Great Straight Forward Advice for all Marketers

I've just read the best post all year. It's on Psychotactics.com basically it gives straight forward advice which most marketers will run a mile from but for those who take it will be worth its weight in gold.

Here's the secret marketing 'trick' that'll guarantee to make you a fortune.

Speak to your customers

Let them tell you what works on your site, ask them abut new products and promotions. Do they think you're offering the best customer service. If they see problems do you react quickly to fix them or do you just brush it off as another annoying customer.

Reacting quickly and asking takes time and god forbid you have to speak to customers but in the end they are the ones spending cash, ignore them at your peril. Quite a few already have and they aren't around anymore (Woolworths anyone?)

Anyway Psychotactics put it in actual things to do, check out thier post.

Jack White and The Dead Weather to play Glastonbury 2009

I was just listening to Spotify and as I'm tight I had it set to free. One of the ads mentioned Jack White's new band, The Dead Weather. I like Jack so I checked out their website on the tour page it seems they have a date at The Forum in London on 24th June.

It just seems quite a coincidence that that is only 2 days before Glastonbury Festival begins and there are several TBC slots on the line up. For me 2+2=4 so I recon that Jack White and The Dead Weather will be making and appearance.

Back to analogue photography

If you've read my blog before you'll know that I love my Lomo Cameras. The cool thing about them is that they are analogue i.e. they aren't digital cameras they use good old fashioned 35mm film. This means that I have to get them processed in the old way with chemicals and everything.

This way of processing photographs has been around for nearly 100 years. But very quickly its become a niche service. Companies who until recently only charged a few pounds for processing and capturing on CD suddenly doubled their prices.

I used to take my films to ASDA nice and cheap and decent quality processing too but then the price shot up from £2.50 per film to £4.00 shocked and skint I decided to look else where.

So I tried Max Speilman, they seemed to know what they were doing, they've been around for years. Unfortunately they don't have a clue, my film was badly processed, so much so that you can see their finger prints allover the scans. Then the prints where scanned badly so that the images ended up on the wrong prints. Never, ever using them again.

Then I tried Snappy Snaps, cool name (they even sell Lomo Cameras). The processing is great but the price is a bit steep too. £5.99 per film! When I went to collect my pictures today instead of £11.98 they tried to charge me over £17 as they said that the person who'd taken my order had forgotten to charge me for the CD's. £17 for 48 pictures is just crazy so I complained and they dropped the CD charge.

What I'm getting at is that I understand that film processing is dying out due to digital cameras but there is a massive surge towards people still wanting analogue photography. The number of people who are members of Lomography measures several million on it's own. This means that there's still a massive demand for film processing.

I just need to find somewhere that will do my processing for a decent cost at a decent standard. If you know anywhere please let me know. And if they're any good I'll tell all my friends and they use it too. This good service will make a lot of money because the niche who need it are on the look-out for it.

Do I need a website anymore?

Once upon a time if you had a business you had to have your own website.

It took ages to write copy, mainly because you'd never done it before and when you read it back it sounded really dumb. You had to find a designer, who always looked about 12 and baffled you with tech jargon and produced an expensive flash website no one could find, but hey it looked amazing!

Well I was just thinking,why on earth do you need a website any more? The Internet is full to bursting of free tools for websites and blogs, social networking, photography hosting sites, e-commerce sites. Loads and loads and loads of stuff just laying around for free.

All this stuck together must be able to make your presence on the Internet, easy and fulfilling plus making it blindingly easy to find. I'm not techie, but I've heard of using the 'Cloud' i.e. having everything floating on the web and I honestly can't see why it shouldn't be able to work it's just a bunch of links at the end of the day.

I'm sure I'm re-inventing the wheel because this is so blindingly obvious that someone far cleverer than me must be already doing this. Regardless I'm going to try and see if I can get this off the ground if only for my own amusement.

Anyone willing to help, drop me an email. Even if it just to laugh at me for not already knowing all about it.

Shuttleworth and Yorkshire Tea match made in heaven

I love John Shuttleworth so I'm really pleased that he's back on TV all be it in a TV ad from Yorkshire Tea. His comedy is just perfect for it and the really great thing is that there's been no compromise in his style or act, Ken and Mary are there as is the Jacket, roll neck and glasses.

Jarvis wins over Bruce Springsteen at Glastonbury 2009

I'm going to Glastonbury at the end of the month, did I mention it?

Anyway recently I posted about which acts to see at this year's Glastonbury Festival.

I was torn on Saturday night the big headliner is Bruce Springsteen, now I'm not a fan of the Boss never have been, nothing against the man just not my cup of tea. But Springsteen at Glastonbury would be quite an event one probably never to be repeated. So I was going to go.

But then over on the John Peel stage, I think, Jarvis Cocker is headlining up against Bruce. I'm from Sheffield, like Jarvis so my loyalty was tested. Any way I just got Jarvis' CD 'Further Complications' which is great I've listed to it five times already. It's so varied and interesting, pure Jarvis.

So that's it Bruce I'm sure you'll put on a great show but I'm sticking with Sheffield, I'm sticking with Jarvis.