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Meet James
Productivity Comes Alive With The Sound Of Music
I was looking for inspiration for writing a blog post so I do what I always do, I read. Reading newspaper articles, watching interviews, whatever happens to be easily available. I don’t target things, I just read whatever comes along and see what inspires me…
But nothing did. Perhaps I was too tired or just felt a bit under pressure but nothing was grabbing me; I gave up my search, put my headphones in, and started addressing other work. I have recently gone back to listening to music when I work. I’m very goal-oriented and I find that by plugging in my headphones I can focus on a single task and complete it faster than if I was listening to the ambience of the office. While I was working, I remembered recalling something I had read about how music boosted productivity and I started searching for evidence to back up or refute my half-recalled truth. Continue reading
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Marketing In Focus: Make an Update Details Campaign Work For You
You might not have heard of an update details campaign before but the name speaks for itself. It’s campaign you run to make sure that the information in your database is as accurate as possible. Having a name and a contact detail is a good launching point but you shouldn’t allow these blanks in your database to be absent forever.
Why? In the long run, more information will save you money and will help to prevent you from over sending to your database. There are various avenues in which doing an update details campaign can save you money in the long run. A big issue is sending SMS messages to your entire database, whether or not they might be interested in the particular item or event in question. Each SMS has a cost, and although it might only be 6-10 cents per message, it’s still something you need to pay. If you’re sending 100 SMS per message send at 8 cents per message, and you do 8 sends a month, you’ll be expecting to spend another $64 per month. However, if you can find out which members of your database are interested in which areas of your account, you can reduce the total number of SMS you send. If people are able to provide you with their email address, the savings increase. It adds up in the long run, and the larger your database, the more necessary this action is.
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Make Welcoming Welcomes Well
Imagine you turn up to someone’s house, they open the door, they say “You are here” in a monotone voice and then stand in awkward silence as you try to figure out if you’re supposed to walk in or not. Continue reading
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Are You Mac or PC?
You can’t go anywhere without seeing news about the ongoing feud between Apple and Samsung. The issue? Well, its issues, plural, but it boils down to patent infringement. Apple are wanting more and more money from Samsung because they feel Samsung has copied a lot of their designs and cost them money in the process, Samsung disagree, $1.05bn (paid to Apple) later and the fight is still going. There’s so much information out there about the feud that it would be pointless to write yet another article about the details. Continue reading
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Technological Darwinism
In the olden days, and I mean the olden olden days, people willing to adopt new tools ended up being the most successful. The difference between the hunter using his hands to catch prey or a spear meant the different between eating dinner and being dinner. Although we have progressed far and wide since the days of the hunter/gatherer, the idea of adopting the most appropriate tool to suit each task has never changed.
If you had a loaf of bread in front of you, and a knife was lying right next to it, and using the knife to cut the bread was free, would you use the knife or would you try to cut the loaf of bread with a swift karate chop? As amusing as the latter option sounds I’m sure you’d use the knife. With this in mind, if your business has limited or no online presence, and there are programs available for you to use for free to raise your online profile, would you use them?
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Playing Devil’s Advocate
My dad recently gave me a gift. It was a book called “Be the worst you can be” by Charles Saatchi, the head of one of the world’s leading advertising companies in the 1980′s and the curator of the Saatchi Gallery.
Within this book, Charles (Mr Saatchi) has compiled a large list of questions that he’s been asked and has answered over the years. Almost every question that is posed is answered with the most basal, immoral, unethical and inhumane responses you could imagine. This book is inspiring, after a fashion, and reminded me of something I had forgotten.
It’s not that I read this book and decided “YES! The formula for success is BeBad multiplied by Time” nor was it that I decided that being bad was a better idea than being good, or that it was easier. The inspiration comes from the fact that due to my upbringing, which was normal and nice, and due to my education, which was normal and nice, I never really knew how to think on the same lines as Mr Charles Saatchi (which I consider, for the most part, a good thing).
I used to be heavily into debating and did it all throughout school and university and I would often use my debating skills to argue with my family (hours of fun, and it’s free!). I had always fancied myself a “Devil’s Advocate” when it came to making decisions. I would always try to think of both sides and get my head around what my opponent might use in a debate so that I could shut it down the moment it came up. The lines of thought from this book, however, are so far outside my scope of plausibility that every second question shocked and amused me.
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