Have you ever being looking for some information on a website, you click and link and your PDF open dialogue comes up? No word of a warning, just a simple link like most of the other links of the site but it links to a PDF document instead of another web page.

This really annoys me, from both sides of the fence:

• As a website visitor, I may just want to skim through some information. I don’t want to have to open up Adobe Acrobat to read a document. It breaks the user experience of clicking through to the next page - it breaks my stride.
• As a marketer, PDFs are not as optimised as HTML can be. Yes, you can add meta data to them and yes, a search engine can list your PDF, but how much linkability is being lost?

So. Why do web authors do this? Well, I can only guess because it’s easy for them. “Yes, let’s save it as a PDF and lump on the web server”.

Websites rely on quality user experience, not ease-of-maintenance for the author.

I had a new business meeting yesterday with [effectively] a startup - sounds like a good product. This startup is being self-funded and the meeting was initially about branding.

Figures were banded about and you can sit in those kind of meetings thinking about the potential revenue you could earn. But I didn’t. Half way through (and I have never done this before), I suggested these guys use an online service to buy in a bunch of logos for about $200.

Why would I do that?

Well, firstly, they are a start-up and it’s time to bootstrap. I’ve been there and I gave my honest advice as if it were my money.

Secondly, and this is the key one for me, I can add more value doing an effective website, rather than charging for branding.

My example was Google. Take a look at their logo. It has changed over the years but principally it is the same as it was when they designed it themselves in their college dorm in the nineties.

My rationale is that if I can offer value, that gives a return, then surely I have more client buy-in and potentially more investment / revenue, because they know I didn’t rip them off and the stuff I did do worked.

To many companies talk about business relationships and partnerships but quickly forget it at the sniff of short-term cash gain.

Sometimes, gaining trust costs in the short-term. The payback comes further down the line.

Besides, it actually felt great to give them that advice. I hope they take it.

I met someone today who is as passionate about their town as I am about mine. It may seem strange to be passionate about your town but tell that to any person in a northern town today after a ‘think tank’ branded them beyond revival.

The problem with so many areas, especially a London over-spill town like Basingstoke, is that they either have no identity, or it has been eroded away over time. Some towns have their heritage as a base - like Winchester - but how do you tackle getting people to have pride in a town like Basingstoke which is well known for…. roundabouts?

The thing, is, not every girl can grow up to be the prom queen and not every boy will be David Beckham. For every town like Stratfield-Upon-Avon, there are ten Basingstokes and Runcorns.

But… I have a theory for all those places that don’t have a legacy to build upon. I’m no sociologist but I think pride revolves around having something to be proud of, something successful that people can attach themselves to and at the centre of that pride is popular arts (such as music and film) and sports.

Compare Manchester in the mid eighties to now. Regeneration off the back of a world successful football brand, the Commonwealth Games and some of best bands of the past twenty years. Am I missing something?

Both Aristotle and Plato saw the negative effects of musi, and perhaps they were right in terms of society in general, but the point is that these things DO have an effect and, in terms of civic pride and being able to capture the imaginations of the citizens of a town, they can be leveraged.

So. My idea. Invest in talent - musicians, bands, actors, potential sports stars. Invite the people to your local events that will get maximum profile. Case in point: Last year, Basingstoke Live had Chesney Hawkes headlining. This year it was Chas N’ Dave. What if they spent an extra £10-20k to get someone really big? How much profile would that buy?

Encourage local teams to be successful, especially football teams. Get them known nationally and internationally - help them gain profile by giving them marketing support and encourage them to link back to your town.

As you can tell from my rant I am passionate about this. I am also naive into the ways and workings of the organisations and commitees involved in civic pride incentives. But, show me any passionate pioneer- such as an inventor, an entrepreneur; even a world record holding athlete - who didn’t also show some naivety in their goals and I will crawl back under my stone and lose my pride in a silent fashion, never to rant again.

I bought an iPhone on Friday and now find out today after much chasing that I won’t be connected until next Tuesday - that’s ten days. I am sure there is a valid reason for this but it doesn’t make it better.

The only reason I moved to O2 is because of the iPhone contract restrictions. It may be a great deal financially for Apple and O2, but I’m not impressed because:

1. I didn’t really want to move from Vodafone.
2. O2 have given me a ride from hell

Anyway, how apathetic do I (or any customer of any business) have to be towards a brand before we say enough is enough. I already don’t like O2 and I have only just signed up. But, I feel compelled to just keep to this path - it’s easier. And what about Apple’s brand?

I remember a client said to me once at The Escape that our business relationship was like an old married couple and we simply put up with each other. It was great feedback and we changed some stuff but should it have even got to that?

