I often have business meetings in suitable cafes and hotels around Cambridge: last week I met a local business owner in a hotel just outside the city.  I was pretty stunned when I drove past an advert while leaving and noticed a spelling mistake in their advert, meant to attract clients to their health centre.  I even decided to drive around the hotel and quietly stop the car, pull out my mobile phone and take a shot for you to enjoy

I am really wondering who is the agency that managed to design an advert, had it approved by the client (the Marketing Manager or Executive?) and sent it to print on a 5 metres banner without anybody noticing that Receive should not be spelled Recieve.

Posted under Cambridge, Marketing

I will start this post with some questions:

• Have you ever been invited to a party, conference or another important event?
• Would you find natural to reply, if you were invited by a personal invitation from somebody you know?
• If you replied YES would you find natural to turn up trying to pay attention to place, date and time?
• If you cannot make it at the last minute would you find natural to let your host know?
• If you turn up would you find natural, as soon as you arrive, to go and look for your host to let him know you are there?
• And at the end when you leave would you find natural to look again for your host, thank and say bye?

Without any doubt for me the answers are 6 times YES!

Perhaps it’s me and my way of dealing with people, perhaps it’s my way of demonstrating I appreciate other people and make sure they know it but how is it possible that any of the above has a NO as an answer?  Let alone that I am talking about an event where all visitors have the opportunity of meeting likeminded business people and exchange opportunities for business.

Well, what happened this morning made me think many people are very different in appreciating true business opportunities and respect for those that invite them: I was mong the organisers of a large visitors’ day for two joint chapters of BNI in Cambridge. BNI is a large (probably the largest) networking organisation in the world and I happen to currently be the director of the Trinity chapter in Cambridge. The well managed organisation paid back greatly: among the combined 50 members of the two chapters we managed to have over 120 visitors in the great hall at Hometon College and the whole event was a true success.

Nonetheless the inspiration to write this post came at the end of the morning when I did the math for my own guests.  I invited to this event 28 people out of a selected list of contacts, following some constraints we were given.  Here are some facts:

• 4 of them thanked me for the invitation and accepted without the need for a follow up J
• 1 of the others was kind of upset when I called him to find out if he was coming along: let alone I have asked him in person before sending the invitation and he was keen then…
• At least 5 did not return my call when I followed up the invitation to check whether they were interested in taking part in the event
• Between phone calls and Emails the total number of guest as of yesterday lunch time was 12 J
• By 6pm the list was down to 9
• This morning 7 people turned up J
• 2 did not bother to say hello when they arrived
• 3 left without letting me know they were leaving or saying bye
• I found 1 Email of one of the missing guests that something came up very late last night
• 2 sent a thank you Email J
• 1 tweeted a thank you J

Perhaps there is scope for basic courses about how to network successfully by simply paying attention to common sense and good manners?  Or is it that most people in small businesses tend to be so overwhelmed, so overly busy that they forget how to behave?

Perhaps they need a coach

Posted under Cambridge, Marketing, Networking

It is a fact that the majority of businesses nowadays have some kind of Internet presence in the form of webpage, website or blog.  Unfortunately too many people have little idea how to best choose a domain for their business and they just assume anything will do.

I am nearly shocked when sometimes I meet people, exchange business cards with them and notice the domain they are using to represent their business.  The sad reality is that a poorly chosen domain, as well as a badly designed logo, can give a bad first impression of who you and your business are.

There are rules about what Top Level Domain (TLD) should be used to identify a business, a non profit organisation like a club or a charity or a university: some of these rules are strictly enforced (e.g. you cannot have .gov,  .mil or .gov.uk unless you are respectively a US government, US  military or UK government organisation) but there others that can be used by anyone for anything although some guidelines do apply.  Inappropriate use of those reflects, from my point of view, little understanding of these rules and more broadly about how Internet works.

I will list below a couple of examples that highlight typical possible mistakes:

• MaGa Coaching, specialises in Business and Executive Coaching: for this reasons we have registered magacoaching.com and magacoaching.co.uk as domains. As it is a business based in UK we use and advertise magacoaching.co.uk as the active domain but if you try browsing magacoaching.com you will find the same website.  Typical mistake in this case would have been to register magacoaching.org or magacoaching.org.uk or magacoaching.net. MaGa Coaching is a for-profit company and the .org, .org.uk would have suggested it is not while the .net would have suggested we offer networking services and that is definitely not the case.
• My nick name since high school is Gaet so I found it normal when registering a personal domain for my website, now this blog, to register gaet.org.   This is not a company and definitely it is not a profit making organisation therefore the .org domain is just fine (or .org.uk).  I could have used .me, .name, .me.uk but they did not exist when I bought gaet.org.
• A common mistake, for lots of regular profit making businesses, is to use .org, .org.uk domains to represent them: although legal it would be like registering a company called “Make More Profits Limited” or the “Profit Club Limited” as a charity, not for profit   How much trust would you put in such a company?

Here is list of main TLD that you should consider for your own use:

What I describe in this post typically applies for entities in US and UK (all domains finishing with .uk are supposedly for UK based entities).  Each country in the world has its own TLD and for some domestic market the natural choice is to choose a localised domain name (e.g. .it for Italy, .fr for France, .de for Germany and .es for Spain and so on…).  For businesses there is an unwritten rule that says that a .com will be the domain for a global company: when in doubt I would choose a domain for which both the .com and the local domestic domain (e.g. .it) are available.  You can choose to have both of them served by the same website or simply leave one unused and avoid confusions.

There are many other domains that have been more recently defined (in the last few years): a short list of these is: .info, .biz, .ws, .us, .eu, .mobi, .tel They are all legitimate and appropriate to use but for many Internet purists they tend to be considered like second class domains.

I would like to conclude this post with a little suggestion.  Whether you are registering a domain for a company, a brand, a charity or for your personal blog try choosing a simple, easy to spell and appropriate domain that immediately reflects what your business / organisation / club is about.  If have problems with that you could ask an expert, there are many around, and if you fail with that contact me, I would be glad to help.

Posted under Marketing

I am often surprised, when looking for a business I know of, how difficult it can be to find it.   Earlier today I was sending out some invitations to a group of people I previously met at various networking events: I have business cards for all of them but nonetheless I had serious problems finding the postal address for 5 out of 20 of them.

How is it possible that somebody who designing a website or a business card decides to leave out the postal address, the post code or any other detail that can be crucial to find your business?  Think about it: if you are difficult to find the odds are that a potential customer may decide to go to an easier to find competitor.

This is my check list: although not exaustive it probably helps to correct many basic mistakes:

• Have your full name, title, job title or profession on your business card;
• Have the full postal address on the business card;
• Have a “contact us” or “about us” page that has the full postal address and perhaps a Google map;
• Have a “our team” page and highlight who the top person/people behind the organisation are;
• Register your company on Google maps and then search the name of your company and the city where you are: you should really be on the first page!

Posted under Marketing