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The power of negative word of mouth

Thanks to Patrick J. Lamb for his post "Negative Word Of Mouth Is An Absolute Killer" which points us to an important customer service story on NPR this week.  Patrick writes: "Great story on Monday’s All Things Considered on NPR about the ramifications of poor customer service.  The key is that customers who have a […]

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More on the importance of “radical” differentiation

I’ve written before about the importance of differentiating your company from the rest of the pack, a concept that has been refined by marketing gurus Seth Godin (The Purple Cow) and Marty Neumeier (Zag and the Brand Gap).   I came across Marty’s wonderful graphic that says it all on Olivier Blanchard’s Brand Builder Blog, it […]

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The importance of time off

When Gerry called, he was exhausted and distraught.  He reported that he had accomplished next to nothing in the past week, having spent too much time putting out fires for a client who has been constantly screwing up.  This client insists upon making changes to their software program themselves, creating problems, which Gerry has to […]

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Of ideaviruses, social viruses and stickiness

Last week’s post by Hugh McLeod on the "gaping void blog" entitled "the social virus" is a visual version of how to make things "sticky" and "memorable."  For those who don’t know about Hugh, he’s a marketer / cartoonist who uses "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards" to put forth his ideas. In […]

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Even more on hiring well…

I’ve written quite a bit about hiring, and was interested to see a post by Olivier Blanchard on the Brand Builder Blog entitled “Be Great or Go Home” where he rants a bit about his ex-doctor (and others) who don’t do the right job and aren’t thorough enough.  The crux of this post as it […]

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Who’s minding the store?

Mark runs a small graphic design studio.  He’s the art director, and has two full time and one part time designers on staff.  Mark’s day to day tasks mostly revolve around supervising the designers, doing presentations, trouble shooting, dealing with printers and making sure projects are done on time. His busy schedule over the last […]

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A strategy for email marketing success

There’s a great post by Ardath Albee on the Marketing Interactions blog entitled "Quit using email to train your leads to ignore you" which makes some great points on how most email campaigns don’t work and what to do about it. In the article, Ardath points specific steps on how to build an engaging, successful […]

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Email Authentication: A growing response to spammers and scammers

In response to the tremendous amount of spam and scamming email messages, there is a growing trend towards the use of email authentication.  Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog reports: "MarketingVOX: Authentication for email marketing messages is being used by an increasing number of marketers, reports ClickZ. The report on usage comes from Microsoft, who presented […]

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More on narrowing your focus and being specific

I wrote a couple of days ago about the importance of narrowing your marketing focus and being very specific in your marketing message.  Today, I ran across a post by Ben McConnell on the Church of the Customer blog, speaking about Twelve, a book publisher who’s taking the specifics of it’s focus really seriously: It […]

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Marketing, sales and ethics: The consultants conundrum

Vicky is a relatively new marketing consultant in the software industry and has been slowly building a solid practice over the past year or so. She spends a good deal of time working on-site with her customers and their prospective customers. In the process of doing her work, opportunities often come up to work for […]

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