How to lose a customer
Let your customers go quickly and painlessly.
When someone decides that they no longer want your services, it’s usually too late to do anything about it. What you can do, is act professionally and make the process of switching suppliers uncomplicated and swift.
A bureaucratic, unhelpful attitude does not reverse a bad opinion, it confirms it.
It’s also worth remembering that when customers leave, it can be because of budget, location and just not being a great fit with you or your company. If you make their final experience a negative one, they’re much less likely to recommend you to someone who could be your customer.
Designing Accessibility
Accessibility guidelines for websites are great. They give you an edge over your competition.
Remember that guidelines and rules don’t change and don’t always tell you about how things are used. If someone can’t use your site, is there a way for them to tell you? Have you watched a blind person use your site, or just run it through a screen reader?
Think of each person who visits your site as an individual and speak directly to them.
The Basics
Maybe we should stop focusing on the basics. Everybody does the basics then they add the good stuff later if they have time. Or if they can convince those in charge. Or if it’s within budget.
Maybe we should focus on the good stuff first, then pick up the basics as we go along.
Do we need ethics in marketing?
Recently I heard an SEO say that ethics have no place in marketing. I wanted to argue with that, but I feel that in some ways he is right.
The problem is, before you are a marketer, you’re a human being. And being human is all about ethics.
Why are books for the Kindle so expensive?
Seth Godin points out in a post about the Kindle that the costs for paper and inventory disappear for Amazon when supplying books. So why do those books cost the same as their physical versions? Actually for someone who buys second-hand, they’re more expensive.
For economists the short answer is always “because that’s what people are prepared to pay”. But I wonder if Amazon have a smarter idea.
The proprietary format that Amazon uses creates a kind of scarcity. If you want to read a book on the Kindle, you have to get it from Amazon. So you’re stuck with the price they charge. This all changes when someone starts to provide an alternative service which seems like a pot of gold waiting to be plundered. Or so it would be, except customers wouldn’t be able to read your downloads on a Kindle. So anyone who wants to go into competition has to create their own hardware or rely on the existing offerings. Which are kind of underwhelming.
In a way it makes sense to take advantage of this, but what irks me is that if I was a Kindle user, I’d feel kind of cheated every time I downloaded a book. As a long-term strategy you could do better.
Don’t be ordinary: lessons from Yahoo! resignation
Go read Stewart Butterfield’s resignation letter on Valleywag.
OK? Now read the comments.
No real focus on the story, just he’s crazy, he’s on drugs, and above all he’s not funny.
When was the last time anyone agreed on what was funny? “It’s not funny” might be an opening sentence but by itself it’s not an argument for anything other than your own ego.
I’ve no idea what this letter is all about but that doesn’t matter to me. What I love is that this guy seems to be the kind of guy who can’t do anything the way you’re supposed to do it. Maybe that’s why he’s so successful.
Why fake linkbait is a waste of time
A lot of SEO is about putting the cart before the horse. Traffic before content.
Recently, some SEOs have been creating fake stories and articles as a way of increasing eyeballs on their product or service.
I think this has got a bit backwards.
SEO used to be about stuffing keywords and amassing links by any means necessary. But as these things have become less important and filtered out by the important search engines, the internet marketers have turned to linkbait and viral campaigns.
The reason Google doesn’t want your ability to crank widgets to affect the ranking of your website is that it makes Google useless. It’s not that they are promoting ethics necessarily, they just want to build a tool that provides useful, relevant, interesting or timely content to users. And they want to do that because (drum roll) that’s what users want. Users like you and me.
When it gets to the point that SEOs are creating fake content to lure people to their sites, isn’t it just a whisker further to get that content to be real? Or at least relevant?
The cart before the horse is this: you’re trying to get higher traffic so you create something that will pull in the numbers. Wrong. You create something useful, relevant, interesting or timely and you will get traffic. And the great thing is, for as long as search engines are around, that will always work.
What your CV really says
I was reading through the archives of Veerle’s excellent design blog, when I came across a post about her sending out her CV as a kind of package. The funny thing is that most advice about job-hunting steers you away from being this imaginative.
When you’re writing your CV, it’s easy to get bogged down in details. What is going to make the most impact? Which font, how much line-spacing, what order to put everything in?
The best CVs are not CVs at all. They’re one of a kind and they break the rules. Sometimes they aren’t even about work or experience or qualifications. Sometimes they’re packages or blogs or gifts or paintings.
There’s the guy who sent a ransom note to Disney with a piece of Mickey Mouse’s ear. (Is this apocryphal? I can’t find a link.)
People who do the same as everybody else are great for companies who want a horde of drones. But you don’t really want to work for that kind of company do you? The best way to stand apart, is to do what no one else has done. Don’t be afraid to stand out. Why do you think the word is outstanding?
If you’re worried about what your CV will look like to the person that’s hiring you, ask yourself how you would react, put yourself in the mind of the recruiter. The truth is that the best people to work for are human and humans love things that are extraordinary. There’s very little extraordinary.
