GASP Customer Service Simply Not Good Enough In the Current Day

People, who have followed my writings in articles and on this blog, will know full well the importance I have always placed on the absolute necessity for maintaining unflinching levels of customer service and civility to you customers and prospects alike.

In light of this, it will come as no surprise that I am appalled to hear about the recent events taking place concerning Chadstone store of GASP clothing, as seen on the Sunday evening news on February 12, 2012.

In September 2011, an incident occurred between a customer and a staff member, where the staff member incredibly told the customer that the clothes were too exclusive for her. In a time of economic uncertainty and ongoing hard times in the retail sector, such comments barely seem believable.

Specifically the attending salesperson is reported to have said:
"Look at what you're wearing. Let me find you something to wear so that you can dress good for once in your life!"

In an amazing follow up to this incident, management have responded to a complaint made by the customer that can only be described as incomprehensible.

One would assume that put in this position; management would be focused on putting the incident to bed, but not so.

In fact the GASP spokesperson had this to say in response:

"Keara (O'Neil) and the three bridesmaids came into the store and were making a mockery of the dresses," he told Sunrise.

"The women's behaviour had the potential to bully other customers who wanted to a buy a dress and the incident had been Ms O'Neil's fault because she had not visited the store with a "positive approach".

"Some people come into the store who don't want to turn heads, who don't want to stand out from the crowd and that's not what we sell," he said.

He went on to add:

"Our shops are packed, everyone knows us now and I can't thank her enough for what she did for us," he said of Ms O'Neil


I will leave it to each of you to think about whom you believe and how credible this response is.

Suffice to say in a world of social media and unprecedented networking, I believe the market will have the final word and the GASP management will come to understand the value of humility and modesty as these events work their way through the various social platforms.

I suspect Decjuba and other up market rivals will be rubbing their hands together with glee.
I mean it's not every day your rivals display such unrivalled contempt for customers.

Until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Daniele.

New Social Media Guidelines for the Pharmaceutical Industry

After a long, two-year period,the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced new social-media marketing guidelines for pharmaceutical firms that market their products to doctors, and depending on the country, patients.

The FDA posted its 'Guidance for Industry' in response to ongoing requests for Off-Label Information About Prescription Drugs and Medical Devices" in the Federal Register.

The 15-page FDA guidance addresses only off-label information, laying out instructions for pharma companies on how to respond to consumers seeking information for a prescription drug other than what it is indicated for.

That is, in a very rudimentary example, if a consumer asked a question on Facebook or called a pharma company's 800 number asking whether it was safe for men over the age of 50 to use Botox, a representative for Botox-maker Allergan could certainly answer the question. However, if the consumer asked whether the use of Botox also helped grow hair on balding men, the representative should refer the consumer to the Allergan website on use and safety information.

Big Pharma, which spent $1 billion in on-line promotion last year and will grow to h $1.52 billion in spending by 2014, has been set by the lack back guidance and ambiguity on social-media use.

going to be like Nike or Apple and say whatever we want in social media. The rules haven't changed for us -- it's the same rules this industry has for traditional media."

I guess it will still take a little longer to see what else the FDA comes up with in the future but for now it seems that pharma firms still need to be vigilant and continue to market their brands cautiously.

Until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Daniele.

LinkedIn Shown To Be Better For Lead Generation

The last few years has increasingly demonstrated the value of social media marketing sites for generating qualified leads for businesses. However the comparative benefit of the various mega platforms was until recently not clearly expressed.

However a recently released study conducted with over 5,000 businesses by leading Social Media firm HubSpot, has demonstrated that traffic from LinkedIn was found to generate the best visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74%, almost 3 times higher (277%) than either Facebook (.77%) or Twitter (0.69%).

As well when you looked at all the traffic that came through on all platforms, LinkedIn's conversion rate was again better than social media in total, with LinkedIn having a 2.74% vs. 0.98%.

Perhaps we should have been able to predict that LinkedIn would have been the most efficient, lead generating engine in the social media realm.

After all LinkedIn is about business and professional networking. Unlike the others, it has never pretended to be anything else. The reason you join LinkedIn is to raise awareness amongst your target market about you, your firm, your brands, Etc. And from the perspective of the person seeking you out whether it be another business or consumer, their focus is also going to be shall we say 'transactional'.

