Modderie
As for external forces forcing you to do some work: Did an un-backuped update which messed up all layout. Instead of trying to fix it, took the opportunity to go for another theme that should be more readable.
Using a setback to move forward sort of speak 🙂
Getting a new customer can come at a high cost. Making a customer active, loyal, a brand ambassador,… is what really counts. This can be so simple, but so many companies do not even try to communicate with their new customers, let alone start a dialog with them.
Off course, you should target your new customers when it is relevant for them (See more on event driven marketing), but dropbox shows how simple this can be (no rocket science here): When you register for a new dropbox account and you do not use it for some weeks, you get a simple mail reminding you of the use for this simple but great piece of cloud software.
You probably cannot make it more simple, but it works. Great!
Ask yourself this question: what do you want to tell to your inactive customers, to your clients that have an issue, that are moving away from your service?
If your business is about knowledge (reminder: knowledge is not information), how do you motivate people to create and share your most valuable asset?
Let’s have a look at the typically ‘knowledge’ company: A strategic consultancy firm. Their main asset is the knowledge and experience that their consultants possess (of course along with the capacities to translate these to a specific business or case,…).
If you work in such a firm, you no doubt receive a bonus when the companies numbers go up, you definitely receive a surplus when you bring in a new client and you even get an extra paycheck when you bring in a new recruit (hey, that is knowledge also).
The question is: do you get an incentive to create or share knowledge?
Do you receive recognition when creating a white paper, host a knowledge session during lunch for the new arrivals on the project, share the status of the project, give everybody a heads up on the added value you bring to a specific customer,…?
There are plenty of tools out there to share the knowledge, but few organization value the importance of knowledge sharing and the effort that goes into creating and sharing it.
If knowledge is your main asset, you should make sure your employees go beyond limits in creating, sharing and defending that asset!
(Full disclosure: Filip is working for Sodexo Web Motivation center and provides solutions for companies that want to work around motivation / incentive / recognition).
Change management is a relevant field of expertise for every professional, be it as a self-employed entrepreneur or as a CEO of a large company. Whatever your personal field of knowledge, learning the basic of change is learning how to cope with people (as employee, as co-worker, as customer,…).
Luc Galoppin put together this e-book that gives you a quick introduction and makes you want to digg in deeper.
After using all kinds of offline and online tools to keep my life (both professional and personal) a little bit less chaotic, I decided it was time to make up my own agenda layout.
Apart from the urge to create something random, the non-fit between the existing agenda-solutions and my specific needs pushed me into it 😉
I found out that I love to have something you can touch. And after my iPod touch falling down to hard and loosing all the information, that ’touch’ part needed to be paper. I love Moleskine agendas, but the thing is: they are too simple.
On the other hand, you have very specific tools like the superb printable CEO series, but they are not really day to day planning tools for everybody.
So I designed a tool that focuses on personal and professional stuff, that lets you be creative and is sociable (build around people). First version for this year, so feel free to check it out, share your idea’s or order it right now!
All info: www.joined.be/blog/agenda
Just a reminder: Targeted communication should be about giving a message that is relevant to every person you communicate with. This does NOT mean that you have to adapt your message to whatever the receiver wants. Only do this when you are still telling the truth.
Do not tell a story about your great after-sales service, flexibility or friendly salespeople to the guy you segmented in the ‘premium buyer’ category if you are in fact a discount seller.
Do what you do best and find the people that want what you do best instead of trying to convince everybody with whatever version of ’the truth’ they want. You end up with schizophrenic customers… Not to mention about the extra work you create for yourself without having actually business results.
Consulting is a wonderful thing. It basically embraces the global knowledge that is available when you need it, without the need for developing the expertise from scratch. However, reality shows that finding the right consultant/consultancy agency is not always easy. Off course, if you happen to be a major corporation that needs a complete turnover of a strategy, an SAP implementation or a financial audit, choice may be easy: You just go for a Big Consulting firm that your boss knows. Whatever they say will be accepted and makes things a lot more easy for you. The price you pay for this is that it will cost you a lot and probably end up with a “best case” solution that they also sell to other companies and is… well “best case” and not innovative.
Also, if you are a PME or have a specific product or want to target new markets and youngsters, chances are that you either cannot or are not willing to engage these guys and girls.
The problem is that with their model, you pay for a solution that already worked but does not necessary works in the future. That is why I believe consulting has to become more innovative instead of copy-pasting. However, to arrive at this level of creativity, traditional consulting structures are not working anymore. People who work in consulting day to day loose their ability to only work on the things where they are best in. They are forced to compromise.
Thanks to today’s communication possibilities, location is no longer an issue. Virtual consulting where specialist all over the world work only on projects when their expertise is really necessary is now possible. Too bad, pure virtual consulting has his limitations: Coordination is low and they forget the nature of human decision makers: They feel better when they have actually one person to talk to… as in really talk to, face to face. A combination where businesses can have real contact with a consulting firm that then virtually connects specialists from all over the world is what we are dreaming of. We called the project JOINED!
Do you believe you can add expertise? Do you think this is a model that can prepare firms for the next decennium?
Feel free to join the conversation.
Check out www.joined.be
An Italian supermarket chain has launched a new combined marketing and HR campaign: They give away 10 jobs to people who posses the lucky numbers. These numbers are obtained by every customer that buys for 30 EUR in one of the chain’s stores.
The winners get a job for one year and can be prolonged if they do a great job.
You can argue on the marketing effectiveness of this campaign. I have to admit, the free media space is huge, but which HR manager has signed off on this?
To your current employees, you say something like “Well, you are as important as any randomly selected guy (m/v)”.
To your future employees, you say something like: “Why trouble, getting a job is just a lottery”.
To your customers this may sound like: “Dear customer, the people that will help you may or not be qualified to satisfy your needs… you just have to be lucky”.
To the shareholders, the message is clear: “Who runs this place and why did I put money in it?”.
Sometimes what started as probably a great idea in a brainstorm session is a lousy when you do it…
Original article (Dutch): Deredactie.Be
Supermarket Tigros.
Keeping up with my running activities, almost back home from my run, 2 people on a bike passed me. My speed is not high at all, so they passed me rather quick. But in a split second a perfume of one of them hit me and in that same split second, my brains brought back the memories of my first girlfriend (whatever that may be in a first relationship ;-)).
Off course, this blog is not about my personal (love) life, but it is striking that scent can lead towards memories and feelings so quick: I did not notice who passed me, and being honest, even if I would see my first girlfriend back now, it would probably take me more than seconds to even recognise her.
I reckon it is harder to introduce scent into marketing campaigns (you cannot easily print a scent for the time being) than your average flashy visuals, but the power in it is great.
Something to keep in mind!
Some info to start with:
Scent blog marketing blog.
Harrods introduces scent marketing.
…and our friends at Google of course.
This morning, I went jogging. No big deal of course, but whilst running, I realised that before I ran of, I posted on my Facebook account that I was of for a short run… Which is a strange contradiction: We use social media to let everybody know… we do something alone…
Not to mention the number of sites that let you share the details of your run (pace, distance, route,…) with the rest of cyberspace… What happened to sporting with your friends?
Speaking of contradictions…