CopyDiva

It’s Friday, so who wouldn’t need a little motivation to end the week? Well thanks to the good folks at Despair, Inc. — you know, the ones who sell posters parodying motivational posters — you too can harness your creativity into parody poster making.

Oh yeah, and there’s certainly no better example of viral marketing then their Parody Motivator Generator. I don’t have any numbers, but I am guessing this little site gets lots of hits. I’ve already sent it to many myself. Thanks to RageBoy for getting me hooked into this.

One of my creations is below:
Any guesses what’s in his mouth? I have no clue…

Last night’s BMA Colorado meeting featured Adi Sideman from Oddcast was a big hit with the business-to-business marketing crowd. Certainly, the attraction was the cool factor being used in consumer marketing such as Cheerioke, the Cheerios karaoke machine and Careerbuilder’s Monkey Mail. But Adi also spoke about the applications that are more B2B in nature — using an avatar for virtual sales training of a wide spread and hard to bring together sales force. Just think, make avatars of all those execs that need to be a part of the sales training, then just re-record the audio as needed and let it go live. You can save a lot on video production costs, because there are no video production costs.

Other applications: apparently, some firms are using them in e-learning tools, where they are more effective than those without.

How can B2B jump on board with talking ad units? Its clearly much cheaper to set up an avatar on a banner ad, and hope that people pass it on, then it is to buy standard media ad units. Even if its a failure, the test costs a whole lot less than traditional media. Do you think the trade journals will jump on board with talking ad units?

Then of course, there’s the idea of using avatars to make a product web page more compelling. Sure, have your web copy, but add an avatar that appeals to people on a different level. McAfee apparently tried this with one of their virus programs and it made a big difference in conversion rate over just a web page with copy.

Perhaps in a product world where most of the products from you and your competitors offer basically the same thing, an avatar would expand the lead gen pool by simply adding a different way of communicating to customers.

Yesterday, my office suite mate, Dan accused me of listening to Muzak. Well, to be honest he was right, but it wasn’t something I was enjoying. You see, I was having a moment in time with the on-hold music of the customer service center for Toshiba, the maker of my laptop computer. Ok, a moment is really to short for what really went on — it was close to an hour. An hour to talk to someone about a erroneous charge to my credit card they made — an hour!

To be fair to Toshiba, their technical support group seems to really have their act together, and mostly when I speak to them, they don’t treat me like I am a computer idiot that barely knows how to turn on a computer. And, I can speak to a person within 5 minutes. The problem happens when I get transferred to customer service, where apparently no one works.

Yesterday’s call was at least the third call I have made regarding an outstanding issue with them. That issue: they sent me a faulty battery replacement. I requested a replacement for the replacement. They asked me to send the faulty battery back. I said sure, send me a return slip and I am happy to - what do I need with a faulty battery? So, do you think I ever got the return slip? Tried a few more times to get customer service to send me a return slip, complete with very long wait times to re-explain the entire issue to customer service whenever they did finally answer. The response was always “we’ll send it right out.” So of course, since I never sent the battery back, they charged me for it.

Allegedly, the issue is now resolved. I can toss the bad battery and they will credit my account. We’ll see. I remain less than confident in the whole process. I do know this: this problem has made it unlikely I will purchase another Toshiba laptop, even though this is my second one (though I was already leaning that way, because the current laptop is not nearly as good as my old one was). In a commodity market such as this, I would think good customer service and technical support could make the difference with customer loyalty.

The bottom line: When products are undifferentiated, what makes the difference is support, service and customer care.

This week in his Excess Voice newsletter, Nick Usborne’s article asked the question: what is trustworthy information online? Apparently, blogs and other social networks are moving down in credibility among consumers. In fact, according to a story in Brandweek, a new study by Jupiter Research reports that only 21% of consumers trust the product information found on social networks like blogs and forums. And, get this – they are twice as likely to trust the information they find on corporate web sites.

If you’re in charge of the content on your web site, use this to your advantage – don’t abuse the trust. Don’t hype. Give site visitors the real information they want.

The whole trust element I find personally interesting as it relates to the book reviews I post here. I wonder, and I posed this to Nick as well: would it be more valuable content for readers if book reviews were not all just glorious praise? What if I reviewed a business book that I ended up thinking wasn’t very useful? Should I post that on my site? Certainly, no one would buy it based on my review, so why post with an affiliate link to Amazon? ‘true that the books I review are just ones that I find helpful. Is there a place for a broader spectrum?