Permission is a funny thing. Most businesses think that they have it when their customers don’t say “no”. But real permission actually needs your customers to say “yes”.
Example:
You have permission when someone signs up to get your RSS feed.
You don’t have permission when you trick someone to give you their email addresses, then use them to send out SPAM messages. Yes, the opposite of permission is in fact, SPAM.
The real question you should ask yourself is this: “once we stop sending out [whatever], will it be missed by our audience?”
If not all, at least some of your marketing resources and effort should be spending on publishing.
Every website should be a publisher today, with all the blog posts, Youtube videos, Flickr pictures, Facebook fan pages, Twitter tweets, whatever.
The key thing to remember though, is that you are not publishing to introduce your new product or announce some promotion.
Instead, you are publishing relevant content to your audiences with their permission so that you can turn their attention into interest, interset into trust, and eventually, trust into fandom.
Passion is overrated. Heck, it’s fairly easy to find something you love and enjoy doing.
The challenge, though, is to somehow make sure that the thing you love to do will lead you to where you want to go, plus make you a decent living at the same time.
To unify work and love, as Hugh would say, “after friends and family, what the hell is there?”
The best products always come from the most criticized market.
In sports, teams like the New York Yankees, LA Lakers, Boston Celtics and Red Sox all come from markets where they get drilled relentlessly by the local media and their fans, if they have any hint of not competing for a championship that year. The market demands the best, therefore, is willing to pay more for the products, with time, money or attention.
Average products come from more forgiving markets.
Only a handful of division one college basketball teams are expected to be in the Final Four every year. For some others, their fans are satisfied if their team just make it into the NCAA tournament. Aim for the middle, and that’s exactly what you will get.
Most of us seek to be forgiven for our mistakes, but I think in order to become great, we must welcome and embrace criticisms.
I think we all know the obvious: the total spending of ads on newspapers, magazines, radio and TV has been declining for years. That said, we are still talking about $125.3 billion spent on ads in 2009. And that’s a HUGE market.
Will the market ever recover to its past glories? Very unlikely. But is there room for innovation and new opportunities? You bet!
The truth is, nobody really knows what’s guaranteed to work. The only thing that is guaranteed is that the market isn’t going to stop declining on its own. And if the industries don’t make some changes quick, they might be left with just half of the market pretty soon.
Apple shouldn’t expect to get much cellphone business from Microsoft employees. According to this Wall Street Journal article, approximately 10,000 Microsoft employees were accessing their work e-mail accounts via iPhone last year — representing about 10% of Microsoft global workforce.
Also, it is said the company in early 2009 changed its corporate cellphone policy to only reimburse those using phones that run on Windows Phone software.
I am not sure if that’s a smart move. I mean, if you have to use some corporate policy to “convince” your employees that you have a better product, what are you going to do with people who don’t work for you? And what does it tell you that your employees still choose to buy from your competitor despite all that?
Shouldn’t you encourage your employees to use products from your competition?
I am not talking about your R&D or marketing team whose job is to try to find your competitor’s weaknesses so that you can pounce on them — but rather your average employees who don’t have any ideas about the technology and only care about what works — the people who use their cellphones just for the sake of using it.
If you let them speak their minds, they are also the same people who can and will tell you the reasons they choose your competitor over you, as well as the areas that could be improved — things that you could use as foundations to make something better, something that they’d be proud of owning.
Wouldn’t that work so much better than corporate policy?
I wish there are some easy answers like: the 10 steps of running a successful online marketing campaign, 3 secrets of building a multi million dollar website, 5 software tools for getting 100,000 Twitter followers or whatever.
But the unfortunately truth is: whatever works for others might not work for you.
It doesn’t matter how many success stories you hear from people who follow the same guidelines. If something is guaranteed to work 9 times out of 10, you could very well end up being the 1 who’s left out. Each person/business is different. So when someone promises you that their methods will turn your life/company around without actually spending a substantial amount of time and effort to get to know you, you should be alarmed.
There are only difficult choices.
