Consumer Intelligence

I received a letter this morning from an accounting company marked “Private and Confidential”

Feeling all excitable I decided to open it.  You never know with accountants.  It could be a long lost relative deciding to leave money to me in their will.

It wasn’t it was an offer to do payroll for our company.  That’s an interesting service, agreed, not one I need to buy.

But why is it Private and Confidential.  In order for it to be private it must be something that is for my eyes only, something that is personal to me.  For it to be confidential it must be something that if anyone else was to read it then I may be in deep trouble.  For it to be both basically means, if anyone touches this, other than me, they will be shot.

This letter was so non-private and non-confidential that the sender didn’t even bother to sign it themselves, it was a digital signature.

Shame on them.

This is a reckless abuse of the post and of an address on an envelope and I have had enough of it.  I intend to use this blog to post the names and web site addresses of any company that sends me a Private and Confidential letter when it isn’t.  That way you can harass them directly.

So let me just retrieve this letter from the bin.  Oh yes, here it is Bishop Fleming Chartered Accountants, based out of Torquay.   torquay@bishopfleming.com is there email address.  I publish this here, because it will certainly be harvested and then spammed heavily.  Just like they did to me.

A few months ago, a magazine approached me from the insurance industry to do a mystery-shopping piece about insurance companies. For those new to this back page, or who haven’t followed the Ian Hughes story, my company is a mystery shopping company, which sort of focuses on that market. So the offer was interesting for us.

We worked hard on it for about 3 weeks to collect the data and turn it into an interesting article of about 1,000 words. Having submitted it on time, things went quiet. After a few days I wrote to the magazine to see what they thought. They wrote back saying that they really wanted to name and shame the bad companies, they weren’t interested in celebrating what was good in the good companies.

For me that causes a problem, a public naming and shaming is a bit like bring one of those paparazzo’s that follows stars around. I’d rather be a Hello magazine sort of mystery shopper, it just feels classier.

So I said no and the article was spiked.

You have got to hate sub-editors, with this esteemed magazine as the obvious exception. Clearly this is the Hello of Direct Marketing magazines.

I found this annoying, so I thought I would write to the editor. The best way to find the editor, go to the web site and look under contacts, Right? Well, when I went to the site, it gave me an error message when I called up contacts.

Being devious, I thought I would go in through the subscription route. After all, the whole point of publishing a magazine is to get people to subscribe. Isn’t it? Well, I clicked on the subscribe button and…error message.

Bottom line, you can’t buy from this company, and they don’t like to make it easy to talk to them

Imagine that, having a web site where you can’t subscribe and you can’t contact them to tell them you can’t subscribe

You know that they look at the web site regularly, because they will want to make sure that everything looks right in the work they have written. None of them have tried to subscribe or contact themselves via the site, though. Naturally, they will look at the subscriber stats and say “well no subscriptions from the site this week, that’s because no one ever subscribes from that site.” Little do they know the reason why?

The story doesn’t end there. 4 times over 6 months I wrote to them to tell them what was wrong. And the site is still broken.

What you have just witnessed first hand is not something terribly complicated. It is a simple piece of mystery shopping. In mystery shopping terms it is a Lowry. Simple and uncomplicated.

But when was the last time you mystery shopper yourself? When was the last time you checked out your own web site, actually bought something from yourself or tried your customer service? Or have you tried calling your company and seen how friendly the greeting is? Seriously, next time you call your office think toy yourself “would that be OK if I was a customer?

When you have a complicated system and process it is easy for things to fall over, it’s easy for mistakes to happen. But these sorts of mistakes are unforgivable.

It’s bad for a little back street Insurance Industry Magazine. But it can happen to the best of us. While writing this article I was considering whether I should go to DMDNY in New York. So I went to the DMDNY web site and clicked on exhibitors to see if I knew any of the exhibitors going. Then I thought I would check the agenda. A broken link.

Arrgghh….

We should know better, we could know better, but without good testing and good mystery shopping we won’t know. Another way to do it is to look at the error messages thrown up by your web site, but who has the time for that.

