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The Irish Bank Robber and Facebook

August 22, 2010

When the renowned Irish American bank robber, Willie Sutton was arrested having been caught after one of his many bank heists he famously gave the following response to journalists who asked him why he kept robbing banks, “Because, that’s where the money was!”

Willie Sutton, The Famous Bank Robber

Willie Sutton, also known as “Slick Willie” and “Willie the Actor” (he was a master of disguises) was born in Brooklyn in 1901 and lived till 1980. He managed to rob 100 banks in his 79 year career, spending much of this in prison after many captures. Toward the end of his life he ended up fronting an advertising campaign for a bank who were introducing card ID’s with the person’s picture on it.

Besides being a notorious bank robber his quote earned him everlasting fame as his surname is now often quoted to refer to any situation where something is clearly “obvious”. In medical circles in particular his name comes up as “Suttons Law” to describe a situation where a diagnosis is exactly that and accountants even use it when talking about Activity Based Costing, “The Willie Sutton Rule”!

In the business of Marketing & PR we often get resistance when we recommend to clients that they should be engaging pro-actively with users on Facebook. We get the arguments about not liking computers, not having enough time, that all users are youngsters and generally not knowing how to use Facebook and not seeing the relevance to them.

Worldwide users have reached 550 Million with the figure in Ireland just over 1.4 million. Of these over 700,000 are over the age of 30. Many of these are your customers!

On average people are using Facebook about 25 minutes per day. Facebook has individual users as well as many businesses who have their own “business pages” and are interacting and influencing Facebook users on a daily basis. Starbucks, the famous American chain of coffee stores have over 12 million people signed up as fans.

The next time we talk about the relevance of Facebook with a client we might just quote the famous bank robber, Willie .. after all it’s very obvious!

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion Communications

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Posted in Business Start Ups, Marketing, PR, SEO, Social Media, Uncategorized, Web Marketing | 21 Comments »

Bill Gates and his last dollar

July 4, 2010

 

Bill Gates

“If I was down to my last dollar I would spend it on PR” was the famous quote that Bill Gates made and one that many of us in the PR industry use when we are trying to draw attention to the importance of our services.

Ironically many of us are nearly down to our last dollars, or Euros and you might question does this piece of advice really hold water, how applicable is it and is this really what Bill Gates meant when he made the comment?  Was he ever down to his last dollar? – I wonder..

Does he really suggest that when a business is really tight that it spends its income in such a way?

When the recession kicked in how did you react in your business? What overheads got the chop? I’m suspecting that Marketing & PR budgets were given the scissors treatment – was this the right thing to do? How did this affect your business and the attitude of those working there?

Positive Attitude, Positive Activity and Positive Spend

Not knowing Bill I can only guess but this is my interpretation of what he meant ..

PR is as much an attitude, a process, a set of beliefs, a way of behaving positively as much as it is about Press Releases and actually employing a PR resource.

PR or Public Relations is all about Managing your Reputation– protecting, maintaining, building and managing your reputation. Even if you are down to your last dollar you need to keep investing or doing this.

There is nothing more valuable as a good reputation and this is about a lot more than employing PR companies or about issuing press releases. Your reputation is every single aspect of how your business relates to the outside world, your customers, your prospects, the general public and the media. This applies equally to a self employed candlestick maker as it does to a large multinational.

Ok, how about 16 Tips for improving and managing your Reputation (PR) for €1

1.    Answer the phones politely and helpfully
2.    Return missed calls promptly
3.    Return email enquiries quickly
4.    Deliver a good service to customers
5.    Handle complaints fairly and efficiently
6.    Deliver products and services on time
7.    Ensure your billing is correct
8.    Be polite, fair and efficient with your suppliers and staff
9.    Keep customers and prospects up to date with new products, features and services
10.    Treat your suppliers fairly
11.    Treat your customers with respect (even if they are experiencing difficulty and are under financial pressure)
12.    Ensure that all correspondence is well laid out, with correct English, is easily understood, professional and properly reflects your business
13.    Ensure your premises and vehicles are kept neat and tidy
14.    Ensure the attire of your staff is in keeping with the standards of your business
15.    Ensure your staff always talk up your company and do not air grievances outside of the four walls with external people – make a pact to sort things out internally
16.    Talk up the achievements of your company and the staff working there – their talents, skills and achievements

This is not an exhaustive list – have a think about it and add another 5/10/20 points to improve your reputation even more. Even better get your team to help you with this task.