Whichever road you decide to take, you must understand that you will always sacrifice something.
They made it sound like that there was something wrong with what the bottled water industry did. But isn’t that what marketing was all about? To convince people that your product (bottled water) is better than the alternative (tap water) regardless of what the truth is.
In fact, it rarely matters what the truth is. What matters is what the people — your target audience — choose to believe.
The difference between now and then is that you used to be able to buy attention (on TV, magazines, newspaper ads, whatever) and turn it into trust. You can’t, anymore.
Do you track the frequent asked questions section on your website? I think you should. In fact, I think there should be a constant effort spent on tracking your FAQ section in order to improve your website as well as your product/service.
First off, if a question is asked (clicked) by almost all of your users (over 80%), rather than simply putting the answer up on your website, you should probably look to resolve it entirely. For example, if people keep wondering where the reset button is on your product, you should seriously reconsider the location of the reset button.
Next, if it’s obvious that some questions are more popular than others, you should separate them. Sure, still breaking them down in categories so that they can be browsed easily, but don’t just stop there. Put the questions into different visibility brackets based on their click rate, and sort them accordingly. Never ever use the alphabetic order when it comes to your FAQ — it doesn’t make sense and it shows just how lazy you are.
Your goal should be to answer ALL the questions (and eliminate all the doubts) before they even cross your customer’s mind.
Just because something is urgent, doesn’t mean that it’s important. It could very well be the opposite, and you are just letting your deadlines making decisions for you.
The distinction between having to do something simply because the due date is approaching and having to do something is often overlooked.
Sometimes spending a little time choosing to do what matters versus being forced into doing what’s “necessary” could make all the difference in the world.
Few people or businesses have the guts to do this. They are afraid that they will lose customers this way.
The thing is, if you are selling just about the same thing as your competitors, then whoever offers the lowest prices wins, period. And it isn’t very smart to deny or hide that fact.
On the other hand, if you are selling something completely different (hopefully better), why not promote your competitors on your website? Believing that your customers are smart and are capable of making the smart decision (of choosing you over everyone else) might just go a long way.
Sure, your competitors will use your compliments to brag, but so what? You could gain something way more valuable: trust and attention.
Badminton is not nearly as popular here in the US as it is in Asia. And because of that, the community is small but tight with not much competition, and sometimes lacks a leader. If you can somehow manage to find a niche to create something remarkable, you then can build/lead a tribe that will eventually benefit your business.
Your business objective should be: What do badminton players want?
- To improve their game.
- To find nice places to play.
- To find better games (play with people at similar level).
- To find better partners.
Here is the key:
#1. Pick one or more items on the list, and keep giving them away for free.
#2. Make sure that whatever you are giving away for free is so good, that people are willing to pay for it.
“Courier will function as a ‘digital journal,’ and it’s designed to be seriously portable: it’s under an inch thick, weighs a little over a pound, and isn’t much bigger than a 5×7 photo when closed. That’s a lot smaller than we expected.”
I haven’t been the biggest Microsoft fan, but after watching the videos above (If they don’t show up in your RSS reader, click here to see), I might just have to jump on the bandwagon.
I think it’s dumb for industries to treat the Internet and/or social media as the enemy, and then try their best to resist, discredit or even fight them.
The Internet isn’t here to put you out of business — whether you are in the music, real estate, movie, magazine, newspaper, or the numerous businesses who have seen your sales go down every year since the inception of the Internet.
Instead, the Internet presents an opportunity to grow. Let’s not forget that the Web is still fairly young. Google, for instance, has only been in business for a little over a decade. As it continues to develop, at the very least, you should grow with it.
Sure, you are not the first one to blog or create a Facebook Fan page or Twitter, but please don’t let that be the reason to not start doing them today. If your company doesn’t have a web team yet, you might want to consider starting one. Just as you don’t expect your sales team to handle accounting, you shouldn’t expect anyone else in your company to understand the Web. It’s not in their job description.
The Internet is here to stay. You probably can’t beat it, so join it.
