Great article by Daniel Pink about removing corporate talk or ‘professionalese’ from your vocabulary and speaking more open and honestly to your customers and colleagues.

Go back to that all-too-common phrase: “We apologise for any inconvenience this might have caused.” Would you say that to your daughter when you were late picking her up from football practice? To your neighbour when your dog trampled his flowerbed?

“Any inconvenience” is emotionally anaemic and lacks the specificity to make it meaningful. “We apologise” isn’t much better. It’s distancing almost to the point of dismissiveness. “When you say, ‘I’m sorry,’ you’re owning,” Fried explains. “When you say ‘I apologize,’ you’re renting.”

Professionalese is a renter’s language. It doesn’t expect to be around for very long and has no stake in the long-term prospects of the neighbourhood. It says, “mistakes were made” rather than “we messed up” and claims to “take responsibility” instead of acknowledging “it’s my fault”.

via New York Times

Speak Like A Human At Work is a post from Bob Hazlett, a digital marketer who writes at One Half Amazing!

Howard Shultz, Starbucks CEO, announced stores nationwide will offer free wifi starting July 1, 2010.  Previously Starbucks offered two free hours of Web access each day to registered customers.  Now, all 6,700 locations will have access to free wifi. Hooray!

Breaking: Starbucks To Offer Free Wifi Nationwide Starting July 1 is a post from Bob Hazlett, a digital marketer who writes at One Half Amazing!

via The Brads

How to Alienate a Fanbase is a post from Bob Hazlett, a digital marketer who writes at One Half Amazing!

Just past midnight last night, Facebook pushed a feature to their pages that allows administrators to publish posts, links, photos, and videos to fans based on their location and language preference.  A post that is published to Facebook users in a specific location or language will only be visible to those users. Other users will never see the post in the News Feed, on your Page, or anywhere else across Facebook.  I think this is huge for facebook pages.

Some examples of Pages that may find this useful are:

• Global brands who have tons of Fans across the world, may want to talk about a new product that is only available in a certain location.
• Musicians & Celebrities who may want to announce to fans in California that new tour dates have been added across the state.
• Retail shops that may want to let fans in a certain city know that a new shop is opening locally.

New: Publish to Facebook Fans Based on Location and Language is a post from Bob Hazlett, a digital marketer who writes at One Half Amazing!

FEED is an annual consumer behavior report put out by Razorfish that, in the past, has charted how consumers adopt new internet technologies and digital services. This year they flipped it up a little and changed focus. This year’s report is focused on understanding how digital is changing the way consumers interact with brands and how experience really does matter. Their reports are worth their weight in gold. Great stuff, beautiful design.

Free PDF for Download. I’m also happy that they are now offering a printed version via Blurb

Razorfish 2009 FEED Report Now Available is a post from Bob Hazlett, a digital marketer who writes at One Half Amazing!

ThinkVitamin had a great comic this week on creating and understanding personas.  Personas are ficticious characters that are created to represent a larger segment or targeted demographic of customer that you’re trying to reach.  They are used to help guide decisions about a product, features or its overall design.

Personas are useful because they put a face on otherwise abstract data about your customers. By thinking about the needs of these fictional characters, you can better infer what a real person might need or want.

Additional Articles on Personas from The Cooper Journal

• The Original of Personas
• Putting Personas Under the Microscope

Creating and Understanding Personas is a post from Bob Hazlett, a digital marketer who writes at One Half Amazing!

The Future of Marketing and Advertising is a post from Bob Hazlett, a digital marketer who writes at One Half Amazing!

Louis Gray wrote a wonderful piece on what he believes are the keys to satisfying consumer expectations in today’s real-time world.  Gray believes consumers and technology are becoming more acute, hence they are demanding greater advancements in communication and openness with the companies they do business with.  In his post, he details 10 key tenants for dealing with today’s real-time consumer including, my favorites, #2 – We Expect the Product to Work on Any Platform In Any Location and #10 – We Want You To Trust Us As Informed Consumers and Partners. It’s worth the read, check Louis Gray’s rules for today’s consumers.

The world of communication and product delivery is changing as the Web evolves and new services are introduced, enabling us to gain faster access to information, download richer media more quickly, and rapidly voice our opinions and feedback near and far in a wide variety of methods, including text, voice, video and imagery. As customers become more savvy and in tune with these new tools, we are also expecting those offering products and services to adapt, and as such, I thought it made sense to put forth what I believe are key tenets of a new consumer manifesto for today’s real-time world.

Who do you feel are the best companies that are really in-tune with real-time consumer expectations? The worst? What will it take for more companies to tune in and take action?

Satisfying Consumer Expectations in Today’s Real-Time World is a post from Bob Hazlett, a digital marketer who writes at One Half Amazing!

Wow, who wouldn’t want to work for a company that valued and promoted company culture like Zappos.com?  Watch the video below and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Zappos Core Values

1. Deliver WOW through service
2. Embrace and drive change
3. Create fun and a little weirdness
4. Be adventurous, creative, and open-minded
5. Pursue growth and learning
6. Build open and honest relationships with communication
7. Build a positive team and family spirit
8. Do more with less
9. Be passionate and determined
10. Be humble

What core values are important to you in your work?  What values would you add if you could start a company tomorrow? Let me know in the comments below.

Starting A Company? Model It After Zappos.com is a post from Bob Hazlett, a digital marketer who writes at One Half Amazing!

Check out the image below, its from Rhodes College.  While looking for some adult education classes I came across their form for a free class catalog.  The only (and big) thing wrong with it is that it requires a CAPTCHA to process your request.  The issue in this example is that the CAPTCHA image is broken, so the user will never be able to submit the form.

There are too many tools available today for this not to work.  Instead of playing the $350 for the class, I guess I’ll just find some videos on YouTube. Do you think Rhodes will notice?

Lessons in Online Marketing – Make Sure Your Form Works is a post from Bob Hazlett, a digital marketer who writes at One Half Amazing!

I’ll make this quick. Overall, not the best experience in the world, but I didn’t go in expecting much.
• Got to store at 5:30AM, was about 20th in line.
• Apple Employees came around about 7:30 to show off new phone, offer juice and make sure you were eligible.
• Store had the capacity to handle about 10 or so people at a time.
• Apple employees have to put in all your info in on those little handheld devices. Whoever thought of that is a damn fool.
• Number successfully ported over at about 9am, but activation through iTunes hung. Employee said I was his 4th customer and 1st were he got all (most) the way through.
• Credit card handhelds in store crash about 9:10am.
• Wait, Wait, Wait on iTunes to activate – nothing
• 10am, they say we can go home and activate them through iTunes
• Line didn’t move for about an hour or more, people were getting restless outside. Employees at a loss about what to do. Head guy on the phone.
• iPhone still not officially hooked up to iTunes, but I am getting calls on it now.

ping me @onehalfamazing on Twitter if you have direct questions or concerns. I’ll do my best to get to them all.

My Experience at Apple Store on iPhone 2.0 Day is a post from Bob Hazlett, a digital marketer who writes at One Half Amazing!

Here’s a great example of what to do (right) when you mess up. Netflix had some problems with their shipping system recently and instead of the usual corporate spin, they turned it into a positive. They (1) gave a sincere apology, (2) admitted fault quickly and (3) made it up to the user. Take a note, wheather your business is offline or on, people want to be treated fairly and will remember memorable experiences.

3 Things to Learn from Netflix about Customer Service is a post from Bob Hazlett, a digital marketer who writes at One Half Amazing!

This post is the first in a series I like to call ‘Free Trade Ideas‘. To give you the shortened overview; I post idea an idea that I’ve been tinkering with and if it’s something that you like, then you are free to use it as your own. No string attached, no gimmicks, no restrictions.

Why would I do something like this? In simple, the idea part is easy for me, its the implementation that I find hard to overcome. No, I’m not worried about someone taking my idea and turning it into a billion dollar business. My main concern is to strengthen the quality and quantity of my ideas and to better communicate them within this community. Ideas and innovation are meant to be free. It serves no purpose trying to hole them up within some Moleskine notebook anymore.

The Setup:
Blogs and social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook are all the rage within the business community. Every business should have some sort of communication platform in which they can reach out to their customers and fans. If you’re still trying to get to this level, then maybe this article isn’t for you. But, if you’re ahead of the curve and have had a blog, Facebook, MySpace page, etc and are looking to capitalize on new ways to reach your customers, then this should be right up your alley.

Twitter is a micro-blogging service which allows its users to send updates to both their personalized homepage and other users or ‘followers’ who have signed up to receive them. Messages are sent through SMS (text messages), instant messages or e-mail and are capped at 140 characters. Twitter’s service revolves around one simple question: “What are you doing?”

There are legions of followers within microblogging services such as Twitter, Pownce and Dodgeball, so I wholeheartedly believe that somehow a business model must come out of it.

The Idea:
An experienced and trusted Twitter user that merges, captures and translates real time data from these microblogging services and marries it to an advertising partner. Not simply showing an advertisement or spamming the community, but rather starting true conversations and solving problems for both the community members and their advertising partners.

For an example, lets say your client is a small business coffee shop in Manhattan. You (the trusted Twitter user) setup a script or notification through a proprietary service or use something like Search Twitter with a set of keywords you plan to target. Through your feed, you receive instant notification when user AngieAnn (who happens to live in Manhattan) is disappointed in the coffee her roommates left on the burner.

Your service relies on speed so you quickly comment on her Twitter page, introduce yourself and offer her a discount on her next drink at your client’s coffee shop. She can use the coupon code you’ve just left for her and your client can then measure the effects of this.

When she then redeems the offer, the coffee shop staff is in on the promotion and asks AngieAnn to become a follower of their feed. Through your Twitter profile, you can then offer the coffee shop’s best customers (those that have signed up as followers) discounts, free products and exclusive offers. Followers feel special and privileged, your client has customers for life and the effects of your promotion may even cause a Twittermob.

Therefore, the benefits you can present to your advertising clients are;

• Challenging customers with information that provokes a response. Customers want to take action.
• Speaking with them on theirr own turf. You are tailoring your conversation to them and not trying to sell them items they don’t need. You are starting two dimensional questions in which the user feels engaged.
• Customizing the experience to that specific user. No where else in the world is someone getting the same attention.

Concerns:
Its important that you establish yourself first within these communities, that’s another reason why a middleman who already has a expertise in this can excel. Ensure that your clients don’t get a case of Twitterhea or want to overwhelm their customers with messages. Encourage them to really get to know their customers and slowly begin to slow value within the community.

Additional Resources:
Twitter
Pownce
Dodgeball
Twitter Search Engine
Beyond Madison Avenue – Apparently, Twitterers are Morons

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Free Trade Ideas – Using Twitter/Pownce/Dodgeball to Advertise to Your Best Customers is a post from Bob Hazlett, a digital marketer who writes at One Half Amazing!