Firefox and Word of Mouth

Why I changed my addiction to Microsoft Explorer to Mozilla Firefox?

Very simply, by an "influencer", Martin Varsavsky, the entepeneur, founder of FON, Ya.com,... who nowadays is probably one of the most outstanding bloggers in the web 2.0 world.

I read a post published on it blog on March, and since this moment I get in love with Firefox, simple, faster and with lots of complements, like Foxmarks, Gspace, NewsFox, .... finally I forgot my last 10 years with Explorer with a modern, friendly and innovative tool.

And just because a word of mouth marketing recomendation, of course by a guru, but just WOM. This new marketing field, well not so new, years, maybe decades ago, named recommendation or advise, but from this new century all these new ways to create, like the WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) says "The act of consumers providing information to other consumers"

Definitively, Word of Mouth is growing so fast as web 2.0, so, its absolutely essential that marketeers introduce this brand new technique in our relationship marketing projects.

Technorati Tags: firefox, fon, martin varsavsky, relationship marketing, web 2.0, word of mouth

Incentive Programs Measurement

My good friend Paul Hebert has posted a very interesting article about this field, that many companies forget in the development and tracking of incentive campaigns.

I want to extract from it:

"....As an example: The company wants to increase sales. They determine their sales force has the most impact on that objective so they target their sales organization for an incentive program. They know that they have a high probability of sale if the sales people follow a specific process. However, they don't track those steps. They train and communicate the steps - they rely on sales management to reinforce those steps in their "huddle sessions" - but they don't officially track those steps. Therefore, when they announce the incentive program they use "sales" as the reward event. Those who sell, get the reward - all based on the assumption they are following the steps...."

Link to the post

Technorati Tags: incentives, loyalty, motivation, relationship marketing, rewards, roi, sales force

Marketing vs. Air Transport

Sometimes marketeers should think that we are living in a real world... I'm telling you this because of my last loyalty program lauch. My marketing agency and I were sure about the impact would have some kind of spectacular action link to the beginning of this program.

The fact is that we are sending to more than a hundred outlets through our country, a welcome pack box to introduce the project to our sales teams all over Spain. In this box they would find several marketing materials, like leaflets, posters, loyalty cards, demo CD, and when the box is opened....a surprising ballon will fly (containing helium gas).

So, nothing to be different from other projects...but.... we didn't realize about sending this boxes through airplane to Canary Islands and other offshore locations. The problem is helium air transportation is prohibited being liquid, and in gaseous situation, it has strong legal conditions (International Air Transport Association - Dangerous Goods Regulations) to be sended by this way.

Finally I have to take out the balloons of the boxes to this locations and they will not have surprise....

Conclusion, marketeers & agencies can develop great strategies, impressive day of lauch, but finally real world, with real rules makes you think about how important are ALL the details in relationship marketing projects. We usually focus on database analisys, create spectacular marketing actions, emailings, direct mails, but there are many others small items to be considered. Be careful.

Technorati Tags: logistics, loyalty, relationship marketing