Great Customer Experience – Every Little Helps

It’s well established that a great experience can make all the difference in keeping a customer beyond their initial purchase. The best customer experience is when you can make their interaction with you so pain-free and simple that it becomes a no-brainer to return for more.

Healthy stock levels, useful product info, error-free payment processes, and prompt delivery – they’re all hygiene factors if your business is to provide a good customer experience. However, for a great customer experience, you need more. You need to think smarter.

Sex, Drugs & Rock & Roll: Google Maps Mashup Style

Sex toys, crime statistics and the Artic Monkeys.
Words I never thought I could unite in one blog post. Take a moment to consider where this could go…
Nothing quite so sensational, I’m afraid, but interesting nonetheless.
Anyone who knows my geeky side will know that I have a penchant for Google Maps Mashups (If you don’t know [...]

Social Media Innovation

Now is the time to innovate, not stick your head in the sand and wait for the storm to pass by.
That is the theme of my article on social media innovation in this quarter’s edition of Figaro Digital Magazine.
The takeaway thought from the article was that whilst budgets are being cut left, right and centre, [...]

Space for hire

Would you pay a guy $1 (or £0.60p at today’s exchange rate) to wear your branded t-shirt for a day?
Seems an odd question, but hundred’s of companies are apparently doing it.
Jason Sadler of iwearyourshirt.com has made $70,000 this year by selling ad space on the tshirts he wears, according to Mashable. Prices start at $1 [...]

Building an App for Twitter

On Monday 15th June 2009, Jobsite launched it’s Jobs by Twitter service – a simple but innovative service to help jobseekers find a new job by providing personalised job tweets via Twitter.

The key component of that sentence is the word personalised. The fact that you can specify the jobs you receive makes it different to the majority of the Twitter based job services available today.

Jobs by Twitter has been a bit of a pet project for me over the last couple of months. This is how it came about…

Google Profiles in UK Search Results

Today I noticed the new Google Profiles section inserted into the UK search results. When the new plans for Google Profiles were announced last month, it was mentioned that they would insert up to four matching results in a Profiles section at the foot of the first page of the SERPs (for a search on a name). The roll out was due to start in the U.S., but with no announced timetable for the rest of the world. Well, it seems the UK is ready.

Google Profiles to take on Monster.com in job market?

Depending on your Twitter Follow list, you may have already seen the buzz over changes to Google Profiles recently. Whilst the product has been around for a while (in relative obscurity), two recent announcements have fixed the spotlight firmly upon it.

First off was a relatively low key announcement a few weeks ago, revealing that you could personalize your Google Profile URL to include your name (nicely termed a vanity URL). Then followed an announcement that Profiles are to start appearing in the Google search listings.

Cue a whole bunch of savvy people flocking to Google to ensure they could secure their ideal vanity url before someone sharing their name (or a cybersquatter) grabbed it. The news from Danny Sullivan that Google Profiles pass PageRank might just have contributed to the rush.

Since then there has been a lot of speculation regarding Google’s intent with its Profiles. A popular theory is that it is the start of a manoeuvre to take on the social network giants, Facebook and LinkedIn. There are many arguments for and against such theories, but it would certainly be quite a feat to unseat either colossus when you consider their size and integration into their users’ lives.

So what else could Google Profiles become?

Jobsite win double at Onrec Awards

Jobsite.co.uk came home a double winner last night, winning both the Best Technical Innovation and the Innovative Offline Marketing awards at Onrec.com’s annual online recruitment awards bash.

Jobsite (the company I work for), won the Offline award for our recent branding campaign, which including heavyweight TV advertising starring Max Beesley. The other finalists were Fish4Jobs, TheLadders.co.uk and Graduate Yorkshire.

Perhaps more interesting for this blog is the Best Technical Innovation award we won for ‘BeMyInterviewer’.

If you’re not familiar with the product, it’s an interactive video-based service that enables you to practise your interview technique with a panel of some of the UK’s most successful businesspeople. Topping the bill is Duncan Bannatyne from the Dragons’ Den, along with interviewers from Ernst & Young, Virgin Atlantic, ITV, BSkyB and O2.

Other finalists for the Onrec award included Monster.co.uk, Guardianjobs.co.uk, s1jobs.co.uk and Workhound.co.uk.

Free Advanced Twitter Power Guide

In my quest to understand Twitter, I’ve discovered two things – 1) a great resource in the Marketing Over Coffee podcast by John Wall and Christopher Penn and 2) a revealing – and free – Twitter Power Guide by the aforementioned Mr Penn.
The podcast in itself is great listening and it’s given me something different [...]