that canadian girl

For this panel, I ditched the laptop and only used pen and paper so my notes are less than clear. In fact, I’m lucky if I can read my own handwriting, but the highlights for me were finally meeting the lovely Tara Hunt, a fellow Canadian expat and inspirational blogger.

My notes might be a bit garbled but sue me, I was too busy listening.

“Self-Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing” panel notes
Panel: Deborah Schultz, Chris Heuer, Jeremiah Owyang, Tara Hunt, Hugh McLeod, David Parmet
Read the rest of this entry »

Cognitive Seduction 4.0: 20 ways to woo our users
Kathy Sierra, Creating Passionate Users

For this panel, I’ll admit my notes were a bit patchy and I relied on a few other ppl’s notes to improve them. I was too mesmerised by Kathy’s talk to worry so much about notes. But read on anyways…

I’ve also borrowed a few of Kathy’s images to illustrate for those who weren’t so lucky as to attend. They’re completely her copyright, ownership and what not. (They rock!)
Read the rest of this entry »

South by SouthWest is over. Well, the interactive bit is anyways. Music is clearly still going strong, as I witnessed walking down 6th Street and lucking out on seeing Simian Mobile Disco at La Zona Rosa with a few of the geeks still left in town.

Reflecting upon the past week, it’s comforting to see a clear sense of community amongst the geeks. Topics that kept reoccurring were ones of social capital, change and collaboration. The jaded half of me couldn’t help but snicker. Is this hippie 2.0* or something?

Don’t get me wrong, I find this “Let’s hug, love and help each other” attitude immensely endearing and refreshing, but I can’t help but be tickled by some of the more naive ideas that were exchanged over the course of the week. Not every single one of our ideas will live on past the panels, not every one of our harebrained startup ideas will become the next Facebook and not every suggestion is revolutionary. But it doesn’t matter, it’s motivating to be surrounded by people with faith in their ideas and seemingly endless energy to turn them into reality.

So if it’s up to me, I’ll be attending SXSWi again next year. The panels may not all have been oh-so-fabulous, but regardless, meeting so many new people is an injection of energy, if nothing else.

I now need to somehow make sense of this creative energy and communicate it to my team at work. I’m not sure I can express it in words. Maybe I need a Kumbaya 2.0 to express my feelings?

[* I seemingly didn’t coin the word, as it comes up on the Interweb in a different context, but I think it’s terribly fitting here as well.]

This evening, looking at the activity on Twitter, I was fascinated to see how quickly the usual Jaiku crowd had migrated. For those who haven’t noticed, Jaiku was showing a big fat 502 Bad Gateway error for a number of hours before it was replaced by the Jaiku birdie telling us that busted hard drives were to blame for the downtime.

Now, Twitter is notoriously flaky and known for going up and down more than a kid’s see-saw in a busy park in midsummer. Yet, everyone flocked over as the default alternative to Jaiku. If it wasn’t Twitter, it would have been something else. Pownce? Facebook? Seesmic?

In a magpie-like fashion, the web 2.0 crowd will look for the next shiny thing. I know. I’m one of them, and I sure as hell am guilty for chronically creating accounts on every new service, just to promptly ditch it and move on.

So what makes a service people come back to? A site that makes it past the 12-18 months “best before” date? Or are all new web 2.0′ish services destined to peak quickly then die just as fast? Lots more thoughts to add on this, but first, I’m interested to see what everyone else thinks.

I’ll leave you on this thought… What if Twitter and Jaiku were down at the same time? Would the world collapse? Or would everyone’s productivity increase by 200%?

For now, I must go tweet about how sick I am of packing boxes. It’s more bearable than it was some years ago but it still bites.

Dan Germain blogged about the ultimate job at Innocent Drinks, one of creative writer.

Anyone who knows the Innocent brand and loves it as much as I do will agree that these are big shoes to fill. The writing is one of the assets that make the (somewhat overpriced) smoothies seem so much more appealing than their less expensive, but not so adorable, supermarket’s-own alternative.

They’ve created a new benchmark for fun, cute and downright comical writing, so if you feel that you’re suited for the job, give ‘em a ring on the bananaphone or apply for the job!

