If you want consumers to trust you as a business, then perhaps it might not be such a bad idea to learn to trust your customers first.
That means trust all of your customers..
- are smart and well-educated.
- care about their money enough to Google about you before they buy.
- have read or heard about you before they decide to choose your competitor.
- read the fine prints you put on your website.
- have at least 1,000 Facebook friends, Twitter followers and/or blog subscribers.
- are capable of joining Facebook or Twitter, or start a blog today.
- are more likely to spread the words on a bad customer experience than a good one.
- have seen all types of ads already.
- will be able to tell the difference between being ripped off and getting a good deal.
Okay, maybe not ALL of your customers are like that — only the most intelligent, active and influential ones. Wouldn’t it be smart to have those people on your side?
- People are generally too lazy to think. They like to be told what to do rather than to understand the problems and find the solutions themselves.
- That’s why lists of “instructions” are so popular online, but the concepts behind them are not.
- People are generally irrational. They automatically apply the worst possible outcomes to unknown situations.
- There are always signs pointing to failure; that’s a given. The uncertainty falls on whether or not you have more belief toward success.
- Time is not more important than money to some people. They’d spend hours trying to find the cheapest deals available.
- Attention, on the other hand, means a lot more.
- The opposite of ignoring isn’t looking; it is expecting.
- Have this in mind when you build your website: Love me or hate me, but please don’t like me.
- Change is NOT needed when the following 2 statements are true: 1) You can identify correctly what has worked for you and duplicate it; AND 2) the changes occurring in the outside world won’t effect you in a negative way.
- It saddens me to see BusinessWeek, Forbes, or Fortune go down, but I guess the common phrase is, “what can you do?”
- I am convinced that the newspaper and/or magazine industry won’t find a solution for newspapers or magazines, just as the music industry didn’t invent iTunes Music Store.
…and save money while doing it.
McDonald’s spends roughly $2 million EVERYDAY on advertising through a number of media channels.
Here is my proposal: cut that amount in half, and pay $100 to the first 10,000 visitors who click on a certain link on Mcdonalds.com everyday.
That’s it. No strings attached. If you are among the first 10,000 who clicked on the link, you get paid. Make the announcement of the link at a random time between 9 to 5, and watch your traffic explode!
The benefits of doing that:
- You are guaranteed to get more traffic than you do now.
- You could let go 90% of your marketing team you have today.
- You won’t have to spend time on meetings to decide which ads to run.
- You won’t be stressed out dealing with all different types of media — you have eliminated the middle man(media) and gone straight to the source(consumers).
- That’s a lot of money you are saving: $300 million a year plus the salaries and the benefits…
As for what people should do while they are on your site…well, if it hasn’t been your major concern for the past 5 years, why start now?
This week’s Wobo is Colo Flush. I have updated the Wobo library over at WeWobo.com.
Wobo Name(s):
Colo Flush
Catchy Tag Line:
Like most other weight loss Wobo’s of the Web, Colo Flush has promised the following:
- Breakup & remove Toxins in your body
- Raise your Body Energy Level
- Decrease Gas & Bloating
- Flatten your stomach
- Look and Feel better
and of course, a 14-day FREE trail period.
So what’s the real story? Continue reading Wobo Wednesday #2: Colo Flush
So you don’t have anything better to do than _________ ? You can fill the blank space with reading, writing, playing, working, gaming, doing nothing, etc., and the answer to that question is always “yes”. Given the choices that we have, we chose to fill our day with certain activities. Therefore, they are our best choices in our situation at the time of choosing.
You might say, “but I have to work to earn enough money so I could survive, even though I really don’t like my job.” In this case, your choices were: surviving -> need money -> work, they outweigh the dislikes you have for your job.
“I know what I have to do to get better, I am just too lazy.” Again, you have made your choices clear: relaxing and being lazy outweighed trying something new and maybe get nothing in return.
