Wheels that is. Bike wheels.
After years of being super negative towards cyclists, I think I'm about to turn into one - and I'm as shocked as anyone who knows me, and knows my distaste for cyclists.
During the last Tour de France, I must admit I'd really only watched it for the first time because it was on at the same time as the Ashes series in England, and during the breaks, and rained out sessions I'd flick across to SBS and watch the cycling.
To my surprise it was actually enjoyable to watch, I think that Phil Ligget commentating had a lot to do with it, as he explained what was happening so that someone who had no clue, like me, could enjoy without dumbing it down sop much as someone who followed the sport would be turned off by it.
I can also point the finger at Paul, who has an office next to us, and is a big cycling fan and has been trying to rope Skye and I into the sport.
I think lastly, what's tipped the scales is that I'm now getting on in my sporting pursuits and playing footy isn't something that I can do any longer, or really feel the need to play, and that probably goes for all contact sports really - it's just so hard the following day, and walking around like a mummy for 2-3 days recovering isn't a fun thing. But I am looking for something that will help me keep my weight down, and that is competitive, that I can still be competitive in - and since I have my mums legs, I'd probably be a reasonable armature sprinter on the bike.
So I spend the weekend either going around to various bike shops, looking for my first bike, and gear to boot, or looking on the net, I've found three bikes that I thought was OK.
They are;
a Merida from St Kilda Cycles
a MBC from Melbourne Bikes
a Giant from eBay, that the bloke bought some time ago and basically hasn't used.
It is really confusing because I don't know much about bikes, and on the forums everyone has an opinion, and instead of getting an entry level bike, you're pushed into spending several thousands on a bike that you don't know which way to go.
So I think I've made a decision - I'm going to bid on the eBay bike, but if that's no good, then i think the Merida is the way to go. At least the frame is a good one, and if I want to upgrade the running gear I can.
The next step is to get the bike and take it for a spin - now that will be interesting, because I did take one around the car park on the weekend, and an onlooker might have described me as having less balance than a circus bear on a unicycle is probably true - but after a good ride, that should be sorted out.
At least I can still bunny hop - though road bikes now aren't made for it, it will still look cool?
Enjoy,
C
Monday, 26 October 2009
Friday, 23 October 2009
Talking again about being remarkable...
Following on from my last post about being remarkable, based on what Seth Godin speaks about in his talks and books, I found something remarkable too.
OK, so hands up this happened because I made a mistake, but with that said, it's still quite a remarkable result.
Now our service has a feature that allows you to send a SMS to a virtual number, and that message is then forwarded onto a group - great for sales people on the road to tell everyone about a new sale they got, or for emergency alerts to where it can reduce the time it takes to send out to people that need to know by some margin.
So, I had a school send me an email about it, and I thought, I haven't played with it for a bit so I'd refresh my memory about how it worked, trying things I knew would work to make sure they didn't and vice versa - since working in an IT world, I've learnt about replication, where as coming from an engineering background it was always a matter of getting on to rectify the problem.
So with that I logged into my web account and sent a SMS to a test group that was already in there.
Now, because I generally use my account for testing, I assumed the test group just had my number in it - but it didn't, it contained 125 mobile numbers, whom I have no clue who they were or are.
The service worked great, and all 125 people got the message "this is a test message".
Bugger it, I could have done with not doing that, but there's nothing I can do about it now, I'm sure someone would reply, and I'll just send back a message apologising for it and I had the wrong number.
So over the next hour or two, I checked the inbox a couple of times, nothing, no one replied - odd, but good in a way, so I didn't worry about it again and went on with what I was doing.
It did nag a bit at me, and late in the day I went back to my account and had a look around, oh no, the service alias (which means the originator of the message I sent) was set to a mobile number I didn't recognise?
The next day, Lorretta, the building manager came to see me asking a question about her phone, she'd received so many messages and a number of calls from people asking who she was? Strange, but then it dawned on me that the message I'd sent, I sent it from her number.
It was because a while before she had asked me to SMS someone who wasn't getting the messages from her phone, and so she would get the response I set the messages to come from her number, and then forgot to take it off again.
Is that remarkable? It's a remarkable stuff up, that's what it was, but that's not what it is.
It is remarkable because she received 60 messages back and 5 phone calls - that's a response rate, to a test message, of over 50% - in fact one caller told poor Lorettra that he needed to know what she did because he was so intrigued by the message.
Now of course you can't send out to a marketing list "this is a test message" to trap possible punters to buy your wares, but it does show with the right message, response rate can be massive.
Compared with more traditional methods where a 2% response rate is almost unheard of, 1% is a real win, and average is less than that. In a world where no hears you any more because the noise is so loud, this is what it was like when the idea marketing was born, and you only had to whisper to be heard!
Now that's what I call remarkable!
Enjoy,
C
OK, so hands up this happened because I made a mistake, but with that said, it's still quite a remarkable result.
Now our service has a feature that allows you to send a SMS to a virtual number, and that message is then forwarded onto a group - great for sales people on the road to tell everyone about a new sale they got, or for emergency alerts to where it can reduce the time it takes to send out to people that need to know by some margin.
