by nick on August 30, 2008
No Team GB Olympic organiser or coach could’ve really expected we’d finish fourth. Publicly, they refused to
be drawn on targets and predictions (very wise) but privately they must’ve sat on the fence with quiet confidence and, no doubt, more than a modicum of fear. Yet, Team GB shattered all expectations and it’s praise indeed to all involved; from Chris Hoy all the way back to John Major (for instigating the lottery). An elite winner with big ambitions has replaced the plucky underdog and polite also-ran that was the United Kingdom. But can British business align itself with sport?
Well, I heard an ex-government economist on the radio last weekend who admitted that official figures used by the Bank’s MPC (and the media of course) are constantly adjusted with time. They can move. A lot.
What was a 2-point drop in growth for March 2006, with hindsight and more data, may actually prove to have only been a quarter point. A one point positive may have been just the opposite. So the data we’re all hearing about now may be completely incorrect.
Ultimately it’s no surprise that forecasts can be, and often are, incorrect. There’s hope then that the current slow-down won’t amount to the economic Armageddon we’re all consuming in the media? It’s fingers and toes crossed that the predictions are as incorrect for GB’s Treasury as they were for Team GB.
Photos from Olympics.org & Getty on BBC.co.uk
by nick on August 25, 2008
The overall pass rate for this year’s GCSE results was an astounding 98.4%. Instead of celebrating this as faculty brilliance, we’re all berating it as a farce. New Labour’s (now very old) mantra of ‘education, education, education’ needs to be seen as reality, not political theory, and these figures apparently do just that.
It’s very easy to jump on the Daily Mail lets-all-hang-ourselves bandwagon but how long will it be before the top schools abandon this rubber stamp in favour of a more robust measurement of education? Two years? Five? When the stat hits 99%?
But the results also show greater feast and famine than ever before. Nearly 2 million children are leaving school this year without a GCSE above grade D. Speaking in the Sunday Times, Tony Little, headmaster at Eton College, said GCSEs were now like a ‘factory process’ that were tailored towards success in school league tables.
Anyone believe that current school leavers with GCSEs are better prepared than their predecessors?
by nick on August 22, 2008
The variable cost of emailing is so small, they’re practically free. So if you’ve got the type of boss who throws pennies around like manhole covers he’s going to love them. ‘I want you to send emails, lots of them. Then send some more. Blitz ‘em, flood the damn database.’ A bit extreme but you get the picture.
The boss of HMV’s communications must employ a similar tactic. After ordering a DVD earlier this year at HMV.com the inbox onslaught started. Obviously I got the confirmation and order shipped mail etc, but in 30 days since exiting their checkout HMV sent me 34 emails. Even Jonathon Ross can’t be that interested in his movie and music collection.
Granted, there isn’t a hard and fast rule for the number of emails to send potential or current clients but interrupting (yes, your message is just that) people more than once a week with shopping tidbits is likely to devalue your brand credibility. ‘But what about my business’ true disciples, those who want to know about everything we do, the minute it happens?’ RSS updates are the answer for what are surely the minority of your clients allowing you to not lose favour with the overriding majority.
The biggest winner here is ‘branding’. Newsletters should be part of your online tactics but don’t expect a sales silver bullet. This is a chance to touch your customers and show them what’s new with clever design and thoughtful copy. He’s my two penny’s worth on how to play it:
DO -
- Communicate regularly with those who’ve given you permission (cue Seth Godin).
- Outline objectives before creation – who is your audience (age and sex for starters) and what do they want (maybe more Big Brother than Business Brunch)?
- Provide great content – even great design can’t compensate for an empty message.
- Give them something – advice, top tips, a freebie, insider information (e.g. a book reseller interviewing a popular author) etc.
- Provide lots of text or you’ll be blank to all those users with their images switched off (very common) and it’ll avoid some mail clients thinking you’re spam.
- Have a call to action.
- Be as personal as possible – don’t show me all your offers, make them relevant to what I like (HMV send me weekly game deals. I’ve never showed an interest on their site by searching/browsing games, but I browsed business DVDs for 20+ minutes).
