Rethinking Customer Loyalty

I’m paraphrasing any number of management gurus here:
If you want to be good enough, focus on shoring up your weaknesses. If you want to be extraordinary, forget your weaknesses and focus on building up your strengths.

The idea was proposed in the context of how to become extraordinary at whatever it is you do, and in [...]

I promised myself I wouldn’t, but…

This is a bit of a rant. And not a really important one at that. But it seems to me that there are things companies do that impose themselves on their “customers” and, in this case, their “customers’” “customers.”  The culprit in this case is Technorati and, that one thing is:
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I feel responsible to those [...]

Ford Takes a Not-so-Small step Toward Responsibility

Yesterday, The Detriot Free Press reported that Ford dealers are taking part in a pilot program offered by the company to help those dealers reduce their environmental impact. The report highlighted the reductions in energy use and the resulting cost decrease that the dealers are likely to see from adopting this program, but at the [...]

Is the “Age of Conversation” Coming of Age?

We are no longer at the point where we are experimenting with what the new tools can do. We have reached the point where we’ve played with the new tools and now we have to go start finding out not only what they can do, but where they are useful and how to make them a part of our own lives, our own professions and our own relationship. Then we have to use them to redefine and rebuild those lives, professions and relationships in ways we may not fully understand.

Change of Control

I am fairly certain that even simple steps will dramatically improve your customer relationships and put you miles ahead of your competition in your relationship with the rest of the market.

Long-Distance Romance

If a marketer’s dream is to have an intimate relationship with and knowledge of his or her customer, then that marketer’s worst nightmare must be to know nothing about the customers who they so fervently hope will buy whatever it is they are selling.

Dropping the 80

Earlier this week, my friend @morganm pointed me to this post from TechCrunch that talked about a hypothetical future for the New York Times. Essentially, they propose that the top 20% of the New York Times reporters should walk out and form their own journalism outlet.
I agree – we’d all subscribe (though we’d have to [...]

Not Just Hammers

Once I know about your cause, why you think it’s important and how big the problem is (usually what I hear from these organizations), now I need a reason to move to interest. At this point, I am more likely than not to say something on the order of “that’s nice, I hope you solve that problem” and move on.

What we leave to chance is Interest, Motivation and Action.

Stop Circling the Wagons

This past week I had the privilege of attending The Economist’s 2009 Marketing Forum. As you might expect, the topics this year were focused on managing through challenging economic times, how to prepare for what we all hope will be better times in the near future and how we might know when better times are [...]

Just Ask

At this morning’s Social Media Breakfast (great discussion with Anneke Seley, author of Sales 2.0 on using social media in sales), I was talking with Sue of KITList and Clare about how to improve the conversation and engagement of the thousands and thousands of KITList members. The three of us wrestled with updating the blog, [...]

Your most important question

It would have been hard to miss the turmoil surrounding the change a few weeks back in Facebook’s terms of service. It appeared that they had changed the terms so that Facebook now owned complete rights in perpetuity (or something similar) to anything and everything anyone has ever posted or ever will post on Facebook.
It [...]

I had to ask

I don’t know if these ads run in your part of the world, but Jimmy Dean (the sausage people) are running a series of ads here featuring, well, weather – starring (pun, I assume, intended) the Sun, with a less-than-full moon (who becomes full after eating one of the advertised products, fog, and rainbow.
Rainbow is [...]

Improvement and Change

I learned something from my last few posts: The people who read this blog like to respond by e-mail. OK, maybe I’m generalizing based on just a few events (e-mails in response to posts), but I do get e-mail, and I don’t get many comments.
I didn’t intend to experiment to find out how my “market” [...]

October 10, 2008

It’s a new year, and that probably means that you’ve made a bunch of resolutions and now you’re thinking about how you’re going to make all of those resolutions happen. There’s no shortage of resolutions to be made, and I’ve made more than a few of my own (breaking a long tradition of refusing to [...]

Reading Your Spirograph

I’ve been reading a lot over the past few weeks on the explosion of social networks. It’s hard to read marketing blogs and not read about Twitter or Facebook, and how they relate to Pownce and LinkedIn and all the other options. Oddly, I don’t find myself at all confused. I’m on LinkedIn and Facebook, [...]

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