Ken Sethney [marketing coach]

Dedicated surfer scores PR win for Comcast.

I have often encouraged CEOs and senior managers of midsize businesses to find someone in their life to be a dedicated surfer, someone who can keep an eye on the social web for good or bad comments about their companies or their competitors.

Comcast (not a client) has apparently adopted this approach in its efforts to climb out of the customer service cellar. Only time will tell if customer service scores will improve, but here’s an example of a single contact that resulted in major publicity for Comcast and a company in Philadelphia called iFractal.

clipped from seattletimes.nwsource.com Stormy times for Comcast By Bob Fernandez The Philadelphia Inquirer PHILADELPHIA — Most afternoons, the Internet in Sarah Chambers’ office at iFractal in Philadelphia crashes and leaves her cyber-stranded without e-mail or online communication with clients. When it happened for the zillionth time a few days ago, Chambers tried something new, once her Web connection reappeared. She shot Comcast a curt public online message on the social-networking site Twitter: “My Internet goes out every day at 3:30. Why would that be?” Frank Eliason, a Comcast manager with the daunting assignment of monitoring the nation’s blogosphere for venomous posts aimed at the company, answered right away: “That should not be. We should have that looked at. Send an e-mail with account info to We_Can_Help@cable.comcast.com.”

Add comment May 1, 2008

Ten Steps to Successful Online Marketing

A successful website can help your company cut costs, generate income and expand your horizons with new product and market opportunities. An unsuccessful website wastes precious time and resources. Worse, it can damage customer relationships and destroy business development opportunities.

The following ten steps will help CEOs and senior executives manage the development and implementation of successful ebusiness initiatives.

Continue Reading Add comment March 26, 2008

How To Avoid Common Website Mistakes

Companies have been building websites to support marketing, sales and customer service since 1994. Along the way, they have made a lot of mistakes that you can avoid… or repair.

Continue Reading Add comment March 24, 2008

Ten business problems you can solve on the internet.

A website works when it solves a problem for the site visitor. Visitors may be prospects, customers, sales reps, distributors, retailers, job hunters, investors or the media. When you solve a problem for any one of these, you will benefit by increasing sales, satisfying customers, finding new employees or improving investor/media relations. You may also cut costs and expand your business with new product and market opportunities.

I have selected ten business problems as a starting point for discussions about ebusiness strategy. What is the most important problem you can solve online?

Continue Reading Add comment March 18, 2008