Suffice to say, what ever other social media platforms you're on, LinkedIn is now a must.
And what about for you. What has been the most effective social media or other lead generator?

So until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Regards,
Daniele.

New Social Media Marketing Survey Continues to Show Positive Results for Businesses

New Social Media Marketing Survey has reveals multiple areas of benefit for businesses.

A recently released Social Media Marketing survey undertaken between September and November 2011, surveyed over 700 social media marketers to ask them amongst other things, what they saw as the main benefits to their business for using social media marketing as a promotional tool.

By far the biggest perceived benefit according to 88% of the 700 plus respondents was the ability to gain increased brand awareness within your target market.

As marketers we have always been acutely aware of the importance to raise awareness of our business and brands as a first step in the process that ultimately leads to product sales.

Almost as impressive is the second most reported benefit with 85% of the marketers surveyed reporting an increased ability develop a dialogue and engage the customer or prospect.

If we use the AIDA model as a guide with Awareness-Interest-Desire- and Action, we can see that the first two parts are well and truly positively impacted by social media according to the results of the survey.

It's reasonable to assume that with increased awareness and interest comes an increased level of desire and so it shouldn't surprise anyone that almost 3 in 5 (58%) of the respondents also felt that social media activities also led to increased sales and partnerships such as strategic alliances, with around 2 in 5 (41%) also feeling that social; media allowed them to save costs.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority (75%) plan to increase their social media marketing expenditure during 2012.

I suspect that in the next 3 to 5 years the only thing that will change is the degree to which businesses increase their expenditure each year, as social media continues to emerge and gain its place as a legitimate option to more traditional promotional tools.

What about your business. Are you planning to to increase social media spend in 2012 and if so where?

Until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Daniele.

Google Announces Google + Now Integrated into Google Search

Google has recently announced that Google Search now formally Integrates Google+ content into its standard results.

With this additional information, Google will have the potential to evolve into a search engine that not only lists information but has greater insight into understanding the relationship between the people with a new feature being the personal results.

The net effect of this will be that have more specific and tailored data based on the publically available data from the Google+ social networking platform.

As I said recently in an earlier blog post, numbers and growth rate aside, Google+ continues to come in a big way. Facebook beware.

Please feel free to share what do you think will be the next service Google+ may be or what you'd like to see them develop?

And until next time, good luck and good marketing.

Daniele.

Google+ Continues To Grow and Grow

Google+ just had just experienced its largest traffic month up 55% from November, 2011.

According to key research firm Experian Hitwise, Google+’s total monthly US visits have grown by 55% from November, 2011. Specifically some 49 million visits were registered during December, 2011 which was the best result thus far. In more recent time it has been suggested that the current numbers are even higher and in fact have broken through the 60 million mark.

This period of sustained growth underpins Google+ continued strong appeal and promotion, and despite Facebook still being the undisputed gold medallist of social networking sites, given Google’s' extraordinary daily traffic, the potential for Google + to one day challenge Facebook is not so difficult to imagine in the not too distant future, based on some key product features and differences.

What is also clear is that Google which has undeniably made mistakes in the past in this social media space, has learnt from these previous false starts and is wisely including sensible and practical functional service differentiations that will make Google + a must have for any business in 20102 and beyond as it maps out its marketing plans.

In the end however it is unlikely that it will either be a case of one or the other. I suspect most businesses are very comfortable with the notion of being on several of the key social media sites and platforms concurrently and accepting that they all play a part.

Twitter Set to Follow Facebook and LinkedIn with Company Pages

Hello everyone and welcome back for 2012. A year that will no doubt prove to be exciting, unpredictable and filled with more extraordinary advances in how we market ourselves to the world.

To begin with,as some readers I'm sure will already be aware, Twitter have now come up with there own version of Corporate Pages, along the lines of Facebook fan pages and LinkedIn company pages.

Up till now of course Twitter have adopted a similar strategy to what Google did with Google +
in that they only allowed a small number of privileged larger and well known firms such as Coca Cola,to start a page, again trying to create the same type of buzz around the place that Google where able to do with Google.

No doubt in time any and all businesses will be allowed to join and start their own page, so that they will be able to leverage it against the other marketing platforms they also have.

Naturally we will do a full review once we at Road Scholars have been included and can report as too the relevant utility and functionality of these pages.

So until next time, good kuck and good marketing.

Regards,
Daniele.