[Via Gapingvoid on Twitter]

Today, I’m getting out of the way and giving the blog limelight to my old work colleague and fantastic friend Tom Crinson. He’s the nicest guy I could have ever worked with, but he’s also completely bonkers and going on a life-changing trek up the Kilimanjaro in a few days. Here’s his interesting customer care story…

I am going on a walk. A very big frickin’ walk, up a very big frickin’ hill (Kilimanjaro). I am scared. However, I am about as well prepared as I can possibly be, I have decent kit which has cost a small fortune, I have been training a lot, which has hurt. However the biggest shock of it all so far has come from a customer services experience. This is what happened:

The trek is only a few days away and I am getting my kit together to run through final checklists etc. and I suddenly remember that after the trek I am going on a safari as well! As girly as it sounds, I have nothing to wear! I have been so focussed on the trek I had forgotten about it. Literally nothing I have would be good enough for the African savannah, and I start to panic. Mainly as I don’t have a day free to go shopping on to get kit, and it’s the middle of winter here, no shops are going to be pimping their summer wares just yet!

So panic sets in, I reach for the magical box which contains the internet (it is shiny and silver and has an apple on the front) and type in “Safari clothing”, up pop lots of results. Clicking about I find some shirts that look like they are up to scratch for 40 or so of your english pounds. £40! For a frickin beige shirt?? Holy jesus mary mother of poo no way am I paying that. Remembering that some of my walking trousers are from a company called CragHoppers I thought I would give them a go. Perfect. Good quality shirts with UV(blah) protection and stuff. £15. Now were talking. Ordered two of those and two pairs of walking trousers that zip off to form shorts for a measly £70. A-mazing. Value and quality I know I can trust.

Confirmation email time. Oh yes, this gem: “Please note: We are currently experiencing some delay in the dispatch of orders. Therefore your order may take slightly longer to arrive. Please be patient and bear with us at this busy time.” Appears in it! Not a single mention of this on the site, only after my money has been taken do they mention this. So I call them up….“Err.. WTF?” to hear an amazingly friendly voice which belongs to a nice lady called Dawn at the other end of CragHoppers’ customer services line.

She explains to me how their system went down over Christmas and that they are going mental trying to get the back orders through. “But I’m off on friday!” I say, “Fear not” says she, and about an hour and a half later, the wonderful wonderful woman has somehow managed to get their warehouse to dispatch my order that day. Literally ordered Sunday night, panicked Monday, goods arrived Tuesday. Brilliant.

I don’t think I have been so amazed by a customer services department before. She could have just told me to go away there was nothing she could do, but she went out of her way to help me and for that I am unbelievably grateful.

Thank you thank you thank you! I am now a teeny bit less stressed!

In the past few days, I’ve read some genuinely interesting articles which I’ve been meaning to blog, but to avoid stale blog entries in my drafts, I’ll just share the links and let you read on.

• Fair use in the digital world according to Thomas Hawk
• Companies without conversation: Hasbro/Mattel on Scrabulous and Target on working with the bloggers’ community. They completely missed the boat; When you look at your brand’s social media universe, are you looking for criminals or evangelists?
• 25 Signs of Site Architorture: Love your site, don’t torture it.
• Chris Lake on online PR agencies using the term “Feel free…” a bit too freely.
• A very inspiring article on Think Simple Now on training your eyes and your mind to focus on the right things. Interesting little experiment which I think has genuinely affected my life positively in the past week.

Want more? Why not subscribe to my Shared Items in Google Reader?

With the beginning of a new year comes a brand new look for our Pepsmedia website.

We’ve been so privileged to have the opportunity to work with interesting, open (and sometimes challenging) clients in recent months, and they have kept us so busy that we’d neglected to update our own portfolio.

I’m looking forward to seeing what 2008 will bring!

Being the end of the year, everyone jumps in on Top lists, both retrospectively and looking to the new year. Fortune created its list of 101 Dumbest Moments in Business in 2007. From the peanut gallery, I can’t help but comment on their list and add a few of my favourite dumbest moments of the year in business and technology.

From Fortune’s list…

8. KFC/Taco Bell rats video in NYC

Did you really need a video to remind you KFC/Taco Bell is likely to kill you? Apparently, a million people did.

16. Microsoft’s PR firm sends writer own background document

Now that’s probably one of my worse nightmares when handling the PR aspect of a project. I’ve never had 13-pages long background files on anyone, but certain short notes which are helpful in remembering how to handle certain difficult people would probably not be received too well, should it fall in the hands of the person profiled.

17. Cocaine energy drink

Well, the marketing team can’t say they didn’t see that one coming when they picked the name. While I don’t approve of the choice of name, find another product that can call itself “Censored” or “NoName” yet keep a supposedly cool cachet to it due to its previous name.

36. Best Buy

“The state of Connecticut sues Best Buy for setting up in-store kiosks set to a website that looks identical to bestbuy.com but lists higher prices than those they would actually find online.” That was a marketing disaster waiting to happen, and I personally would have put that far higher on the list. For someone to actively commission this mock-site is beyond words. How else do they screw their customers?

46. Johnson & Johnson throw a hissy fit at the Red Cross for infringement of its trademarked red cross

Here, J&J’s PR team definitely could have spent a bit longer doing their homework and evaluating how to best put a positive twist, some sort of partnership with the Red Cross rather than getting all uppity about the international symbol of rescue, safety and health being used on First Aid Kits.

51. Apple threatens to sue a 9 year old for sending ideas

Here, good ol’ AAPL could have taken a kinder approach to responding to this child. After the public uproar, the little girl received an apology for the otherwise formal and harsh response from the legal department.

58. Taco Bell “It doesn’t pretend to be mexican food”

It doesn’t pretend to be edible either, does it?

59. Radiohead “In Rainbows” available freely

Fortune gets snipey about it, saying Radiohead will follow shortly with an album called “In Debt”, but TUAW echoes my thoughts - Fortune is utterly wrong in its calculation. Only the labels have been starved from their fat paychecks in this deal, with Radiohead clearing over twice what it usually would on an album.

65. Verizon Wireless realises it’s not God

Verizon Wireless attempts to stop messages from a Pro-Choice American association to its own opted-in subscribers, but gets overruled. Good. Mobile carriers are facilitators of communication, not a censorship office.

70. Circuit City shoots itself in the food badly

In a cost-cutting exercise, Circuit City shows 3,400 of its best employees the door. Nobody ever taught these guys about the 80/20 rule where a few of your employees either make up most of your sales or, at least, serve as positive motivators for the rest of the team.

Vero’s list of top dumbest moments of 2007

1. Twitter claiming upgrades every time it went down.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter, I love their approach and style, and while I’ve never met the team face to face, they all seem like a bunch of people I’d love to work with.

However, when your community is made up of the cream of the crop of early adopters, you can’t take ‘em for a ride, or they’ll head over to The Next Big Thing. So Twitter, in the future, a bit more honesty and transparency would be very welcome when you’re flippin’ us the bird.

2. Facebook Beacon launches without asking users to opt in first.

This was a fundamentally stupid mistake. There’s a fine line between giving users useful services and features, and being invasive 1984-stylee!

I find it shocking that anyone thought they were doing users a service by opting us all in by default. Coming from an email marketing background, I appreciate how difficult it is to convince users to opt-in of their own accord, but sharing this much information without our explicit permission is downright disgusting. As one of the articles on this topic said, what if I was buying a book called “Coping with AIDS”? It’s not all about purple scarves and ruined Christmas surprises, it’s personal lives that could be ruined by it.

Thankfully, Facebook did well in listening to feedback and sorting the situation as quickly as possible.

3. Apple plays hard balls over iPhone in the UK, gets fewer sales

Against any past mobile culture in the UK, Apple chooses to charge a significant amount for the iPhone regardless of the contract it is purchased on. The Register comments on the tumbleweeds rolling by on launch night. Brits and Europeans aren’t blinded enough by Apple to fall head over heels when the deal isn’t good enough.

Hopefully, Apple will shape up to the culture in the next round of iPhones.

4. A few idiots rob the blogosphere from Kathy Sierra’s writing and insight.

I still haven’t forgiven the mean kids who’ve caused Kathy to stop blogging. It may have felt like a funny joke at the time, but their impact is greater than they realise. Her style was unique and enlightening for people in my area of work. It may have been 9 months now since Kathy’s stopped writing but her words still carry.

What are the dumbest business moments of 2007 in your eyes?

On December 11th, it was flagged up to me that our account had been debited by British Telecom for an unusually high amount. The cheeky bastards had helped themselves to £233 my money via Direct Debit, when the monthly amount I expected to be taken every month was a measly £10.49. The reason behind it was some unwarranted billing for work done outside our property some time ago.

I promptly wrote to the BT Chairman, their press room, Ofcom, Otelo and blogged my letter. Whether the knowledge that the issue was public made any difference to the pace at which BT dealt with it, I’ll never know. What I know is that the money is, two weeks later, back in my account after I was informally told over the phone that it would be back last week. Still not too bad.

What grates me is that there’s been no apology. I fought the charge and got a refund, but BT still seemed unapologetic about having taken the funds over an issue for which I wasn’t supposed to be charged.

This leaves me with a few words of advice to everyone who may not be keeping a close eye on their finances:

• Speak to your bank about setting a limit on direct debits when you expect monthly payments to be regular. It’ll avoid random high charges like this.
• Check your online banking once a week and sanity-check any spending that looks unexpected.
• Setup “monthly bill” payment rather than “full bill” with each service where your cost may vary and where maintenance work may be slipped onto the bill.
• Get everything you can in writing, or record phone conversations. I’m seriously considering recording conversations with customer service agents from now on to avoid “he said, she said” arguments where it’s my word against theirs. Anyone got suggestions on the best way to record all calls to/from a house line?

A week ago, I shared my complaint letter to British Telecom with readers, and it seemed to have had an impact! Many of you seem to have had issues with either BT as well (some sound far worse off than me!) and others with Direct Debit in general.

On Tuesday morning, I turned my phone on to find a voicemail asking me to call back Linda Duggan at British Telecom. Speaking to Linda, she assured me the refund for the full engineer visit charge would be refunded today. (As an aside, no, the money isn’t in my account yet, so whoever said “they promised you’d have it in your account by Christmas… but Christmas of what year?” will probably turn out to be right.)

So the outcome is as follows: I got my money back after a bit of whinging, I got an explanation on how to change my direct debit from “Full bill” to “Monthly bill” but nothing resembling an apology for taking the money in the first place.

The first lesson we all get out of this is that we need to keep a very close eye on our finances because companies will unapologetically take excessive funds out of our accounts without so much as a notification. I discovered there was a difference between Full bill and Monthly bill payment, and will ensure, from now on, that only the authorised amount gets debited.

The other lesson is that you shouldn’t be afraid to be forward and take your complaint straight to the top. Faffing with call centres won’t get you anywhere, they are not interested in your problem. Go to the chairman, the press office, the customer relations officer, and follow-up on it regularly. Don’t let it slip, be prompt in dealing with it when you discover the problem and you’ll get resolution.

[Crossposted from the Taptu blog]

Sitting in my parents’ living room in Canada, I’ve seen just how much unrequested mail they receive, flyers from supermarkets and furniture shops to clothing and hardware stores. Each one is filled with “50% off” claims and coupons. It’s a quaint tradition that is now being shoehorned into new technologies like mobile.

Mike writes about it saying that marketers tend to think of the mobile as a fantastic advertising medium, “always on, highly person, uniquely identifiable users”. That much is true, isn’t it?

“So I end up reading about things that the folks in the industry generally tend to term “The Starbucks Example”. It’s the example where a service could somehow figure out you’re near a Starbucks (whether it be location based services or some kind of near field communication system like Bluetooth) and push you a coupon (”RIGHT THEN!”) for 25 cents off your latte. […] How often do I really want 25 cents off my latte? Is it really worth all the other junk I get in return for it?”

