BeConnected

Know Your Audience

Presentation coach Scott Rayburn has some good advice for speakers and email marketers alike:

Know your audience.

That doesn’t mean learning people’s names and birthdays and favorite movies before you speak to them.

It means investing the time to determine how the people in your audience relate to one another. What commonalities exist? What burning issues might they be facing?

For an audience to be willing to let you enter their world, you first must demonstrate the thoughtfulness of a good guest. Make inquiries. Do your homework. Then acknowledge who they are and what they value as a community of people.

Neglect to do so, and you may be left knocking at their door, your message unheard, your objective unfulfilled, your opportunity lost.

Here at BeConnected we have a whole category of posts detailing Customer Intuition Tools that can help you research, track and relate well with your customers. Use these tools wisely to look for patterns and commonalities that can help you develop better interactive marketing materials.

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tags: presentation coach | scott rayburn | customer | intuition
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Only 3,000 Wake Up With Target

I posted before about the customer intuition flash that created an opportunity for Target to insert a marketing promotion directly into the lives of their customers. Last Thanksgiving weekend they designed a promotion that invited people to sign-up online to receive a celebrity "wake-up call" for the busy post Thanksgiving shopping days of Friday and Saturday. I thought the promotion was smart as it acknowledged the existing customer behavior (getting up early to go shopping) and delivered a fun experience for customers while communicating a brand message.

We now know the rest of the story. Target Corporations, Scott Himes reports that only 3,000 people signed up to receive the wake up calls. I speculated before that savvy consumers are increasingly aware that promotions like these despite their fine print are often vehicles to build telemarketing lists.

I still give Target credit for finding a way to insert their brand into the existing behavior patterns of their customers. Perhaps with better disclosure of how the phone numbers will be used and better overall promotion this idea will succeed in the future.

The question remains. How have you found creative ways to insert your brand or message into the existing behavior patterns of your customers?

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tags: customer | target | wake-up call | Scott Himes
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Knowing When Your Customers Blog

RSS technology is becoming more and more important for both mission critical applications and geekified conveniences alike. But let's face it in today's world it's hard to keep up with the exploding number of feeds that are filling up our newsreaders and Bloglines accounts.

Why not take a handful of critical feeds from your customers websites or blogs and use a service like feedbeep to alert you to changes by SMS message to your BlackBerry or other SMS enabled cellphone.

Don't be caught clueless about your customers latest product announcement that they just posted to their blog because you aren't at your computer. With a service like feedbeep you can get a notice to your cellphone and know there is something you should read before you call that customer.

tags: rss | newsreader | bloglines | feedbeep
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Change Something: Be Remarkable

Seth makes a great point relevant to email marketers. People are interested in things that change. His two examples are bank signs that give you dynamic real time updates on current time and temperature and Gmail that frequently increases the amount of storage space users have access to. People are attracted to what's new and changed.

This is an important point for those who are publishing and/or writing email marketing newsletters. If you aren't providing new content and fresh ideas people will ignore your efforts. Can you formulate change plans for your offerings? You should have a plan for changing how you present your information so that your offerings are fresh and remarkable. Saying the same things in the same way month after month will quickly get your newsletter ignored by readers looking for fresh and new.

In order to be remarkable your product, newsletter, service, experience must be worth talking about. We see this all the time. If Gmail launched with 100MB of storage it wouldn't have been remarkable. It launched with 1GB. At the time that was remarkable! Recently, Google upped the ante and increased storage to 2GB. Again, something remarkable.

Are you doing remarkable things? Are you doing a remarkable newsletter to tell your clients about it? Want to?

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tags: google | gmail | seth godin | permission marketing
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Productivity Hack: Abreviation Tools

For several months now I have been using a productivity tool that I have come to rely on. It's called TypeIt4Me(OS X) and it's awesome. (There is a similar tool called Active Words for you Windows users) Both applications allow you to abbreviate often used words, phrases and paragraphs of text. The idea is that you can save keystrokes by entering an abbreviation an then entering a trigger keystroke (enter key, tab, space, etc.) The program then replaces the abbreviation with the stored text.

I use this tool for all sorts of things like long user names, repetitive bits of html code, my name, even entire email messages that I often send. It's extremely useful.

Do yourself a favor and spend some time configuring a tool like this that will save you many minutes every day. What would you do with an extra hour or two every week that you gain from the smart use of productivity tools? Of course, you would enhance your customer intuition by reading the archives of BeConnected. Who knows what useful customer intuition tools you will find that will help you build B2B relationships and help your bottom line.