Ok, all of this is good for your business reputation, it didn’t require the intervention of third party consultants and oh yeah, it didn’t really cost a shilling – you still have your €1 left!

So far we have looked at some housekeeping reputation issues.

Positive Attitude

As we mentioned PR is in essence a positive attitude – first and foremost you need to declare war on this recession and ensure that you and everyone in your business understands the importance of your reputation and a Positive Attitude towards your business. You will thrive in this environment and if you are alert you will not only survive but you will be in a position to seize on unique opportunities that may arise.

Back to the job of spending our last €1..

Communicate that you are going to invest in positive activity for your business – You have been in Retreat mode and now you want to invest funds in forward mode – you want to “Storm” this recession. Your staff must understand that every €1 is vital, that you want maximum return from it and challenge them to achieve this. Show and positively display the faith that you have in the business and communicate that you and your team are adopting “attack” mode!

This positive mind shift is essential for the business.

Where do we spend our €1?

–    Refresh your Website – review and refresh the text, besides being new and positive it helps your Search Engine ranking
–    Optimise your Website (do a Google search on this and you will learn find how to do it for free)
–    Update the News items on the website – announce new customers, products or services
–    Set up a Facebook business page, it’s free – take the time and build a following for your business online. Ask customers to sign up, email them, ring them, tell them..
–    Start using the other social media sites such as Twitter or LinkedIn to build your contacts and spread awareness for your business, products and service. If you’re not sure how to do this – Google it .. there are plenty of articles and tips available online
–    Prepare Press Releases about your company or services . Do you have anything interesting or new happening in the business? – let the press know.
–    Advertising: maybe you have an advertising campaign running with the local papers or a trade publication – negotiate that you get some free editorial to support these adverts (keep it interesting, they won’t print boring stuff!)

All of this is positive – have you ever noticed that you like being around positive people? In business we are no different and we like dealing with positive, successful businesses. Behave like one of them.

Build your reputation, shout it from the rooftops and make this a clearly understood activity in your business.

Big problem… we still haven’t spent that €1

Print a few posters and put them around your business “We are Storming the Recession”

If you have more than €1 to spend feel free to give Fuzion a call and we will help you achieve the maximum from your Marketing & PR budget.

Bill, thanks for the PR thumbs up ..

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion Communications

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Posted in Marketing, PR, Recession, SEO, Social Media, Web Marketing | 16 Comments »

Get it off your chest Online!

April 20, 2010

Have you found yourself in the frustrating position of getting absolutely nowhere with a complaint?

Now this could be on a small scale in a corner shop, at a restaurant where you have had a lousy meal or it could be against one of the big guys. The old saying goes that a bad experience travels quickly with word of mouth as we do tend to share our frustrations with friends, loved ones and anyone that will listen! If anyone is really annoyed about something they tend to share it with a lot of people.

TripAdvisor Logo

TripAdvisor

Spreading the frustration has now got much faster and easier and with a much bigger reach with the onset of the web and the powerful free tools available including Trip Advisor, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and blogs.

These tools can work for you in that they can help get rid of that frustration and genuinely hurt the culprits but they can also help to actually resolve your issue to a satisfactory conclusion.

If your issue is with the “big guys” your activity online can really work in your favour and help to get that proper attention that you have been looking for.

The “big guys” and a lot of the smaller companies are very conscious of their reputations and are often carefully tracking what is being said about them online using tools such as Google Alerts and Twitter searches.

