MBA Geek

An interesting page on CNN outlines the top 100 best companies to work for. The top three are SAS, Edward Jones and Wegmans but there are also a number of other well known names in there. It doesn’t matter if you went to the best business school or just followed one of those medical coding training courses, it’s good to have faith in your employer and to know you work somewhere that you can be proud of.

So, are you happy where you work? Is your company in the list?

I came across a great tweet today by @KellyShibari who posted a really great snapshot of the web stats of a website showing the effect of some Social Media promotion she did. Here’s the schematic:

Notice the stats for August are way higher than any of the other months. This was accomplished thanks to the work Kelly put in (which you can read all about on her post), but it’s a really good example of what can happen when you start using the tools at your disposal.

So, how can Social Media help a business? Well, building a business online is no different to opening a retail outlet. But when opening an outlet you get to choose where it’s going to be. Location is paramount to getting the traffic you need and that traffic is the lifeblood of your business. The situation online is totally different. All websites are born intrinsically equal; it doesn’t matter if you’re a purveyor of fine office furniture or if you sell real estate on the moon. Traffic is still the life blood of the business, but the rules are different. You need to pump effort into getting people to your site, building up relationships and making sure they come back. Social Networking gives you those tools, so make sure you get your hear around them today.

Last Friday, Andy and I took some time out of out day to visit a customer who had emailed us with a problem he had using the Isle of Man Government’s Online Services. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not part of a crack team that flies around the Island solving people’s problems, we have a helpdesk for that But it was a concerned user, who had some valuable feedback and we wanted to engage at a level that was useful both for him and for us.

And why shouldn’t we? This individual took the time out of his day to put his thoughts down on paper (email actually) and send them to us. His input was more valuable than any focus group we could put together, any survey we could send out. It was a genuine sentiment of someone who was trying to use something we built and failing. We could turn that energy into something positive we could use to improve what we were delivering. This is true for any industry; whether you are selling ballet shoes or offering Colonix reviews as a service. Engaging with your customers is paramount, because that’s how you know whether you are succeeding in what you set out to do .. or if you are failing.

Failure is not the issue; the issue would have been not learning something from the failure.

I had an interesting experience with a local company recently. I bought some tickets online from the Steam Packet website, our local ferry company. Anyway, we’re off to Butlins, so booked a ticket to go over with the car, two adults and a child. Anyway; it turns out that after I booked the tickets I found out that Arthur is still classed as an infant not a child and I needn’t have bought a ticket for him. I duly emailed them about the problem and left it at that.

Now, I expected to be contacted about the problem, and maybe not get a full refund as this would have been a change to our ticket (which normally is charged at £5 per leg). After a few days I didn’t hear anything, but spotted a credit from them on my card. Turns out they gave me a full refund for Arthur’s ticket, without even levying any charge. I was pretty pleased with this, but couldn’t help thinking it was a missed opportunity for the Steam Packet to gain some goodwill.

You see, all they needed to do was drop me a line to say that they were refunding me. I’m not even saying that they needed to call me, just an email response would have been perfect. We tend to hear a lot of negative publicity about firms, whether ones that provide transport services, or others that promise you diet pills that work; but unfortunately we don’t always get to hear the good news. This was a perfect opportunity for them to show that they care about their customers, but it was missed. If I hadn’t been checking my card statement, I would never have known that I was issued a refund.

Have you ever had a similar experience?