I am so over dealing with bad service! You look, watch and observe channels like Twitter and you can see millions of messages of people moaning about the total cr*p service they are receiving from their telecommunications service, utilities, retail outlets, banks and so on.

I have had it with Vodafone, we spent our holiday dealing with an Indian call centre and threatening bills in the thousands for data charges we had no visibility over, no control over and we had really tried to avoid this by buying two data bundles at the huge cost of $400. Insane and now a TIO case. The TIO stated in their 2011 report

“There has also been an alarming increase in the number of consumers with high debts because they could not monitor their usage adequately, the majority using mobile phones,” Mr Cohen said. Of the 10,469 issues reported to the TIO about inadequate spend controls, 7,844 were exclusively about mobile services – an increase of 119 per cent compared to the previous year.

“It is in everyone’s interest to make sure there are effective and easy-to-use monitoring tools available to consumers to track their own usage. Service providers should also monitor customers’ usage and notify them if they are accruing unexpectedly high bills to avoid people not being able to pay their bills and facing credit and debt collection problems as a result,” Mr Cohen said.

Could we resolve this issue easily – NO. The customer service we received was so bad, so time consuming and so dreadful. When we looked to another supplier,  our friends and colleagues tell us on Facebook every mobile provider is rubbish (albeit Vodafone is cited as the worse of the worse, here in Australia AND in the UK).

I read an article by Michael Winner, while in the UK, whiling my time away with Vodafone Australia’s indian call centre…Michael said “Who says we get happier with age, I am getting more grumpy” As a restaurant critic he says one his favourite remarks to a waiter is “Could you send a search party to the kitchen to find my main course”…The waiter goes away saying “Grumpy old sod” and of course he is quite right. Why shouldn’t Winner be grumpy when left sitting waiting endlessly for a meal. One of his better examples, that I can completely understand is restaurant receptionists, “Do you have a reservation in a surly contemptuous voice as if you are a non-person if you don’t!”

Why shouldn’t we complain if the meal we get served is awful?

Why shouldn’t we complain if Vodafone try to rip us off on data charges that are daylight robbery?

Why shouldn’t we complain when we can’t get a shop assistant to help us in David Jones?

Why shouldn’t we complain when we have to deal with robots on customer service lines?

Why shouldn’t we complain when you deposit a lot of money in your savings account, which states “here to make the most of your money easily” and they can’t answer their “Always Open” telephone line? ….just listen to music and listen while we tell you in an automated patronising voice how to make a desposit ….(Yes UBank its you)

Why shouldn’t we complain when our major telco can’t get one bill correct in any one month over a 12 month period.

Yet when we dare to complain our complaints are met by an aghast sigh and/or an attitude of “here we go a difficult customer”and/or a foreign call centre that hasn’t a clue.

Seriously that is why half these companies and brands are frightened of Twitter, Facebook and social networks. People like me are getting grumpier and grumpier and they are telling everyone what the real promise is behind the brand BS.The real promise is really really bad customer service and it is getting worse across the board.

OK the lists from 2011 are being published

Here is the good – top virals of 2011 from Ad Age here

The bad from eConsultancy here

And to end the year with more research that shows our dearly beloved Marketers don’t get social media (or maybe don’t get their audience) all here

I am sure there will be more lists to come.

Truth is

1. Clever creative works whatever the channel – The Good

2. The bad – don’t patronise the audience or try to lie

3. Marketers  - well 2012 maybe your worse yet. Clients are waking up to the public and starting to realise maybe marketing has to change, just like the rest of many industries.

Just think about it, you wouldn’t be planning to open up a shop selling cameras next year would you? Maybe you shouldn’t be trying to set a marketing campaign using the usual next year either

Have a great Christmas and here is to some refreshing new thinking for 2012

Read more

We’ve just published a 46-page Internet Marketing Strategy briefing which is free to download. It analyses five key current trends: customer centricity, channel diversification, data, social media and content strategy.

It’s a bit unusual for us to make something like this free. It’s an experiment in ‘content marketing’ – a hot topic in digital marketing and something we examine in the briefing itself.

