Crumbs from the Scone
“I subscribe to a wonderful Web-based entity that sends me a weekly newsletter, which I enjoy very much,” begins an entry in the Editorial Emergency newsletter. “But a while back they started sending me a daily e-mail on top of my weekly e-mail.”
The first problem with this scenario is—of course—that the company never requested permission to send the daily missive; the second is that Editorial Emergency could find no obvious way to unsubscribe from the unwelcome daily missive without also cancelling the beloved weekly issue. Making matters worse, they were still waiting for follow-up long after the 48-hour window promised by an autoreply from the site’s webmaster.
“Naturally,” continues the entry, “I’ve begun to associate my annoyance at these daily e-mails with the organization that sends them, which I imagine is not its marketing strategy. I’m on the verge of canceling my subscription altogether.”
So annoyed has Editorial Emergency become, it used this topic as an opportunity to ask its own readers how often they’d like to receive newsletters, and plans to publish the results in its next issue.
We spend a lot of time discussing the theoretical advantages of permission-based marketing; in this real-life example, we can see a customer relationship being destroyed in slow motion, and for no good reason. They’re lucky Editorial Emergency hasn’t hit the spam button.
The Point: Don’t second-guess your subscribers. Announce any changes you plan to make, and allow them to choose to opt in—or not.
Cheers, Skip
Source: Editorial Emergency.
Crumbs from the Scone
In a post at Emergence Marketing, Francois Gossieaux tells the story of making reservations with Air France for a trip to Belgium, where his father—who had been diagnosed with a pair of aneurisms—was scheduled for a complex surgery.
Gossieaux didn’t notice a glitch in the itinerary until calling ahead to give his parents the dates of his arrival and departure. “I wanted to come back on the 27th,” he writes, “and for some reason when I ordered through airfrance.com they booked me on a train from Brussels to Paris on the 27th and a flight on the 28th.”
It seemed to him like an easy fix—especially when he learned the desired flight had plenty of space. Gossieaux was even willing to pay a fee for something he blamed on the Air France interface: “I order stuff online all the time and if there is an overnight situation I expect the site to alert me to this.” But no amount of cajolery, however solicitous, would cause Air France to budge. He would have to buy a new ticket, they said, and he did—on Air Lingus.
“In these bad economic times, you would expect companies whose service[s] are going to be the first to be cut from personal and business budgets to do everything they can to hold on to their customers,” he notes, “especially if it does not cost them a dime to accommodate the change request which would satisfy the customer, and perhaps make up for their deficient product offering.”
The Point: There will be times when you cannot meet a customer’s expectations—but be prepared for very public fallout if your position doesn’t sound reasonable to most people.
Cheers, Skip
Source: Emergence Marketing.
Crumbs from the Scone
As fallout from the current economic crisis continues to mount, thoughtful people are beginning to ask what we can learn from this experience. In a post at Harvard Business Online, Bill Taylor highlights a Warren Buffett interview on Charlie Rose in which the billionaire investor responds to the question “Should wise people have known better?” in the affirmative, with the note that there’s a natural progression when things go wrong:
Innovation
Imitation
Idiocy
An innovator spots an untapped opportunity; the imitator attempts to capitalize on its merit; finally, explains Taylor, the idiot goes and apes the imitator, and with avarice “undoes the very innovations [he is] trying to use to get rich.”
According to Taylor, avoiding this cycle means developing the ability to distinguish between “genuine innovation” and “mindless imitation.” In other words, he asks, “Are you prepared to walk away from ideas that promise to make money [when] they make no sense?” Taylor, like Buffett, concedes this is easier said than done when you see competition heading in a particular direction and fear you’ll never catch up if you don’t join the charge. It takes discipline, notes Taylor, to remain conscious of the difference—taking advantage of innovation without getting caught up in the idiocy.
The Point: “[D]on’t use the financial crisis as an excuse to stop taking chances or downsize your ambitions,” says Taylor. “But do use the crisis as an opportunity to take stock of what really matters—and to stop looking over your shoulder.”
Cheers, Skip
Source: Harvard Business Online.
Crumbs from the Scone
In a video from BNET, Edward Muzio of Group Harmonics explains how email conversations can start unnecessary fights. “It happens all the time,” he says. “It starts out as a simple bit of information; turns first into a discussion; then an argument; finally our inbox is full of emails back and forth. No one knows what’s going on.”
The reason this happens is simple—and surprising. In conversation, says Muzio, words account for a paltry seven percent of the information we perceive. And since an email exchange makes it virtually impossible to convey visual cues (55 percent) and tone (38 percent), your recipient might “hear” something you didn’t intend. Muzio illustrates his point by placing stress on various words to demonstrate how the same sentence can carry a number of meanings:
I didn’t say you have an attitude problem (or, don’t blame me—someone else said it).
I didn’t say you have an attitude problem (or, I said that about someone else, not you).
I didn’t say you have an attitude problem (or, you have a problem alright, but not with your attitude).
The solution, argues Muzio, is restricting email communications to facts and data—deadlines, appointments, new policies and the like. Once a discussion veers into emotional content, it’s time to pick up the phone or, better yet, drop in for a face-to-face conversation.
If you choose the right medium for the right conversation, you can keep preventable drama to a minimum—and concentrate your energy on Marketing Inspiration, not Crisis Management.
Cheers, Skip
Source: MarketingProfs newsletter 11/07/08
Crumbs from the Scone
Now’s your chance to bid on a website from Shadowbend Studios! I have donated a Budget Website Solutions package
http://www.shadowbendstudios.com/budget_website_solutions.html to the “Bid For Kids” auction at John Baldwin Elementary School (where my kids are attending kindergarten). Check out the online auction listing here…
http://auction.bidforkids.com/Bidding.taf?_function=detail&Auction_uid1=1738580
Bidding has just begun so there is still time to get one of my websites for a VERY good price!
Take Care,Skip
Crumbs from the Scone
Even if you’ve never heard the term tag cloud, you’ve likely seen them in your online travels: clusters of keywords relevant to a site’s content, rendered in varying font sizes and shades, and often found on the left or right navigation bars. “Flikr, the photo sharing site, was the first high-profile website to use tag clouds,” writes Barry Harrigan in a post at Accelerating IT Sales, “while the origins of tag clouds can be traced back to Douglas Coupland’s 1995 Microserfs.”
You can check out Harrigan’s original post to see examples of the tag clouds he generated at websites like these:
TagCrowd. “After a little tweaking on my part to remove some irrelevant words such as … ‘permalink,'” he notes, “[I] was rewarded with [a] nifty visualization of the content on this site.”
Tag Cloud Generator. “[I]t was easy to use,” says Harrigan, “didn’t require that I register, and created a visually appealing cloud tag.”
MakeCloud. This service displays fewer tags than Tag Cloud, he says, but all accurately reflect his blog’s content.
“Tag clouds are an interesting way to quickly scan a site to figure out if its content is relevant to [a customer’s] needs,” writes Harrigan. “[They] can use tag clouds to search for topical information without having to come up with specific search terms on [their] own.”
The Point: Find that silver lining. Try forming a tag cloud to boost user interest—and clicks—at your site.
Cheers, Skip
Source: Accelerating IT Sales.
