Very Responsive Home Page
February 13, 2010 at 1:08 pm
@burkie noted this on Twitter on Saturday:
Ulster Bank have a welcome message to Halifax on its home page.
Tags: Home page, ulster bank
To Close The Blacknight Matter
November 17, 2009 at 11:29 am
I posted on Friday about my disappointment that Blacknight doesn’t properly use the tools available to it in times of crisis. While many people commented on the blog, seemingly Michele Neylon (MD of Blacknight) wasn’t able to. He claimed to have posted his comment twice and insinuated on Twitter that I was receiving these comments and choosing not to publish.
That is not true.
It’s also irritating that someone who was clearly having technical difficulties at his end chose to publicly insinuate an untruth about me on Twitter (a very public space) – about something that was factually incorrect.
On Friday I emailed Michele and asked him to email me directly and I would publish his comments. I heard nothing back. I emailed him again yesterday because I believe in open discussion and sincerely wanted to publish his comments as they would add to the discussion. He came back to me late yesterday and I’m happy to publish what he has to say below:
Most of what I would have said has been said by other people in the comments. In common with a lot of companies in our sector we maintain two separate blogs:
http://blog.blacknight.com – news, offers, marketing etc.,
http://www.blacknightstatus.com – technical service notifications both from us and from companies that impact on our services eg. domain registries or bandwidth carriersWe have not posted technical information to our main company blog in well over a year. All our technical support staff would direct clients to the status site and it’s also linked to from all pages on our main site and in all outgoing emails from the support desk
The status site is 100% independent from the main Blacknight network etc., and doesn’t even use our DNS servers. Basically as long as we can get online in some way we can get onto it to post updates to our clients.
All updates posted to the status site appear on Twitter as well. See: http://twitter.com/blacknight/status/5709231280 for but one example. You posted a screenshot of our Twitter account to your blog. If you’d gone further down (back) you’d have seen several posts in relation to the issue on morgana from Thursday afternoon.
So there you have it. The word from Blacknight.
I’m doing a lot of reading around how people engage online. The academics would tell us that people tend to engage more quickly and more deeply due to the levels of anonymity; that they feel they can hide behind the anonymity in order to express themselves in ways that they wouldn’t do face to face. I think Twitter is an interesting phenomenon (for many reasons) but mostly because I’m noticing a variety of people who act like it’s anonymous when clearly it’s not. I wonder if Michele would have published his derogatory remarks about me on another online forum – I think not? Obviously Blacknight keep their blog to the superficial PR/marketing level. They wouldn’t blacken it with a personal attack that is unfounded and not proven. But yet he feels that it’s OK to do this on Twitter? Same size audience, same damage done.
What ever happened to the telephone? If I was heading up a company that was in crisis management mode, and a client (ie. me) published a blog about their poor handling of the situation, I would do everything in my power to get my opinion across; to attempt to rectify the situation and to clarify things. If I was unable to publish a comment and the client expressed concern at not receiving my comments, I’d pick up the phone. Or I’d email. Or do something to make myself heard. I wouldn’t go ahead and publish a derogatory remark to an audience of the client’s peers and colleagues.
Maybe that’s just me and how I do business?
Tags: Blacknight fail, Twitter behaviour
Top 5 Tips For Sign-Up Forms
May 18, 2009 at 10:04 am
Ryan Singer at FOWD in London a few weeks ago. If you haven’t got 10 mins to watch it, here’s what he says:
- Put the easy stuff first. Things people don’t have to think about. That way they’re more invested and have a bit of momentum going when it comes to things they have to think about – like choosing a user name.
- Add Ajax goodness for think about fields, eg. choosing user names. Show people on the spot if that name is taken. It’s much more satisfying than completing the form and having to go back and change.
- Only ask for what you need. If you need to ask more, you can always ask it inside the app.
- Use conversational language – and that includes on error messages. Instead of a bossy command style “you have not completed all the fields”, use “Can you check this? You’ve missed something.”
- Design your form to take numbers in whatever way the user wants to give you - if they want to put brackets around their number prefix – let them!
Plus one more!
- Show them what they’re getting at the end. Similar to how ecommerce sites allows you to review your purchase, similarly you need to show them what they’ve just signed up for.
