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multi-channel marketing

 
March 30, 2010
 

15 minutes tea: sending the wrong message

It raises a smile every time I go to that café, but then I’m easily pleased. I can see the marketing meeting in my mind's eye: brainstorming around the core message that this tea helps create a small piece of the day that's just for you. 15 minutes where the outside world can go hang itself as you detox in herbal-tea-heaven.

The café in question is at the railway station here in Hebden Bridge, so people passing through are likely to be in a hurry. They must have been losing enough in sales to make it worth putting up a sticker to 'augment' the branding. It's a salutary reminder to consider where and how the messages you send might be delivered.

Seriously, however, it hightlights the importance of test-driven design processes. We know that test-driven design is great at picking up unintentional messages that you are sending and feeding those back into the creative process. There's nothing like showing a design to people not involved in the process for highlighting where your assumptions have led you astray.

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Filed under  //   marketing   multi-channel marketing   test-driven design  
March 4, 2010
 

Twitter that platter

If you are a DJ, having that hot new record in your bag for Friday is kinda important. The first shop to get it in stock will probably get the sale. Getting out the word about their hot new platters is worth hundreds of pounds a week to Fat City. It's useful to their customers too: DJs who want the latest and greatest. 

We built an easily managed website extension that pushes Fat City’s new stock direct from the website to Twitter through the twitter API (the allowed ‘under the hood’ connectors that allow you to talk to Twitter automagically. In the time it takes to tick a checkbox (about 2 seconds), it’s up there at www.twitter.com/fatcityshop

This is a good use of twitter: benefitting both the shop and its customers. Finding a happy confluence of wants and needs is what social media marketing is all about.

The Fat City site is actually hugely sophisticated. It’s one of the top five independent record stores in the country, serving tens of thousands of weekly visitors. There’s a weekly email-out measured in tens of thousands,  all the stock is automatically fed through to Google Shopping and www.gemm.co.uk (like eBay for music) and so on. It’s one of those sites that looks simple on the outside but spreads as far as the eye can see under the hood.

eCommerce is about a lot more than a shop-front these days...


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Filed under  //   marketing   multi-channel marketing   Social media  
February 23, 2010
 

Having a natter - the social web

The whole social media hype has been puzzling us of late. In that: we can't work out why there's any hype about it.

It all seems so self-evident, y'know, the whole buzz about 'the web as a social medium' thing. Of course it's a social medium: it's the most public facet of a communications technology: the Internet. It's whole raison d’être is to allow people to talk! Sounds awfully social to us.

Maybe the confusion has arisen because it's social activity mediated by a keyboard and a screen, instead of drinks at a bar; or it might be that it was invented by geeks, who are meant to be uncommunicative and socially awkward.

Whatever, there are a lot of people in the marketing industry and business wondering how to understand the rise of the web as a social space for all of us, not just the geeks. We recommend reading 'The cluetrain manifesto'.

It was a big hit among the online crowd about 10 years ago. It's not about how to construct a Twitter strategy, more one of how to think about the 'net. Oh, and it's free to read it online. A quick quote:

"Through the Internet, the people in your markets are discovering and inventing new ways to converse. They're talking about your business. They're telling one another the truth, in very human voices...

...You have two choices. You can continue to lock yourself behind facile corporate words and happytalk brochures.

Or you can join the conversation."

How current does that sound?

 

http://www.cluetrain.com/book/index.html

 

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Filed under  //   multi-channel marketing   Social media  
February 11, 2010
 

How not to do personal service

Just got my favourite email of the year so far from a recruitment agent.

It began:

Hi <<firstname>>,

And went on to extol the virtues of their personal, tailored recruitment service.

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Filed under  //   email marketing   marketing   multi-channel marketing