Here below is a very interesting idea how to ornate a public toilet in a mall. This was implemented in Portugal. Allegedly, this is for a more lusty experience in a lavatory. Could be just a joke for fun. But here is an idea for an advertiser: dress those ladies in branded underwear, and a cool, fun advertising media is there for you 
I was always wondering about the managers here in Russia… How self-confident and arrogant and overweening they can be… Browsing different business forums, I see their polemics, and there happen to be their attitude to some prominent people in the world of business. What could the reason be for a marketer to label Kotler or Trout as lame writers who don’t know a thing about marketing etc. Ok, you live in Russia, you have your specific realia here, I know that. Ok, you live in 2007, and those probably had their best years little earliers (you think so). But come on, have some respect to people who you MUST have learned a lot from. And if not, your business knowledge most probably sucks…
What do you think of Aristotle’s and Plato’s philosophy? Are they not good enough thinkers for you, just because they did not have the information you have learned at school? I try to respect thinkers for the thinking they do. To err is human, just as much as is to think. It sounds fair enough to me
John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing blog was sharing his idea about finding an ideal customer. Paradoxically, many companies feel much better by starting out with finding not-so-good customers. That’s an even better idea to me. You will think at least twice before sorting a client out of your preference list, and you will be sure in the end, that you have not just picked this or that customer because you felt like that, but rather you have had enough reasons to discard the worst customers, or reduce your efforts on working them out, in favour of those who you consider worth cooperating with…
I was posting about the problems one is likely to face when trying to contact for a prospective partner. A couple of months ago I was approached by Jon Lunetta of MyWaves Inc. He was exploring opportunities for connecting to Russian mobile service providers to arrange partnership programmes for their clients, with MyWaves’ technology platform. Since our TeriMobile company was already preparing for a shutdown, I compiled a small list of the industry players who had been most active by that time.
Just now, after 3 months, or maybe even more, Jon has come online again. None of the list would care to give any reply. I mean, hey, this guy is trying to get you in touch from over the ocean - how serious do you think he may be? I believe, pretty serious. If you are not interested - just be polite and say smth like “No, Thanks”. How hard can it be to type these two words? With the speed that mobile marketing industry is developing here (sloooow), I don’t think you have 5000 unread mails in your inbox…
A marketing dilemma from Seth Godin - which customer will you choose as preferred, and thus pay more attention and provide a better service: the one who is loyal and valuable or the one who you might turn into loyal.
Simple answer is that you cannot afford providing insufficient service. You can, and you must, treat people differently but none will settle for the worse. Should you have no nice table at your restaurant, let them have a special offer, a free drink, or whatever else. Should you have no nice rooms left at a hotel, there are tons of ways to make your guest feel special living in a less decent room etc. Many ways to improve the worse offer, many ways to lock a customer loyal and as many - to set him free to search for your competition. Choose one wisely…
A very interesting idea started up by Starbucks recently.
It is about crowdsourcing - the company has introduced a MyStarbucksIdea.com website where you can register to share your ideas about just how the company could improve. The visitors can view the ideas by recent, popular and top all-time (which must be the same as popular I guess).
The registered users are encouraged to share their ideas and vote for already posted ones. Behind this are the Starbucks’ employees who are specialists in various fields, and they will respond to the advice - not directly to users but by acting, hopefully.
There’s also a blog page - called Ideas In Action - where the company will most probably describe the way they are acting on the advice received from the community. So far there are just a couple of posts - one welcoming by Howard Schultz, and one from Chris Bruzzo, where he wow-thanks the community participants and encourages them to keep on sharing.
This is a great way to get even deeper into communications with the customer community and have a better knowledge of their preferences. Crowdsourcing is a win-win for the parties, and Starbucks should keep their efforts on this site - more and better communication and, more importantly, show action to the community who take their time to share their knowledge…
If you are a boss, think this over: who is to blame at your company when something goes wrong, or something is done a wrong way? Is it an employee, his line manager, you - the boss, or the company?