Tags: FOWD, Ryan Singer, Sign Up Forms
What The Big Switch & Airtricity Don’t Advertise
April 22, 2009 at 2:08 pm
Yesterday I posted about how Airtricity and how they take €200 off new customers at sign up. I was a bit miffed about that, so I looked to the Big Switch.
As there is no information about customer entry fees on the Big Switch website either, I telephoned and found out that Bord Gais Energy also charge a switching fee. In fact, they have a matrix that helps them determine what that fee should be.
- If you’re already a Bord Gais customer and you are a tenant – you pay €100
- If you’re already a Bord Gais customer you’re a tenant living at your address less than 14 months – you pay €200
- If you’re a home owner living at your home less than 14 months – you pay €200.
The reason they say is because tenants have a habit of skipping off without paying their electricity bills. Fair enough. But what about a new home owner already beleagured with multiple costs? They’re hardly going to skip off.
- How long does Bord Gais get to sit on your money? 6 – 7 bills.
- That’s about 14 months of interest-free cash from you. Nice one.
Now this is all regular business practice I’m told.
But what I find highly irregular is the fact that Bord Gais do not advertise any of this on their website.
The Big Switch says nothing, nowhere, not even in the terms and conditions which I read. Nor does the Bord Gais mothership site. The first time you find out about this fee is when you’ve already done the switch (or so you thought) and you get a demanding letter in the post.
This is not how we do things on the web.
We give people full information as early as possible – so as not to waste their time and piss them off. Good sites show the full price (including shipping) as early as possible because that is the way things are done.
I take issue with Web Factory again because they ought to know this. OK, maybe they were a bit afraid to bring it up with their important client Bord Gais? But hey, the guys at Bord Gais ought to know this. They’re currently shortlisted as best internet marketers in the Net Visionary Awards. Is this how you’d expect such esteemed people to behave?
Either way people, if you are planning on switching from ESB to either Bord Gais or Airtricity, you WILL have to pay for the privilege if you don’t want to give away your bank account direct debit details. Suddenly big fat utility co ESB looks more attractive….
Tags: Airtricity, Bord Gais Networks, ESB, The Big Switch
What I Don’t Like About The Big Switch
April 6, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Everyone’s talking about how great the Big Switch campaign has been, but I would like to point out 3 things I don’t like about the site:
- There is a typo. On the “why switch” page, bullet point 1. Should be ‘your’ electricity costs. Also, that asterix doesn’t have a corresponding explanation on the page – anywhere! Wow, Web Factory need to check their work a little more closely. How embarrassing.
I wanted to see where they’re getting the basis of their calculation from. It says 10% saving – but how does it work? Is it a blanket 10% off whatever I’d pay with ESB? If so, then tell me that. Again in the box on the right hand side of that page, it’s referring to a 10%* but nowhere on the page does it tell me what the asterix is about. A nod and a wink from one of Ireland’s utility providers doesn’t exactly instill me with confidence. Especially when it’s the gas people, the ones who raise their rates by 20% at a time.
I can’t stand untalented ubiquitous RTE ‘celebrities’. Lucy Kennedy seems to be flavour of the month right now. So we get Lucy all over Ireland telling us to make the big switch. In non-controllable television-land I can’t do anything about that. But when she hits my computer screen, it’s rude to have her talking at me. Give me the ability to hit that ‘turn off sound’ button and shut her up. Actually if you gave me that button, I’d probably drop in and out of the big switch site just to shut her up!
So although Nicky Doran, head of marketing at Bord Gáis, Nicky Doran believes in interacting with bloggers, here’s one blogger who believes he hasn’t got it right. When you reach out to bloggers, or to Twitterers, or even run a natinonwide poster campaign directing people to your website, you should ensure that you get the basic www right.
UPDATE: What I don’t like about Airtricity’s website.
Tags: Big Switch Typo
Three Mobile: Nosy Gets
March 20, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Consider this: you want to buy a new mobile phone. You’re thinking of a rather smashing Sony Ericsson K770i. You go online and have a look round to see what kind of deal you can get. Three Mobile, the newest kid on the Irish mobile operator block, offers you one with a plan for €49 a month.
You check the specs. Decide it’s for you and hit the buy now button.
The phone’s supposed to be for free. You’re choosing a €49er plan. But what’s this unexplained, unannounced ‘administration fee’? Are we on the Ryanair site?
You continue to the checkout. But this is where the real intrusive behaviour happens.