To demonstrate this point I will share with you a small real life example of how this worked for me.  I recently had a problem with one of our national phone service suppliers and was very quickly getting nowhere fast. After nearly 12 months of total frustration and the realisation that this problem was not being sorted out by the normal means I decided to write about my issue in my personal blog, carefully naming the offending company in a way that, if they were paying attention they would definitely notice!

Having completed my blog post I then shared the blog with my Social Media Community, my Facebook contacts, my Twitter followers and my connections and groups on Linked In.

All I had to do then was wait and see if my nothing to lose experiment would actually work ..

Within a few hours not only did I have a bucket load of responses from other people with similar complaints but I also received a call from the offending company in response to my blog issue!

Not in response to my complaint but to my blog!  To be fair to the guy calling he wanted to sort out my problem and I was able to take him through it in detail and within days the whole issue was sorted and I managed to negotiate a fair rebate, which I was told was impossible up until then.

Was this a company eager to satisfy unhappy customers or one that didn’t want to be “red-faced” online? – to be honest I didn’t really care, I finally managed to solve a problem that had been dragging on forever.

The lesson in all of this is that if you require it, you have a very powerful and effective voice available to you online if you choose to use the  tools available , to make your point.

However this can be a double edged sword!

Exactly the same can apply to your own business and you should pay attention to what is being said about you online.  Use the simple to use tools such as Google Alerts and Twitter Search and hear first hand about the good, the bad and the ugly!

If it’s good then highlight the unprompted testimonials on your website and in your newsletters and presentations. If it’s bad or it gets ugly then deal with the problem and don’t be afraid to share how you solved the issue online. Use the issue as an opportunity to show you genuinely care about your customers.

There is no hiding place online!

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion Communications

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Posted in Customer Care, Irish Economy, Marketing, Social Media, Web Marketing | Leave a Comment »

Get Results – Complain Online!

March 1, 2010

This is just a very simple follow up piece on an issue that I was having with Eircom, which was dragging on and on forever.

Basically I was pretty much getting no satisfaction, I was being passed from pillar to post and getting nowhere fast.

In the meantime I read an interesting article about how many years ago a guy in the States blogged about lousy service he had received from Dell Computers. Once he had blogged the post was noticed online and soon there was an avalanche of people with the same problems & eventually Dell spotted the commotion, reacted and more importantly took the issues on board and sorted out some serious issues they were having.

Eircom

Eircom Business

I took the same approach and put my frustration on my blog (I circulated this through Facebook & Linkedin) and found that while no one in Eircom was listening through the normal channels the story online was quite different!

Within hours I had a guy onto me directly from Eircom responding to my blog post. The issue that had been dragging on forever was sorted within a week (well hopefully, when I get the credit I will know it is sorted).

On the positive side the issue was sorted, on the negative why did it take an online post to get a reaction?

The power of online media ..

Greg Canty is a partner of Fuzion Communications

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Posted in Customer Care, Marketing, PR, Social Media, Web Marketing | Leave a Comment »

How do I find New Customers Easily?

January 24, 2010

I deliberately changed the heading I originally had for this article as I felt many of you may just switch off and not bother reading any further!

While that may not be a fair thing to do it is actually not too bad as the title I have chosen for the article is actually very accurate. However the title I had originally chosen was “Social Media is a form of free advertising – Use it!”

Already as I had feared many of you could be saying – I can’t even use a computer so I’m not even going to read this!

Please bear with me and read on. It’s easier than you think and this is a unique opportunity for your business. Many people are already using the different forms of Social Media and are successfully spreading the word about their business and winning new customers in the process.

Consider the different Social Media tools as forms of free advertising, free publicity and a free way to spread the word about your store or your brand. How can you ignore it?

You owe it to yourself to at least understand how it all works, how it could work for you and your business and then decide whether it is something you need to learn or something you need someone to do for you. Most importantly understand how some of your competitors are using these tools and the advantages they are gaining in the process.

Facebook

Facebook for Business

A small piece of information that might help to hold your interest – There are over 1,110,000 registered users of Facebook in Ireland, all over 18. You might assume that most of these are quite young? Nearly 500,000 of these users are 30 and over. My guess is a lot of your customers are busy using Facebook!

