You might have an amazing product or service. You might have done a great job promoting it, everybody knows it, they can see it everywhere and new customers are likely to recommend it. But if the customer service you offer is faulty, say goodbye to repeat customers and to long term deals. Because no matter how good, affordable, innovative, useful your product is, there always are problems! In a perfect world, there wouldn’t be, but in ours, there are. And what happens when your customer has a problem is what turns your relationship with them into a long term one. Yet here’s where most businesses fail! Continue reading

If you’re looking for a great PR idea that is both low budget, interesting and efficient, here’s one: the Gift Meme organized by Kdo.ro, an online gift shop that promotes special, unique gifts, and PRwave, the first online PR community and news site in Romania, managed by my friend Loredana Pascal.

The meme is simple: Loredana started by buying gifts for three of her friends, myself included. With the gift, we received a nice envelope describing the campaign and encouraging us to buy a gift for our friends and get a 10% discount for it. We could of course choose to write about the campaign or not, join it or not. From there on, you can consider yourself tagged when you receive the gift. Sounds simple, the budget is not big and it does not imply spending something to get the bloggers to write, it just entails a small discount.

Why exactly does this campaign work? And it does work, all three of the initial bloggers plus others have already joined. Here are a few reasons:

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What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

Welcome to a new edition of our Monday link list, showing you articles you should definitely read.

Last week brought me across one of the best post for new bloggers: a collection of categorized tips and resources from Joanna Young. Any young blood in the blogosphere should read this.

Networking is far more than exchanging business cards and it rarely happens on events only. Barbara Gibson of Connecting the I’s has done a great job at presenting networking as a way of life .

Being a guru is not always about dominating a room, a conversation, a group. It’s mostly about having the knowledge and graciously sharing it with other, while being modest. An entry on the value of modesty from PR Squared aimed at making us think about what’s really valuable.

Karen Swim makes it her business to have the humanity and relationships build through the internet stand out. As she says, business done over the internet needs not be impersonal, on the contrary!

Ivana Taylor of Small Business Trends identified the top ten SMB marketing trends for 2009. The first three are authenticity, do it yourself marketing and tech driven word of mouth marketing.

That’s all for today. Feel free to add your recommendations in the comment box and see you all next week with a fresh list of interesting reads.

Crisis, depression, downturn - no matter how you put it, the feelings the current situation generates are the same: fear, panic, pessimism. Stories of layoffs and closed doors hit us on every channel: TV, newspapers, blogs, email lists at work, water cooler stories of what’s happening in other companies. I won’t link to any of these stories, I don’t want to help the general depression feeling grow.

The best advice anyone can give you is not to panic and not to give in to feeling depressed. You might have heard this particular piece of advice before, but you should repeat it to yourself daily, use it as some sort of personal mantra. Why? Because panic makes you stop thinking and because depression keeps you from seeing the opportunities lying right in front of you. As we all know, fortunes do not evaporate, they merely get redistributed. No matter how dire it all looks, we are far from having no options at all. Continue reading

In most cases, before buying something, we stop and evaluate our existing offer. From a cart of milk to a computer, car or hosting service, we need to know we’ve made the right choice, that we’ve invested wisely, especially in a time where the economy is forcing us to act smarter. It sometimes happens that a certain buyers is extremely loyal to a brand, but that doesn’t mean he or she has never compared it against its competition. It only means they chose the brand they most like and trust every time they wanted to buy that same item.

When trying to decide what to choose, a potential customer might request offers from several companies. They might also tell you who you are up against and they might even ask for your opinion. And here’s where the tricky part begins! Continue reading