Ever since I said in a previous blog that I don't get much spam, it has increased. My Clarkson moment, perhaps. But I have been doing a bit of reading, to see what it is like, and the one thing that strikes me is the fact that someone must fall for this rubbish.
Phishing emails have inundated my inbox, but to fall for it you have to be a can of Carlberg Extra short of a six-pack. My bank clearly states on any correspondence that it will never ask for personal details via email. So I don't give anyone anything.
Not exactly rocket science, is it? So who falls for this stuff? If it did not work, I presume the criminal fraternity would move onto a more lucrative scam...
The same goes for the Viagra pushers. Who buys this stuff online to make their activities worthwhile? The mind boggles.
But the whole activity begs further questions. My ISP labels most of it as spam, so why not stop it getting through altogether? It does no one any good, so stop it at source.
If roughly two thirds of email activity is spam, as the dreaded survey says, they could save a good deal of energy and capacity by getting rid of it.
But no one does? Why?
Answers on a postcard, please.
3 comment(s)
Why would the government consider creating a national database of mobile numbers and internet addresses? Not only are they bound to cock up the building of the database, cue headlines about zillions over budget, but they are bound to lose some or all of the data in the internal post.
And apart from all the potential career banana skins, just how are they going to do it? These sort of numbers and addresses change faster than light. It would always be out of date, even if they can deliver it in the first place.
Big brother wants to watch, but just how are they going to regulate all this? And if the intention is to catch criminals, don't they think the criminals will lie, or use a computer abroad, or find some other cunning way around it?
You can see the new department being set up, with lots of civil servants in hoodies and baseball caps, hiding another few CD's with all the unopened correspondence in that office no one ever goes near. It will cost a lot and deliver little of value.
And voters do not like being watched, or their money being wasted. Golden Brown is so out of touch, he can't even float a winning idea. Let's hope Call Me Dave has a bit more sense, when his turn at the oche comes around.
I know, I know...I am such an optimist...
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Social and business netowrking are going to become one and the same thing. Vodaphone have just bought up a mobile version, brands are flocking to Facebook, and the likes of LinkedIn are starting to loosen up the business focus. Budiness directories are starting to allow interaction and comment. You read it here first.
Social networking has a certain stigma. Fun, frolics and photos you really would rather your boss never saw. Business networking is a rather dry, souless experience. You connect with friends, you expand, but it still feels like a job search facility.
Linking all networking activity, business and pleasure, makes much more sense. When we all get tired of being funkymonkey123456789@hotmail.co.uk and start being ourselves, things will get much more interesting.
Linking it to the company you work for, and making it more than just about an individual has its risks, but this is the new world we live in. The company has to learn to manage its PR online, and the individual has to learn that there are limits.
Not bad lessons, either way. I think it also brings us all closer to having an online address as solid as our postal address. One that we can carry with us, wherever we go, like a phone number. One that we can secure, and use with confidence online.
In my opinion, this is where all this is going. The next phase of the online revolution will be about longevity, trust, openess and confidence. And DM will be a major beneficiary, if we play our cards right.
4 comment(s)
The Post Office needs private investment to maintain a daily delivery service? Who are they kidding?
The daily post service is dying. Of course it is unprofitable to deliver daily to every house in the country for a flat fee, no matter how rural. It doesn't take a genius to work that out. I don't see how private investment is going to make much difference to that. Or who would be crazy enough to invest.
I have said before that we need to decide what sort of postal service we want. The majority of mail these days is DM, door drops and bills, plus the seasonal surge of Christmas cards.
Does that all need a daily service, everywhere?
Modern life has moved on. As a consumer, I would be quite happy to recieve my mail two or three times a week. There is rarely anything that important that a day would make any difference. Online billing and statements will further reduce volumes in the years to come. Even DM will go increasingly electronic. Private investors will see that, and only be interested in the profitable bits.
If you live in John O'Groats, or somewhere remote, you have no chance.
Sometimes, in worrying about the delights of data, creative, copy, targeting and brand, we forget about the basics. Big companies, medium sized companies and even small companies forget that when they have a prospect interested in them, or a customer tries to get in touch, they actually have to talk to them.
I have been trying to sort out a few things lately. Do we all realise how difficult it is to actually talk to a human being these days? Those abominable automatic switchboards give you every option but the one you want, then cut you off just before you rget to the humans.
Oh they play some soothing music, regularly interrupted by the message that you are important to us, and that you are in a queue, but you wait, and choose another option, and fume.
Getting the basics right is crucial. In fact, I am starting to believe that the brand that actually enables itc customers to talkand contact them easily, answers phones, replies to emails and letters, will win a significan lead in their particular market.
This applies to B2B as much as B2C. Human beings cost more than a machine, of course. And even when you find one they are usually housed in an anonymous battery farm with no authority to do what you want to do, and an inability to put you through to someone who can.
This is beginning to sound suspiciously like a rant, and one no doubt many people will identify with. But it is taking over like a cancer. Getting queries dealt with and offering answers to problems - then making sure it happens, is the nuts and bolts of business. But it seems to be ignored by marketers everywhere.
Back to basics...bring back John Major. Now there's an idea...peas anyone?
