Tony Attwood's Blog

Two weeks ago an acquaintance from one of the dance clubs I frequent (just my way of staying fit you understand) asked me if I could help her in a dispute with a garage.  Seems she had wanted to test drive a Jaguar she was looking to buy, but once the garage realised the applicant was female she was turned down, because (she felt) the garage didn’t believe a woman would buy this car.  “I don’t want to put the mileage up on the car” said the garage manager.

I wrote a letter on her behalf to the garage, complaining, and pointing out various issues, and suggesting that there were matters that would concern the Advertising Standards Authority.

A note came back saying that they had done nothing wrong, and that they had checked with the ASA, and their advert was fine.

I immediately upped the tempo, for two reasons.  First, I know from experience that it is very hard to get a clear answer like that on a complex issue from the ASA within a day, so I didn’t believe their response.  Second, the garage immediately changed its web site to remove the area that had caused my acquaintance to make the complaint. In other words they were trying to fob me off and cover their tracks.

We are now plotting the next move – and it might well cause a fair amount of harm to this garage.  I’m doing it because my friend was genuinely upset by the experience, (not out of vindictiveness or because I have nothing better to do with my time).

But also I am doing it because the garage did not have the decency to admit an error, and (in my personal view) started treating me like an idiot.  (If there’s one thing I can’t stand it is being treated like an idiot).

Now I come to my point.  As I immediately realised, it has never before been so easy for customers (or in our case a would-be customer) to fight back.

Indeed there are so many options for the customer who wants to make life tough for the errant retailer, it is hard to know where to start.  If you are really angry you can set up a web site just exposing what the company did to you.  Or you can go onto a message board and leave messages about the company.   I could write about the company here (although I am not going to mention them by name – at least not at the moment, since I want to see what the ASA says first).

You might argue that no one is going to see or notice any of these things - except that if the person who is doing the attacking knows how to get a web site up the Google rankings, and if that person is angered enough, it could happen.   Besides which, dealing with the ASA does take time.  Three minutes to make a complaint, three hours at the very least to answer it.  Sometimes more like three days.

(In this case the situation is likely to be even more annoying for the firm, because it is part of a franchise, with each franchised car dealership sharing the franchise name.  The rest of the dealers are going to get so angry if they feel they are being tarred with the same brush!)

Of course the above is a private affair – I am helping a friend who was genuinely upset.   But it can happen to any of us – sometimes through the crass stupidity of an employee, sometimes through an error.

So in my view all companies need to stay alert.

The first way to do this is through using Google Alerts to monitor every mention of your company on the internet day by day.

Monitoring any mention of your name is the first step towards recognizing when someone you have irritated  is getting worked up.

What’s more you can often have the chance to respond.  If someone says on a blog, “I tried Hamilton House and they were terrible, didn’t answer the phone, never called back, took a week to respond to an email…” then at least I can get in there and say, “I really can’t understand how that happened – but I want to start by apologising.  I’m the chairman and….”

There’s a lot more that can be done and I will come back to this shortly, but I would say everyone should monitor their brand names on Google Alerts.

If you have not used the service and don’t know the ins and outs, give me a call on 01536 399 000 and I will talk you through it.

Tony Attwood

You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings and via email by emailing direct-mail-secrets-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.

The American firm “Trip Advisor” has warned its customers that a significant part of its 20 million long email list of customers has been stolen.

It is trying to suggest to its customers that this is not too serious, since it doesn’t hold credit card numbers.  Yet in many ways this is not the main thing that worries people – it is the level of junk email.  Having your card number stolen is serious, of course, but in the end all you have to do is call the bank.   Stopping unwanted emails is much harder.

Most people value their privacy above all.  Indeed if you subscribe to the Education Marketing news service that runs alongside this service you may have noted my comment the other day about how not to write to people when you follow up hits on your web site.If you email a group of people it is possible to see which ones have then gone to your web site, and to extract this list and email them again.  (If you are interested in Hamilton House working with you on this, do let me know and I’ll be pleased to talk it through).

But, what many firms do is write to people and “personalise” the email by making it quite clear that they know the reader has been on the web site.

Generally this is a disaster and utterly turns people off.  Trust vanishes, because it appears to be an invasion of privacy.  Collecting the details of people who visit a web site is fine – and very helpful in your marketing.  Just don’t tell them!

A study from ExactTarget and CoTweet last year found that generally people start from the premise that their details are safe with the companies with whom they deal, until something goes wrong.   Play.com recently suffered a loss of data – and wrote to everyone to say “don’t worry”.  I am not sure what effect this has had on their sales, but I bet it was not positive.

TripAdvisor itself seems to have been very lax in its approach, since all its technical staff had access to all files – an ideal way to suffer a loss.  One disgruntled member of staff perhaps…

So the rule seems to be, people will trust your privacy arrangements until they have a reason to do otherwise.  Telling them that you are able to see if they have been on your web site is as bad a way to engender trust as is losing their data.

Tony Attwood 01536 399 000.   You can follow us on Twitter @HHMailings

Royal Mail media director Mark Thompson says the offer would be a “real statement of intent” to marketers considering using direct mail for the first time or returning to the channel.

He adds that as a media owner, the Royal Mail needs to promote direct mail use over or integrated with other media channels.

This comes as RM has started to advertise its new Advertising Mail for direct postal mail (excluding things like statements and bill reminders) that will allow most firms to use DM with a price rise of just 2%, as opposed to the 10% plus for most post.

If you have a web site and you have any concern about how high up the rankings it appears, these are times to be thinking and pondering.  As I have been pointing out in a few times Google has changed the way it ranks sites, in order to push sites with a huge amount of low quality data down the rankings.

That might seem irrelevant to you, but it is easy for sites to be mistaken for something they are not in the general mish-mash (to use Douglas Adams telling phrase) and as a result this, more than any other time, is the moment to put lots of high quality relevant text on your sites in order to force Google to recognise you as being of quality.

But there is something else happening in the background that you need to be aware of.  Although you might not heard of Blekko it is another
search engine with a certain following, and they have just gone further than Google, by banning over 1 million websites from the engine.

Now Google already ban a lot of web sites because of copyright infringement but not for low quality content.   But Google doesn’t like to be outdone on anything and in a move that was not reported much
outside of the sphere of those who study such matters for a living, Google is letting people ban sites they don’t like from their search results.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/hide-sites-to-find-more-of-what-you.html

Goggle is not currently using the domains people block as part of its ranking, but it is looking at the situation.   Goodness knows what happens when the campaigns start: block the Royal Family sites as Prince Andrew has a link to certain undesirable aliens.

Fortune magazine has suggested Google introduce a social block in which people can block the same sites that their friends have blocked.

The lesson is, you can’t just expect your site to sit there and do things for itself.  It needs an ever changing and developing content.

If you would like to talk about how this can be applied to your site, please call 01536 300 000 and we’ll do a review for you of where your site stands and how it might be developed.  No charge, no obligation, no
fruit drinks.   Well maybe one fruit drink.

Tony Attwood

Hamilton House Mailings Ltd reg number 2444392 VAT 354907535GB.  Phone 01536 399 000.