The One Call You Always Take

Twice in the last two days, I've been talking with colleagues who interrupted our call by saying, "Hang, on, I've got to catch this call." In both cases, the call was from a child at college. My daughter is 14 hours away at college so I perfectly understood being put on hold. You always take the call from a kid at college, whether the topic is "I need money" or "The oil light came on last month....should I worry?" or "My professor hates me, I hate my roommate, I hate college, and I've just signed up for the Peace Corps, cut off all my hair, and got a tattoo." Some people are just too important to ignore.

Do your clients feel the same way? Do they interrupt calls to take yours? How do you become the "interrupter" and not the "interruptee?" Here are three ways to make sure they take your call:

1. Offer a gift. Every time you talk with a client, you should give them something no one else can give them. It could be a compliment, a tidbit of free advice, a tip on a new technology that would make their life easier, or just a juicy piece of news about a mutual acquaintance.
2. Keep it short. We're all busy, so keep the interruption to a minimum unless, of course, they want to talk.
3. Listen more than you talk. Once you offer the gift, let the recipient do the talking. If they're busy or don't want to talk, fine. But you may have caught them in the middle of an issue. We all want someone who listens to us on our terms. This might just be the time the client wants a receptive ear.

Give 'em a reason to take your call. They'll appreciate it more than the call that begins, "Daddy, who is our insurance company....?"

IVR Revenge

Seth Godin mentions in his blog a company that has found a way around those interminable phone trees we get when we call a large company. Fonolo is in beta with a service that "spiders" phone trees for, say, your bank, and then allows you to "deep dial" the number you want. You bypass the language choices and the inane "Please listen carefully because we've changed the options" speeches we always get and you get directly to the number you want.

Fonolo is an example of consumer backlash against companies that place operational efficiency ahead of a positive customer experience. It will be interesting to see if the large companies fight this or accept it. The excellent companies will take a lesson and make getting to the right number quickly a normal part of their process.

Help a Reporter Out

Heard of this? Help a Reporter Out http://www.helpareporter.com/ is the brainchild of Peter Shankman, an author and PR guy in NYC who got tired of going to his contact list when reporter friends were looking for sources for a story. He started it on Facebook then quickly out grew it and moved to its own site. When you sign up, you get daily (usually 3x) emails from Shankman with one to two dozen requests for stories. You find a story that you can help with and respond to the reporter. The subjects and publications range from the obscure (and a bit weird) to mainstream media.



There are currently something north of 16,000 people who have signed up to be sources. There's also a LinkedIn group.



Why should marketer's care? Well, first, if you're in the professional services world, what better way to market yourself than by being quoted on a subject that's close to your heart and where you can add value? Second, here's another great example of the melding of social networks and digital technology to meet a need.



Check it out. You may get the chance to have your fifteen minutes of fame riffing on your favorite subject.

Staying Up in Down Times

Here in the South, we're "fixin' to" (or preparing to) enter the Dog Days of Summer...a time when the heat goes up and everything slows down. This summer we face the Dog Days coupled with an economy that by all accounts is and has been in recession. What should we marketers do?

If you listen to management guru Ram Charan, you go on the offensive. In a recent Fortune magazine article, Charan lists his four imperatives for business in a slow economy. Good advice for marketers as well.

1. Keep building -- excellent companies cut where they have to but don't touch new product development, innovation, and brand building.
2. Communicate intensively -- your employees are stressed, your investors are stressed, your customers are stressed. Keep the lines of communication open. More importantly, keep listening to your customers to understand their needs. If you can profitably meet those needs now, you'll be in a great position to grow your relationship with them when things pick up.
3. Evaluate your customers -- right now, cash flow is king. Do some of your customers view you as a bank for interest free loans by continually postponing payment? Maybe it's time to let them go or renegotiate. Either way, now is not the time to prolong unprofitable business.
4. Just say no to across the board cuts -- make cuts with a scalpel, not a chainsaw. Slow times may be a good opportunity to sell or close unprofitable parts of the business, but across the board reductions rarely work.

