Push or Pull

Posted in: Business to Business, blog by CW on 28 January 2010

In discussions of on-line content you may frequently encounter the terms push and pull. These are more than catch-phrases. They reflect two totally different philosophies employed in sharing content with your audience, whether they are reading your posts on-line or employees at a company meeting.

Pushing content has become the traditional method for delivering a company’s message to customers. We tend to call our customers consumers because that’s how companies see their customer’s role in the business cycle; consumers are expected to swallow what’s fed to them, be it products or propaganda. In the words of industry analyst Jerry Michalski, a consumer was no more than “a gullet whose only purpose in life is to gulp products and crap cash.”¹ This business model creates a wall of separation between the business and it’s customers. We are telling them what we think they need to know about us and our product. It’s a one-way form of communication, one that discourages feedback from our customers. When we deny them the opportunity to provide us direct and instantaneous feedback we run the risk that they will find other outlets for their comments like blogs and community forums. These sites are not under our control and correcting misinformation or offering clarification is often impossible, even on those few occasions when we’re  aware that we’re being discussed outside of our own website.

Content that pulls customers in and along, on the other hand, provides a means for them to engage and converse with us. The conversation may not always be pleasant or productive; there are times a dissatisfied customer simply wants to vent and ignores any attempt of ours to become involved in a conversation. But if we’ve pulled them into our venue, our website or blog, we have the means to turn their comments into a conversation with other customers even if the original customer never responds. We can’t always control the conversation but we can always become engaged in it. When we pull our customers into engagements with us, we can be aware of what’s being said about our company and products and respond in a timely manner.

To pull customers we need to provide interesting and informative content and most important, a way for them to post their comments on our company and products. The best option for a company website is to provide for comments right on the site. Deflecting comments to a third-party site or only providing an opportunity for email contact detracts from the immediacy and transparency of our communications. As Doc Searls and David Weinberger remind us in The Cluetrain Manifesto:

The Internet is a place. We buy books and tickets on the Web. Not over, through, or beside it. To call it a “platform” belies its hospitality. What happens on the Net is more than commerce, more than content, more than push and pull and clicks and traffic and e-anything. The Net is a real place where people can go to learn, to talk to each other, and to do business together. It is a bazaar where customers look for wares, vendors spread goods for display, and people gather around topics that interest them. It is a conversation. At last and again.

In this new place, every product you can name, from fashion to office supplies, can be discussed, argued over, researched, and bought as part of a vast conversation among the people interested in it. “I’m in the market for a new computer,” someone says, and she’s off to the Dell site. But she probably won’t buy that cool new laptop right away. She’ll ask around first — on Web pages, on newsgroups, via e-mail: “What do you think? Is this a good one? Has anybody checked it out? What’s the real battery life? How’s their customer support? Recommendations? Horror stories?”

“I’m in the market for a good desk dictionary,” says someone else, and he’s off to Amazon.com where he’ll find a large number of opinions already expressed:

I love the look of this book, and the publisher did a great job; but I made the mistake of buying it without realizing that it was first published over 7 years ago….

I’ve had this book for two days and I keep going back to it. I may not be typical since I collect dictionaries and wanted this when I heard about it last year, but….

Ugh, they don’t have “aegritudo” but they have the “modern” definition of “peruse”….

These conversations are most often about value: the value of products and of the businesses that sell them. Not just prices, but the market currencies of reputation, location, position, and every other quality that is subject to rising or falling opinion.

It’s nothing new, in one sense. The only advertising that was ever truly effective was word of mouth, which is nothing more than conversation. Now word of mouth has gone global. The one-to-many scope that technology brought to mass production and then mass marketing, which producers have enjoyed for two hundred years, is now available to customers. And they’re eager to make up for lost time.

If we do not engage our customers in conversations, if we fail to talk with them, we can be sure they will be talking about us somewhere else.

These days the easiest way to begin a conversation with our customers is to take advantage of the many social netowrking platforms available to everyone on the internet. Create a Facebook account for your company, set up a Twitter account and start a blog. You don’t even have to spend a lot of money buying a domain and setting up a fancy website. Begin with a Blogger account and a Gmail address in your company’s name.

Once you’ve set up a place for the conversation to take place, initiate the dialogue. Start posting and Tweeting. You may not get much feedback at first, but don’t let that dissuade you. Mention your blog and Facebook page in your email signature and on company advertising. Make sure your customers know you are there and willing to respond to their comments and questions. Keep your content up-to-date and informative. Eventually your customers will respond.

When they do, treat them as if they were at the counter or front desk of your place of business. Don’t be dismissive or rude. Don’t treat them any differently than if you were both face-to-face. Use these opportunities to converse, to educate, to correct misconceptions, to build relationships with your customers. If you impress them as an open and honest business person willing to take suggestions and even criticism, it won’t be long before they are recommending you to their family, friends and co-workers. And as every small business owner knows, personal recommendations are the best advertising money cannot buy.

