Being Smarter

This is a follow up article to one I made last month entitled – Smart email marketing – NOT! It was my first rant on this site about a company definitely not being smart. In fact, I’d go as far as saying that they were being quite the opposite… so much so I voted with my feet and unsubscribed from their marketing database, despite me really rating their product. That’s a strange combination I know.

In case you haven’t got time to read this original rant, in a nutshell, I bought a holiday to Cyprus to be taken in October, from Sovereign holidays back in August. They then proceeded to send me emails selling me holidays and special offers for holidays in October, despite the fact I’d just bought one. Terrible, appalling, rubbish marketing. I unsubscribed before I went away, and had a wonderful holiday.

This annoyed me, as it’s simple to fix, so I had Tweeted @ them, I had written the rant article and I had written to their customer relations team. Surprise, surprise, I thought I’d been swallowed up again by the corporate black hole of complaint handling.

Well, I was wrong. Well sort of. When we arrived in our hotel room in Cyprus a couple of weeks back, we had a huge bouquet of flowers and a bottle of champagne waiting for us in our room, with a card welcoming us to the hotel, and signed from a lady at Sovereign. No mention of the reason for sending however…

At first I assumed they greeted everyone like this… but after investigation it turns out we were special – so I was even more intrigued. After much detective work, I got hold of the relevant email address and wrote to them on my return, thanking them, but also asking why it was sent.

This was their response:

Dear Mr Copeman

Thanks for your letter and I’m pleased you got our small apology in resort.

We have recently changed email marketing companies to prevent the problem you experienced happening, We have also just recently changed our customer database management system with the plan of implementing some serious changes to our customer contact strategy to make it much more customer centric and more engaging.

I hope this clarifies the problem and I hope you continue to travel with Sovereign. Please let me know if you have any further questions I would be happy to help.

Best regards

Thoughts:

1) They had gone to the efforts of marrying my name from my email to their customer relations address,  to a booking and bothered to send flowers and champagne to the room on our arrival – very nice touch. Quite delightful in fact.

2) It was slightly marred however, by the fact we actually thought they did it for everyone – and there was no mention of the email I had sent. If I hadn’t have followed up, I would have assumed that my email had gone unresponded to and would have spread bad news about Sovereign.

3) The explanation in the email response was impressive… I have to assume I’m not completely responsible for this change of strategy, however, it’s great that someone has listened and is reacting to customer opinion.

So, how do you deal with complaint handling? Would you have done better? Do your customers’ emails go into the corporate email blackhole?

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Would you like to read related articles?

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• How To Set Up The Most Effective Email Follow Up System – Part 6 (johnchow.com)
• The information gap between marketing and sales – and how to fill it (thecustomercollective.com)

Or leave us your thoughts below….

Last week was interesting for lots of reasons – but one of the most common themes which came up was how often marketing and sales organisations are brilliant at devising strategies for their clients, yet struggle to do it for themselves.

I’m sure many of you can relate to this issue – you spend so much time working on your business, you can’t see the wood from the trees when it comes to devising the right words for describing what you do.

There’s no hard and fast rules about how to come up with the right words when it comes to marketing your own organisation, although getting a basic understanding of what value propositions are all about will help you along the way. Once you think you have something – here are five good ways to check you are on the money…

1. Give your materials to an ‘average’ 13 year old and let them unprompted tell you what they think. They will be an excellent barometer of the language you are using.
2. Even if you messages make sense – it’s always worth a back of an envelope test to see whether people are actually searching for the phrases you use. Use the planet’s best market research tool to test out your keyphrases. If no one’s searching for what you’ve written, rewrite it or you will always be running uphill.
3. For every 10 people you discuss branding/marketing with, you will always get at least 11 opinions, so bearing that in mind, send your materials to 5 people you are close to and respect and then to 5 acquaintances for feedback. Ask each group three specific questions about your materials – DON’T just ask for feedback – that’s too hard.
4. Get brave – head off to a local networking group and make a real effort to meet 10 people in the room. This is the perfect place to test your elevator pitch, which forms part of these messages. Get good at refining it in front of people. A great test for success is whether you get a follow up question after the initial “So what do you do?” one. When people start to offer you names of people you should talk to – you know you’re onto a winner.
5. Finally, whilst it’s not scientific, NEVER ignore your gut feelings (or your team’s gut feelings) about what it is you’ve produced. If you aren’t comfortable and proud to be using the materials and messaging you’ve produced, then make changes immediately. The best marketing won’t work, without the belief of a team behind it. Confidence and passion definitely breeds success.

