Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

Saving your name with Vanity URLs

It’s a well known fact that your company name is important. Most entrepreneurs spend hours, if not days deliberating the most appropriate/coolest name, and lots of mid-large firms spend plenty of money marketing & promoting their names.

Which is why it surprises me as to the number of companies that don’t bother protecting their names online. If you haven’t already done it, go and get your company name setup as your username/page/whatever for Facebook/LinkedIN/Twitter/where-ever-else-your-clients-are. You’ll hardly look professional if someone else is operating your username & you’re left with something like “MyCompany01″. There is a process to reclaim infringing usernames on most sites, I’ve no idea how long it takes or how effective it is, but ask yourself, vs. 20 minutes of registration time – is that really the route you want to go? Really?

Most sites are pretty straight forward, Facebook is a little more complex – but HubSpot has a great article on how-to get your own Vanity URL for Facebook.

As an aside, protecting your name is important online & offline, registering a TradeMark under one category is cheap & worthwhile doing so if you’re about to make an investment into a business that hopes to have a brand or a name one day. It’s also helpful if you’re going to try and reclaim and infringing social-media name at a later date.

Keep it Simple & Stupid?

I recently read this blog post and found it remarkably insightful!

In short summary, there is an incredible number of on-line spaces where you may want a presence, and they’re growing by the day. Every space you occupy needs it’s own specific type of design, planning & interaction. Beyond a point, it’s tough & expensive to manage, probably requiring dedicated personal/software or an agency. An alternative is to setup all your profiles, but keep the content on your own website – so as to drive the traffic back to your main website (where your conversions & tracking happen anyway). Leaving you (effectively) with only one channel to manage.

Seth Godin does this where Chris Brogan doesn’t; check out his Seth’s google+ profile here vs. Chris’s profile.

If you don’t have the extra time (or software) to manage multiple channels, Seth’s approach may be easier – though it might lack the depth of engagement you can achieve with the extra time and more micro-management.

1 good reason to use QR codes

There’s only one reason why you should be using QR codes, people are lazy. Thats right. Yours truly included.

I get lots of business card, emails, price lists, etc. So many that I have a seperate file and emal label for those where I still need to enter the persons contact details into my contact manager. Wouldn’t it be easier if you could just scan all those cards in? Suck them right out of the emails (or whatever) and into my contact manager…

Imagine the number of customers, potential partners, etc. that could be adding your details at the moment they saw (and scanned) that code. Instead of getting suck wondering what your name was weeks later.

I’d suggest that where ever you have contact details, add a QR code BS card.

Who you gonna call?

At this rate, probably the GhostBusters.

It’s late. I need to send a proposal out tomorrow. The price sheet I’ve got doesn’t have the price of the equipment I need. There’s no contact information for the guy, or his company in the price-sheet. I’m not expecting an immediate response, it’s the middle of the night, but I can’t even send him an email (hoping he’ll deal with it early tomorrow morning). Worse, I’ve already wasted half an hour just looking for his details and trying to remember where I might have kept any of his contact details. Even if it did have the price, I still have no idea how I’d buy the stuff from him – I can’t reach him.

I’ve said it lots of times, and I’ll probably keep saying it till I’m blue in the face.
Put your contact details on everything you produce.

I can’t buy anything from you if I can’t find you.
Nor can any other prospective client.

Learning from local business

There’s a lot of marketing lessons that even big corporations can learn from successful local business. Take for instance our local pharmacist, there are 8 pharmacies on our high street, all within easy walking distance of each other. Which one do you shop from?

My wife is very clear, there’s only one pharmacy that goes the extra mile for her and they get all our business (diapers, shaving cream, asprin, everything). It’s not just her either, most of the couples we know use this particular pharmacy – what’s their secret?

Easy. The owner took the time to understand what his clients really needed. He over delivers on those few points and ignores everything else.

He worked out that his customers largely have infants or young children, they need small quantities of the same type of item frequently. They have alot of trouble coming out, and don’t have time to wait in a queue. Plus, he noticed the buying is predominantly done by the lady of the house.

In response he decided to do the following:

1. Over serving: For all the mums in the area, make home deliveries, irrespective of the size of the order.
2. Over serving: Always ensure that stocks of diapers & baby milk powder are available (even if all the other chemsits don’t have stock, he does)
3. Under serving: No discounting, no credit. Other chemists will do this, but he knows it’s not the deciding factor for his clients so he doesn’t take the trouble.