[TypeIt4Me]

[ActiveWords]

tags: productivity | life hack | typeit4me | activewords
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Customer Intuition Tidbit for USPS

USA Today reports that the United States Postal Service(USPS) expects to process 33.5 million fewer tax returns on April 15th this year than they did 5 years ago. The decline comes as a result of the hugely popular and convenient e-filing system. That's close to $12.5 million in lost postage revenue for one day.

It appears that the only solution the postal service sees to the obvious "buggy whipping" they are receiving at the hands of the internet is to raise postage rates. They've asked for a two cent increase for first class stamps. Many of their former customers may not take a break from their email reading and online bill paying to notice.

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tags: USPS | postal service | e-filing | April15
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Google Goodies to Go

For those out there who use a mobile web enabled device like a BlackBerry or smartphone these are good days for you. I've already posted about an RSS newsreader for the BlackBerry and a way to get answers on the go. Now you need to know about two new features for the mobile web.

Google Local

When users visit http://mobile.google.com/local on their XHTML-enabled mobile phone, they can enter their search term in the ’What’ search box and location in the ’Where’ search box to receive results from Google Local. For example, if users enter the query [wifi hotspot] in the ’What’ search box and [90266] in the ’Where’ search box, they will receive Google Local results of wifi hotspots in Manhattan Beach, Calif. Currently available in the U.S. and Canada, this service enables users to find business listings and driving directions, view an area using Google Maps with zooming capabilities, and click-to-call.

Driving Directions

With Google SMS, users have another choice to access information on-the-go. This service enables users to send a search query as a text message to the U.S. five digit shortcode 46645 (GOOGL on most phones) and receive Google Local, Froogle, finance, weather, and movie showtime results. Today, Google added driving directions to this list. For example, if users enter the query [from jfk to 50 broadway new york], they will receive turn-by-turn driving directions as a text message on their mobile phone or device. Google SMS is available on most U.S. carriers. More information can be found here.

[Google Mobile]

tags: BlackBerry | smartphone | google | mobile
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Lessons Learned

Anyone who has been in business for some time has learned some valuable lessons. In keeping with the continuous learning theme of the April BeTuitive newsletter I want to point to this nice list of lessons learned from 3 years in business by Kevin Stirtz over at Better Local Marketing.

Be of Service

Time x Activity = Results

Manage Inputs and Monitor Outcomes

Do the Right Things Every Day

Have Faith

Be Patient

Lead, Don't Push

Apologize, Fix it, Move On

Be sure to click through and read Kevin's brief insights into each of these.

So what have you learned lately? Care to share an insight or key learning and the story behind it?

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tags: lessons | Kevin Stirtz | BeTuitive
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Productivity Hacks in Latest Newsletter

In the April BeTuitive Enewsletter we have a great productivity hacks round-up of tips submitted by BeTuitive newsletter subscribers.

Scott Silver of Printable Promotions had an idea for streamlining your information channels. If you respond more quickly to email than you do to voice mail, let the people who call you know that in your outgoing voice mail message.

Sign up for the monthly BeTuitive Newsletter

tags: BeTuitive | newsletter | productivity | life hacks | voicemail | email | Scott Silver | Printable Promotions
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Eats, Shoots & Leaves: Book Review at BeTuitive

Sarah Eaton at Betuitive has a nice review of Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynn Truss and reviewed by our coworker Susan E. Fisher. This is a part of our BeTuitive Book Club.

Susan knows her stuff:

Do you realize the impact you are making when you introduce errors in your electronic messages? Do you even realize the errors you make? Of course, there’s a difference between simply slipping up with a typo and making a grammatical error out of ignorance. Those typos can be forgiven, but ignorance is unacceptable.

Still, the prospect of reading a grammar book may sound as appealing as drinking cod liver oil. It’s something we know is good for us but seems a bit old fashioned, and we fear it may leave a bad taste in the mouth. Truss serves grammar to us with a spoon full of sugar (much like that upright symbol of British civility, Mary Poppins.) "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" opens with a title that is a reference to a joke and keeps you amused along the tidy, 204-page way.

(You see, there's this gun-totting panda that enters a bar and "eats, shoots and leaves." The bear, it turns out, is merely fulfilling his destiny as defined by a punctuation-challenged wildlife guide. The guide reads: "Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves.")

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tags: writing | book review | lynne truss | susan fisher | sarah eaton | BeTuitive
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