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Getting Answers on the Go

MobileanswerscolorTwo important things you can do to help build your B2B customer relationships:

Understand Them - It's important to understand the terms, phrases and jargon a customer is using. You can't always ask them to define every word they use. You need to at least appear knowledgeable.
Inform and Educate - Often when you are meeting or speaking with customers and prospects a new term idea or concept comes up and more information is needed for full understanding.
I know what you are thinking. "Google is your friend!" and that is true providing you have a net connected computer handy.

When you don't have a computer handy. Reach for your BlackBerry and pull up MobileAnswers. From the Answers.com people, MobileAnswers accesses Wikipedia and other sources to provide information on over one million subjects.

It will have you looking like the goto person you want to be.

via bb hub

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March 31, 2005 in award winning newsletter, Blog Outsourcing, Building Customer Community, Business newsletter, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

BeTuitive Newsletter: Continuous Learning

I am really looking forward to the next issue of the BeTuitive newsletter in a few days. I just learned the theme for this issue is continuous learning. I am always interested to learn how people are keeping up and continuing to learn and grow their knowledge and skill set. I for one am an avid reader of business books, magazines and blogs.

If you are like me you are at times overwhelmed by all the material you have to read. How do you keep up? I for one am very interested in checking out business book summaries that I could easily digest on the train(print versions) or in the car(audio versions).

So how are you learning these days? What is your approach to continuous education? Is it more formalized with classes and seminars or less structured reading and listening to audio materials? Do you have any recommendations of sites or resources that might help us all? Leave ideas and suggestions in the comments. Thanks.

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March 29, 2005 in award winning magazine, Award winning publications, Building B2B Relationships, Building Customer Community, Building Customer Intuition, bulk email marketing, Business Marketing, Business newsletter, Business publications, Business relationships, CMO, company blog, Current Affairs, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Intuition Tool: TrendMapper

TrendmapperTrendmapper is a new service that will track the number of Google results for a given keyword, name or phrase. Use this to track your marketing keywords or your customer, competitor, product name over time to see just how much web attention your terms are getting.

This is a new and small service so expect it to get slammed from time to time. It's yet another valuable customer intuition tool which you can use to gain insight into your customers. Have they just launched a major new product? A breaking scandal? News stories? You can see the buzz happening over time with trendmapper.

[TrendMapper] via

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March 29, 2005 in Blog Outsourcing, build credibility, Building B2B Relationships, Business newsletter, CMO, Current Affairs, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Customer Intuition Tool: Tracking del.icio.us Comments

Here's a nice tool that will help you see what people are saying about a particular website, web page or blog. Another tool to discover what people are saying about you, your competitors, your customers, industry websites, etc.

The bookmarklet returns the tags and comments that del.icio.us users have associated with a given url.

Just follow the three easy steps here and get started listening to the conversations about you.

via lifehacker

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March 28, 2005 in Blog Outsourcing, blog publish, build credibility, Building B2B Relationships, Building Customer Community, Business Marketing, Business newsletter, CMO, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Converting Frustration Into Good Stories

Here's a fun one. Griffin Technologies the maker of a variety of accessory gadgets for the Apple iPod has a great customer friendly policy. Rather than a costly and time consuming process of returning defective products to the manufacturer Griffin replaces the product and asks that customers destroy the defective item in a creative way and send photo evidence.

This is a great way to save costs, endear your customers and get people talking about your product and company. One recent customer used model rocket engines to destroy her non-functioning iTrip.

Destroyagriffin1

Way to convert customers frustrations into great stories about your company and customer service.

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March 24, 2005 in Award winning publications, blog publish, Brand enhancement, Building Customer Community, Business Marketing, Business newsletter, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Four Keys to Permission Marketing

Seth gives it up in four sentances:

I told her that the first step was to offer something in your email newsletter that people would actually want to read. That the second step was to promise people exactly what you intended to give them. And the third step was to create content that was so remarkable that people wanted to share it. I explained that if you take your time and keep your promises, it'll build if it deserves to build.
Easily said difficult to understand harder to do but he's right their are no short cuts. Quality of content is what matters. You need content that your audience wants to read.

We face this everyday preparing world class email newsletters for our clients. We have some good strategies and insights into how we can provide relevant content for our client's subscribers. Why not see us in action by subscribing to our own monthly email newsletter? You can do so quickly and easily right here.

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March 23, 2005 in award winning newsletter, blog publish, Blogs, Building B2B Relationships, Building Customer Community, Building Customer Intuition, bulk email marketing, business credibility, Business editorial, business magazine, Business Marketing, Business newsletter, Business publications, Business relationships, CMO, company blog, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Creatively Sponsoring Podcasting

By now you have heard something about podcasting. It's a niche audio programming system that allows anyone to produce an audio recording that can be easily downloaded and transfered to a portable audio player for playback at a listeners convenience. As the phenomenon catches on thousands of individual podcasts are popping up across the internet. Because individual podcasts are usually associated with an established blog the audiences tend to be segmented and very focused. This naturally appeals to marketers looking to expand the number of channels they use to communicate with customers.

