My neighbor owns a small pipe bender company. He makes machines that bend metal and pipes for all sorts of uses. He has a good many employees providing a lot of jobs while boosting the local economy. It’s sad to think that he could be taxed more thus reducing his ability to provide those jobs.
I just opened a new box of tissues – it’s cold season – and all it took was one quick pull of a thin plastic sheet to reveal the tissues inside.
I really appreciated how easy it was to get to the product. I didn’t have fight off a safety seal, I didn’t have to fill out a long form, or stand in a long line, nothing. It was just sweet and simple.
On Saturday my wife and I got up early and went to a local mall to buy Christmas gifts. We found some great gifts in the Ralph Lauren store so I headed to the counter to purchase our finds. Before I paid the guy behind the register asked for my name. I gave it to him. Then he asked for my address and I remembered how they do this at the Polo stores. I declined.
I’m sure that most shoppers provide their address, and I don’t have a problem with companies gathering marketing information, it can be beneficial to everyone if the marketing is targeted well (and a recent visitor is well targeted), I would just like to see it gathered differently. Hand me an address form and ask me to fill it out and drop it in the mail for the chance to win a $500 gift card, or whatever. Just give me something in return to fulfill my human need for instant gratification.
When you build a Website or even a Web page do you know who you are talking to? Who is your audience? What is the person that visits your page looking for? What are you trying to sell? What are you trying to say?
Know the answers to the above questions and your pages will be better.
We just experienced the results of the greatest marketing campaign in history.
I had big plans to put together a new Rubbermaid shed this weekend. I used a commission check I had saved just to buy a quality shed, went to Home Depot and spent twenty more dollars renting a van to bring the shed home, and used up a lot of muscle and sweat dragging the heaving box through my yard. On Sunday morning I woke up early and went outside in the cold to put together my new Rubbermaid Big Max shed. I took each part out of the large box and started assembling my new toy when I learned that an important part had been left out – the bag of screws to hold it all together.
I looked and looked to make sure the bag wasn’t strategically taped to the underside of a panel and to make sure it hadn’t fell under something. It wasn’t anywhere to be found. The person that put the box of parts together had left out the most important piece. The box was sealed in plastic when I bought it so I know it wasn’t removed in the store either.
My Sunday plans were wasted and now the two weekends I had free to clean out my garage are also behind. I’m not furious or even all that mad, but I am disappointed with Rubbermaid and the person they trusted to do his job correctly. Now I’m going to have to spend time on the phone with Rubbermaid (and please let it be someone that speaks English and has a little common sense) using up their paid resources and my limited time to try to figure out what is missing, and then have them mail it to me (again at their expense cutting into Rubbermaid’s profits).
You and I both know what probably happened. An underpaid assembly worker didn’t feel like walking across the warehouse to get more screw bags, or either just didn’t care enough to even drop a bag in the box. He probably even knew that the bag was missing, but it wouldn’t be his problem once the error was discovered so he didn’t care. How many other boxes left the warehouse that day without the needed parts? How many will be returned to Rubbermaid from Home Depot cutting deeper into Rubbermaid’s profits? How much would it have cost to ensure that the guy packing the box did his job correctly the first time? Was he really underpaid or just careless? Either way it’s going to cost money, and this isn’t the time to be wasting money.
Yesterday I got a letter from Charter Cable offering me the Triple Play package for less than $100 per month. This is a good savings over what I’m paying right now, and I almost fell for it until I remembered how much trouble I had with Charter in the past. I dealt with Charter for about one year before I finally gave up with their customer-no-service and switched to Direct TV.
When I was a customer of Charter Communications Inc. I had constant problems that I couldn’t get resolved because their customer support department was a waste of space. My bills were constantly wrong and my service stunk. Charter is not worth the trouble just to watch TV and surf the Net.
I’m glad that I remembered that Charter Communications is a terrible company and that the only reason they are still in business is due to monopolies.
Don’t take my word about how much Charter sucks. Just check out their stock price (.38 cents at the time of the posting) and read what the experts are saying about Charter.
If you’re not interacting with your visitors you are really missing a lot of opportunities to improve your site and your business. Your visitors see things about your company and site that you don’t. They have different perspectives and come from different backgrounds, races, sex, countries, and ages other than you and your cohorts.
There are many ways to get feedback and interact with your Web visitors including contact forms, message boards, blogs, and comments, and even social media. The initial fear is that these things will only provide a place for your upset customers to complain. And this is true, but it’s also good because it provides a place for you to address these concerns in the open and in a controlled environment. This make the visitor feel better and lets prospects know that you care and work to fix issues. In this world of corporate corruption transparency is important and can only help you in the long run. I like to say that if you don’t control your brand online someone else will.
It’s easy and fun to jump on the bandwagon when things are good, but it’s a lot scarier to do so when things are tanking (like right now). But in truth you often come out far ahead when you take risk when others won’t. If you buy some of the good stocks now you will be happy later if you’re willing and able to hold onto them for a few years.
Starting a new technology company or Website now may not seem like such a good idea either, but if you have stamina, a good idea, and the ability to live without profit for a couple of years you will have a good chance of success when things do improve.
Just a thought…
Yesterday I noticed that Google had linked to a page with information about registering to vote. While the linked-to page was a little confusing I was still happy to see this. At Google’s core it really wants to be a socially responsible company. With its rapid and enormous growth this has been difficult and they’ve heard about it too. Google is now suffering from the Starbucks syndrome in that it has gone mainstream and those that consider themselves Geeks and first-adopters will reject it based its popularity, but say that it’s for some other reason.
Is it possible for a giant corporation to really be “good” and to produce more good in the world than they take away? I think so, but most of us are damaged from all the bad that we’ve seen from the giants too. Yet I’m by no means a hater of corporations. In fact, I believe that corporations are a large part of what has made America great. I was always a believer in the “Captains of Industry” idea more than the “Robber Baron” concept, but I do think that corporations of today should do more. In that same breath I can say that many are trying. Just because someone is a CEO doesn’t mean that he’s not also an environmentalist – or at the least someone that wants to leave a better world for his kids.
Well there’s your Friday ramble. I’ll talk to you again next week after Congress takes credit for saving the world and blames all that went wrong on someone else.