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Archive for January, 2007

Sorry, No Time For Clients…Must Social Network

Sunday, January 7th, 2007

As the director of an company, I’m well aware of how many hours one can spend on the internet every day.

Much of my online time is spent on these two basic tasks :

Things that will deliver more leads for our clients.
Things that will generate more clients.

I do, however, spend some time reading blogs, websites, checking on the football scores, downloading software that I’ll never actually use and obscure music that I’ll never actually listen to.

I expect most of us are like that to a greater or lesser extent.

However, in the time I spend reading blogs, etc. I’ve come across what I consider to be a slightly strange phenomenon. That is: ‘the expert’.

The expert is someone (usually an online marketer, an SEO or one of those types) who, no matter where you find yourself on the web, always has a presence there.

All the major internet marketing forums : check - there he is.

Facebook - yup, he’s there. MySpace - he’s there.

LinkedIn - yup.

Twitter - all over it with important messages about riding his bicycle to the office and how, like, really cool it is to be able to mini-blog.

Blog ? Did someone say blog? This particular type of expert has several : his personal blog, his corporate blog, his blog for his dog and maybe a couple more.

In between all this, our expert is Digg-ing stuff on Digg, adding bookmarks to his del.icio.us page and generally making a nuisance of himself on some social networking website you and I have never heard of.

My point is this : if these individuals (if you want names, I’ll supply them) are such major players in the internet marketing space, then surely, honestly, they can’t possibly have the time to be so active at all the social networking and media sites ?

My increasing suspicion is that many of these types are..shock, um, horror…not really the experts they claim to be. If they were, they’d be far too busy to be posting on Twitter, sending MySpace bulletins, adding del.icio.us bookmarks, commenting on Digg, etc…ad nauseam.

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Delivering For Your Clients

Wednesday, January 3rd, 2007

My younger brother, Alex, believes that the most time-consuming and labour intensive parts of any job can and should be automated in some way.

And, on the surface, it’s easy to agree. After all, everyone has parts of their job that they don’t enjoy, that take a long time and aren’t necessarily the most creative aspects of the day.

However, it’s very easy to extend my brother’s idea to the whole of an online business. It doesn’t help that many web developers and computer programmers are not the most gregarious, people-orientated individuals and the idea of automating things to a level where there is no client-provider interaction is often appealing to personalities of that type.

The result of this kind of thinking is that you end up with something like Google Adwords. Essentially, the whole of Adwords is completely automated : you create your ads, you choose your keywords, they go live, the bid prices, quality scoring; preferred cost bidding, etc….it is all automated.

From one perspective, this is great. One system can handle thousands of advertisers with only a minimum of staff. The holy grail has been found. Hallelujah. Praise Be. And Stuff.

However, it comes as no surprise to anyone that different people have different requirements; will require different levels of support and, often, just need that human touch.

From our perspective at Reach24, the fully automated lead generation system looked extremely appealing, but in terms of really delivering for our clients, it just doesn’t work the way you might expect.

We have competitors that have almost completely automated systems and, to be fair to them, we have heard positive feedback about how they choose to do business.

Nevertheless, you remove the human element of business at your peril.

There is no long term value in automating parts of your business if - in the process - you are unable to respond quickly to the particular demands of each customer.

Someone a lot smarter than me (OK, it was Gandhi) once said :

“A ‘Customer’ is the most important visitor on our premises.

He is not dependent on us. We are dependent on him.

He is not an interruption on our work. He is the purpose of it.”

If you’ve ever felt the frustration of dealing with ‘customer service’ (I used that phrase advisedly) from a company that is pretty much completely automated (I give you AOL or Google as prime examples), then you will know that - to really deliver to your clients - it is definitely not always the best policy to automate the time consuming and labour intensive parts of your business.

Those companies that can find the right balance are, ultimately, the ones that will succeed in the 21st Century ‘on demand’ economy.

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Archive for January, 2007

Sorry, No Time For Clients…Must Social Network

Delivering For Your Clients

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