Click Z reports that Warner Brothers is sponsoring a podcast. Warner Bros. will provide some exclusive music and interviews for an entertainment focused podcast.

The article includes this kernel of an idea for the future of podcast sponsorship:

"He'll incorporate that this is a sponsored message," said Bill Flitter, CMO of RSS marketing firm Pheedo, which brokered the deal. "It's basically paid placement. The music becomes the advertisement. The way I sold both these sponsorships is [that they're] enhancing what someone's already doing and adding value to it, as opposed to the interruption mode."
The challenge of sponsoring podcasting is understanding that traditional, radio style, interruption advertising is inappropriate when the listeners have the ability to fast forward right through the spots.

The approach of value added content contributions is a far better approach. This is a no brainer for music producers but other types of businesses can contribute as well. Consider interviews with the CEO or product designers/engineers, audio documentary style customer profiles, site visits, etc.

Another tactic mentioned in the article is to include an exclusive promotion code that listeners can use at a company website to obtain special services, discounts, exclusive products, etc. This technique has the added benefit of being measurable.

Bottom line is to keep an eye on the growing world of podcasting. While your business might not yet be at a place to start your own podcast you may want to track the emergence of prominent podcasts that are relevant to your customers and prospects and then consider creative sponsorship opportunities.

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March 22, 2005 in audio publication, award winning design, award winning magazine, award winning newsletter, Award winning publications, Blog Outsourcing, blog publish, Blogging Tools, Building B2B Relationships, Building Customer Community, Business Marketing, Business newsletter, CMO, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Be Discoverable Be on del.icio.us

Last week I asked Which Channels Are You On? talking about using a mix of available channels to communicate with your customers. Now I want to encourage you to use as many tools and channels to make yourself, company, product, service or experience as discoverable as possible.

Beyond SEO today's savvy marketers are using social web systems like Flickr or Technorati to discover what information customers and prospects are publishing about them. By now we all know that we cannot control the discussions but we can shape them by participating.

Toward that end I encourage you to discover and use the social bookmark sharing service del.icio.us. Here is a great overview/tutorial that will explain the how and what you can do with the service.

At the very least you need to bookmark your blog and website with relevant tags(keywords) that can help people discover you.

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March 21, 2005 in award winning design, award winning magazine, award winning newsletter, Award winning publications, Blog Outsourcing, blog publish, build credibility, Building B2B Relationships, Building Customer Community, Business Marketing, Business newsletter, CMO, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Good News for Newsletter Publishers

Marketing Vox points to some good news for e-newsletter publishers:

DoubleClick reported that the last quarter of 2004 saw the highest ever orders-per-opened-email (0.35 percent), despite seeing lower email open rates. That represents a 14 percent rise over the same period the year before. DoubleClick noted that more and more email applications fail to load graphics when people open their messages, making it difficult to track the real open rates. Click-to-purchase conversions came in just shy of tying record levels, rising to 4.8 percent.
The important thing here is to realize that quality matters. If an email newsletter is of high quality(worth reading) and relevant to a reader it will be successful. Sometimes doing a high quality effective e-newsletter is beyond your capabilities in terms of time and staffing. Ever wish someone could just take the newsletter off your plate?

If you are interested in learning more about outsourcing your email newsletter marketing explore the BeTuitive website where you'll find some sample newsletters and an opportunity to spend three minutes to get a price quote.

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March 17, 2005 in award winning blog, award winning newsletter, blog publish, Blogs, Building B2B Relationships, Building Customer Community, Building Customer Intuition, bulk email marketing, business credibility, Business editorial, business magazine, Business Marketing, Business newsletter, Business publications, Business relationships, CMO, company blog, Current Affairs, Web/Tech | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Know Any BlackBerry Toting March Madness Fans?

If you, your significant other or even your best customer are a college basketball fan and a RIM BlackBerry user here is the must have app this month. Get this to thy email app!

From BB Hub:

The NCAA basketball tournament brackets have been announced. It's possible your alma mater is one of the contenders.

If so, you'll be interested to learn that mobile device software information service Pocket Express has launched a "March Madness" feature in its $19.99 a year Express Sports feature. March Madness will show you game matchups and real-time, running scores from the NCAA Men's tournament.

As part of Express Sports' content package, March Madness is available on the BlackBerry 7210, 7230, 7280, 7290, 7510, 7520, 7730, 7750 and 7780.

To access March Madness, launch Sports, then select "Basketball (NCAA Men's)." Choose the the "Weekly" schedule option and then click on theĀ game you wish to know the score of.

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March 16, 2005 in award winning newsletter, Brand enhancement, Building Customer Community, Sports, Web/Tech, Weblogs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack