ONe of the hard things about online business in 2.0 world is the opportunity to use freeware for business purposes.
Skype is good for person to person but how does a business use it if you can’t transfer a call to the right person?
This is a work-round but a simple one and I found it nicely compelling. See bottom of page for list of "instant online" contacts.
Haven’t tried to contact them yet…. wonder who’ll reply?
When you see what you think is a holding page on a website what do you think?
Take a look here
and here
Which looks like a holding page and which is just crass arrogance? How gorgeous and famous do you need to be in this world before you don’t actually need a website at all?
Are they courageous, confident or blind?
Interesting… following my post on the Hotel Chocolat postal strike email campaign I got a response.
I was checking my blog statistics, and I find Chris Bishop the online marketing manager from Hotel Chocolat has visited this blog…. he’s in the recent readers panel below…
Learnings
1 - check your stats and incoming links regularly
2 - track down your readers and find out if it’s worth recruiting a closer relationship with them
3 - act fast - read their blog, write replies, trackbacks, re-post on your own blog (as I have done here)
4 - if you haven’t done it yet, set up those all-important Google Alerts for your own brand / business name / personal name
5 - install the Recent Readers widget or similar as a second-line check behind the stats
This is how I met John Kearon of Brainjuicer…and he’ll probably come back because I named him here and remember that I want to go to that conference with him.,…. [nudge].
it works.
A theme has been emerging from a couple of meetings I’ve had in the past days. It’s a subject that appears dull but can be the strongest possible boost to growing your business.
Lead Management.
What is it?
The process by which prospective customers are attracted to your product or service, make themselves known to you and from which you move them towards a purchase.
Vital. Consider it a chain of events that lead to a conclusion that in itself can become the start of a new chain. Sometimes called "closed-loop" marketing.
Write down the chain as it happens in your company.
Are there any breaks in the chain; anywhere that information can be ‘lost’, forgotten or drop down the cracks between one person and the next in the chain (technically called a hand-off).
I was talking to the Manager of a consulting firm who felt she couldn’t keep track of the pipeline and the current jobs the firm was handling. They use ACT! as their sales tool.
I made two suggestions
1 - keep a spreadsheet for two months of your prospects and clients fees and use the weekly team meeting to update it
[this is a near-manual work-round - but it should serve to keep a regular focus on prospects, invoicing and revenue streams. When they’ve used it for a couple of months, I suggested creating a report from ACT! to subsitute and automate the process]
2 - tracking current client jobs. Write a single page template summary for each job. Keep them in a marked coloured folder on your desk, i.e. somewhere public, and hand-write updates on job stage, sub-contractors, payment terms, next action dates. Then each team member can access the file at any time and it’s readily at hand when you have a quick thought or something changes.
3 - Put a recurring diary note in to block out time each month to write your monthly report with a reminder to email the team 2 days earlier to send in their information for your report.
Oh, that was three suggestions…
I am out of the office now but will add the spreadsheet template later for anyone who wants to use it.
I was browsing a rowing blogger, Rowena Hullfire and saw she ordered from Potomac Rwing. They used to be a great catalogue retailer in the US and I’ve never found them online before and so I followed the link to find this error message
Potomacrowing.com expired on 09/11/2007 and is pending renewal or deletion.
Yikes
crisis.
Never, ever let this happen to your site. It is simple death to your business. The search engines stop indexing you and it could take months of hard work to recover.
Checklist to prevent web domain expiry happening
1 - Find out the expiry dates of all your domains
2 - keep a central record of all expiry dates
3 - write your own diary reminder one month before expiry
4 - put into electronic diary as annual / biannual reminder.
5 - Add a reminder alarm
6 - check the alarm is really on
7 - when the alarm goes off, do something that day. Don’t put it off.
8 - if you work for a business that one day you might leave, put this information into the Bible / Handbook of your job so the next person to take over doesn’t screw up, or add it to the corporate calendar.
I got a timely reminder from Hotel Chocolat on Friday by email.
If the Royal Mail strike affects your business - make sure your customers know:-
1. what to expect from you during this period
2. how you will overcome the situation
3. that you value their continued custom.
Here’s what HC sent to me…. copy at will!
Stand and Deliver!
It takes a lot to stop us getting your chocolates to you
and to your gift recipients. So, whilst the planned industrial action by the
Communications Workers Union is affecting Royal Mail deliveries, we’ve been busy
making alternative arrangements.All deliveries during this time will be
upgraded and handled by a carrier unaffected by the industrial action – at no
extra cost. That means you can rest assured your chocolates will arrive in mint
condition and on time! Peace of mind at no extra cost.So if there’s a
gift that needs delivering, you can order online at www.hotelchocolat.co.uk
and be sure it will arrive, come what mayOnly Dick Turpin can
stop us now!Kind regards
Angus Thirlwell
Co-founder
& Managing Director
Nice piece on the BIMA Blog from Felix Velarde of Underwired on the 1to1 future predicted by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers in 1997. H rails against the fact that most campaigns driven out are email based and should be much wider.
But this is all based on the use of email as the channel that replaces
snail mail-enabled printed materials. And eCRM should be so much more
than that. A digitally-centred relationship marketing programme -
centred so because of the immediacy and cost efficiency - should not
mean email alone.
Yet again, few agencies are doing the whole picture for client brands. (let alone for their own business).
I have started work with Honeycomb Software who provide just the centralising database and data management tools for enabling this detailed customer understanding. Take a look and let us come and show it off to you.
But seriously, there are so few brands willing to start this detailed customer engagement which has been technically feasible for the past 3 years that it angers me. Felix is right, email marketing is just the first step - broaden the customer conversation and deepen their brand engagement. Then you’ll see if you can sell more stuff more profitably.
I met Mark last night for the first time. We bumped into each other (metaphorically) as prize winners from the David Airey prize draw…. we were both prizes!
He works coaching creatives in how to get past creative block, improve work outputs and also with their managers enabling them to get better work from their teams. His message to the advertising industry
Spend more time on the human talent in your organisations. They are neglected at present.
Mark’s going to introduce me to the "planosphere" a group of planners who blog.
I pitched him on my opensource for agencies plan. We argued a bit over the probably objecitons that a business would raise. But I think I’ve won him round to the cause!
Mark’s other passion is Poetry and he edits a poetry magazine.
We are planning an event together. This will follow the same format as the one I did in April with Adriana Lukas.
More news to follow…..
One of the keys to improving your publicity ‘reach’ online is enabling the search engines to index your site.
the key ones are MSN, Yahoo and Google.
There are some quirks that come up from time to time and I hit one today…. I received an update notification that a blog post linking into my site from a contact I met for lunch in May 2007 had been checked by a search engine spider.
Now that is S….L…..O…..W…. and obviously says a lot about your brand’s online presence and relevance.
And so here are 5 quick things you can do to speed up the linking process:
1 - Get an incoming link from a high-ranked blog
2 - Add Techorati Tags to your blog posts (see below….) This ensures that Technorati is receiving tagging information from your source site and helps it to register your presence on the web
3 - Use feedburner as one of your site feeds (it comes free with most blogging software) And it automatically pings the relevant search engines for your
4 - Check how you are doing regularly - read your own site statistics and see where incoming visitors are arriving from. Your site stats should list the search engines own spider programmes as well as real people
5 - Keep a check on yourself by setting a google alert for your blog name and running a regular Technorati check on your brand (everything in the known universe about….)
By contrast, a post on my rowing blog postd at 9.26 pm on Friday 28 September was indexed and the alert was back in my inbox by Sat 29/09/2007 at 01:04 am. Four Hours.
