It’s SO the little things. In a future blog post, I’ll be talking about the wonderful experience that is GroundLink. But as I was taking a GrounLink car to JFK this morning, it got me thinking about why I loved them so much – And I realized that yet again, it’s the little things. Here’s a list of eight things you can do RIGHT NOW, for little or no cost, that will improve your customer service, get your customers happier than they’ve ever been, and get them talking about you to all of their friends! 8) Know your audience. This is one of the easiest, yet most forgotten things in customer service. Imagine being able to talk to your audience [...]

In general, “the rules” fall into two categories. “For our safety,” or “for gain.” By “for gain,” I mean for a company’s gain – i.e., “We can’t give out more than one sample because we’ll lose money.” In general, the rules make sense. Except for the TSA. Their rules never make sense. But – Part of succeeding in business has to involve knowing when the bend, or even break the rules. There will never be a rule that can be designed for every single situation without fail. Every situation is different, and anyone in charge of enforcing the rules needs to understand that. No business will thrive (or even survive) if they don’t know when to bend or break a [...]

So in 2 days, this will happen:     That will be almost 16 hours of uninterrupted writing. Blog posts, my new book (due out in January, being published by Palgrave/MacMillan), emails for my newsletter… Heck, perhaps even a note to my future child (not that there’s anything in the works yet, calm down, mom…) But there will be writing. It seems that planes are the only place lately where I can write uninterrupted, without the real world, or the Internet, or my mobile phone, or my cat distracting me. (Squirrel!) Planes are my last bastion of creativity. I’ve got a handful of new blog posts to write, including… A true story of how a six year relationship with a [...]

A bit over a month ago, I was contacted by Facebook, asking if I’d like to “merge” my “fan” page (I’m STILL not comfortable calling it that) with my “personal” page on Facebook, and turn my “fans” into “subscribers.” Facebook’s logic there was that I’d only have to post all my content in one place, and could determine which content was “public,” (i.e., subscribers, the world, etc.,) and which I kept only for my “friends.” I volunteered to give it a shot, even after being told there was no turning back – i.e., my “Fan page” would disappear, and I couldn’t bring it back. After asking a ton of questions (and to Facebook’s credit, the person who reached out to [...]

With today’s big announcement that Vocus is acquiring iContact, I think it’s time to revisit the four ways to be hated because of your email marketing. There are a lot more, but follow these rules, and you’re off to a really good start. (Remember – I’m the guy who created a company that sends out 3.4 million double-opt-in, non-spam emails each month… So I kinda know what I’m talking about.) Realize – Email marketing without the right training is a way to screw up to a larger audience in a shorter amount of time. What’s so great about this merger is that you now have the tools to look at email as another marketing tool – not just something alone [...]