So, I had a school send me an email about it, and I thought, I haven't played with it for a bit so I'd refresh my memory about how it worked, trying things I knew would work to make sure they didn't and vice versa - since working in an IT world, I've learnt about replication, where as coming from an engineering background it was always a matter of getting on to rectify the problem.
So with that I logged into my web account and sent a SMS to a test group that was already in there.
Now, because I generally use my account for testing, I assumed the test group just had my number in it - but it didn't, it contained 125 mobile numbers, whom I have no clue who they were or are.
The service worked great, and all 125 people got the message "this is a test message".
Bugger it, I could have done with not doing that, but there's nothing I can do about it now, I'm sure someone would reply, and I'll just send back a message apologising for it and I had the wrong number.
So over the next hour or two, I checked the inbox a couple of times, nothing, no one replied - odd, but good in a way, so I didn't worry about it again and went on with what I was doing.
It did nag a bit at me, and late in the day I went back to my account and had a look around, oh no, the service alias (which means the originator of the message I sent) was set to a mobile number I didn't recognise?
The next day, Lorretta, the building manager came to see me asking a question about her phone, she'd received so many messages and a number of calls from people asking who she was? Strange, but then it dawned on me that the message I'd sent, I sent it from her number.
It was because a while before she had asked me to SMS someone who wasn't getting the messages from her phone, and so she would get the response I set the messages to come from her number, and then forgot to take it off again.
Is that remarkable? It's a remarkable stuff up, that's what it was, but that's not what it is.
It is remarkable because she received 60 messages back and 5 phone calls - that's a response rate, to a test message, of over 50% - in fact one caller told poor Lorettra that he needed to know what she did because he was so intrigued by the message.
Now of course you can't send out to a marketing list "this is a test message" to trap possible punters to buy your wares, but it does show with the right message, response rate can be massive.
Compared with more traditional methods where a 2% response rate is almost unheard of, 1% is a real win, and average is less than that. In a world where no hears you any more because the noise is so loud, this is what it was like when the idea marketing was born, and you only had to whisper to be heard!
Now that's what I call remarkable!
Enjoy,
C
Thursday, 22 October 2009
Being remarkable....
I’ve started reading a Seth Godin book called the Purple Cow – it’s about 7 years old now, and everything doesn’t just ring bells, it’s a blaring noise in my ear – it’s about noise, and the noise we create being in business.
My favourite business saying is that every business is first and foremost a sales business, we’re in the business of selling.
If you’re an accountant, you’re selling your accountancy services – the provision of the services is part of the deal, but it’s not the deal. If you’re a GP, you’re selling your medical skills, again providing those skills comes later after it’s done, and so on.
Seths book (I hope he doesn’t mind me referring to Seth by his first name) is all about being remarkable – Seth himself wasn’t remarkable to me until recently when one of the directors forwarded a clip online to me from one of his talks, so he must be right!
There are a host of concepts in there that he’s introduced from others, and recommended books by other that I will at some stage try and get myself across them, but I won’t comment on all of it, because then I’d be writing my own book.
Instead I’d like this think about what is remarkable, and how do we show we’re remarkable to our customers?
Well, as Seth says, being remarkable is about being worth someone remarking about you about, i.e. we have a good pizza place not to far from us that Lisa and I get takeaway from occasionally, it’s good but it’s not remarkable because it’s not GREAT and I wouldn’t tell friends about this place, but it is the best around me. I’ve got a GSXR1000 which also I think is good, good fun, but it’s not remarkable, my old R1 that was remarkable.
What really is remarkable, and here’s a nice plug, is my TIVO and my XBOX – both of these two items are remarkable.
After having Foxtel, it was costly junk, they couldn’t sort out whom I was a customer of be it Telstra’s or Foxtels? And I found 90% of the content unwatchable filler – so I guess it too is remarkable.
But for the TIVO, it’s remarkable, because it learns behaviour, what I like to watch, whom I like to watch and goes off and records things accordingly – along with the things I wanted to record aswell. It’s not pay TV so some of the new edgy US stuff isn’t there, but I have a PC and an XBOX and I’ll come to that.
The XBOX is also remarkable, because I don’t have pay TV, I do have a PC with internet that I can download content from, and my XBOX picks it up and lets me watch it on TV.
It’s great, it fills the cap between what I have currently, and what I want that I can have and at a fraction of the cost, that’s remarkable – my daily viewing experience have improved tremendously because of it and I’m always to watch something that I’m in the mood to watch.
Sure, reading the start of the book my mind was racing about how is Esendex remarkable – we do stuff others don’t, we include things others don’t, but it’s boring. But then I started thinking about our value prop, case studies on how we’ve effected customers, and that’s how we’re remarkable, to me at least and that’s important because I’m selling the stuff.
We’re remarkable, because we’ve save so many customers time – enough time to show significant labour costs. We’ve reduced complaints, evened out and raised the bar on customer service levels, reduced operating costs, increased profits and most of all... we’re made our customers remarkable by using us.
And that’s remarkable.
Enjoy,
C
My favourite business saying is that every business is first and foremost a sales business, we’re in the business of selling.
