Month: May 2020

By Posted on Posted in Branding, Business-general, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Networking, Publishing, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

Have you been dithering about starting a blog? Blogging provides several advantages in your marketing, but a lot of people are scared off by the idea.

It’s not that hard. A no-cost tool called WordPress makes it easy.

WordPress dashboard showing the ribbon, file naming, and text-editing window
WordPress dashboard showing the ribbon, file naming, and text-editing window

WordPress is a terrific platform. I have never heard of it not working on a site, though if your host company doesn’t support it, you’d need to do a manual installation (any web designer could help you with that). Most webhosts have one-click WordPress installation in their CPanels.

You do need to know some things about WP before you set up.

  • There is WordPress.com, which is hosted on THEIR servers, and WordPress.org, where your content is hosted on YOUR server (you don’t have to own your server–let your hosting company do that). You want .ORG, so you have full control over the content and cant be held hostage over it. Neither one charges money.
  • WordPress is a very simple shell that uses “themes” to determine the look and feel. There are thousands of themes out there, some at no cost and others for a fee. Find one you like that can incorporate your company branding, but play with it to see how easy it is to work. There are some that nest text inside Java routines as one example) and I have found it’s really tough to find the place I need to be to make minor edits.
  • Editing in WordPress is really easy, assuming you picked a theme that didn’t have the issue I just described. If you turn off the blocks feature, the interface is similar to Microsoft Word or GMail . So you don’t have to learn any HTML. Instead of using angle brackets to e.g. turn your text bold and then back to regular, you just highlight the text and click the B button in the formatting ribbon. You can see that ribbon at the top of the screenshot.
  • Find and install a few key plugins: a backup program so if WP utterly collapses, you still have your content; a file-namer that gives your posts a meaningful name taken from your headline (see where it says “Permalink” on the screenshot?), probably some others.
  • WordPress updates frequently, both to add function and to beef up security. Set yours up to automatically run the updater, but remember to check every now and then to see if you need to update your plugins. Updating is just a few clicks and very intuitive.
  • You have a choice every time you post new content: a post, which goes at the top of your blog (which posts in reverse chronological order so the newest is on top) or a page, which is part of your permanent website structure and can be organized with menus, etc. Posts can also be sorted by category, so your reader can see everything you’ve put in any particular category just by clicking on the category name. I find it very worth the extra few minutes to add categories, keyword tags (which help people find your post), a picture, and an excerpt.
  • Consider having a designer set up the site to begin with, making sure they know you want a theme that’s easy to edit posts, and then posting your own content from there.
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By Posted on Posted in Branding, Business Ethics, Business-general, Consumer Issues, Corporate Social Responsibility, Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Trends/News, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,
A small-town Main Street, https://www.publicdomainpictures.net/en/view-image.php?image=18641&picture=main-street
A small-town Main Street

A marketer friend in Connecticut sent out a wonderful tribute to his 95-year-old mom and used her to illustrate several points about customer-centric marketing and customer service. In the course of this article, he waxed rhapsodic about Amazon. I see Amazon (and some other companies) as not always so wonderful–and the public having blinders on about its predatory practices. This is what I wrote back to my friend. The third link is actually a very complete summary of the issues:

* * *

Great piece! I love the way you take your mom’s everyday activities and spin them into marketing do and don’ts.

While you certainly shouldn’t change it for Mom, you might want to rethink Amazon. It is very much a two-edged sword. It’s great that it has made the Long Tail [the ability to find obscure products that don’t support a large retail base and wouldn’t be stocked in physical stores] a thing and that any author has access to international markets. But…
  • They are a serious threat to the vibrancy of our downtowns. Can you imagine Stamford with only a few struggling chain stores? Goodbye to that nice falafel shop and Asian restaurant across the street from (Amazon-owned) Whole Foods (I’ve often eaten at one or the other on my way to NYC). Book stores, hardware stores, appliance stores–and all the traffic into town those stores bring–are increasingly shaky in an Amazon-dominated world. And when that foot traffic goes away (assuming it comes back after we’re finally out of quarantine), so do the restaurants, night spots, etc.
  • Their labor record is very poor. Their treatment of independent publishers is not only very poor but IMHO a violation of monopoly rules. Did you know that Amazon, a retailer, takes the 55% industry-standard wholesaler discount instead of the 40% retailer level for its smaller publishers selling them physical books? (They do have much better deals for publishers on the books their subsidiary KDP prints on demand.) This is one of the two reasons they’re killing the independent bookstores (the other is that they’ve successfully trained the public to think of them first). Also, they present used and new versions of the same title on the same results page, which is a complete stab in the back to publishers–sort of like offering counterfeit designer watches and purses. I have no objection to selling used books (and keeping them out of landfills)–but not in direct competition with the same book, new.
  • For a long time, Amazon didn’t charge sales tax, which was an especially cruel anticompetitive practice in that it not only hurt businesses who have to collect those taxes, but also reduced the availability of government services by reducing government revenues.
  • Amazon has actively and repeatedly suppressed competitors. This includes using its enormous data on customer behavior and buying patterns to manufacture its own products, sold through its own channels. And students of the company’s behavior see evidence that once competitors are eliminated or demand spikes (as on household cleaning products during the pandemic), Amazon’s prices rise, sharply.
For these reasons, I buy from my local independent food markets, booksellers, appliance, and hardware stores (on their websites, currently) and shortly after Amazon bought it, I stopped going to Whole Foods even though it’s actually my closest supermarket.
* * *
That was the end of my letter. I love the convenience of online ordering too, but I’m happy to do it at the websites of independent businesses, especially if they’re local to me. What are your thoughts?
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By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Branding, Business Ethics, Consumer Issues, Corporate Social Responsibility, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, General Commentary, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Green Marketing, Innovation, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Technology Tagged with , ,

We still have a long way to go on eco-friendly packaging. I just finished a box of crackers. I washed out the plastic tray and will add it to the plastics recycling bag when it dries, put the box in the paper recycling bin, and threw away the shrink-wrap around the tray in the actual trash.

cracker box, tray, and inner shrinkwrap
Excess packaging: cracker box, tray, and inner shrink-wrap. Photo by Shel Horowitz

Most people won’t bother to do all this. Designers: this is a profit opportunity for you: create packaging that people only have to put in one place when it’s over, and that can be repurposed later–and remember that today’s compostable “solution” is only an alternative if people have access to an industrial compost facility. Most people don’t.

And businesses: as you adopt truly eco-friendly packaging, you’ve got a branding and marketing opportunity.

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