Of course we’re interested to see how many visits and downloads we get, the tweets and social mentions, but we’re most interested in getting links to this page (ideally with the link anchor text Internet Marketing Strategy) to see how this impacts our natural search rankings for the phrase ‘internet marketing strategy’.

Currently we’re nowhere near the first page of Google, or other search engines, for this competitive search phrase. But could we be with a bit of ‘content marketing’? And what value might that drive to us?

We plan to publish a mini case study with the results of this experiment which hopefully you’ll find interesting and which might help put more concrete value to the effectiveness (or otherwise) of ‘content marketing’.

You can help with our experiment…

Of course we encourage you to download and read the briefing itself (we think it’s very good) but, ideally, you would send a link to this page (not the file itself – little SEO value there…) to relevant contacts or, even better, you’d link to the page from your blog, via social media etc.

In an ideal world you’d even use the anchor text Internet Marketing Strategy to the link to the page.

I’m sending this email to around 30,000 of Econsultancy’s members globally so, if you do your collective bit, then we should stand a good chance of building some great, and relevant, links…?

Will we shoot up the rankings as a result? Or get punished for the suspiciously quick build-up of links with the same anchor text? Who knows… watch this space.

Obviously we’re not incentivising you to do this in any way because that would be “paid links”.

All the best and thanks for any help.

Ashley

Ashley Friedlein
CEO
Econsultancy

I’ve become a huge advocate of personal branding. Before working at Bendalls Group, my only form of social media presence was

Emily Zwolinski

through Facebook. I’ll call myself a social media rookie. Twitter was reserved only for famous people, or those who like to overtly vocalise their opinions, and LinkedIn was a completely foreign concept.

This has all changed. I now have both a Twitter and a LinkedIn account; I’ve discovered Twitter is a great way to connect with thought leaders and their opinions, and I see LinkedIn as an essential self-branding tool for anyone wishing to get their name out there. Although I am still ‘learning the ropes’ on how these sites work, and have set myself up as an observer not participator, I’ve taken the first and most important step in developing my own personal brand. My Twitter account is @ezwol, currently I have protected my profile, until I feel ready to turn it on and understand the content and conversations i can best contribute to. But I have learnt that this is just fine. I have started the journey in my personal branding.

It is not only essential for businesses these days to have and maintain a social media presence in the corporate world, but I’ve discovered that the power behind creating an individual personal brand through these platforms is enormous. The instant exposure you gain to large networks of people, and in turn the influential connections you can form is literally priceless.

Anyone can go and make a LinkedIn account, but the true significance lies in their ability to effectively brand themselves to the world, and maintain this brand over time. So it isn’t a question of how many social media sites you can join or how many followers you have on Twitter, but rather the quality of your personal brand and how you choose to use this exposure to your advantage.

However, it doesn’t mean jump in where angels fear to tread! I am taking this slowly and watching these sites I have signed up, as opposed to pushing myself out there. Where I do jump in, I want to make sure I am contextually relevant to the audience. Consequently I am set up, but siring Linked In, before I post my full profile and perhaps even use multi-media to present myself to the world! Watch this space!

Which brings me on the next point, you may be wondering when the ideal time is to start fostering your personal brand. The answer: there isn’t one. Some believe that it is more useful to start once you’ve worked for a few years. You’ll have a great deal more experience in the industry, and sure you might ‘understand’ yourself better, but why not start young? Although I am still studying, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is essential for people to start building their personal brands as early as possible, especially in this increasingly competitive media environment. If you already have a positive social media presence, employers will be far more likely to take interest in you than those who have no presence at all. The only caution is to ensure you know exactly what you are making public, and the consequences of this. You don’t want something negative to hurt your personal brand further along in your career.

Having a personal brand isn’t a one step process – it requires a strong commitment over time. But, the benefits you will reap can be endless – being vocal about your great skills and abilities isn’t always tacky. You may not think you have the tools to create your brand, but you know yourself better than anyone else and social media is now easier to use than ever before – go for it! Even if it is a watch and learn approach like me, before long, you will see me out there. This blog contribution is another start.