While maybe I’m more of a sucker for Starbucks than Mike may be, in theory, I can quite comfortably see a Bluetoothed voucher for 25p off a latte cause me to detour towards the overpriced coffee store on the way to my destination. However, it’s an extremely slippery slope, and encouraging Bluetooth marketing exercises would probably result in a heavy influx of untargetted marketing messages to my phone, which I definitely would not welcome.

Coming from an email marketing background, I know quite how poorly some “marketers” can choose to understand data protection and user privacy, giving themselves artistic license over what “opt-in” means. Carlo also echo’ed my suspicion that too often, bluespamming is so untargetted that it gets a very poor conversion. So let’s scrap Bluetooth marketing!

An unprompted SMS is even more invasive than Bluetooth marketing, since it can disturb me during a much needed holiday nap, so that’s out too.

This leaves us with user-initiated promotion. This is like the mobile equivalent of double opt-in in email marketing - Far tougher to achieve user participation but cream of the crop conversion rates as a result, since you’re only reaching those who are actively showing interest. The best example I can think of for this is Orange Wednesdays, a promotion that’s been running successfully for over 3 years, launched by Orange and Flytxt in the UK. Orange customers get a 2 for 1 discount on movie tickets on Wednesday nights, feeling they’re getting a great deal at 50% the usual ticket price, while cinemas get a fresh influx of visitors in an age where the big screen is suffering from lower footfall every year. Brilliant deal!

Using a word which needs to be texted to a shortcode is a reasonably low-effort option for the mass market, while QR codes scanning is only a suitable solution if uber-nerds are the target market. Ask anyone else what that stamp-sized black and white garble means and you’ll get an uninterested shrug.

The bottom line is that it’s got to be simple and non-intrusive, something that not all marketers can achieve successfully!

What are some of the best mobile marketing campaigns you’ve seen? What’s the wildest ideas you’d like to see using mobiles? At what point is a discount, a promotion or an incentive good enough that it should be allowed to interrupt our life?

[Disclaimer: I realise the last thing I should be doing is giving this guy more visibility and mentions on the web, but his original article, as well as his follow-up REALLY rubbed me up the wrong way and I need to vent it out.]

When I took on my first marketing role, some years ago now, I quickly realised that the term marketing, like sales came with a lot of negative baggage. Since then, I’ve met enough marketers who fit the awful cliché to see why the name has been sullied for good.

I’ve made it my personal goal to never, ever fit in with the stereotype of the marketer who is willing to lie, cheat and sell his firstborn child for the sake of hitting some haphazard target numbers set by a boss in an executive leather chair in a clinical office boardroom. I want marketing to be about a great product and an honest passion for the community to whom it brings a solution to a problem. I only want to work for company directors who have visions I can agree with, and marketing managers who have their heart and their ethics in the right place. Call me idealistic or naïve, but that’s how this girl rolls.

This morning, I came across a TechCrunch guest post by a guy called Dan who claims his viral video marketing agency can take average videos and shoot them into the viral fame sphere. He candidly starts with this introduction:

“Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine.”

Now, I’m not new to paid blog posts, fake forum users and spam comments encouraging users to go view videos. I know very well how much money some companies will pay to get some of that hard-to-get attention time from viewers. In fact, I’ve been asked in the past to take part in every single one of these types of grey-area tactics, and have held my position. The Internet is polluted enough as it is, I won’t be adding to the spam that goes around by lowering myself to talking to myself on a public forum, pretending to be some teeny bopper who loves whatever product I’m asked to market.

What rubs me the wrong way is the apparent pride with which Dan talks about his agency, while knowing very well that what he’s doing is a. ethically wrong, b. taking the lazy route, c. quite likely to one day blow up in his face.

In his follow-up post, Dan apologises for the tone he took in his article and does a 180 degrees on his claims of spam tactics. His attempt at saving face with the sudden claim that he does not spam or manipulate people is pathetic and pretty damn weak.

There are two scenarios that could’ve led Dan to require that second mea culpa post:

• Either he does use dirty tactics and was a bit too honest, which makes him a moron for not foreseeing how others, with more ethics than him, would be incensed and angered by his post. If he can’t foresee consequences this obvious, do you really want him marketing your product?
• Or he’s being a gusty bastard and did this specifically to get a rise out of people for the sake of some publicity, spicing his article with a few sensationalistic techniques he doesn’t necessarily always use. If that’s the case, he’s still an idiot for claiming to use frankly spammy techniques.

