Being Smarter

So much of what we get up to here at Being Smarter is about getting personal. The days of broadcast email, send and hope direct mail and one voice for all customers are effectively over.

2010 and beyond is all about defining your buyer personas and getting personal. Click each of those links for some background and inspiration if you want to get your business noticed.

Bearing all that in mind – I couldn’t help noticing a piece of direct mail my wife received over the weekend from Boden clothing.

The front page is a real attention grabber and you can’t help smiling at the fact they’ve recognised she’s not bought from them recently…

Inside – they carry on with the personalisation… in a really nice way.

If ever there was a piece of DM to make you take a look at someone’s ‘stuff’. This would be it.

What are you doing to get personal?!

We’ve been doing quite a bit of research of late for our new venture and been looking at a ton of web application sites – because I’m a massive believer in not reinventing the wheel. Why try a new design from scratch when there are thousands of sites and companies who’ve already blazed a trail.

I just came across a great example of how to do a features tour – never seen this technique before, and I like it. Judging by the fact there’s a couple of hundred links back to this page – I’m thinking there’s a few others liking it too.

Huddle have been around for a while. It doesn’t stop them innovating.

Check out this technique for producing a feature tour. You’ll find it will also work on your iPad – because it’s not Flash!

It’s not a secret that I’m a fan of 37 Signals and how they’ve built their business. What I didn’t know until yesterday was the number of customers they have. How many of those are paying it’s hard to know – but a good proportion I bet.

Jason Fried is the co-founder and president of 37 Signals and in his presentation below, taken from a Chicago conference last year, he outlines his company’s ethos for winning new customers.

It’s all about Market Leadership, as Ed Dale would say.

It’s also a brilliant case study for David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of PR and Marketing.

At 12 mins ish Jason talks about a single blog post which explains the way 37 Signals have tested and implemented a flashing yellow bar to alert users to a change on the screen. This post has been read 800,000 times! How many of those hits have resulted in sales? Who knows – but a good few I bet.

The moral to this story is give away your secrets, build trust and people will buy from you.

If you have any interest in winning customers in the 2010′s, do yourself a favour and spend 20 mins watching this.

Write on Glass has been gathering buzz and momentum for some time now. Quite simply, it looks like an awesome new way to share content. Sorry, experiences…

Whilst I’ve not got access, what really interested me is seeing how have they chosen to demonstrate the concept. With screen shots? screen cams? a clever technical animation?

No.

They’ve illustrated the concept quite brilliantly by showing the application interacting in a real live environment and I like it. It stands out from the crowd as an application and they way they tell their story does exactly the same.

We can all learn from this!

Watch, enjoy and learn.

You may have read our sister blog – Watch us Getting Real, where we write a regular diary of the trials and tribulations of an online startup and building a web application, following the process outlined in the totally awesome Getting Real book from 37 Signals.

We are getting to the stage where the talking’s about to stop, the planning’s done and the focus swings onto execution. Remarkable execution we hope.

I couldn’t help noticing a sidenote in Getting Real, from a chapter you find in its entirety here, but I wanted to emphasise the thinking of the entrepreneur, Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby and Hostbaby. He provides the simplest of formulas behind the making of a good idea and it’s based on a multiplier:

Ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.

Explanation:

• Awful idea = -1
• Weak idea = 1
• So-so idea = 5
• Good idea = 10
• Great idea = 15
• Brilliant idea = 20

• No execution = $1
• Weak execution = $1000
• So-so execution = $10,000
• Good execution = $100,000
• Great execution = $1,000,000
• Brilliant execution = $10,000,000

To make a business, you need to multiply the two.

Simple.

How well are you executing?

It’s been a real delight getting involved with my son’s local school recently. We’ve been building their new website which I’ll talk about in another post and which will go live in September. I’m really excited about getting the pupils blogging and the parents more involved in what goes on.

Whilst that’s been going on, we’ve also produced a video prospectus for the school – 4 mins 31 seconds of a day in the life. Not too long, not too short. Narrated mainly by the headmaster – the fabulous Richard Jarrett, and produced quite brilliantly by a colleague of mine.

The beauty of having an asset like this – is that it started life as a DVD rotating on the plasma screen in the school foyer. It’s now going to be available online for anyone who wants it, as well as available on DVD for prospective parents. It will also be the start of a collection of video assets available on the school website, which will tell the story of the school year for parents and extended family, who can’t always get to events and see their children participating.

I’ve always preached the opposite to the title of this post because I’m normally discussing communication with customers and I will never stop believing that surprises are normally bad.

The right kind of surprises are very welcome however and mobile operators are notoriously bad at not giving those. Imagine my surprise then when I got the text below yesterday.

Costwise, bearing in mind Vodafone own networks in most EU countries this will have minimal impact. Revenuewise, people are too scared to use data abroad anyway and so the majority of customers don’t use it. Financially it’s therefore going to have minor impact either way. From a customer loyalty perspective however, this is huge. Customers will renew contracts because of this and customers will leave other operators for this scheme too.

Vodafone I’m personally very grateful for this promotion. However in a corporate sense I also think you are very smart and I bet the others follow.

I bought an iPad a few weeks ago and I love it.

I decided to get myself an O2 PAYG microsim – because they are the only operator offering pay as you go in the UK – hats off to them for offering something different and not following the others by demanding monthly payments.

So – off I go to the O2 page, order my sim and guess what…

Do you know what, actually it’s not… 14 days! Clearly they are embarrassed about the length of time it’s going to take to arrive – due to the statement above. As it happens I reckon it’s been at least 3 weeks since I ordered it – but that’s another debate.

For me, I’d like to ask

“Why?”

Why on earth can sending a sim card possibly take so long? I could have used it say 5 times in that period of time and generated £10 for them. Multiply that by the 1000′s of people who are also ordering but factor out the 1000′s of others who are probably ordering sims from other operators because they can’t be bothered to wait.

The reason for the 14 days I suspect is simple – the corporate ordering systems JUST TAKE THAT LONG. It takes that long because it does and guess what, no one has thought to ask why?

It would be cheaper, more efficient and speedier to hire a team to receive the orders, stuff envelopes and deliver sims within 48 hours. Customers could start using the sim quickly, which in turn would pay for this extra labour… but no one has thought to have done that, because that’s not the way it’s done. Why?

Don’t accept the norm. Don’t accept the answer “Because it’s always been done that way”. Question… ask why? and then do things differently. It’s the only way to get noticed.