If you’re an accountant, you’re selling your accountancy services – the provision of the services is part of the deal, but it’s not the deal. If you’re a GP, you’re selling your medical skills, again providing those skills comes later after it’s done, and so on.
Seths book (I hope he doesn’t mind me referring to Seth by his first name) is all about being remarkable – Seth himself wasn’t remarkable to me until recently when one of the directors forwarded a clip online to me from one of his talks, so he must be right!
There are a host of concepts in there that he’s introduced from others, and recommended books by other that I will at some stage try and get myself across them, but I won’t comment on all of it, because then I’d be writing my own book.
Instead I’d like this think about what is remarkable, and how do we show we’re remarkable to our customers?
Well, as Seth says, being remarkable is about being worth someone remarking about you about, i.e. we have a good pizza place not to far from us that Lisa and I get takeaway from occasionally, it’s good but it’s not remarkable because it’s not GREAT and I wouldn’t tell friends about this place, but it is the best around me. I’ve got a GSXR1000 which also I think is good, good fun, but it’s not remarkable, my old R1 that was remarkable.
What really is remarkable, and here’s a nice plug, is my TIVO and my XBOX – both of these two items are remarkable.
After having Foxtel, it was costly junk, they couldn’t sort out whom I was a customer of be it Telstra’s or Foxtels? And I found 90% of the content unwatchable filler – so I guess it too is remarkable.
But for the TIVO, it’s remarkable, because it learns behaviour, what I like to watch, whom I like to watch and goes off and records things accordingly – along with the things I wanted to record aswell. It’s not pay TV so some of the new edgy US stuff isn’t there, but I have a PC and an XBOX and I’ll come to that.
The XBOX is also remarkable, because I don’t have pay TV, I do have a PC with internet that I can download content from, and my XBOX picks it up and lets me watch it on TV.
It’s great, it fills the cap between what I have currently, and what I want that I can have and at a fraction of the cost, that’s remarkable – my daily viewing experience have improved tremendously because of it and I’m always to watch something that I’m in the mood to watch.
Sure, reading the start of the book my mind was racing about how is Esendex remarkable – we do stuff others don’t, we include things others don’t, but it’s boring. But then I started thinking about our value prop, case studies on how we’ve effected customers, and that’s how we’re remarkable, to me at least and that’s important because I’m selling the stuff.
We’re remarkable, because we’ve save so many customers time – enough time to show significant labour costs. We’ve reduced complaints, evened out and raised the bar on customer service levels, reduced operating costs, increased profits and most of all... we’re made our customers remarkable by using us.
And that’s remarkable.
Enjoy,
C
Tuesday, 20 October 2009
Well done boys
Dear Mark and Casey - well done on your respective GP wins over the weekend in the F1 and MotoGP races respectively.
I thoroughly enjoyed watching the two of you pull out wins, when neither of you were favourites.
Though both seasons are about to come to an end, and you have both managed to be somewhere up the top of the tree, I'm looking forward to next year, where I hope you'll both be world champs!
Well done again.
C
I thoroughly enjoyed watching the two of you pull out wins, when neither of you were favourites.
Though both seasons are about to come to an end, and you have both managed to be somewhere up the top of the tree, I'm looking forward to next year, where I hope you'll both be world champs!
Well done again.
C
Is it really 2009?
For whatever reason last night I was looking at marketing companies in my local area.
There were tonnes of them, in fact I was surprised at how many there actually were - fair enough if I'd been looking in the CBD, but in around me, there were still tonnes.
The only thing that out amazed me were the number of MARKETING companies that didn't have websites!
"A marketing website that doesn't have a name?" I hear you saying, "Get out of town, it can't be possible!" but it's true.
I won't name and shame them - although I could because they obviously don't use the interwebbie thing so they'd never be able to see to it, but one thing I did was wrong was...
As a marketing company that doesn't have a website, I think the following rules should apply;
There were tonnes of them, in fact I was surprised at how many there actually were - fair enough if I'd been looking in the CBD, but in around me, there were still tonnes.
The only thing that out amazed me were the number of MARKETING companies that didn't have websites!
"A marketing website that doesn't have a name?" I hear you saying, "Get out of town, it can't be possible!" but it's true.
I won't name and shame them - although I could because they obviously don't use the interwebbie thing so they'd never be able to see to it, but one thing I did was wrong was...
As a marketing company that doesn't have a website, I think the following rules should apply;
- Marketing companies without a website are not allowed to have the following words in their business name;
- Better Results
- Idea Generators
- Creative
- International
- Enterprise
- Concepts
- Thinking
- Results
- and most of all MARKETING
Call me a snob, but if I was to employ the services of a marketing company, goodness, what message are they sending by snubbing the worlds most powerful marketing tool - the Internet!
Look I'm sure there are many back end marketers, and by that I mean they fill specific voids in the world of marketing, and they may never see the ultimate client, but work on behalf on behalf on behalf of the ultimate client, but I would have thought that if anyone should understand the principle that every company is a sales company, then why would they ignore to use something that ultimately will help their business grow - because as far as I see it you can never be too busy, and a company that isn't growing is dying.
Amazing, truly amazing.
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