Getting your email newsletters out, flashing yourself around the social networks, and generally being a bit of an e-vamp is all great for your business. Ask yourself, though, whether you are splashing around the electronic world, or immersing yourself into it.

From my isolated little (currently too-hot) loungeroom, it’s all well and good to imagine that people have moved away from print newsletters. But they haven’t!

In the past two workplaces in which I have been a paid monkey, not one little bit of thought — at all! — was given to emails or e-newsletters. These two companies would prefer to spend thousands on print documents. Filled with bad art, misspelled words, appalling styles of writing.

Not to mention the letters that would go out. Oh my lord.

Honestly, if you want to connect with people, at least go the yards and make it error-free. Nothing says “I don’t have much pride in what I do” than a document full of errors. The second stage is bad typography, awful design, and clip art.

These organisations ‘think electronically’ or believe themselves to be ‘thinking E’. They are trying desperately to go paperless, with intranets and new whiz-bang computer systems. But instead of changing their cultures slowly, integrating themselves with what is not new technology any more, they’re sitting it on top. Of course, it teeters and wobbles and eventually falls over. Nobody has managed the change properly, and nobody is immersed in the electronic world. Every one of them is splashing around and being excited by the pretty patterns.

For those businesses who are actually serious about thinking electronically, here’s a tip. You aren’t immersed until you are measuring how you are rolling.

You might be sending newsletters out by email; but until you are measuring the performance of each one, you aren’t anywhere close to Thinking E; at least, not fully. It’s when you get to the point where you are monitoring the performance of your communications that you are truly immersed.

If you are a true E company, you would:

• send email newsletters out, regularly
• assess the performance of your previous newsletter to improve on it, month-to-month
• reassess your website content for relevance, every six months
• maximise social networks with communication strategies, monitoring, and analysis
• keep on top of your website analytics, understand them, and push better and better performance
• keep on top of your grassroots metrics: word of mouth, recommendations, which are reflected online through social networks
• help your employees become engaged in promoting and talking about your business online (which they will, if they’re happy and encouraged!)
• … and so on and so forth.

I might ‘just’ be a copywriter. But I’ve worked in the field long enough to understand how your business’s attitude towards the electronic world can impact on its communications.

Does your business splash about, or is it immersed? Thinking E isn’t just about marketing or profit margins, it’s about communication.

Filed under: Marketing

You know, I didn’t even look at this website for most of 2011. When I did, it struck me as being patently absurd that anybody would contact me for rates or quotes or any other bollocks.

So I did away with it.

And I put in a shop.

And I love the shop.

If it were me, I would use the shop.

After gradually migrating towards an online-shopper-only, I have to say that just letting people buy things — and talking to them later — is easier. And better. And SIMPLE OMG.

Remember simple things? Nice, weren’t they.

I’m going back to simple. Better blogs, better experience.

And at some stage I’ll do something about the typography on this damn site, too. It’s all a little bit too.….. black.

Let me know what you think about my store!! I want feedback please!

Tags: online shop
Filed under: Brutal Pixie Things

I recently sent out my first newsletter in nearly a year. My imaginary marketing mentor is slapping me around the head right now, yelling, “It’s not good enough!!”

So rather than ignore this nasty beast, I started thinking about a series I might be able to post, both here and in my newsletters.

This week at my ‘real job’ (I actually work full-time as an administrator elsewhere at the moment) I was asked to run a series of workshops about writing. The workshops we came up with were:

• creative writing
• article writing
• review writing

Once we mapped these out, we started thinking about IT workshops, given that the attendees won’t be particularly savvy. So, we’re going to cover:

• writing for the web
• blogging and publishing online
• … aaaand something else, probably related to use of web 2.0 technologies

The planning I’ll be doing for these workshops will all go to waste if I don’t do something with it. So, in six to eight weeks you can look forward to the start of these posts.

And if you don’t want to have to visit this site to see them, sign up to the pixie list. If you’re anything like me, you’d rather everything go to your email so you don’t forget!

Filed under: Marketing