Now – go and test!
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We hope you enjoyed this article. What can we do for you now?

• Would you like to see how to use bite-sized video chunks to deliver messages to your teams or customers?
  
• Would you like to see a demonstration of how to convert sales targets into prospects?
  
• Would you like to follow the founder of Being Smarter on Twitter?

Would you like to read related articles?

• Steps to creating your Need Statement (business901.com)
• Why Should Your Customer Do Business With You? (digitalprintink.wordpress.com)
• Your Employees Have No Clue What Your Company Does (blogs.harvardbusiness.org)
• The hidden secrets of market research (entrepreneur.venturebeat.com)

We all get frustrated by poorly written emails and poorly executed email marketing. I felt compelled to write about a company which sadly just isn’t joined up. My hope is that they do read this and maybe sort out the left hand and right hand.

Sovereign holidays are a good company. They are part of the TUI Group. They offer luxury holidays, have good customer service staff, who actually answer your tricky hotel questions by email – they actually don’t go into the standard corporate blackhole mailbox. I have no complaints about that side of the business.

Their marketing department however is a different story. They should know they’ve lost a subscriber, due to blanket email blasting like so many other companies.

We booked a holiday on 2nd August and head off later in October. Why then would I receive emails as follows:

• 21st August – Offer of exception value to Turkey

I’ve just booked a holiday with you – would I really be considering another already?

• 28th August – Great sale weekend and exclusive offers

Once again – I’m really not in the buying mood – I’m looking forward to my holiday in October with you.

• 4th September – Luxury All-inclusive etc

Ahem – now I’m getting annoyed – I’ve just parted with a substantial sum of money to travel with you – I don’t want to spend any more money at the moment and you’re annoying me now.

• 11th September – Enjoy October for less

Err – I’m already going away in October – for goodness sake, how on earth would I take two holidays in October? Do you not know what my schedule is like? You’re now selling double glazing to house which has just had triple glazing installed.

(I’m skipping a couple)

• 1st October – Book now and save over £2,000!

I’m going away in three weeks’ time with you. UNSUBSCRIBE.

Smart advice

Sovereign holidays - add two fields in your email marketing database which says date of booking and date of travel. Be smart about when people are sent emails. Set a flag to email someone two weeks on their return with relevant, compelling offers.

• 13th November – Thanks for travelling with Sovereign – special offer inside to loyal customers

It’s not hard.

To get even more sophisticated, personalised emails which are timely and relevant work. 100% click through is possible.

This article was responded to by Sovereign holidays. To see the outcome click here.

Related articles

• Enhance Your Email Marketing with Social Media (growmap.com)
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• Free ebook on how to succeed at email marketing based on years of research (being-smarter.com)
• Dos and Don’ts of Email Marketing (craig-edmonds.com)

Here at Being Smarter, we like to review software which saves you time and generally makes your life easier. We’ve talked about managing knowledge before – it’s such an important part of business life. Information is power… knowledge is power.

Everyone has the capability of finding information now thanks to the power of search. What sets you apart from the crowd however is minimising the time you take to set up and monitor your information streams and of course how you use them. It’s easy to spend all day watching data. The trick is to have it done for you.

Becoming a Knowledge Jedi is about spending as little time as possible monitoring and researching data. In order to help you become as efficient at this as possible, you need the right tools. RSS is one must-have skill you need to master. We’ve found another essential data mining tool which we would argue is a must have too.