In the wonderful world of marketing, we often spend so much time thinking about and worrying about the look and feel of something that we completely, totally, utterly forget the execution. And the very people who should really care about it seem to be blinded to it. In Insurance Times doesn’t sell subscriptions then the sub-editor is out of a job. But the sub-editor doesn’t take enough pride to make sure the web site it right. Similarly whoever runs the web sites for DMDNY, if the show doesn’t work they will loose their job. Maybe a web site that works is a good place to start.

I can preach this lesson because I have failed at this, badly, so many times in my life that it is crazy. I have built so many web sites that build to dead ends. Where customers end up frustrated and annoyed. It can often happen when you are rushing to get something done and, as a result, you forget the details

In a world full of rich communications, you just expect the web to work. And if I have a choice of buying from you or your competitor, and your web site isn’t working, well guess where I am going!

When was the last time you gave your own web site a good kicking? And your competitors?

Apparently I am being followed.

Somewhere, out there, in the ether, someone is following my twitter feed (you can follow me @ianchughes.

You can also facebook me, I am Ian Hughes (no surprise there).

Oh, and I am on linkedin.

I used to be on bebo and myspace as well, but you can ignore those. I have an MSN account and a Yahoo account and several email addresses that are required for mystery shopping purposes.

You can check my blog out at www.consumerintel.com or here at dmionline.com. you can email me, call me or text me.

In short, I’m on the grid.

So now what?

It seems to me that with all these connections my life is not that much richer and neither is that of those around me. You see I can facebook my daughters (can you use facebook as a verb?), I can twitter with my eldest. Some of my friends are on Facebook, some are on LinkedIn.

But in all of this I am finding little extra value as an individual. And if I can’t find value, well it won’t survive.

A recent survey of twitter found that less than 10% of the users are creating about 90% of the traffic, or content or something like that. Bottom line, most people are inactive. MySpace has even announced that it is laying people off.

IMHO (also know as In My Humble Opinion) there is a lot of communication but not a lot of conversation going on.

And it is this conversation that engages people.

For me, a large amount of facebook and twitter is just that, it’s a lot of people making noise. It’s a bit like someone in the old CB radio days (remember those), randomly pressing the transmit button every now and then and saying “I’m driving along”, “Now, I have stopped”, “now I am driving again”.

It’s the electronic equivalent of saying “look at me!”. Before you know it, people will be writing columns for magazines. God forbid!

But where is the value for you as a marketer. There are some great examples of marketers that are using Twitter, like Jet Blue and iPhone. And my good friend Aleksandr Orlov is on Facebook with nearly 500,000 fans.

But the question is, does it make me want to buy car insurance, an iphone or fly jet blue. And the answer is….no.

So what’s the point?

We have tried doing some advertising on Facebook and, I have to say, it worked to a limited degree. But is that because Facebook is a good place to advertise, or because we happened to be one of the first. Will it really work long term?

Let me give you one example of where social networking does seem to be working. On LinkedIn I have a group of people who went to Harvard with me, we are spread across the 6 continents of the world living disparate lives. LinkedIn gives us the ability to reconnect our community. As a result of linked in we are organizing a physical reunion, in order to match the virtual reunion. And this does seem to be working, and it is very simple.

However, recently we had a recruiter try to join our group in order to try and offer members of the group a job. Needless to say we declined. But what would be something that we as a group would be willing to accept? And could the company make money out of it?

Folks, I don’t know. I am not sure what the value of blogging is, or the value of being connected. But here’s what I am planning to do. Over the next month or so, I am going to try my best to get and stay connected. I am going to try to immerse myself in this new digital.

I am going to try and become as connected as a man can be and see what I think some of the angles are. And then I will report back.

Right now, I enter this with a preconception that says this: the only company that has successfully managed to make money out of mining the interests of consumers is Google. Every other company that has worked to build a community of content, which it gives away for free in the prospect of making money from other sources, has failed.

It fails because people get bored or because they object when companies overtly try to monetize the relationship then all this fuss and nonsense is all fuss and no fizz.