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Netcheck

By Clare Forrest (April 2005 Issue)
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Marketing – the whole art of getting and keeping customers – is something that exercises us all at times. Recently there has been a spate of enquiries about this topic on UK-HRD, and we’ve noticed a lot of our clients asking if we run courses in this field. So this seems a good time to look at what the Internet has to offer. Frankly, if you just run a search on marketing, you’ll get nearly 2 million hits – and none of us has time for that! So I freely admit that I fell, quite fortuitously, on www.marketingprofs.com when I was looking for something about blogs – of which more later. And the result of this happy accident is this month’s column.

Billed as the site that gives you ‘marketing know-how from professionals and professors’, this does seem to be a good information resource and also – perhaps more interestingly in some ways – a hands-on means of experiencing some innovative ways of web marketing. Since this site did come up as hit number 12 of the near 2 million in my search, it does mean the designers must be doing something right.

You can get quite a long way on this site without signing up for the newsletter, even though you are encouraged at every turn to do so, and my advice would be don’t – boy, can you can tell this site’s about marketing! In the interests of research for you, however, I did. It’s the usual thing – once you’ve handed over your e-mail address you’re signed up. In this case, though, the twist is that there is an immediate attempt to persuade you to join the premium member list. If you refuse, as I did, you haven’t escaped yet. The next suggestion is that you sign up to a number of other marketing-related newsletters. I confess, I did sign up for a Customer Relationship Marketing one, mainly because this is a subject that interests me professionally and personally and (truthfully) because I was very taken by the freebie CRM starter kit on offer. I’ve not had this yet so I’ve no idea what it involves, but I’m sure it’ll be worth the wait!

Now, normally I avoid signing up for newsletters like the plague – just more junk to clutter up my inbox. But I did like the sound of this guarantee from the site, particularly the unsubscribe process.

As with our newsletter, any newsletter we recommend is free, has an outstanding privacy policy, will not rent or share your e-mail address without your permission, and has straightforward unsubscribe procedures. Plus, they don’t simply rehash the same old ideas over and over again … that’s refreshing!

And, frankly, if that’s just so much spin, then I’ll just ask Norton to treat it as spam and never see it again anyway.

Mind you, once I’d carried out the final part of the sign-up process I was met with another bash at getting me to be a premium member! You have to admire this level of persistence. I admit that, by now, my curiosity was piqued, so I investigated what premium membership actually meant. In essence – though the three subscription plans take a little time to work out – the main advantage is that you get access to the Premium library and, for an additional fee, you also get ‘free’ access to online seminars on marketing. Unfortunately, there’s no opportunity to see whether either is worthwhile – other sites often give you a free full membership for 24 hours – so I declined. Ironically, the free article I got in my welcome e-mail from the site was all about the value of introducing samples to customers who were already interested – me in other words. Practice and preaching not quite meeting here, I think.

Even without the premium membership there is a wealth of information on this site. A topic of permanent interest to the trainers on UK-HRD is that of web marketing and there are a number of articles here for you to get your teeth into. However – guess what? – quite a few of these are only available to premium members. Sigh. I did find some useful information, though, particularly when I put ‘blog’ into the site’s search engine. This topic has also cropped up on UK-HRD several times, and is of additional interest to me today as I write this column, because I have just discovered the phenomenon of doocing via an article in the Independent. You can read this too by visiting http://news.independent.co.uk/world/science_technology/story.jsp?story=613705

Apparently, ‘doocing’ is urban slang for being fired for something you wrote on your blog or website about your employer. Fascinated by where this word had come from I did a search and found that about three years ago one Heather Armstrong wrote about her job in her blog ‘Dooce’ and was fired for it – thus begetting the word ‘dooce’. And if you want to know why she calls her blog Dooce, then you’ll need to visit www.dooce.com/faq to find out.

Of course, you may not be too sure what a blog is either. It’s an online diary (web-log, thus blog.) You can find an excellent short article on blogs by Debbie Weil entitled ‘Three reasons to publish an e-newsletter and a blog’ on the marketingprofs site.

Anyway, back to the point … All the articles I found on blogging on this site were mostly enthusiastic about the idea and the only mention I found of employees and blogs was this:

Trust your employees
Employees generate the most credible blogs, but there is always the risk of unveiling corporate secrets. Encourage your employees to blog, but set reasonable ground rules. Groove Networks has a good model. Policies should also address how much corporate time employees can spend blogging.

Oh yes indeed … policies should – given doocing. Incidentally, there was a link to the Groove Networks’ model but this was broken. Instead, though, you’ll find that this link provides some useful thoughts on corporate blogging policy.

Now – that search engine on the site. Ostensibly, it’s very good. But there is a snag. Bear with me while I try to explain. Read an article on the site and you’ll see that it has, helpfully, references to hot topics – that is, most read articles – which are listed on a menu bar to the side of the main article. Now, this same menu bar appears on every single article on the site, which means that, when you do a search, if the word or phrase you’re searching for happens to appear in the most-read menu then you’ll get a hit on every article on the site. Here’s an illustration: I was, you’ll remember, searching for ‘blog’, which did appear in the most-read menu; this meant I got 287 hits to articles – most of which had nothing whatsoever to do with blogs.

This glitch needs resolving and, by the way, the same problem seems to hold true for all of the (many and different) side bars recommending other articles. (I got fed up wading through hundreds of hits using different search words, so I can’t be absolutely sure of this, but it certainly looked like it.) It can’t be impossible to write a piece of code that excludes the most-read side bar, and any others that appear on each page, from the search engine – can it? Final point on the search engine … it would be useful to have it tell you how many hits you have. I had to click right through to the end to discover there were this many – that’s 28 pages.

On the plus side, there’s a really fine function on the site that enables you to save articles as you go along, so you can gather the research in one place and then go through it at leisure. I like this. It shows that someone has thought about how we research material in real life – say, when using a library. Most of us go round first collecting as much as we can find that we think might be relevant and then we settle down to assess it. Do remember to log in first though (which means signing up, I’m afraid), otherwise you won’t find your saved articles. You also have several other options whenever you read one of the (non-premium) articles. You can comment on it, e-mail it to yourself and others, and print it.

The most innovative area of the site is the one that on most sites is least well-used – the forum. It operates in what seems to be a totally unique way; certainly, I’ve never come across anything like it before. In essence you spend and collect points for posting and answering questions respectively. There’s a leader board of those who have the greatest number of points and who are known as ‘experts’. The main idea behind the points is to recognise members who give the best answers and are the most frequent contributors to the community. It’s a clever idea and one that others may like to consider. However, it also seems to generate some controversy. I read a fabulously spiteful series of postings about the system, chiefly directed against successful points collectors.

We can’t avoid marketing. It happens to us virtually every moment of the day via e-mails, texts, adverts, and so on. We are marketing every time we lift up the phone to speak to a customer. As trainers we constantly market our own brand and our credibility to our audiences – they have to believe in us before they believe our ideas. This site has lots to keep you interested and, if you’re thinking of using your website as a marketing tool, lots to experience too.

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http://www.marketingprofs.com/
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Quick hits
www.teamcommunications.com/performance_tools.htm
***
If you’re in search of a team diagnostic questionnaire, then this one is free and gives you a diagnostic report. It has a specific question about remote teamworking, and many of the other factors in it are relevant to the subject. It can be used as a team ‘180’ questionnaire as well. It’s not particularly clever but it does give some useful pointers. (Thanks to John Faulkes for drawing my attention to this.)

www.brainbashers.com
****
A great site for those moments at work when you’re brain needs a bit of a challenge. Lots of puzzles and games to get the grey matter ticking over. Have fun.


Clare Forrest would be pleased to know by snail-mail, e-mail or carrier pigeon the URLs (web addresses) of any sites that you have enjoyed, loathed or found just plain indispensable so that she can bring them to everyone’s attention. She can be contacted at clareforrest@structuredlearning.com or visit www.structuredlearning.com

Garry Platt returns in the May issue of Training Journal to share the findings of his latest Internet trawls.

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