¹ The Cluetrain Manifesto Chapter 4 Copyright © 1999, 2001 Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger. All rights reserved.

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Buy 4, Get 1 Free sale

Posted in: blog, store by CW on 22 January 2010

As mentioned in a previous post, we recently had to raise some of our prices to reflect the increases in ink and laser cartridge prices charged to us by our suppliers.

We understand that while these prices still reflect a substantial savings over buying OEM cartridges, any price increase is unwelcome. We are attempting to help offset the impact of those increases by introducing our “Buy 4 Get 1 Free” sale.

Buy any four remanufactured or refilled cartridges and you will receive a fifth cartridge of equal or lesser value absolutely free.

Feel free to mix and match; buy three ink cartridges and one laser cartridge, buy two ink and two laser cartridges, buy four laser cartridges and get an ink cartridge free. As long as you are buying refilled and remanufactured cartridges you can combine them in any quantity and style and you’ll still receive the fifth cartridge of equal or lesser value free.

(Please note: this offer cannot be used in conjunction with any other discount or sale)

“Driving Directions” bug

Posted in: blog, store by CW on 15 January 2010

Image via Wikipedia

We’ve been made aware of an odd bug in the “Driving Directions” page on our site.

If the directions you get when you enter an address East of our store include “Turn left at Rolfe Rd” after turning onto Clairemont Mesa Blvd. West, you should ignore that. I cannot figure out why Google wants you to turn there, but it’s totally unnecessary.

Whether you are turning onto Clairemont Mesa Blvd. from Interstate 15, 163 or 805, all you need to do is take Clairemont Mesa Blvd. West until you get to 3952-H. Once you’re on Clairemont Mesa Blvd., no other turns are necessary until you reach our location.

I apologize for any confusion this may have caused. The bug is on Google’s side. There’s no way for us to edit the directions provided.

Ink costs more than blood

Posted in: blog, store by CW on 13 January 2010

Ink is the most expensive component in a printer cartridge.

Even our replacement ink, manufactured by Cartridge World specifically for its franchise locations, costs us over $100 a gallon.

Now the price of ink is increasing again, and while we regret having to do this, we are finding it necessary to slightly increase our prices to cover the additional cost.

Up until now we have been able to keep the majority of our prices static for the six years we’ve been open. Even as costs were increasing we preferred to reduce profit margins rather than raise prices. We could afford to do that because of the increased volume of sales we were enjoying, due in large part to the word-of-mouth recommendations from our current customers.

But now we’ve reached a point where we simply have to add a dollar or two to the price of a wider range of our cartridges just to cover the cost of materials.

We still offer a substantial savings over the cost of OEM cartridges from an office supply store or directly from the printer manufacturer. There’s simply no need to pay for your printer over again every time you buy a round of cartridges.

Not only do we offer you cartridges that are guaranteed to work to your satisfaction but we offer you a savings of between 30 and 50% off retail prices, depending on the cartridges you purchase.

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Improve network speed with DNS

Posted in: Tips & Tricks, blog by CW on 6 January 2010

If you have a home or office network you have probably noticed that on occasion a webpage will load slowly or you may even get a time-out message in your browser. Sometimes this may be caused by an overload of internet traffic on a particularly busy server, but other times it is most likely the result of a poorly configured DNS setting in your router.

If you’re not sure what this is all about, DNS (Domain Name Servers) are servers scattered throughout the world whose job it is to translate human readable domain addresses into machine readable addresses. In the early days of the internet, to reach google.com you would have to type 64.233.183.106 into the address window of the browser. Every website had its own particular address, and they still do. Web servers, the computers where webpages are stored and “served” to you and I, cannot understand words, only numbers. Web servers have no idea what yahoo.com means, but they know where 69.147.114.224 is. You can prove this by typing 69.147.114.224 into the address window of your browser. Domain Name Servers take 69.147.114.224 and translate that into yahoo.com strictly for the benefit of us humans. Comodo explains the purpose and functionality of DNS well here.

In a router there’s a setting for DNS. Usually the default settings will be those of your ISP (Internet Service Provider) like Cox or AT&T, but they may also be whatever default DNS addresses the manufacturer chooses to use.

Whenever you click a link or type an address into a browser, the first stop for that electronic packet is a DNS server (I know, that’s redundant). The server will translate the typed address into a machine readable one. If that DNS server is too far away from you, you’ll notice the connection is very slow or may even time out. So the ideal situation is to have the DNS listings in your router be servers as close to you as possible. You do not have to use those provided with your router or by your ISP. There are several alternatives, one of which may speed up your browsing because it’s closer to you.

Google has entered the DNS provider ranks with their Public DNS, 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4. Needless to say this has raised security concerns over Google having access to our searches and web browsing.

Comodo offers their SecureDNS (156.154.70.22 and 156.154.71.22) and OpenDNS has been around for a while (208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220).

To determine which DNS server is fastest at your location may I recommend Steve Gibson’s Domain Name Speed Benchmark.