Presto, he has loyal fans. My wife won’t let me buy from anyone else.

Silence isn’t Golden

Remember when your mum used to tell you “If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything”? It was more than just your mum who preached that. Alot of people are shy to complain, so if you can’t hear customer praise or complaints; think about what they’re saying when you’re not looking.

Social media might make it easier to listen to your customers, but if you’re an SME, it might be hard to find anything (positive or negative). Don’t just sit around. Ask. Speak to your clients. Get objective feedback. Don’t wait till it’s too late.

Understand their opinion & engage them so you can improve & grow (use different words when talking to them).

Silence isn’t golden, it’s a good indication something’s wrong.

Being Market Driven

I recently answered this question on LinkedIN Answers, regarding how to take an idea from inception to monetisation.

We go through lots of new ideas regularly. Usually, for anything that seems promising we create a one page business plan to see if it holds together through some basic analysis. If it still looks good, then we market test it.

We don’t develop, or source or anything till we’ve got concrete market feedback – and maybe even a prospective buyer that someone would actually buy it. This forces us to be business led, and helps us avoid getting caught up in the excitement that surrounds new ideas. Be ready for a good number of ideas to crash & burn at this stage – HBR calls this failure by design.

I’d strongly recommend that any prospective entrepreneur start by answering the question “Who will buy this?”, and then get that person to commit to buying it (discuss a rate!) before they do anything else.Yes, this is hard. That’s why you need to do it first. Product design and development is usually the easy & fun part.

If you’re a developer, think of this as a weird beta test.
If you can’t sell it, don’t build it.

Impressive Technology

I recently walked into a meeting with carrying an Acer Iconia tablet, on which I loaded up a copy of a proposal and some designs we were discussing. The project designs aside, the client was impressed that I’d turned up with a tablet! One of the guys commented that as a technology company it’s what he would expect, and noted to one of his colleagues that meetings at some tech companies made you feel like you’d stepped into the future.

It was interesting to note what they were expecting to see in the meeting. Our clients have the expectation that we (as people) match/represent the high-tech nature of the solutions we provide. No different to a fashion designer turning up badly dressed to a meeting, or an interior designer having an unappealing office design.

This is a great example of why image is important, and what goes to completing that image!
Make sure you’re technologically dressed to suit :-)

Pick up the phone

I read this article on HBR and it really resonated with me. Not from a conflict perspective though, more from a communication & personality point of view.  At some point to many businesses, people became customers, customers became statistics.

But there’s lots of place left for making phone calls and developing real relationships. I was investigating using cloud storage, wrote box.net an email and very surprisingly got a phone call. It really impressed me. The fact that they cared enough about a random, potential, customer enough to call back (long distance). I didn’t buy the product, but just based on my initial experience with them, I’ve recommend box.net alot.

Most companies would have sent an automated reply, a template email, or an email signed off by a generic “Care Team”. The box response had real personality and sincerity. It demonstrated that they cared about my business and it made me feel important. You can’t buy the goodwill that creates with any amount of Internet advertising.

 

Negative Marketing

Contrary to popular belief, it is possible to negatively market yourself. Take for instance the JetAirways 50% off Companion Coupon, available with the Jet-Citi Platinum Card.You can’t use it if you’re booking online, calling the Jetairways booking line, or even via a travel agent. The only way is to visit their office on JC road or at the airport! I think they designed this coupon to be hard to redeem. Which had the unsurprising effect of making me & my business – feel unwanted.

If you’re going to incent people to use your service, make it easy for them. Don’t forget you actually want people to use your service, even if its on-the-cheap. Making it unnecassarily hard isn’t going to win you any brownie points, if anything it’ll make your customer realise the actual value of the coupon – nil, because they can’t or (worse) won’t redeem it.

Update: just visited the JC Rd JetAirways office, these are the fares for a one way blr-bom ticket at 6pm Monday:
Counter fare: 6034 Rs
Using the discount coupon: 8276 Rs (2200 rs more!!)
The girl at the counter was kind enough to advise me that the internet fares on jetairways.com would be a least 5% cheaper than the counter fare.