Gist has recently come out of closed beta and is available to all. It’s yet another online contact management application, except this is one with a difference. You won’t believe your eyes when you see it.

On  set up, you tell the application where to find your various contact lists – Outlook on your hard drive, Linkedin, Twitter, webmail services etc. The system then goes off, brings in that data to one place, applies intelligent data to it and then displays it in a great format for you to really learn from.

If you are in sales – this is essential.

I would like to highlight three key areas – although I should add, it’s merely scratching the surface.

1) The dashboard

The dashboard view I really like – it gives you a snapshot view of everything going on within the companies and contacts in your system. You can choose to show contacts and/or companies, and also select the type of information shown. When you really sit back and think about this – if you went off to find all of this information manually – and people still do this, it would take you hours, even with the power of Google.

There’s an example shot below taken from the dashboard view.

2) Contact news

I’ve always defined Twitter as ‘legal stalking’ – simply, follow the people you want to do business with, to learn about their lives. Gist takes it a step further and provides you with ‘totally automated legal stalking’.

Imagine you’re a sales person looking to do business with an individual. That individual is already in your contact database, because you’ve researched their details. Before you head off to your meeting – all you would need to do is click on your contact in Gist…

You can then see a photo of the individual, their latest blog posts, their latest tweets and any other news items that have been picked up recently. You can then walk into that meeting feeling like you know them…

3) Company news

The same can also apply at a company level. If you manage or are looking to sell into certain companies, Gist has pulled out all of the companies from your contact lists and runs off and provides you with the latest news, blog posts and Tweets from that particular company, so if you are heading off to a meeting with your suspect – guess what – one click into Gist and you can be completely uptodate with that company’s news and comments.

Conclusions

I hope you’ve found this Gist review enlightening.  It does a thousand other things too – and we think you really should go and register. It is of course totally free.

If we’re honest, it’s never going to replace Outlook, because it’s just so entrenched. However if I were Microsoft, I’d be snapping up these folks and doing everything in my power to mirror what Gist have done and turn Outlook into a real tool for managing knowledge as opposed to letting a corporate industry standard languish with a set of lame updates over the last 10 years.

For Gist, that’s the ultimate compliment.

__________________

We hope you enjoyed this article. What can we do for you now?

• Would you like to see how to use bite-sized video chunks to deliver messages to your teams or customers?
  
• Would you like to see a demonstration of how to convert sales targets into prospects?
  
• Would you like to follow the founder of Being Smarter on Twitter?

Would you like to read related articles?

• Gist beats Xobni at tackling email, Twitter overload (billbennett.co.nz)
• Get the Drift With Gist (gigaom.com)
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• Gist Opens to the Public, Wants to Own the Nexus of E-mail, Search, and Social Networks (xconomy.com)
• Gist (chris.pirillo.com)

It’s always great to write on subjects dear to your heart and ones based on personal experience. Today is both.

I’ve been lucky enough to watch many great presentations, speeches and seminars over the last few years, however have also been incredibly frustrated that no one apart from those in the room at the time can benefit from the experience. How long does it take event organisers to pull good speakers together? How long does it take speakers to put their materials together? Days? Weeks? And it’s all over in a few hours.

Ever cooked a roast dinner for 12 people? Spent 6 hours preparing it to see it all eaten in 15 mins? Well it’s the same thing with events, except with a roast dinner, I’m guessing you wouldn’t want to keep it for ever…

Today and tomorrow our team is working with one of our partner companies to record an expert seminar, given only to a select few. The speaker is then going to spend some time with us after the session, recording in a green screen studio and we are then going to turn the whole event into an ’8.45 Club’ style course for them…

So what’s the point of all this?

1. The presentation which has taken many hours to put together will not be lost forever. It can remain a useful asset for years after the event.
2. An audience other than the limited few that could make it to London on that specific day can now benefit from the material.
3. The company putting on the event can leverage this material with other clients – possibly even sell it, because of its value.

And how will it be presented?

