How to do Business

Mobile marketing. Went to our local Chartered Institute of Marketing event last week. What was most interesting was the way that leading use seems to be pull rather than push. The industry seems to have learnt something from the email spam problem. The biggest uses are for inbound texts in response to advert or web activity such as “text to win” and for CRM and service delivery – plus microblogging using tools like twitter. (see below) Success factors are managing unsubscribes, personalised messages, appropriate use that will be accepted like reminders from the dentist and using the right language for the audience. Just like normal marketing in fact!
Twitter. A useful tool to let the world know what you’re up to. You can update it from your blog or from the Ecademy “status” field or from various specific interface tools. It’s point is that it gives you a way of letting people who are interested in your ideas keep up to date with you. If you’re selling your expertise or your knowledge this can be quite useful as you can embed keywords and links into your 140 characters. A useful primer on this can be found on Graham Jones’ Blog on Ecademy or you can just join at www.twitter.com or follow me on www.twitter.com/alanrae if you want to follow what I’m up to.
Social Media. Thomas Power’s twitter feed included this link to Universal McCann’s latest report on social media. You can download the 80 page report here. It’s worth a read. China has more bloggers than the US and Europe combined. There are 184 million bloggers worldwide. 34% post opinions on brands in their blogs. In fact the report tells us that corporate marketers are being left behind by people like us. And they don’t like it!
Collaborative working. 1 Man Brands often need to be able to work with other small business to bid for or deliver contracts collaboratively. It spreads the pain and burden of customer acquisition and allows a better offer to be put together. I use a product called BaseCamp which lets us have a project document store, manage the project emails and provides some basic project management tools. I use the 3 project version which costs about £6 per month. However one of my gangs introduced me to Google Docs last week which is definitely worth a look as its truly multi-tasking allowing several people to work in a spreadsheet at once. It also supports documents and presentations and looks like a good product for collaborative working. Windows Live is also worth a look.
If you are interested in this our current research project is talking to some early adopters about collaborative working techniques. We’ll be running a pilot workshop in London on 20th June to tell you what we’ve discovered. As it’s subsidised by the University it will only be £25 + VAT. More details here.