If we take this advice, we can help our clients weather this Dog Days economy so that they are positioned to build market share when we get to better times.

Don't Tell the Boss About This....

I used to work with a guy who had this great way of getting out of meetings. At exactly 25 minutes after the meeting began, his secretary would come in and whisper something in his ear. He would then leave the meeting room. Ten minutes after that, his secretary would reenter the room, pick up his belongings and leave. This guy never attended a meeting for longer than 30 minutes!


Now there's a free service called Phone My Phone (http://www.phonemyphone.com/) that cuts out the middleman. If you go to Phonemyphone.com, you can have the service contact you at a pre-determined time so, if you're in a boring meeting, you can discretely excuse yourself and leave. It's also great as a Plan B for that excruciatingly terrible blind date. I've also heard it used to find your cell phone when there's not another phone around.


Now, I doubt phonemyphone.com will become the next LinkedIn for the business world.

But it teaches us as marketers that if you tap into pains in the marketplace ("please get me out of this meeting!!") you can create awareness for your company. Then you can then add additional services that are more serious and business focused.


It will be interesting to see how PMP gains subscribers and how their business model evolves.

Has anyone used Phone my Phone?

A New Spin on an Old Idea

Every heard of “flogos?” A flogo is a floating logo, made of soap, water, helium and compressed gas. Snowmasters, Inc., maker of Flogos, is a Lexington, Alabama (http://www.flogos.net/) based special effects firm who counts Disney, the Atlanta Braves, and Auburn University as clients. Flogos are made from a machine that looks much like the Play-Do clay press we had as kids – the cloud is generated in the machine and forced through a stencil of the desired logo, then it’s cut as it passes through the stencil. The cloud then floats up and, if there’s a wind, out over the countryside. Flogos have been known to travel 30 miles and reach a maximum altitude of 20,000 feet.

Flogos are environmentally friendly and, so far, airplane friendly. The FAA has said the floating logos fall under the same rules that govern balloons.

What’s cool about this from a marketer’s point of view is that it takes an old concept –flying an old biplane with a banner over a stadium – and completely updates it. This is a concept that should have some staying power because of its uniqueness. Until, of course, someone has an accident while watching one of these and then hires a personal injury lawyer. But for now, let’s enjoy a new product from a creative company.

Has anyone seen a Flogo?

Happy Birthday DARPA

Q: What do you get when you connect “100 freewheeling genius zealots” with a travel agent?
A: You get the government agency that created the blue print for the Internet, sponsored the inventor of the computer mouse, and helped send man to the moon via the Saturn rocket program.

The Washington Post ran an article in their April 7, 2008 online edition highlighting the fiftieth birthday of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). DARPA was formed by President Eisenhower in 1958 as a response to the Soviet’s Sputnik launch and as a way to fast track applied research. It’s a unique agency in a world of government bureaucracy – it has only two layers of management and half of its employees are program managers or office directors who are on 4-6 year assignments.

“DARPA will take a chance on an idea with no data. We’ll put up the money to go get the data and see if the idea holds,” said Anthony J. Tether, agency director.

The agency is currently working on two-way speech translation systems which allow a soldier to communicate with and understand anyone they encounter anywhere in the world. They’re also creating a prosthetic limb prototype that uses the brain to control the limb and help soldiers remain in the military without having to be discharged.

So what can we as product managers learn from DARPA?

1. Even in heavily bureaucratic organizations, innovation can thrive. If it can survive in the Mother of All Bureaucracies, it can flourish in yours. Don’t give up.
2. Innovation is best done with flat organization structures that enable fast, go / no-go decisions. You’ve got to get the bad ideas out of the way as early as possible.
3. Innovation is a mix of art and science and is typically not linear. Sometimes you have to go get data to support an idea, rather than having an idea come as a conclusion from lots of data.
   

Innovation is about big ideas that change the way we do things. DARPA is a great example of big ideas that change the world. Happy 50th DARPA.