Andy has bravely decided to launch one – silly boy – about his pet interests in everything (environ)mental. His Green Forum has already started to get battered by me – generally complaining about anything and everything. So good luck to him. I’ve probably already started the warning flares going off in his head. It’s in PHPBB so no doubt he’ll have to keep it uptodate to stop it becoming a mess of porn and Rx (I’m a pessimist after my experiences of a news engine about whisky).

L8rs

It must be the changes in PageRank that’ve affected my brain to the degree that I’m going to do this. First stab will be on Thursday night – as I’m whisky tasting tonight which knocks today and tomorrow out. Need to be in peak performance to achieve my goals.

These really cant be great quality links, and this technique is not something I’v seen for a while. Are people really getting this desperate for links that the amount of effort vs the return in benefit is worth employing this technique? I’m still not 100% convinced but maybe I’m sticking just a wee bit too close to the rules and see this kind of link development as purely spamming (I bet half the sites delivering these links have no idea that this is going on).

Her first driving instructor quit, which is fine, so they got her a second who didn’t turn up for lessons. She’s got so fed up with this farce of an organisational system that she called up to complain. They promised to sort it all out. It hasn’t been so she asked for her money back and get them with someone who can deliver on their promises.

Their response (I’m paraphrasing as I wasn’t on the call itself) was that buying lessons in  bulk was like buying a suit. And you can’t return a suit after wearing it a couple of times. So as she’d had a couple of lessons from the money she’d paid upfront she may not be entitled to her money back – else it’ll take them around 28 days to get her money back. Yes thats her money, its not BSMs money.

If this the world we live in. Large, supposedly trustworthy companies, delivering a customer service response like this.

In the world I inhabit, and I hope you do to, when something goes wrong with a service or a product and you ask to be reimbursed for their mistakes from money you’ve paid them you get at least something useful in return. Not condescended to and certainly not a smart arse response designed to make you angry.

The art of customer service is to turn a negative into a positive. I went to the Concert Hall in Glasgow on Monday to see Kevin Smith Q&A. Booked ticket online, chose my seat. Turned up and was told that part of the auditorium was closed and was summarily dispatched to a crappy seat on the corner. So I emailed them PDQ. Within ten minutes the manager had came up, found me and moved me to a better seat and explained the rationale for having moved me in the first place. Delightful woman, great customer service and turned a crappy experience of them into a far better one.

If only everyone was as good at customer service as the Concert Hall in Glasgow.

Cost per influence is mentioned on only 3,430 webpages (according to Google by doing a quick intext:”cost per influence” search) . And some of these date back to 2005 so its not exactly a term setting the heather alight with online conversations and interest. And to be honest I think the whole concept may be wrong.

The great love that I, and lots of businesses, have for online marketing is that its quantifiable. I make a PPC advert up I bid 10 pence of every forty people I get a sale. The sale costs me £4.00 and I make a couple of quid back as profit.  If its not profitable I do some refinement, if it’s not profitable I turn it off or keep going with it accepting that revenue generation is more important and that other high return keywords will subsidise this one. With every channel its the same – we spent ‘x’ and we got ‘y’ as our return.

By starting to bring in concepts such as “cost per influence” everything beomces fluffy. Less empirical. Not based in numbers and we’re unable to define cost and benefit. There is a link between having strong PPC and a strong SEO campaign (PPC can beomce tactical and SEO more strategic by working together). But no agency goes in and says if you spend an extra couple of quid on PPC you’re SEO will benefit due to the growth in brand equity, and this means you can cut back on your SEO investment. And why? because:

• they know they can’t prove it

They know that banner advertising will always cost you a fortune and deliver only marginal results (marginal compared to PPC, SEO, email etc). Accept it. It’s expensive: that’s why most agencies will tell you banner advertising helps with ‘branding’ – my friend colin once described “branding as the excuse you give for not making sales” and I agree whole heartedly. Measuring brand equity online is a fools errand – it can’t be quantified. And if it can’t be quantified should we really be bringing it into online marketing. Just because your brand was mentioned 20 times in one tweeting day doesn’t indiciate that your campaign worked.

Cost per influence looks remarkably like the excuses made for campaigns that were for “branding”. Online marketing is about proving causality between action and result. I’m not saying that online advertising cant have a benefit in developing brand equity etc. Rather than you should not view these kind of fluffy, unquantifiable variables as something of use to your campaign.

Online campaigns generate return,  clients invest to make returns and achieve targets. Multichannel analysis may indiciate cross campaign pollonation and benefit. But an indiciation of something is not evidence, and saying that some one came through one channel and bought on another without a clear factual basisis wrong.

Here endeth the rant for today. Feel better.

and you should be accepted. Nice link, nice site, job done. That’s my first recip in ages!

Have fun.

As you can tell I am really angry – thank God that the iPhone is such a high quality piece of kit you can do really clever things with it. Unfotunately blocking phone numbers is not within its scope – I can see Google Earth, find a Persian reataurant in almost any conurbation, do a blog post on ScotRail but I cant block these idiots.

Apparently this number is a VodaPhone thing – which is a bit strange as I’ve never been with VodaPhone. I’m concerned that what happened is that they’ve taken my number, without my permission, when I partially filled in a form about a free netbook with mobile Internet (I would have signed up to had I not eventually noticed that the Inspiron Mini 9 they offered only had an 8 Gig hard drive – my phone has more than that),

Over at NakedSushi the chatted is to add the number to a contact called ‘Blocked’ and stick it on silent when they call. Its a fix – not a fix I like but may be the best I can find – anyone got any brighter ideas from smashing my phone. Am willing to hire a bus or drive a section of like minded people down to meet these sods.