Seeking Direct Customer Feedback
As businesses have made our way onto social networks we have several new ways of listening to our customers, tracking what they’re saying about us, and engaging them in conversation. Much has been written about the success that companies like Dell have had engaging customers through Twitter and other platforms, and we’ll probably write more [...]
Two Leadership Mistakes To Avoid.
We are currently working on a naming project (sorry, confidentiality won’t let us disclose more than that) and when doing some random Googling, we ran across this very un-timely, but insightful article from Entrepreneur.com on the “8 Mistakes to Avoid When Naming Your Business (from April 2005).”
However old the article, we found the advice solid [...]
Demonstrate Your Value
As a consulting firm that works for a lot of non-profits and small businesses, we are often forced to make value a central part of our pitch, demonstrating that our clients will make money by hiring us. That in the short or long term, the money they invest in our consulting fees will pay dividends [...]
Serving Customers. Creating Loyalty.
We just stumbled on this old Chris Brogan post where he waxes on about Ideas for Hotels and Hospitality, which got us thinking about ways in which we, and our clients, could better serve their customers and create lasting loyalty.
Give them opportunities to tell you what they want.
It is amazing how much people will talk [...]
Great Concept. Poor Execution.
While reading a website earlier today, an Orbitz ad—in the form of a 3-hole mini-golf-style game—broke through our pop-up blocker and offered a great excuse for distraction. (We couldn’t post link because the “tell a friend” button didn’t work, or because, perhaps, our ad blocker actually prevented that portion)
It was a simple little game, [...]
Croudsource Your Startup
Innovation has been on our minds a lot recently and we’ve had both internal and client-focused conversations about “how do you innovate in this economy.”
Well, our answers have varied depending on the situation, but a lot of what we’ve discussed has shared the theme of: “collaborate more.” Collaborate within your organization–find new ways to [...]
Don’t Cut Prices Just Because Everyone Else Is
Just because we seem to be in the middle of the Great Recession doesn’t mean that we should all bring out our “Sale of the Century” signs. Quite the contrary, for some businesses, now is the time they should re-evaluate what their price-point is.
We were reminded of this when we ran across this post on [...]
Listen!
Today, Tom Martin has a great post up over at Positive Disruption about the power of simply listening to people. His consumer insights firm took an incredibly simple and powerful to consumer research in New Orleans: they took a camera onto the streets and asked people one question, “Why?”
Take a look at the video [...]
Amazon’s Nonstop PR Problem
If you’re on Twitter, #amazonfail is already old news to you, if you’re not on Twitter, all you need to do is Google “#amazonfail” to get a run-down of yesterday’s Amazon PR crisis. The summary of this issue is this: Amazon seems to have removed the sales rankings for gay and lesbian themed books by [...]
Designing in the Recession
A recent article on Fast Company’s website about the fate of the design business in our current economic struggles (read it here) got us thinking about the current state of design. The question we keep hearing: is design work an expendable luxury, or a more vital necessity now that budgets are slashed.
We are involved [...]
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