Some of you will already have discovered the power of the different social media for your business but for most it is a fabulous awareness opportunity just waiting to be discovered.

Let’s start with the basics – What exactly is Social Media?

They are the tools available on the web for socialising with other people online. There are many such tools and all totally free you will be glad to hear. The most popular and most useful of these are Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

You don’t need to have a website to use any of these tools, just an email address. If you have a website they can be used to bring more traffic to it.

I will try my best to explain each of these in the most simplest of terms:

Facebook (www.facebook.com) is a powerful free resource for communicating with individuals and groups. At the heart of it you sign yourself up as an individual, build up a network of friends sharing messages, pictures and even video. You can also become a fan of business pages, which could include your favourite shops, charities etc. You can also set up a business page for your own business and encourage your customers to sign up as fans – through this you can add news about new products, show visuals of new collections, announce sales and even invite your fans to an event such as a sale.

I strongly recommend Facebook for any business in the hospitality or retail sector. We encourage all of our clients in these sectors to set up their presence on Facebook and to use it proactively. For example Starbucks have over 5.5million fans worldwide on their Facebook page, that’s a lot of coffee drinkers!

Twitter Logo

Twitter for business

Twitter (www.twitter.com) is a totally different beast. Basically you can set up an account or identity for yourself or your business and you then choose to follow others or let them follow you. You can then publish short messages referred to as ‘tweets’, which can be seen by the people following you and vice versa. For me quite honestly I am not totally sold on Twitter but I do see the sense in deliberately following businesses or journalists that may be of relevance to you and learn what they are writing about.

LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com) is quite different to the others as it is a business to business form of online networking. On LinkedIn you set up your profile and from here you can invite others to connect with you. With LinkedIn you can normally see quite detailed information about where people are working and the position they hold. LinkedIn comes to life through the ‘Groups’ facility. You can join groups on LinkedIn such as your local Chamber, trade Groups or different interest groups. You can also set up a group yourself and invite others to join. For example I set up a group called Spend Ireland, which encourages people to spend their money in Ireland. These groups can be excellent for discussing topics and finding out information. Another feature of LinkedIn is the ability to register personal recommendations for your contacts and vice versa and you can also request introductions through your connections.

You can spend a lot of precious time on each of these so are they worth it?

Must – My own view is that you absolutely must be using Facebook proactively for your business as a store or as a brand. Make sure you complete your profile and regularly keep it fresh with news, updates, offers, visuals and comments. Let your customers know that you have a Facebook page and encourage them to sign up. A vital point to remember is that it is a form of ‘Social Media’ – try not to be too formal, you will only turn people off. Learn as much as you can by joining other peoples pages and watch how they are communicating news and offers. If you feel you do not have the time arrange for someone to do this for you.

LinkedIn Logo

LinkedIn for business

Maybe – I would try LinkedIn and Twitter once I was up and running on Facebook.

One final tip for you – If you have a website make it easy for people to share it with their contacts on the different social media by adding an ‘Add This’ sharing button to your website. Check out www.addthis.com to learn how. If you have a website and are also using Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn direct them to these pages by adding buttons to the site.

I know that all of this can seem complicated and can be a little daunting but I promise you will get there one step at a time at you will win new customers for you business. What are you waiting for?

Greg Canty is a partner in Fuzion Communications, providing Marketing Consultancy, PR and Graphic Design and Web Optimisation services.

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Click Your Way to Success

August 11, 2009

Do terms such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and Web Marketing make your eyes gloss over and bring on a wave of sudden tiredness?I totally understand how you feel but I can promise you that getting this area right will definitely lead to more business for you. In a tough economic climate this is one of those areas that you can improve easily and it won’t break the bank.

The good news is that it is not that complicated!

Just think of SEO or Web Marketing as “making it easier for potential customers to find your business online”

The Importance of Web Marketing
It goes without saying that being found on the net easily could be the difference between doing business and not doing business.Your website is in effect your ‘on-line brochure’ and it is vital that it is easily found by potential clients who may be looking for your services or products. Over 50% of all product and service searches are instigated by searches on the web. While this figure may vary from industry to industry it is constantly increasing.

Whether someone is searching for a Tax Consultant in Dublin, a Maternity Clothing Store in Limerick or even a PR Company that provides web optimisation services!, it is vital that you are found online if you provide any of these services. Can you afford not to be visible?

For the sake of argument, quickly do a Google search on one of your key services and see how your website performs – if I do a search for ‘PR in Cork’ it is important for my business that Fuzion appear in a prominent position. There are a number of areas to consider as part of your ‘being found easier on the web’ campaign:

Your Website = Your “On-Line Brochure”

It goes without saying that your website should present your business properly and much of this will be down to the ‘look and feel’ of the website in exactly the same way as a professionally designed brochure would create a good impression.
Just like the old saying ‘paper doesn’t refuse ink’, exactly the same applies for websites.

Google and other search engines, while very sophisticated in many ways are actually quite simple. If they are returning the results of a search query they are attempting to match the words that you have searched on with the index or catalogue of words and websites that they have on their giant database.

In doing this the search engines follow certain criteria but the bottom line is that they are trying to find the best match for the query. Words are the key to every search – it makes sense that if I search for ‘Tax Consultant in Dublin’ the search engine will return a website that has these words featured prominently on the site but critically used correctly. They are clever enough to know that a website with Tax Consultant in Dublin written 100 times is trying to cheat the system!

So, words are important but they must be used in the right way.

When planning your website decide on your key services & products and then make sure that the site is optimised specifically for each of these. I would advise a separate page for each key service, which should then in turn be optimised properly. Yawn, I can feel it coming on..

Optimise – this means ensuring that the content includes the important keywords, that the headings on each paragraph carry the keywords and the first introductory paragraph carries the keywords. Search engines can’t read pictures, except for the labels embedded on them – be careful with too many pictures.

If my company specialises in PR then Google expects to find the words ‘PR’ in prominent places on some pages of my website. Besides the content you see on each page there are a few things in the background that the search engines place huge importance on.

The title of each web page, the description for each page and the keywords for each page are really important. These are programmed into the background but it is important that they include the words that are important to you: ‘PR in Cork and Dublin’ should feature on my PR Services page.

How do you know if this is being done for your website?

The title of each web page appears in the line at the very top of the web browser. When you look at any page of your website click a button on the browser called ‘View’ and then ‘Page Source’ which shows you the code that runs behind the scenes. Check to see the content that appears after meta “description” and meta “keywords” and ensure that these include the keywords that are important for this page.

Outside of this your website should be easy to navigate, should be updated regularly (a Content Management System will enable you do this easily yourself), should carry links to relevant sites and make sure it is easy for someone to make contact with you.

Off-line activities

Another good and quite obvious tip to encourage awareness for your website is to use your web address prominently on all advertising, uniforms, packaging and on company vehicles.

This is an area that’s very basic but is often overlooked.

Paid Search (Pay per Click)

If you have done all you can in terms of optimising your website naturally and you are still not achieving a position on web searches then I would suggest trying Google Adwords.

This is very effective in drawing very specific traffic to your website. Google will display ‘paid results’ alongside organic\normal results. These are the websites that appear at the very top of the page and on the right of the page.

In simple terms if you want your website to be displayed when someone searches on a particular keyword, you can ‘bid’ on that keyword. This is often referred to as ‘pay per click’ as you are only charged when someone clicks through to your website from your advert.

Until your organic or natural position improves, it is a great way of achieving a good position with relevant search queries and if your advertisement delivers exactly what a user is looking for then they will be inclined to click onto your site. It is advised that these campaigns are set up very carefully to ensure your budget is not wasted.

Summary
Being found on line is critical for every business. If your website cannot be found easily than this is great news! This can only mean more business when you sort it out, which is hopefully now easier than you originally thought.

After all that a strong coffee is required!

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Posted in Marketing, SEO, Web Marketing | 7 Comments »

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