants
• Best practices on various practical (logistics, timing) aspects
• Creating a buzzable story around the new product
• A set of communication and other inputs to make the program contageous

The program will start in Q3 of 2014 with one project, more will follow.

To get a feel for what I do, check out my Slideshare presentations, most of them from keynotes and workshops around the world.

I work with the international Speakers Academy for most bookings. Here you can find my profile. If you are interested to bring me to your audience, let them know. If you want to check in with me first, drop me a line.

Willem

In the BuzzBoost that followed, I helped them with the following opportunities

• A buzzable business model – The initial setup required Dilly’s to be four companies at once: real state, hardware, software and creative agency. How do you choose the right one while making sure everything is in place to show off the benefits of your product ?
• Time to market – Among other ideas, we came up with an alternative approach that would speed up bringing this buzzable billboard to market: a ‘plugin kit’ that converts existing billboards into a Dilly…

You will hear more from these guys !

The guys at Declaree have created a new breed of expense management solutions. Mobile and very savvy with loads of smart features such as multi-currency and mileage tracking. The most buzzable feature for me ? Fraud Detection. If you’re not using Declaree, you probably have something to hide ; )

What I liked about their marketing approach is the fact that they allow individual entrepreneurs to use the product for free and have a trial program for companies. As I always tell people: if you make it easy to try your product you’ll boost your word of mouth in no time.

Our discussion to make Declaree’s solution more remarkable zoomed in on:

• Creating Conversations – How can you turn this into a topic to discuss with others ? As it stands, expense management does not easily enter into the conversation. But that can change. We talked about the power of disruption as a tool to achieve this: storytelling that turn your mind on because it does not fit with normal patterns.
• Removing barriers to entry – Entrepreneurs tend to forget about the ‘hidden’ cost of switching. See my blogpost about buzzable behaviour to get more detail on this. We talked about various ways to experience the benefits of Declaree with even fewer obstacles.
• Boosting the Buzz – Declaree has a growing force of happy customers. How can you leverage their positive attitude to get the story to travel faster, wider ?

My BuzzBoost with founders Gianluca and Daniel focused on a few key opportunities to boost the company’s potential:

• Speed up market adoption. Customers who have tried the product think the service is well worth the fee. But potential clients hesitate to spend as it is a new service. We came up with a way to speed up adoption through a trial/word of mouth program that solves this chicken and egg challenge without giving away the product for free.
• Increase the market size. By positioning the service as a risk-reduction or information service alongside crowdfunded products it becomes as relevant for non-equity based crowdfunding platforms as it already is as a valuation tool for for the equity-based variety.

• Sharpened Focus – By setting the right focus, Vacaturebeurs’ product will become more simple, the benefit clearer and key partners will not feel attacked
• Trial Program – How can you get more potential clients to experience the benefits so that they can start spreading the buzz ?

• Structuring a milestone meeting with a potential pilot client
• Positioning the product in such a way that it becomes more than a jetlag-fighting device

Want to know more or hook up with the founders ? Let me know.