Either way, Dan, it still makes you an ethically-twisted little shit.

Unlike me, Ian Delaney doesn’t get his knickers in a twist, and focuses on the positives in Dan’s post, and highlights the things we can learn from successful viral videos.

• Make it short: 15-30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips
• Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex: “Dramatic Hamster”
• Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia
• Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: “UFO Haiti”
• Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!” Ex: “Stolen Nascar”
• Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex: “Yoga 4 Dudes”

So while there’s a bit to learn from Dan’s posts, I just hope everyone remembers that there are plenty of ethical, community-centered and honest people in the marketing world who will agree that dodgy spamming and paid links just isn’t fair play. While dirty tricks might work short-term, you can’t build a community through it, and in the long run, that’s what matters.

Last week, Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail and Wired Magazine blogger, lashed out at lazy PR people. The crux of the story is that Chris gets torrents of press releases, some more or less relevant, from public relations agencies that can’t really be bothered to do their research before sending releases around. Therefore Chris chose to publish the email addresses of a few hundred PR people who’ve sent him said releases.

This story really rings true for me on three levels;

• First, I’m a blogger, albeit a small-time one. But I still get plenty of press material, ranging from jaw-droppingly excited news to awfully written, pointless drivel. More of the latter than the former, needless to say.
• Second, I come from an email marketing background where my key concern was whether the content I was sending week in, week out, to over half a million readers was worth THEIR while. I was, to say the least, precious about Data Protection and if anyone suggested buying lists from agencies or scraping our customer database for addresses, I suggested in return ripping their balls out and cooking them in a nice tomato and basil sauce. Once I felt that the company I worked for didn’t allow me to produce content I genuinely thought could make our customers feel warm and fuzzy inside, I had to leave.
• Finally, in my new role at Taptu, I wear many hats - one of which involves handling some of the communication and PR. I adore that part of my job but it means I’m on the OTHER side of the fence, sending press releases, praying that bloggers won’t rebuff me or, worse, publish a post claiming I’ve spammed them with irrelevant content. That’s amongst my worst nightmares, no joke.

It’s a funny place to be, to say the least. I sympathise with both camps to a certain point; the PR people who are given targets to meet, numbers of mentions and pageviews to get, and the bloggers who want real news.

At the same time, as a blogger, poor journalism in the form of bloggers who regurgitate press releases thinly veiled as news articles make my blood boil, as I know these are the people who have lulled PR agencies into a state of comfortable laziness.

There’s no denying it, working in PR and always being on top of the latest news and the important bloggers isn’t easy and requires passion. You need to be interested in your industry and personally invested. The canyon between the passionate product evangelist and the PR Joe Bloggs who’s trying to hit targets on paper is deeper and more obvious than ever, and I’ll let you guess which one manages to appeal to me, Carlo or Chris Anderson.

So PR people, make an effort to think before you send. Send quality news, don’t blow your own trumpet too much and let us figure out whether your product is “revolutionary” or “ground-breaking”. And bloggers, let PR people know when they’re hitting the sweet spot and when they’re not.

Hopefully, we can all learn to play nice together and live in a nice utopian world where bloggers and PR people walk together hand in hand, surrounded by rainbows and unicorns. Right? Right? Can’t we? Well… I tried.

[Cat picture by edmittance on Flickr]

We’ve all had situations where we’ve needed to call the customer service number for a product or service where either something’s gone wrong, or we’re dissatisfied with what’s happening. It’s normal for that to happen considering the amount of goods and services we consume in a year. Some products are bound to be duds sometimes.

What’s not normal or acceptable is to have to fight uncooperative call centre monkeys, who have no notion of service and no interest in helping you.

To help ease the pain of this process, here are a few tips to expedite the process and get to a resolution to your problem as quickly as possible.