Junk mail gets to the best of us sometimes. Why can't we even do the simple things right? If you are sending out a credit card proposal, at least de-dupe existing customers, for goodness sake.
Like many people, I imagine, I have taken advantage of interest free credit cards to spread the cost of the odd holiday extravagance. No crime there. And the card companies obviously encourage us to do so, even in the middle of the so-called credit crunch.
So I have a wallet full of cards I never use. Like many people, I imagine. So why do I keep getting offers from companies with which I already have an existing relationship?
Laziness? Quite possibly. Cost saving? Well only if the cost of a de-dupe is more than the saving on postage and fulfillment, which I doubt. Stupidity? Harsh, but true.
It is madness to send existing customers untargeted atempts to give them another credit card. It is annoying for the customer, who assume the brand does not know what it is doing, it is environmentally dodgy, which damages the brand further, and it is missing the point that another offer might get the customer to use their existing card.
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Come on, admit it. Not very much. Herein lies the problem with the data industry. Businesses are not looking after their own prospect and customer data, so they have to buy in cold data. It is a viscious circle, and one of our own creating.
In approaching 30 years of service in sales and marketing functions, I have spent roughly half of that time in both camps. In all that time, with companies big and small, and everything inbetween, I have struggled to find one that really cracked CRM or PRM, to use the new language of our humble trade.
There are several reasons for that. For a start, the sales team is legendarily bad at collecting data...or at least at recording it. Ask them what is going on with a prospect and I bet they can talk for ages about them, but look at the notes on whatever sales system you are using and I bet it says 'called at x on x, no progress.
Secondly, we don't use the data we collect. Either because it is too difficult to extract, or cleanse, or dedupe, or because it is too expensive to extract, cleanse or dedupe. We'll just buy a list instead and add the responses to our data base...
The internal database should be accessible, easy to update, easy to extract, easy to use and central to everything we do. Bet yours isn't though.
Personally, I believe it is a mindset we have to change. It is not about software, or budgets, in the end. It is about buy-in throughout sales and marketing functions and a committment to make customer/prospect data as useful as possible.
Let's save the emotive language for real disasters, shall we? Iraq, Afghanistan, maybe Korea in the future, maybe Russia or China, too, but not opt-in. Opt-in is an opportunity, one that will cause problems, but it may also prove to be the saviour of our industry.
Not often I disagree with Rosemary Smith. But on this point, I do. The fact about our industry is that there are too many bad datasets out there. Too much cold data being used and used, focussing not on targeting but on ROI.
Yes, there would be fallout from any opt-in legislation. As always there would be winners and losers, but the datasets that emerge, both in consumer and business markets, will be better, more interactive, and more targetable.
Consumers will sign up for DM if there is a good enough pay-off. That could be in terms of benefits, services or even cash. It is not impossible. I have said before, and will say it again, the future is online and the ability to build an opt-in database is glaringly obvious.
We are all used to free email, free photo storage, free social networking etc etc. What if it only remained free if you signed up for DM? It's a good deal, and everyone would sign up.
Opt-in is only a disaster if we let it be one.
Instant response shouldn't mean slapdash fulfillment. In my early days in marketing, at the coalface of humping boxes, manning stands, proof-reading blah, blah blah, the devil always seemed to be in the detail. Too many people have taken their eye of the ball.
Two recent experiences, no names no pack drill. One, something I applied for by mobile phone. The pack came, some days later, with my name printed on the envelope all in lower case.
Now, I know I typed it into my mobile like that, but is it rocket science to capitalise it on the envelope? I don't think so. It made me negative before I even got inside the envelope.
Secondly, our estate agent. Chosen as the best of the local bunch. Ever since then little niggles have got under our skin. Firstly, my cheque for the dreaded HIP was a penny out. In my favour of course. And the asked me for it. I had worked out the VAT, but the mistake was so minor, why ask for it? I gave the hapless representative who dared to broach the subject me a penny in cash. He wondered out loud if his accounts department would accept it, and I suggested he had a clear and simple choice.
Then, a confirmation letter suggesting we had not paid at all, and claiming that an invoice was enclosed, which it wasn't. Then the surveyor forgot to do the floorplan and had to come back the next day.
All little things, but symptomatic of a general attitude to fulfillment of all kinds. It is so easy to let the machines take over, and not check the output. We are all used to email communication, so who cares about little things like half decent punctuation, putting capitals at the start of names?
Me, I am afraid. It was drummed into me in my formative years. I once worked for a man called Clive Jackson, a decent cove, but a tad pedantic. In the days before email, he used to pass letters he had received down to me with corrections to their grammar made in red ink. We used to have a reguylar debate about the use of apostrohes on any copy I put before him. We liked to get it right.
One of my proudest achievements, whilst working for Clive, and since, was producing 24x 24 page full colour brochures with only 4 small mistakes. 3 extremely minor typo's and something else which I now forget. Clive took great delight in pointing them out to me!
I suspect I could find that many mistakes in almost anything these days. It is the immediacy of being able to check things on screen, click a button and send it off. No colour proofs to pour over.
I think that is a great shame. We should take more pride in getting it right first time.
Hugh Bessant
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