Out of Office

In an era of ‘On Demand’ service and the continued blurring between ‘work’ and ‘play’, is it wrong to put up an Out of Office notice on your email these days?
I am beginning to think most people display far too old fashioned notices - and hide behind them.
I am out of the office from x [...]

Please help

Sport Relief
(I should apologise for bringing you here by illicit categorisation and tagging, but I won’t. You might have wasted just 10 seconds. Hopefully you will make the choice to change someone’s world in less than a minute).

6 factors that make a marketing leader successful

Forrester’s Marketing department do a great job, and they have cut me a very personal email called the Marketing Leadership home page, which has 6 Success Imperatives - the 6 factors that make a marketing leader successful.
Needless to say each imperative leads to a report that I can’t share, but I can share the [...]

Outgoing only

I am sure everyone has received one of these before:
This is an “outgoing only” email address. If you ‘reply’ to this message by simply selecting the reply button, we will not receive your additional comments.
Sounds like a wasted opportunity to start a conversation if you ask me.
Seth Godin reminds us that if you [...]

Facebook’s crime (and PR nightmare)

Facebook is having a public relations nightmare, and it is great spectator sport for the neutral! But just how is this going to pan out?
Just a few weeks ago Zuckerberg said, “Facebook Ads represent a completely new way of advertising online.“ He also said that historically (advertising) media has been “pushed out [...]

Learning from the B2C sector

There is plenty of discussion out there about B2B and B2C marketing, and whether there is a difference in the disciplines. On the one hand business to business marketing is just marketing to consumers who happen to have a corporation to pay for what they buy. And yet there is a perspective that [...]

CMR - Customer Managed Relationships

I wrote about Customer Managed Relationships (CMR) here back in July.
The debate still goes on here and here. I find it interesting that web 2.0 technologies are very aligned to this ethos, and that in the context of B2B, web 2.0 may help organisations better understand their customers - and at least partially ‘deal [...]

Testimonials (and reference based selling)

 
I subscribe to a wonderful newsletter, which is written by a chap called Tom Ranseen from No Spin Marketing in Nashville, USA.  In the latest edition (“NoSpin Debunker” October 2007), he highlights a few helpful hints in getting a leg up on the competition with better [...]

How Apple creates loyal customers

Inside CRM editors have listed 12 effective strategies that Apple uses to create loyal customers.
In essence ‘complete solutions’, ‘familiar formats’ and the ‘cool factor’, keep customers coming back - but the full list is worth reading.

Customer Managed Relationships

Seth’s low key post “CRM is dead” - has really touched a nerve with me. I’ve been thinking about it a lot since.
It might be more than just semantics says Godin. I think he was right. And some.
CMR is our version of CRM - just a slight nuance regarding our philosophy that our [...]

A Potted History of B2B High-Tech Marketing

A while ago, brands were communicated simply by ‘campaigns’. Blast a message out a gazillion times and the message would hopefully ’stick’, and hey presto…..more sales. A consistent monologue was established. In this era, messages and media were key. Communication was the order of the day. But times [...]

T=r+d (Trust = Reliability + Delight)

If you are a Marketing Director, CMO, Marketing Manager…hell…anyone who is trying to describe the power of branding to a luddite - drive them to this presentation.

The Brand Gap

If they still don’t ‘get it’, and they are in the power base, you are working in the wrong company and should pack your things up and [...]

“New Customer Service Representative Required”

I nearly fell over in public today. Can you imagine the shame? I haven’t done that since sinking a few too many Kronenberg 1664’s in quick succession as a 16 year old (for my overseas readers it’s a lager btw).
The small advertisement nearly passed me by (they often do) and it read;
“New [...]

FREE Event: Online Marketing 2007

Online Marketing 2007, (26-27 June) brought to you by NMA and Marketing Week, is one of the only UK events to bring together experts and suppliers covering every element of online marketing all under one roof, over two days. It’s now in its third year and the show promises it’s bigger and better than [...]

Monkey Business

Tim Smit is a social entrepreneur behind The Lost Gardens of Heligan and the Eden Project. But despite his sway toward projects completely unrelated to I.T he has a idiosyncratic management style that I think is worth remarking on.
At the beginning of the Eden Project, rumour has it that his chairman asked him [...]