1. Always document your interactions: Even if you’re sure you’ll remember, write down the name of the person you spoke to, the time/date at which you spoke, and the status of the issue when you hung up. It’ll quite likely help you resolve your dispute quicker.
2. Keep the phone number handy: The first time you use a new service, add their customer service phone number to your address book. If they “streamline” their website and remove all trace of their customer service number, you’ll still have a copy of it. Doubly good if you sync your address book with your phone.
3. Letters still work: Sometimes, nothing will get the message across better than a firm, well-written, snail mail letter to customer relations. Clearly state the context in which the problem occurred, give detailed accounts of communications to date and end with a statement of what resolution you expect. The clearer your letter, the more likely they’ll answer it promptly.
4. Send your letters by registered mail: Don’t allow them to pretend the letter was never received by ensuring it’s signed at the other end.
5. Send a copy of your letter to Public Relations: Whether by email or post, copy the Public Relations department. They have to deal with public flare-ups all the time, and if yours looks like it might cause them hassle, they’ll try to nip it in the bud and might even beat Customer Services by responding first.
6. Most importantly, be patient, polite and have a sense of humour: You’re talking to someone who’s most likely doing an 8 hour shift in a bleak, crowded pigpen of a call centre. If you shout at them or act aggressively, they’ll tune you out and maybe even mislead you to get you off the phone. Being nice pays off in situations like this one.
7. Bonus tip - Do not swear: Ever. Even if you’re the sweetest, nicest office manager around, don’t say “f*cking weather today, eh?” followed by a couple more expletives, because they will respond with “I’m sorry mam, but you used foul language three times, I’ll now have to end this call. Good evening mam.”

[Credit to Dan Says, in Merlin’s Flickr comments, for striking some ideas that led me to finally scrapping this post together after talking about it many times.]
[Image borrowed from Think Geek]

Over the past few years, I’ve written quite a few posts about my amazement at many people’s fear of cooking unknown foods, resulting in Britain households cooking on average 4 meals each.

But while watching Hell’s Kitchen (the Marco Pierre White version, not the Gordon Ramsay one), which is a worthless show by the way, I saw an interesting advert by Asda which got me thinking.

Fish is a type of food many people have issues with. It’s wet. It’s slimey. It looks at you funny with its beady eyes. It can smell funny sometimes. So Asda found a low-cost solution for that problem.

They simply put the fish in a sealed bag which can be put straight into the oven, but also add a few bits of herbs and some lemon. This means a non-foodie can easily get a lovely steamed-in-the-bag meal without the hassle of touching fish.

Asda didn’t need to reinvent cooking or teach anyone to cook. Simply remarkable.

Back when I worked in email marketing, I kept meaning to write about what it’s like to work in that field and what applications have blown my mind, or been the bane of my life. In March, I wrote an article for the Digital Web magazine about the Seven Deadly Sins of Email Marketing, but it focussed more on list management and attitude.

Today, I received an email from an old colleague asking for tips on the best email marketing software to use in her new role. Instead of responding via email, I thought I’d turn it into a post, since it isn’t the first time the question comes up.

The first step in deciding what type of email marketing application to use is whether you’re looking for a one-off-cost downloadable application or an online service-based application. At first glance, the downloaded app will appear to be the best option, and by far the cheapest. That’s the one big pro about it - it’s a one-off purchase. Now, I’ll be perfectly honest and say I’ve never used one of those apps, so the only recommendation I can make on that level is to look for reviews before you buy.

However, I can explain the cons of using a downloadable app.

One of the greatest challenges in email marketing is deliverability. By this I mean the percentage of total email addresses on your mailing list who receive your newsletter to their inbox.

Think of the process as a funnel:

1. Total number addresses in your list
2. Delivered emails
3. Opened emails
4. Clickthroughs to your site
5. Your reader taking action on your site

On that second level of the funnel, if you’ve chosen to use a downloadable app, you have to count on your ISP and your domain name, cross your fingers and close your eyes very hard when you hit the send button. Why am I saying this? It’s because you don’t have the online service’s great ISP relations squad behind you. You get no help whatsoever from your app to ensure your email is delivered, rather than wiped by the server or treated as spam.