The trick is, that in the case of you not being satisfied with your current choices, you could somehow convince yourself that the benefits of changing outweigh the benefits staying the course. Create a sense of urgency to seek motivation and improvement immediately.
Take one step forward (towards your goal) everyday, it ensures you are not taking any steps backward that same day.
What brand loyalty? I will be the first one to admit that I feel no connection with any businesses whatsoever. Google could go out of business tomorrow, and I wouldn’t care a bit as long as its replacement is just as useful. This maybe harsh, but it’s true. We assume that people stick with a brand because they are loyal. No, people stick with certain brands because they are lazy and busy. They are lazy (and probably don’t have time) to try things that are new, unproven, and risky, but they will not hesitate to switch if the new thing suddenly becomes proven(i.e. everyone around me is using it) and more beneficial to them. Hint: these are most people, and these are NOT the audience your marketing campaigns should target. The irony is that people who aren’t lazy always seem to have ENOUGH time to try everything.
So how do you build brand loyalty? Answer: you use people(your employees) to connect with people(your customers). Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh understands this, “Brand building today is so different than what it was 50 years ago. 50 years ago you could get a few marketing people in a small room and decide, ‘this is what our brand will be’, and then spend a lot of money on TV advertising — and that was your brand. If you as a consumer only had your neighbors to talk to, you had to believe what the TV was telling you. Today anyone, whether it is an employee or a customer, if they have a good or bad experience with your company they can blog about it or Twitter about it and it can be seen by millions of people. It’s what they say now that is your brand.”
Maybe now is the perfect time to get out of the closed doors of your meeting rooms. If your customers are already talking about you, it might not be such a bad idea to join the conversations. Transparency, whether you like it or not, is coming.
Also, I’d like to point out that it’s actually a good thing that no one has any brand loyalty today. Combine with the fact that it’s easy, cheap and fast to start any new projects today, it’s guaranteed that any mistakes you make in good intentions while trying out something new will soon be forgiven and forgotten by your customers — maybe not your boss, but certainly your customers.
Great innovations are NOT improvements of the old technologies.
Cars are not better versions of horse chariots.
Guns are not better versions of spears.
Cell phones are not better versions of pagers.
Emails are not better versions of snail mail.
Yes, they offer a better way to solve the problems, but they didn’t achieve it by attempting to improve on the old methods.
Therefore, your digital/Internet marketing should NOT aim to be a better version of traditional marketing.
Break your old ways, then maybe you will have a breakthrough.
I got some feedback from friends on this post I did on Wednesday. It turns out that Facebook is using our profiles to divide us into different groups and show us ads accordingly. For example: they would show me the “workout” ads while showing someone else “skin cream” or “Viagra” depending their age or gender. Also, I would get ads on “LA clubs” while someone else might be shown “Free drinks in SF”.
Here are my problems with this approach:
1) They keep forgetting, as media platforms, that the ads are part of their products, and they should be looking extremely hard to increase value in them. Running everything and anything the advertisers throw at them just isn’t the solution. Designing a great product is about refusing all but the most crucial functions.
2) As one of my friends pointed out, sometimes the ads could be offensive. If I am a 60 year old male, the last thing I would like to be reminded is that I might need Viagra anytime soon.
3) Also, it seems that they are slow on the updates. If I change my network to “Silicon Valley” from “The Great LA Area”, the ads won’t follow. Now this isn’t really a big deal except it’s showing me that they don’t really care. They are merely a computer program/platform that’s updated weekly(?) and looking to make a quick buck.
The bottom line is that we spend the same amount of effort on poor ads as we do on the great ones. But at the end of the day, do we have enough courage to refuse bad designs by people who are paying us, in exchange for our customers’ satisfaction?
If your customers aren’t happy, then you are not doing enough. Simple as that.
With the anonymous nature of the Internet, cyber scams are becoming a very popular way for some people to take advantages of others who are unguarded. I believe this could be a huge problem down the road as the Web continues to develop, and as I mentioned in my blog introduction, I would like to contribute to make the Web a better place.
