Communication: Getting to know your customers

Earlier this week I attended a discussion panel run by Ebay. It was for PayPal actually. I jumped at the chance. Why?

Wow, these are real people. They want to get my thoughts and want to hear from me. How great is that? Plus, heck, I have an unresolved issue and maybe I could meet someone who could assist if I needed help.

Yes, not an email address, or a help desk, a real person.

This, folks, is something that is quite relevant today, especially for the larger organisations out there. Human contact is lost. And, with many organisations, the only contact is via electronic means. Wow, how impersonal.

Of course, there is the old "1800" number. And, invariably, you get to speak with someone with a foreign accent, no offense to the people that man call centres, but it does feel that there is another degree of separation with the organisation that you dealt with originally.

The point I'm trying to get at is that as a marketer, one has to know his/her customer and not just empathise and relate to that person, but communicate with that person.

In the old days, market surveys would have been the go. Today, focus groups are more the way the bigger organisations go about this.

Focus groups are in the main used to run ideas by them and get a chance to fine tune the message. This is what did happen in the panel I joined.

There were several people, other than the discussion leader (who was from a market research company), from Ebay. And, not only did they give us a fair hearing, they engaged in discussion and one of them got my details and offered to help me with a difficulty I had with the dispute console.

Mind you that was several days ago. And, I haven't heard from her since that discussion panel. (Postscript: I did get an email, with an apology for not getting back to me as the lady caught the flu.) Which leads me to the final point: make sure your customer matters. If you promise to do something, do it.

Or, you may get some irate customers venting their spleens in their blogs out there and undoing all the good work you have done over a long period of time.

Worth thinking about, isn't it?

Some more thoughts on blogging...and my new blog

Blogging being a journal means there should be regular posts. Mea culpa. With the many pressures of work and family, the update of a blog seems to go down in priority to everything else. (I should really practice what I preach.)

Last weekend, I attended a seminar on Internet Marketing. It was very similar to the one I attended last year. It was, after all, given by the same people--the Internet Marketing Center.

Mind you last year, the CEO, Derek Gehl gave the seminar, but the guy this year, Jason Bax, was also pretty good. Though, I liked the previous venue better. Telstra Stadium, compared to Syndey University, this year. (No offense to the university, but we had tables and chairs and more room in the previous venue.)

And, since the cost was minimal, they tried to sell their stuff. This I suppose is fair enough. But, again, I digress.

One session in that seminar dealt on blogging, RSS and podcasting. This was the principal reason I attended the seminar. Some new things were covered and this got me even more excited to put more effort in my blogging.

I admit that one reason I do blog is to practice what I preach. I do blogs for some clients and use the lessons learned from actually blogging myself.

I've wanted to be able to have a blog in my own domain, to give me more control than this free forum courtesy of Google. To the folks at Google, thanks and I will still continue using your service. Great job and I push this service to others.

Going back to my earlier plans of my own blog with my own domain. This journal will deal purely on marketing communication. In fact, I've sub-titled the blog: Exploring marketing communication for fun and profit.

If you want to take a peek, it's called messagefromgarcia.net. Yes, I know, pretty obvious and a bit corny. But, when I brainstormed some names this kept coming back with a good feel.

Unfortunately, the ".com" of messagefromgarcia was taken.

Good lesson there. If you have a name you like or want to use, register the domain straight away. Best to stick to .com or .net.

Anyway, again I digressed. I will have more stuff on blogging here and in my other site.

Hope to see you there...soon.

More thoughts on blogging

Admittedly, I'm a late adaptor of the blog. I've only been running this blog for just on a year. And, I must admit that I have only been posting sporadically over that period.

I want to share some nuggets I picked up in my readings concerning Blogs and Blogging.

"Blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpose, or delegate...blogs are not a business elective. They're a prerequisite." (BusinessWeek)

Worth a thought, isn't it? Can anyone in business afford to disregard blogging?

Did you know that the word "blog" was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2003. It's been around for a while, but you know that something is mainstream when it makes the OED.

According to Nancy Flynn, founder of ePolicy Institute: "The blog is an electronic communications powerhouse that is likely to have greater impact on business communications and corporate reputations than e-mail, instant messageing and traditional marketing-oriented websites combined."

She nominated this as the first rule of blogs, in her book Blog Rules (AMACON, 2006).

These are just some random snippets that I gathered from the first part of the book, which deals with a case for strategic blogging. I'll have some more nuggets from this book and other sources in future posts.

Til my next post.