Here's a short article from Marketing Vox on October 25, 2005.

(Blogs are indeed time consuming - reading and writing them! But they can be fun, useful and so easy!)

"A best-guess extrapolation of blog-related surveys and data suggests that work time spent reading and posting to blogs this year will consume 2.2 percent of U.S. labor force hours, and work time spent on blogs unrelated to work will take up 1.65 percent of those hours, reports AdAge (via MediaBuyerPlanner).

About one in four people in the labor force visits blogs and on average spends 3.5 hours during the work week engaging with them.

"And, because blog readers tend to be the most engaged readers of online content, it seems for now as though they are not siphoning blog time from time spent reading their favorite new sites, but are rather reading blogs in addition to existing online behavior.

While it's difficult to measure how much blog time actually relates to work, AdAge's analysis estimates that just 25 percent of blog visits directly connect to the job."

Recently I have noticed that word-of-mouth marketing has been receiving a fair amount of attention in the media.

Word-of-mouth seems like a pretty obvious idea to me. Someone has a good experience and they tell their friends. The same idea works if they have a bad experience. So wouldn't it make sense to put effort into this?

Here's an article that I read in the Womnibus Weekly this week. (Womnibus is WOMMA's weekly newsletter - Word of Marketing Association.)

Excerpt:

"THE INTERNET PROVIDES SO MANY ways for users to spread information in ways never before possible. E-mail, for example, can easily extend the reach of someone's brand by a factor of 10, 100, 1,000 or over 10,000. The Internet also serves as a vast digital repository of such information -- accessible at any time, from anywhere and by anyone. Millions of opinions about your company's brand are only a click away on search engines, blogs, product ratings sites, podcasts and other digital platforms. The immediacy of the Internet is giving way to more word-of-mouth marketing and viral campaigns. Below are eMarketer's top ten reasons for the explosive growth of word-of mouth marketing, and why we feel it will continue to be a major factor in consumers' and companies' lives."

More...

This is another ClickZ article and one that I feel is very important. In it the author gives an example of a bad customer service.

He also includes a few examples of how you can make a sale, inparticular a first sale, memorable (positive) for your customer and encourage future sales.

It's the little things that count!

I'd love to hear what some of you have done - what personal touch you've added, OR an expereince you had when you bought something (service/product - on or offline).

Excerpt:

"What does your company do after the cash register rings? Do you view a sale as the start of the relationship, or the end? Do you exert as much effort to keep customers as you do to acquire them?

Sometimes, the most effective marketing and selling efforts take place after the first transaction.

The customer you just rang up is a walking, talking ad. If she's pleased, she can have her family and friends on board and ready to buy from you in minutes. If she's unhappy, she can spread a seed of discontent just as quickly.

She also holds purse strings and is looking for an excuse to buy from you again. Ignore her at your peril."

More...

This article comes from ClickZ on October 26, 2005. In it they talk about the importance of an email headers and how often they are overlooked.

Excerpt:

"As e-mail marketers, we spend a majority of our time creating e-mail bodies. However, the most important part of a message may be something outside the creative process: the e-mail header, those generally hidden lines of code at the top of each message.

Now that the e-mail industry is using authentication, reputation, and accreditation, the e-mail header plays a critical role in an ISP's decision to block or deliver a message. Most of us, though, let our IT departments or e-mail service providers (ESPs) worry about the header.

With our basic walkthrough, you can interpret what the header tells you about message delivery. We'll also provide a couple reasons fiddling with some list software settings can actually hurt deliverability."

More...