If too many users flag you as spam or the ISP recognises your IP address as being troublesome (not necessarily by your fault, could be due to a previous owner of the address or because you’re sharing it on a network), you might find your whole domain blacklisted. This includes your entire sales team’s email addresses - and that can’t be good for business! Establishing relationships with masses of ISPs worldwide and ensuring nothing goes wrong is a full time job and a very difficult process, which small businesses can’t really manage on their own.

So there, that’s one of the many reasons I support online email marketing apps. They’re the guardian angels of deliverability.

No matter what, online email marketing services also vary wildly in quality. I’ve used a few of them, ranging from the extremely user-friendly Campaign Monitor (my preferred choice) to the awfully antiquated and highly aggravating Epsilon DreamMail and Axciom Digital’s Impact dinosaurs. [It should already raise a big red flag when the service is only usable in IE 6 on Windows…]

Services like Campaign Monitor suit the vast majority of small/medium businesses with to their simple and slick user interface, and are still priced very reasonably. The team does everything in its power to offer great email templates, and gives some of the best email marketing tips I’ve ever read on its blog.

Quite at the other end of the scale, services like DreamMail and Digital Impact give me a rash. They’re from a completely different school of thought, offering far too many radio buttons and tick boxes*, resulting in some very costly mistakes over my time doing email marketing. The service is slow, unreliable - often down “for maintenance” at peak times, unbeknownst to our assigned (and unreachable) account manager. Sure, the cost per email sent is lower when sending very large mailouts (to the tune of 3-4 million emails a month) but the service is dire and the time spent fighting with the system is disproportionate to the benefits gained from the cost-saving exercise for a business any smaller than that.

You might think I’m drawing a grim, black and white picture of the older and more traditional services, but speaking on behalf of those who’ve used it before and after me, we’ve gained a full head of grey hair between us from using them. Go for small, human services who are in tune with their users’ needs. Aren’t they the ones we want to see flourish anyways?

[* I once asked my account manager what some of the tick boxes did and what mysterious options were for. His answer? “Oh they’re deprecated, don’t use those. We should remove them but nobody’s done it yet. We’ll have a new product for Europe at some point but this is the US service, minus a few features.” Yeah, mate. That makes me feel like we’re very important customers… And we’re not talking about 2-3 small tick boxes, but nearly half the interface not being functional for us.]

I’ve played the Get The Glass game a number of times now, but at most, I got to the second mini-game and certainly got nowhere near finishing the game. I REALLY want to love this game, it’s got such an Incredibles feel to it, yet it’s so difficult (maybe it’s the three large wine glasses, but I’m sure I struggled when I played sober too…) that you just lose all the fun factor.

If you’ve finished this game, PLEASE tell me, so I can regain faith into online game developers and assume I’m just rubbish at them! It was developed by the Califorma Milk Developers (apparently) and it’s the sexiest board game I’ve ever come across, but it’s still pissing me off!

Arghhhh!!!

A “funny because it’s true” article on nightmare web design clients by MB Web Design, which I thought I’d share to amuse those friends of mine who are also mad enough to have their own design, development or digital agency of some sort.

On the similar topic of difficult clients, Freelance Switch’s “12 breeds of client and how to work with them” is also a good read.

Every online corp is trying to jump onto the viral video and user generated content bandwagon these days. Most of them fall off the wagon with a few scratches and a bruised ego, but the occasional one succeeds.

Will It Blend was a great example of a viral campaign that succeeded massively on YouTube, one of the first in fact. Yielding many whiny wishes from my husband that “if we lived in the US, he would definitely be buying one of their food-blenders-with-a-lawnmower-engine”, the aim of the campaign was to show quite how powerful that engine is.

The latest campaign that impressed me is in fact for an American illusionist called Criss Angel and his (probably lame) A&E tv show. Rather than opt for a one-size-fits-all viral video, it’s been done through the use of a vast number of pre-recorded cut scenes, which are stranded together based on the customisation your friend has done. No explanation is as good as seeing it for yourself, so here, go try it (and freak your friends out).

There’s no doubt in my mind that the idea is based on Burger King’s Subservient Chicken from 2004, but the Criss Angel video, while simple, is well executed and fits his style.

If the bar continues to be raised for viral videos and this kind of funky stuff continues to be created, then roll on the bandwagon!