So I have started this new project called WeWobo.com as my attempt to fight these cyber scumbags.
Starting today, every Wednesday, I will update a new scam on this blog as well as on the site. So please, help me to spread the words. If you have any ideas, feel free to contact me to have a discussion anytime.
This is Wobo #1: Easy Google
“I became rich in 4 weeks being lazy, read my story and do the same.”
“Would You Like to Make Over $300 a Day Just by Posting Links and Ads on Google?”
Source: Facebook ads
Comment:
The storyline is phony by itself. Plus, he mentioned on the site “I started with this system in October, 2008″, but the check he displayed on his site is dated 2005. I suspect there are MANY similar sites and ALL the comments there were posted by the same people.
So what are they really after?
Reading the (really really tiny) fine prints at the very bottom of the site, here is what it says and I will make it big and clear and highlight what I think are the important parts:
“Upon submitting a request for Membership, a Member ID and Password are assigned to you and can be used to gain access to googletreasurechest.com. The initial shipping and handling charge of $1.97, includes the google treasure chest kit as well as seven days worth of access to the online directories and training. After seven days, if you choose not to cancel, you will be billed your first monthly membership fee of $72.21 for the membership fee for the googletreasurechest.com membership. Membership fees will be charged to the credit card used by you to complete the transaction. You have also unlocked a fourteen-day trial and twenty one-day trail to the Fraud SafeLockID and GrantSpring for just $19.95 and $14.95 a month thereafter (shows as “SafeLockID” and “Grant Spring”) should you choose not to cancel. Prior charges for all programs are non-refundable but bonus subscriptions can be cancelled and future charges stopped at any time by calling toll-free 866.951.1406 Monday – Friday 9am – 5pm.”
I think Facebook is blowing it with their advertisement program. They are squandering this huge opportunity of building something unbreakable for ages, and letting the shortsightedness of “making a quick buck” take over.
If you go on to Facebook.com and run an application, you will see some ads appearing on the right hand side. Here are two of the most frequently appearing ones: “Workout Secret Revealed” and “New Workout Secret”. Call me skeptical, but don’t Hugo and Matt look a lot alike? Put aside the fact that they are obvious scams(I will talk about that tomorrow), how does allowing those ads to appear on your site add any value to your brand?
Now I understand that they want to be like Google and provide a platform where advertisers can setup and run their own ad campaigns. But Facebook isn’t Google. They are so much more. Facebook knows: our gender, age, race, nationality, friends, where we live, which schools we attended, where we work, which celebrities we follow, what kind of food we like, which dialects we speak…you get the picture. They have our entire life in their servers, and they are wasting it.
So what should Facebook do instead? Here are some of my suggestions:
- Create a point system with ALL of their applications where the points can be used to win and/or exchange items from sponsors.
- Work with local restaurants to get exclusive deals for Facebook members in that area.
- Work with local sports teams and offer exclusive Facebook deals for their games.
- Look into existing groups and find the best vendors with the best deals that fit the group descriptions.
- For the groups that were created by businesses, work with the creators to get exclusive deals and offer them to people who have similar profiles as the group members but aren’t members yet.
- Daily, Weekly, or Monthly contests through some of the gaming applications with prizes from sponsors.
- Coupon codes available only through Facebook for EBay, BestBuy.com, etc.
- Be the next Match.com, or team with Match.com.
I am sure there is a lot more, all of which are just so much better than Hugo and Matt’s “miracle diet pills”.
Oh, here is the most important one: Don’t, under any circumstances, ever, allow SCAMS to ruin your brand image…EVER!
If you go to Yahoo.com today, you will find that they have “improved” their site: now they have somehow managed to splash their ads across the entire screen instead of just staying in that little box. I assume they think that it will grab the attention of the visitors and thus improve the click through rate of their ads.
