United Breaks Guitars Song 2
The second song by Dave Carroll is now up. The power of social media and how your customers can react to your customer service is highlighted by what Dave Carroll has done. The first song on his experience has had over 5 million views on youtube.
Enjoy.
How brand savvy are our children?
This was an interesting video on how brand savvy our children are. The children in this video on NBC were 8 to 12 years of age. They were able to identify the brands by smell, sound etc. They also had very definite opinions on what the brands stood for. Advertising and marketing are having very significant impacts.
Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy
Think about what this means to your business? Even if your product is not aimed at that age bracket children and people are foring opinions about the brand well before they are necessarily looking for that product.
The Power of Social Media and Customer Service
This past week I had a pretty crazy travel schedule. Stuck in Chicago O’Hare airport I decided to get some work done while waiting for my flight. Searching for the local wireless network I tried to log into www.boingo.com for the local hotspot. For whatever reason, I couldn’t connect to get their daily service.
So, doing what any Twitter addict would do, I pulled out my BlackBerry phone and using TwitterBerry I tweeted out my sad tale: “Boingo wireless works everywhere in the Chicago airport, except where I am!” They made me feel much better. But the real feel good came a few minutes later.
About ten minutes after my sad tweet, I got a DM (direct message) from Boingo on Twitter asking me to call their number and they would hook me up! Now that is cool! I happily Tweeted this sudden change of events out to my followers, praising Boingo for excellent service and for paying attention.
What a great lesson for all of us. Keyword search your business name on Twitter to see what others are saying, and then empower your team to respond and make a difference. Next time I need wireless in the Chicago airport, you bet I will give Boingo first crack at it.
The power of social media lives on. Now this happy tale is a blog post and will be Tweeted out again and again. It is even likely that others will link to the post and spread the news as a great example of how social media can work for you. All because Boingo decided to pay attention and empower their people.
Great article from Tom Ziglar. It shows the importance of keeping tabs on what people are saying about your brand online.
Posted via web from Major Focus Group – Posterous
Do your numbers add up?
Do your numbers add up?
August 20th, 2009 by Ingrid Cliff
I have been working with a wonderful niche wholesale business over the past month. Their website is well optimised and they appear on page 1 of Google for all of their main keywords at the end of the first month the site has been up. To make it even better they have shown a strong profit from their first month of operating. Pretty impressive by any standards – even more so as this is a small business run from private home.
But what has impressed me most about this particular business is their willingness to work out their numbers – and in particular the cost to acquire each new customer. They track each and every new customer to work out where they came from, and they have done this tracking seamlessly as part of their process rather than as an add-on or afterthought. For this reason they have some solid data to work with.
They then have a simple Excel spreadsheet that lists all of their marketing campaigns for the month in both print media and online adwords. From here it is simple maths – how much did it cost to acquire each new customer, and how much on average did customers acquired by each medium spend in their first month.
What they have found is customers acquired from online sources only cost them $1.03 each and they spend on average $50 in the first month (we are just starting to see this group moving into repeat orders – a whole new set of numbers for the spreadsheet). Customers from the print ads cost my client $21 each and only spent on average $26 in the first month.
Think about it – if you could gamble $1.03 and consistently come up with $50 – would you gamble the money? What about gambling $21 and coming back with $26? Which gamble would you take more often?
The thing here is to realise that you can track your numbers – and use them to inform where you spend your marketing budget. If you advertise “to get your name out there” you are doing yourself and your business a disservice. Warm fuzzy name marketing is great for big business – but doesn’t pay the bills of small business where each dollar counts. You want tangible results from each campaign.
Yes, we only have one month’s data to go on, but we have statistically significant numbers given the traffic through the site (I knew those years of Behavioural Statistics back in my Psychology degree days would one day come in handy).
This is a small business – and yet they know with a fair degree of accuracy which marketing gets results for them. So before you run your next marketing campaign ask yourself – do the numbers add up? If you don’t know – find a way to track the results and determine whether the investment is worth it for future expenditure.
Until next time
Ingrid Cliff
We put your business into words
This entry was posted on Thursday, August 20th, 2009 at 11:42 am and is filed under Small Business Success. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Great article on the importance of tracking your numbers.
Posted via web from Major Focus Group – Posterous
Volume is the wrong way to measure web success
Volume is the wrong way to measure web success
Posted on August 23rd, 2009 in Task Management.
Are you measuring the right things? Could growth in your page views in fact be a negative trend?
“The latest online ABC figures for Ireland show that Daft.ie, the property sales and rental portal, remains the most visited website in the country, with 1,275,630 unique browsers per month,” Mark Keenan writes in The Sunday Times in August 2009. These figures are up 24 percent on a similar audit done in September 2008. In the top 10 most popular Irish websites, three are for property sales (Daft, MyHome and Propertynews).
“Stamp duty — a property tax that has become a relic of Ireland’s burst property bubble — fell 64 percent year-on-year,” Forbes wrote in May 2009. What that means is that far fewer houses are being sold in Ireland today even though house prices have fallen by 30 percent or more.
If you were to believe basic website statistics (page views and unique visitors) you would think that Irish property is booming, when in fact the exact opposite is true. The very growth in website traffic reflects the essence of the problem. Lots and lots of people are browsing but nobody’s buying.
Two years ago property websites had much less traffic but were much more profitable because people were spending less time looking at houses and were willing to pay very high prices. Now everyone is hunting for an absolute bargain.
What’s this got to do with my public website or intranet, you might ask? A lot. Are you measuring the right things? Could growth in your page views in fact be a negative trend? Could more and more repeat visitors be a bad thing?
Before we can measure success we need to understand the customer’s task. Lots of people were searching for “remove conditional formatting” on the Microsoft Excel website. So the team created a page explaining how to remove conditional formatting. The page got substantial negative ratings from customers. The team revised the content but the negative ratings remained high nonetheless.
The Excel team did more research to try and better understand why the page was getting negative ratings. What they found was that the most customers’ actual task was to format properly in Excel. These customers had tried to format but had made a mistake. They wanted to remove the formatting and then reformat. The page that the team had created only explained how to remove formatting. The Excel team got rid of this page. Now when people searched for “remove conditional formatting” they were sent to a page that showed you how to format, remove formatting, etc. Customer satisfaction rose.
Measuring success based on volume encourages bad practice. The search engine optimization industry is often a prime culprit of such bad practice. A search expert I met once refused to remove out of date and clearly wrong and misleading pages from the site he was involved with because it would reduce search traffic volume.
For too long we have belonged to the Cult of Volume when it comes to measuring whether a website is successful or not. For an increasing number of websites, high volume traffic reflects the website’s failure to help customers quickly complete the tasks they came to complete.
Great post. We must measure what matters.
Posted via web from Major Focus Group – Posterous
Not so good at math
Another great post from Seth Godin. This post illusrates the issue why the numbers get neglected in business so often.
A simple quiz for smart marketers:
Let’s say your goal is to reduce gasoline consumption.
And let’s say there are only two kinds of cars in the world. Half of them are Suburbans that get 10 miles to the gallon and half are Priuses that get 50.
If we assume that all the cars drive the same number of miles, which would be a better investment:
- Get new tires for all the Suburbans and increase their mileage a bit to 13 miles per gallon.
- Replace all the Priuses and rewire them to get 100 miles per gallon (doubling their average!)
Trick question aside, the answer is the first one. (In fact, it’s more than twice as good a move).
We’re not wired for arithmetic. It confuses us, stresses us out and more often than not, is used to deceive. [PS here are some reader-contributed explanations for those still lost: Charlie, and Nariman.]
Posted via email from Major Focus Group – Posterous
Test
TEST
Posted via email from Major Focus Group – Posterous
Two profound statements on team managment.
I recently heard a business owner state that “it is easy to get what you want when you are clear on what you want”.
Following on from this I saw a blog post from Andy Sernovitz in which he stated “want to get people to change their behaviour? Take away the excuses.” (Andy was primarily talking about managing customers.)
Both of these statements are full of gold in managing and engaging team members.
We need to be very clear and precise about what we want from the team and how they will be measured. Also if we remove the excuses the results will follow.
Often management complain about the team not doing aspects of their job or not thinking of the customer. But have they been clearly told what is expected. I mean clearly. Management may think they have told the team but is it in writing showing exactly the obligations, the measurements and the bonus upon achieving this.
It is necessary to teach the team the benefits of treating customer the way you would. The team are there to make money for themselves. It is necessary to show them the connection between the fact that way for the business to make money is to serve the customer. This sound trite and obvious but have a look at the exact messages that the management is sending to the team. What is being reward or recognised? Is it customer service or something else.
Remove the excuses. To often I see management accepting excuses from the team or having the systems set up so that it provides excuses to the team. Review all systems and procedures and KPI’s to ensure that customer service can never be ignored.
So remove the excuses and detail exactly what you want.
Don’t wait for perfection – just do it
The words that Nike have made memorable “just do it” is something that all of us in business (or everything) need to practice.
Don’t wait for perfection. Don’t wait until you have the product, service, system absolutely perfect. The important thing is to take action.
Above is a picture of razor blade with the words “Just do it”. I like this juxtaposition. By taking action we will be cutting through and succeeding. So use the blade and “just do it”.
Look I am hugely guilty of this and that is the reason I am writing about this. Often I keep researching an item or trying to perfect a way of doing something when the key was keeping the first draft, take etc up and going and then refine it from there. This can be applicable to so many aspects of business.
For instance I recently was involved in designing a job costing system for a client. The client wanted it perfect. We had numerous drafts and revisions but still no operative system. Finally I sat down with the general manager and stated that we needed to get it going and refine it from there. Fortunately I was persuasive and it got underway. This process then started revealing issue no draft would have ever considered. Perfection can wait.
It does not matter whether it is a system or a product / service, podcast, newsletter etc.
Action will refine it and create the perfection. – Just do it
Photo credit – bbaunach.
Best Motivation Video
Recently I saw this video and was reminded again to ” Follow your dreams”
If you have not failed you have not tried.
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