Seth Godin asks the question “Are consumers responsible for the behavior of marketers?” in a recent Blog post. My Blog gives me the platform for a moan, but I still use some of the services that I moan about.

I have found with some recent comms work that many customers are apathetic to our business. You think they care - but they don’t… and nine times out of ten, when they end up caring, it’s a negative situation.

It’s getting harder and harder to hope that customers care. But one thing seems clear to me time and time again - it all revolves around customer service.

At The Escape we are marketing like buggery at the moment. The core part of this marketing is building a database with a view to a more personalised experience for customers and prospects. This is harder than it sounds though and we are currently going through initial stage teething problems, which I positively call ‘feedback’. In fact, it is feedback - no doubt about it - because we have acted on it.

We recently ran our first two campaigns from the database. The first was to prospects and a select number of clients. It went down well and we got three new business meetings and positive feedback all round.

Then last week, we ran a much more generic direct mail campaign. A series of five ’summer’ postcards that landed one day after the next. In hindsight, this could be seen as overkill, but it was a bit of fun (we knew most of them would end up in the bin), and just a reminder that we existed.

Despite being personalised, the campaign was too generic. We had a couple of [justified] complaints from existing clients to suggest that it was over zealous and totally unnecessary. Although this equates to just less than a half a percent of recipients, it re-enforces to me that generic doesn’t work as well as highly targeted direct mail campaigns. That said, sometimes you have to be generic before you can start to break things down.

Managing an effective marketing database is one of the biggest challenges facing marketers; especially if you do not have the resources to fund and/or maintain it; but, the payoff, is oh so much greater.

And so, our challenge begins to develop more targeted campaigns to a much more refined database. Think Tesco Clubcard. This does mean investment but in a time when every other story is about the ‘credit crunch’, there has never been a greater need to be engaging with people.

A new niche website we have under construction is Basingstoke Marketing.

With little more than a holding page and a couple of links, we are straight in at number one for the search term… Of course, this is very early days and doesn’t really prove much except, why wait until your new site’s ready during build?

Why is is that many small businesses - and I am talking about your one-man bands and non-techie B2C trades here - still don’t have consistent branding when it comes to online?

I still see companies with their www.companyname address printed on the side of their van, and then their e-mail address is below it - an AOL address or the like. I can imagine the reason is the complicated system of email and web hosting when it’s not tied to an ISP. I am (to a fashion) a techie and I sometimes struggle understanding email hosting and SMTP servers, etc.

That said, getting a cohesive presence of name can and should be implemented by all small businesses to offer a more cohesive (and more memorable) experience for a customer.

I have found some good web and email hosting for small business at a company called Cut. They aren’t big, but the service is personal, cost-effective, and problems are very minimal. It’s good value for money.

Using companies like this, rather than the impersonal large companies, I have managed to pursuade more and more small businesses to get the email address that ties in with the web address.

Sorry, mini rant coming. I’ve had a crappy old day.

1. Been trying to install Leopard on an iMac for a new starter tomorrow and it’s taken me all day and I have a problem I can’t work out. Gone are those days when I could understand all the files in the System Folder of System 6.
2. A new client website went live without any 301 redirects - schoolboy errors
3. Just found out a client made 1/2 days worth of changes to their CMS a couple of weeks ago and some silly arse deleted them.

So - humble pie all round.

On the plus side, I have started to roll out the second in a series of feeder websites for the beauty shop. Jessica Nails uses the same template as Zeno Pro and is already getting about 60 visitors a day from the previous small site. The great thing is that these two new sites are driving traffic to the main sales site and converting to business so I don’t mind the extra workload.

The beauty of the new template is that I can commit to adding a few new pages every week so I’m all ready to rumble - as long as nothing else goes wrong!

With the birth of our new daughter, we had to experience a day and night in the local hospital.

It’s interesting, because I tend to think against the grain that doctors and nurses are angels doing an amazing job. I tend to think they are just doing their job. A worthwhile one, but a still it’s just a job that they get paid for. Coming from a small business, I also see an amazing amount of inefficiency, but that’s just me I guess.

My beliefs are compounded by the attitude of many of the staff who did seem more intrested in the end of their shift than tending to my wifes needs.

Anyway - to my point.

It all grated on me (as you may be able to tell) except for one girl. A student midwife who seemed to really care, a woman who my wife will probably remember for the rest of her life. It was her third delivery and she made a lot of effort.

As the week has gone on, I seem to be thinking about when I deliver a project for a client (lame connection I know, but a tangible one). They are spending their cash on their new ‘baby’ and how I react to them during the build, with my levels of customer service, attention and caring, may leave similar impressions.

But, it’s not my first of course and I do wonder if I care enough sometimes during what must be a difficult time for them. I wonder if you have the same thoughts about what you deliver?