- Be humble. How would you address 1,000 clients if you could assemble them in the street? Give it the same respect and diligence you’d do if you had a megaphone and eye contact, not a keyboard and remote access.
- Write a punchy subject line to stand out from the crowd with interest and a desire to be opened.
- Have an easy opt out – if enough put you in their spam folder you can be blocked by ISPs.
- Offer alternative views – online, HTML and plain text.
- Test, monitor and improve. Repeat…
DON’T -
- Expect great conversions and massive sales take up unless your offer is spectacular or rare (e.g. a half price iPhone or an interview with the Queen).
- Abuse people’s attention with pointless rubbish that’s neither ‘news’ nor ‘offers.’
- Send more than one per week (again, RSS is a different ball game, as is a news site).
- Forget the ‘from’ opportunity – admin or sales don’t inspire.
- Send huge images that take an age to load.
- Miss your alt tags on images (which you’ve used wisely).
- Let CSS snobs ignore the functionality of tables that might get less managed en route.
This is a subject which is going to evolve considerably in the next year or so. Please let me know what I’ve overlooked in the comments section.
by nick on August 19, 2008
Since the Yahoo! and Microsoft will-they, wont-they saga I’ve taken a closer interest in uber-investor, Carl Icahn. That most capitalist of papers, The Wall Street Journal, recently wrote a very non-flattering piece about him.
Mr Icahn has blogged his thoughts on the article, tearing the journalist’s (though I doubt he thinks she’s worthy of the noun) opinions apart with fact, insight and obvious relish. All in all it’s a lesson in dressing down with style. A couple of snippets for you:
“…the article was so wrongheaded that I am surprised that it was afforded an appearance in a premier business newspaper. I hope better academic guidance is provided for students in California than that exemplified in the editorial.”
“To imply that these companies’ balance sheets are anemic and debt-strapped is simply not the case. I truly hope Ms. Stout reviews the facts and corrects this kind of distortion that is used to bolster her already weak arguments… Motorola has approximately $7 billion in cash on its balance sheet.”
Reading his blog, you get unbridled access to his thoughts (granted on limited subjects) and are left with the clear impression that this is no absentee businessman. I’m sure he plays golf, or sails, or collects art like others who can afford to, but I bet he knows every inch of his organisations’ KPIs – he probably wrote them.
by nick on August 16, 2008
Every person in your organisation who has contact – direct or otherwise – with your customers is a marketer. Fact. The guy who served me popcorn in the cinema on the weekend is a marketer. He could’ve asked cheerily ‘What movie are you guys heading to?’ but he didn’t. Instead he decided to make his interaction a negative affair, grunting at me to ‘go large’ while his miserable face looked more akin to a concentration camp rather than a by-product of a great work environment.
The waitress who takes your order is also a marketer. So is the UPS driver who delivers your parcels. And yes, you can bet your backside that your sales staff, who largely think marketing is a whole separate department, are marketing all day. And when they do, your glossy literature and slick copy writing is out of the equation; Joe Public is having an honest human interaction, not obediently absorbing a slick 30-second ad.
I guess my question is: does that honest interaction match your brand and all the investment you’ve put into building it?
by nick on August 12, 2008
We all know history shows us nothing lasts. The Roman Empire, the Warsaw Pact, the telegram, the Two Ronnies… whatever. You name it and time will show itself to have moved swiftly on. Google had another record month in June performing 7.1 billion searches, but I predict, with a prize-fighter’s confidence, that Google cannot remain the de facto search engine. There, easily said wasn’t it.