If an employee is unskilled, careless, irresponsible - is it him/her or you to blame? How do you ensure that people at your company work their best? Will you let people learn from their mistakes, or you’d rather set the system so that they have already learned the lesson from the history, before they are put in a decision-making situation?
I used to have a boss who put all blame on anybody but himself/his company. The employees would learn from their experience, and got better and better with time. But soon as they had a chance (and believe me they would get a chance once in a while - ’cause the did learn a lot from their mistakes, and they would become valuable staff), they all left the company one by one. None is happy about feeling guilty all the time, even if it’s true every now and then…
I have just come across a video that we’ve made when working at TeriMobile. This was about our Bluetooth marketing platform - TeriZone. If interested, have a look, the videos aren’t so bad to describe the service at work.
Andy Beal, co-author of Radically Transparent Monitoring and Managing Reputations Online book was a guest writer at Mashable, with a summary of 10 factors to save your online reputation.
An interesting posting, worth reading. Very briefly, it goes like this:
1. Know your Achilles heel. Being aware of your weak points will help you be better prepared for attacks on you, if not save your brand completely and unaffectedly.
2. Assume that everything will make its way to the web. In our world of gtechnologies you can never be sure that anything you express aloud (by voice or in writing)will remain within yourself. So, you should always be careful about what you are saying or writing - always assume it will go public.
3. Create positive online impression. Good intuitive interface, with necessary content meeting expectations of your company, is a way to make a first impression on the audience online.
4. Choose your blog voice carefully. Note, that your corporate blog is not your personal blog. Let a team of employees manage it and fill it with content - their ideas, opinions and communications with the customers and perspectives. Corporate should be corporate (but do not make it completely impersonal).
5. Hang out at the right social network. Do not be driven by statistics to the most popular networks. Rather, find a network with more likely the audience that you target, the audience that talks, or is willing to talk, about you. The best way to target is creating your own network (will take time and efforts to promote, but in the end it will be your audience… and there are open source systems providing tools for creating networks from scratch).
6 . Send bloggers love letters, rather than PR pitches. Keep talking to the most influential bloggers on a constant basis. Agree with them, argue with them, comment on their posts. The more you talk to them, the more they are willing to talk to you. Next time they find fault with you, they might choose to talk to you first before publishing harsh criticism out loud.
7. Build your Google reputation now, not later. It will be much harder to improve your bad reputation than to creat one positive from the start. Once search engine spiders have indexed a negative article about you, it will be there, and who knows how fast you will be able to take it down and bring one positive up instead.
8. Monitor online reputation as often as email. Back to No.7 - do not let them have you caught on smth bad. As soon as smth appears on the web you have to be sure that you will respond promptly to reduce the impact.
9. Face the attackers. Ostriches are not a good example to follow - do not hide your head in the sand whenever you see an attack on your from a blogger. You might choose to wait a couple of days until the problem just goes away, resolves itself. But this is not necessarily going to happen. One of the attacking bloggers could be a Times journalist in the end, and you might become a hot news that very evening. Just face the problem, do something. Admit your fault if necessary, apologise, and take action to prevent further distress.
10. Three words to remember. SINCERITY, TRANSPARENCY, CONSISTENCY. I’ll just quote here:
Sincerity means wanting to hear from your customers and the desire to truly provide a positive experience with your company. Transparency involves tearing down the walls of corporate rhetoric and PR spin–the more you share with your customers the more you’ll win their trust. Consistency is a vital component for any reputation management efforts. Your customers will forgive your isolated failure, but if you’re not consistently living-up to your brand promise, they’ll find a company that does.
Great stuff from Andy Beal. If you liked it, you might wish to read his book - see the link up here in the beginning of the post.
There’s a cool ad from Carslberg. They are seemingly advertising a sports drink. The few words are in Danish, but it’s not about the wording. Enjoy…