1. The material will not be presented as a giant, unmanageable block of 2 hours, it will be turned into an engaging video training course.
2. The 8.45 Club style of training means it will be delivered to email inboxes, first thing in the morning, in bite-sized chunks of ten minutes per day, perhaps for a couple of days of week for a month or so.
3. Learners can now benefit from this session without leaving their desk and still be at their desk by 9.00.

I believe that’s win, win, win…. and possibly win.

How are you leveraging your next event? http://the845club.com/bespoke

No need for text for today’s post – just click play…

Related articles

• Live audio interviewing on the web….. (geoffjones.com)
• Ipadio live audio at book launch (nevillehobson.com)
• Ipadio Releases First Audio Blogging and Mobile Broadcasting App for Android (sociableblog.com)
• ipadio to release killer iPhone app for audio broadcasting (uk.techcrunch.com)

I seem to spend quite a lot of time explaining to people the power of social media. For some people, the penny drops. For other people there is much head scratching. For a different group of people, they plain don’t get it, don’t believe you and quite frankly, they prefer not to embrace change and the power that change can bring.

I’m not going to try and reinvent the wheel on this post – instead, I want to refer you to an expert in the field who’s written one of the best explanation I’ve seen about this whole mysterious area to the uninitiated.

David Meerman Scott draws an analogy between social media and going to a cocktail party. If you ever meet a colleague or friend who raises an eyebrow on the subject of social media. Refer them right here.

Take it away David.

Related articles

• 10 Social Graces for the Networked World (flowingmotion.wordpress.com)
• Social networking is about people, not technology (jonggunlee.tistory.com)
• A Year Later – what *is* Social Media ? (blonde2dot0.com)

Everyone has pet hates don’t they? Well one of mine is to see websites and other marketing collateral showing copyright dates with anything other than the current year. This becomes even more tiresome when you’ve actually informed the owner (who you know!) and they still don’t change it! (The two companies I’ve talked to in the last month shall remain nameless).

It’s got me thinking – why does it bother me so much – and does it bother anyone else? It bothers me simply because of my expectations around the speed of information change online. If someone hasn’t posted on a blog for a month, you assume the site is out of business… if someone is quoted in an article with a date from more than six months ago – you start to assume that they couldn’t get anyone better… We are all starting to demand real-time information – anything more than a few hours old is simply not uptodate enough. Am I being fair?

So back to the copyright thing. If you discover a new site and are wondering whether it is authorative – look for the copyright notice – is it showing this year? If not – vote with your feet – the owner hasn’t bothered to update it – the information is probably out of date. I’ve just done my own (very random)  little survey (which took around 15 mins) and would suggest the following site owners take a look at the following:

• BT Global Services: Flicking through their product portfolio and downloading the first 5 brochures I could find – not a single one said (c) 2009. They were all 2006, 2007 and 2008. They were of course produced in those years and therefore technically are correct – however my first thought as a user was whether the product still exists, or whether the brochure is technically accurate.
• Ericsson’s UK site: Scanning the home page – I’m drawn to their events section – which proudly advertises an Ericsson Roadshow from 30/6 – 10/7. Today is 1/9. This is precious screen real estate and is being wasted, as well as showing Ericsson to be a sloppy company, which I know it isn’t.
• Balfour Beatty: (Homepage) Do you really wanting to be talking about winning awards from 2006, 2007 and 2008. Does this mean you’ve not won anything in 2009 and are going downhill?
• Marks and Spencer: A heinous crime – click on the ‘The Company’ link at the bottom of the home page… Page not found and it blames ME for using an outdated link! Worse than a copyright statement problem which shows 2008!! Come on M&S – you are better than that.
• Severn Trent Water: Corporate social reponsibility seemed to stop in 2007 – that’s the last date mentioned on that page – despite the fact it has a page rank of 4 – ie many, many sites are linking to it. What does this say about you?!

All the above are top European companies, who almost certainly employee dozens of people to run their websites. How are you faring?