Perhaps it’ll be a hostile take over or a merger. Perhaps implosion (though a lack of funds seems very unlikely today). Perhaps huge customer revolt over privacy issues or ‘evil’ infringements. Whatever, but the inventor of the mass-market car couldn’t create a lasting success of things and history will show Sergey and Larry to be no different. However, the guys at Yahoo! aren’t waiting for me to be proven right in 2090. They know they can’t beat Google at their own game so a month ago they started letting others do it for them. Well, that’s one of their strategies to stop the game, set and match scenario they’re staring at today. They’re opening up their search to allow developers to code the final pieces, thus avoiding all the colossal development costs. The Yahoo! blog says:
“our goal with BOSS is to remove as many of the barriers as possible to creating new search products. By providing deep access to Yahoo! Search’s investment in engineering, sciences and core search infrastructure and removing key usage restrictions, we are encouraging a whole new level of innovation in search experiences.”
The more the merrier, eh? Kind of like getting all your friends to help you stand up to the bully in school, but it appears a viable strategy as long as several really do something different from Yahoo! and gain critical mass. I suspect the promotion techniques to come will be far more interesting than the resulting algorithms.
Then there’s Cuil, surely the first of many serious search contenders to come. Serious because its frontline folks are ex-Google, but also serious because it promises different results, not Google regurgitations. They’ve indexed three times more pages than any other engine but “stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency”. Many Google critics cite their heavy reliance on linking as relatively easy to spam (or ‘game’ as it’s known). In a nutshell, Cuil is promising to favour authority over popularity. What will the others promise and will they nibble away enough at Google to actually hurt that dominance? Could it be a death by a thousand engines…?
by nick on August 9, 2008
F1 fans will know the popular mantra well-used across the sport, ‘If you’re not going forwards, you’re actually going backwards.’ It speaks volumes for everyone’s permanent devotion to improving through innovation (and invention of course). You see, over the course of a season teams will gain a handful of seconds per lap. Therefore, if you’re lapping at 1 minute 26 seconds and coming first on day one of the season, it wont be long before the guys running at 1 minute 27, 28 or 29 catch and then over take you. Improvement is a must. Every day.
Surely the metaphor is just as appropriate in your market as it is in Bernie Ecclestone’s? Yes you’ve done well and that industry recognition was deserved but now you’ve taught others what success looks like. You’ve actually made their job a little easier by blazing that trail, by launching that product, by being number one. They’ve had a chance to calibrate their effort, probably finding more finance, stronger personnel and creating a better infrastructure. This (on right) is Mozilla’s Songbird music application. Look familiar? I hope you pushed on when it was good.
Chris Bangle, BMW’s much-maligned chief designer provides me with a worthy example. He hasn’t just sharpened his CAD pencil, he’s completely rewritten his (and everyone else’s) designs. Don’t use wasteful metal, give it skin. Don’t have one style, employ a morphing one. George Lucas couldn’t do much better. Improve every day or get left behind.
As ever: simple, yet very difficult…
by nick on August 6, 2008
Selling is as often as much about the lack of negatives as it is about the number of positives beholden to your features and benefits. That restaurant you ate in last month may have had clean cutlery and smartly dressed staff but you didn’t think better of them for it, did you? That’s because you expected it. The fact that they’re clean goes unnoticed. It’s when they’re not that such things come to your attention and you rate them negatively, perhaps walking away.
A tarmac road doesn’t score brownie points because it’s smooth
, but it quickly loses them if it’s riddled with potholes. It’s a matter of hygiene and as HR managers will tell you, you cant score points from hygiene factors – you can only maintain or lose them.
Therefore, your sales presentation (political races are the classic example) is about degrees of losing: he who loses less, wins.
by nick on August 1, 2008
Got a presentation coming up? This is where the bar is for attention and this is where the bar is for Powerpoint and Keynote. There’s a little bit of help for you here. And finally, as a priest once told me of his sermons: be sharp; be brief; be gone.
be drawn on targets and predictions (very wise) but privately they must’ve sat on the fence with quiet confidence and, no doubt, more than a modicum of fear. Yet, Team GB shattered all expectations and it’s praise indeed to all involved; from Chris Hoy all the way back to John Major (for instigating the lottery). An elite winner with big ambitions has replaced the plucky underdog and polite also-ran that was the United Kingdom. But can British business align itself with sport?