Best practice online forms only ask for information that is absolutely necessary. So for example, on an ecommerce site, you only ask for data that will help to close the sale. If you’re working in an organisation and the marketing department wields a lot of power, you might be forced to add those fields in – but for God’s sake, at least have the battle to make them non-required.
Three Mobile. How Dare You Ask Me For My Marital Status?
And asking for my sex when I’ve just given you my name – I don’t think that is necessary.
Meekly I hang my head and tell the phone company that no, I’m not married. And yes I am a woman in my 30’s. Looking around for a love counselling button, I look further down the page.
What an array of employment options there are to choose from! And as if it isn’t bad enough that I must tell Three Mobile what kind of work I am in, I also must identify how I fit in the pecking order.
Who Wants To Know?
Maybe there’s some cute guy in the marketing department who will ask me out if I tick Skilled and Employed?
They even want to know how long I’ve been employed there.
What if I’ve just lost my job and my work perk of a paid mobile phone? So if I’m not feeling bad enough already, now I can feel worse about myself as I tick unemployed. And if I do that, they don’t want to know. They don’t care how long I’ve been unemployed. Their length of employment dropdown crosses its arms and sniffily looks away.
Those generous guys at Three Mobile are always giving away promotion vouchers. In fact, it’s a requirement that I must have one!
Oh, but I don’t have one. So like a loser I have to click ‘none’ in that required field. Wow, maybe if the guy from Marketing had called after all he might have gotten me one.
Next up I get to tell them where to deliver my spanky new phone. I give them my address. Hhhm, seems like Three Mobile haven’t gotten to grips with the Irish post code system yet – no Dublin post codes listed. But that’s OK because they made it another required field that I must given them delivery instructions.
Dear Three. Please deliver my phone to Dublin 3
But now they want to know more about my living arrangements.
Whether I’m living in a furnished apartment rented, or an unfurnished one. Or worse? Am I still living at home with parents? Gosh that marketing guy will probably dump me if I tell him I’ve just lost my job and have had to move home. Maybe I’ll say I’m living in Other.
Three Mobile you are living in another planet if you think that you can get away with asking such intrusive and unnecessary questions.
- Why do you need to know about my marital status in order to sell me a phone? That is particularly intrusive and smacks of the 1950’s.
- Why do you need to know about what kind of rental accommodation I’m in? Or whether I live in a council house? Will you offer me a more downmarket phone if I tick that?
- Who do you marketing people think you are?
Yes you’re the newest mobile operator. But that doesn’t give you the right to force me to tell you things about myself that you don’t need to know. I can understand how your slimy marketing folk are dribbling down their sheeny grey suits in an attempt to ‘know their customer’. But in the world that we live in, smart companies get to know their customer by establishing trust. They only ask questions about what they need to know and in turn are rewarded with sales. Gradually as time goes by and I have come to know and trust them, I might choose to give them more.
There are other places where I can take my business. And incidentally Vodafone is currently offering a better deal on Sony Ericsson’s.
Tags: Intrusive Forms, Three Mobile
We Do Not Endorse Bionic Creative
February 10, 2009 at 2:09 pm
You got to be very careful when someone asks you for a reference these days. One of the smaller companies we have used once or twice in the past asked us for a reference. They said they’re finding it very hard to find work and they were thinking of stepping up their marketing in the UK. I said yes.
Little did I know that my name, my company name, and some of my client websites was going to be hawked around in a spam email to the entire web community in Ireland!
If you receive an email from Bionic Creative that has my name on it, know that I do not stand over it. I feel duped that they are using my name and my reputation in this way.
Obviously I will not be working with them again. I would suggest that you avoid them too.
Tags: Bionic Creative
iPhone Version of our Newsletter Launches Today
January 28, 2009 at 8:10 am
We launched a nice little iPhone version of Walking the Talk, our (somewhat) quarterly email newsletter. Many of our readers are super cool iPhone users so we thought we’d be the first in Internet Marketing Ireland company to introduce an iPhone version.
Check it out here http://brightspark-consulting.com/newsletter/m/winter09i.html
Apologies. For some reason Wordpress doesn’t like this link.
Tags: iPhone Email Newsletter, Walking The Talk
Say No To Flash Intro’s
September 2, 2008 at 10:51 am
This, via Robin Blandford on Twitter. Kind of sums it up really.
Flash intro's are like juggling clowns - interesting the first time, but never again!
Tags: Flash Intro