Somewhere along the line, during a meeting, the executives at Yahoo decided that rather than trying to improve the quality of the ads, they should start finding new ways to annoy their visitors.
Way to go, Yahoo! This is exactly what we want.
[Update: Seems like the ads are gone for now, we could only hope that it won't come back again.]
“It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that you will do things differently.”
———- Warren Buffett
“We don’t start from monetization. We start from the perspective of what problems do we have,”
———- Eric Schmidt
“I work extremely hard doing what I love, mainly to ensure that I don’t have to work extremely hard doing what I hate.”
———- Hugh Macleod
“Advertising is a tax you pay for unremarkable thinking.”
———- Robert Stephens, founder of Geek Squad
“Innovation is not about saying yes to everything. It’s about saying NO to all but the most crucial features.”
———- Steve Jobs
How does a project get to be a year behind on schedule? One day at a time.
———- Fred Brooks
Yes, I get it. There are still more people watching news on TV than reading them online. For the same shows, more TV viewers than online viewers. The same goes with sports, movies, music…etc. Therefore, should marketers continue to put more focus/effort into TV commercials than Internet/digital marketing? Absolutely not.
Assuming you are counting on your audience to spread your messages, here are two reasons why if you had to choose between TV and web marketing, you would almost always go with the latter.
1) The type of audience is different: Online people are much more willing to adopt, accept, discuss and spread new ideas/technologies. TV people, very unlikely to change their behavior and more likely to just stay the course and do what they have always done.
2) The platforms are different: Internet is simply filled with too many tools(social media, emails, chat rooms, etc.) for people to almost effortlessly create the viral effect. When was the last time someone recorded a TV commercial and showed you on his television set?
Britian’s ITV made exactly $0 in profit off of Susan Boyle’s YouTube video even after an estimated 100 million views on the Web. But it sure turned Ms. Boyle’s life around, didn’t it?
My question: when are these “traditional” companies going to realize that change is a necessity instead of an option?
The best advice anybody could give anybody about starting is: Start.
The best time to start something is always “X number of years/months/weeks/days ago” when “something” was still brand new, unproven, and unpopular. Well, too bad, you have missed it.
The second best time to start is: Now.
The best way to test whether your idea is going to work is: ask around. If most people disapprove, then you might have a shot. Why? Because they are the same people who disapproved Google and iPod.
Invent! Or wait to be KO’ed.
Here is a brand new punch.
What should you do with a business that really pissed you off? A product that doesn’t work as advertised? A service that makes your life a little more miserable?
Simply ignore it.
We truly get what we paid for, and no, we don’t always pay with money. If no one ever opens up a SPAM mail, buys from a scam website, or falls for a phishing trick, there would be no reason for them to exist, is there?
So just walk out of the store, hang up the phone, or close that browser window; find something else(preferably better) and move on.
What’s more scarce than money these days? Your time and attention.
- It took a friend in the high-tech industry asking me during dinner this weekend, “what is Twitter”, to make me realize that even after a staggering 1,382% growth last year, you are still very much in the minorities if you use Twitter today.
- Most people prefer the escalators in the airport over the stairs even when it’s obvious that stairs will get you to your destination faster. True, but it also requires more work.
- We judge a book by its cover; a person by her looks; a website by its appearances; otherwise we would have found many more gems like this and this.
- BTW, this also generated over 32,000,000 views on YouTube in a 9 day span. That’s over 3.5 million per day. It has me convinced that Superbowl ads are now officially worthless.
- Did you know that the top banner ad on YouTube’s home page can be closed?
- Even though changes appear to be absolutely essential, people simply won’t admit it, let alone embrace it, and there is absolutely no point to argue about it.
- It’s easy to have one interesting thought after one play during one game; but difficult to have one after every play for every game; and pretty darn near impossible to do it for 30 years. You could make the same argument for just about anything (including blogging).
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