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It was hard to hear at first, what with all the usual acoustical clutter of a busy U.S. airport, but when I strained to listen I was able to make it out. “We’d like to welcome our SkyLine First, StarAlliance Gold, SkyPRO Elite and Super-Elite Passengers, Fly Higher club members, Fly Higher Gold and Silver, SuperClub, SuperClub Platinum, Diamond-Level GlobalSkies and NationalSkies members, and SunBrand Super Happy Lucky Fortune Golden Dragon passengers. ((I’m exaggerating. But not by much.)

Youch.

Sometimes, I wish all the airlines would get together and agree on a single, common term. Bronze, Silver, and Gold would be so much simpler — heck, it worked for Participaction.

We’re Over-Branding Stupid Things

I get why executives and branding experts prefer “SuperSkies Platinum Members” to something simpler — when you can make it your own, it’s easier to make clear the difference in service quality. If everyone called their top level “Gold,” then the crappy Gold service would ruin it for the good Gold service.

But companies are taking it too far. And, in doing so, making it difficult for their customers to connect with them.

I called my cell company the other day. To their credit, their response tree has just two branches: Self-sevice and Human Operator. But that’s not what the latter was called. My choice was “Or to speak to a real person using Fido Answers, press 2.”

I have no idea what Fido Answers is, but it sounds like some kind of automated system to me. Why can’t it just say “To manage your account using your touch-tone keypad, press 1. To speak to a real person right now, press 2.” I couldn’t care less what your Fido Answers is. It’s confusing.

My cable company does it too. “For Shaw Phone using Shaw Plan Personalizer, press 1. For Shaw Internet using Shaw Plan Personalizer, press 2. For Shaw Cablevision using Shaw Plan Personalizer, press 3.

Why do companies think we care about their special little brand names for everything? We don’t. I want clarity. Something like: “To order a home phone, press 1. To get Internet service……”

Is that too much to ask?

Like many speakers, people come up to me after and will ask me to follow up with them on some issue or another. I used to try to remember (a lost cause, in my case) or write down what they wanted but often I’d end up with something like “Send b-dop. Tue smed?” and I wouldn’t have a clue what it meant.

Then I stumbled upon this idea which has worked flawlessly since I started it. I realized that, in most cases, people wanted me to follow up with them about one of three topics:

1. “Send me a copy of your slides.”
2. “We want to work with engageQ.” (formerly “tMedia”)
3. “We might want to hire you as a speaker.”

So I assigned each corner of my business card to one of these three reasons, then added a fourth “Other.”

So, if you give me your business card and you ask me to get back to you about having engageQ (formerly tMedia) help you with your online digital marketing strategy, you might notice me surreptitiously folding back the bottom-right corner.

There’s actually a second-level on this — all folded corners go to the back of the card, unless it’s an urgent request, in which case I fold the corner to the front of their card.

As I envisioned it, cell towers would be used to locate our phones and we would receive something similar to a text message when we neared an establishment with an offer to make like a special or time-limited discount.

That’s pretty much come true, although so far there aren’t any truly “push” marketing messages out there — the kind that show up on your phone suddenly, like a text message does.

Apps like Foursquare and Gowalla are pull-based — you have to be in the app and ask to see any nearby specials if they’re available. Clearly, a much better solution.

Still, though, I’m beginning to see what can only be called location spam appear on our phones.

Take, for instance, the deal Starbucks made recently with Foursquare. Any time you’re within walking distance of a Starbucks outlet, a special offer appears to give the mayor² a discount.

I live in Vancouver. There are more Starbucks in this city than stop lights. One intersection even³ has two Starbucks! That means that pretty much any time you use Foursquare in Vancouver, you’re going to get an offer from Starbucks.

Problem is, the Starbucks offer is lousy. It’s only for the person who has checked in the most — and even then, it’s a cheap offer: $1 off a limited number of their cold beverages.

I’ve stopped touching the “Special Nearby” banner because I know it’s just going to be a Starbucks promotion I can’t take advantage of.

I can only imagine this getting worse.

The real problem is that Starbucks — and other places that offer Mayor deals — aren’t being particularly strategic about their Foursquare placements.

Foursquare lets you offer a special to people who’ve checked in x number of times — a far more rewarding offer to your loyal customers. Or for a new store, offer a discount if it’s the first time someone’s checked in.

These cheap and prolific Mayor deals will be piling on top of each other soon and, if that happens, the whole concept will become pretty much unusable.

UPDATE: Rob Cottingham has some excellent thoughts on this here.

I’ve just started booking my new presentation Using Location-Based Marketing to Drive More Revenue: Six Key Strategies for Mobile Commerce. If you’re interested in booking it, please inquire about a date.

1. I used to own the domain mobilecommerce.org; I really should have kept that.
2. the person who has checked into that location the most
3. Robson and Haro

While helping a friend determine which stores had iPads in stock (here’s a hint: None!), I ran across this graphic on London Drugs‘ web site. It was in a block of rotating graphic.

It got me thinking how absolutely out of date the phrase “See in-store for details” is.

Print or broadcast ads, of course, don’t have enough space or time to list all the details like technical specifications, so this phrase was necessary. But is there really any need for it in the age of the web? Why didn’t London Drugs just put those “details” on a hyperlinked web page? It’s not like they were trying to get people to call for the price and rope them into coming in — Apple’s retailers aren’t allowed to discount.

It got me wondering — are there any other retail practices that are obsolete?

You’ll get an instantly downloadable PDF file, formatted just like a real book, that you can read or print out to take with you to read during those slow time in an open house. All you need to read it is the free Adobe Acrobat reader. There is no copy protection or digital rights management. It’s a simple, regular PDF file.

.

100% No Questions Asked
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Read Drive! and if you’re not completely satisfied, just let me know and I’ll refund your money — no questions asked. You won’t find a better return policy than that anywhere.

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Inside DRIVE!

The ASSURED ROI™ Model
You’ll learn how to deploy Tod’s system for launching a profitable social media campaign: Assume Nothing… Set SMART… Soft-Launch… Understand… Record and Measure… Engage Audience… Deliver Next Round.

Making a Better Online You
In this chapter, you’ll find out how to present yourself and your brand most effectively online — from the selection of a username to how to pick (and stick with) the perfect avatar.

The Tactics
This is the meat of the book — covering how to market yourself and your listings in social media spaces like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. It also covers why you shouldn’t overthink your web site, how to set up online focus groups, and how to launch an email marketing campaign.

BONUS: Tame Your Life
In this extra, you’ll learn how to set up your voicemail so that messages left for you are delivered directly to your blackberry (or any email address), and how to use an online ‘productivity tracker’ to get more done in the day.

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About Tod Maffin

Tod Maffin speaks to thousands of realtors each year about how to make get new leads and sell properties faster using social media like Facebook, Twitter, and more. He has spoken to:

• Association of Real Estate Licence Law Officials, Florida
• RE/MAX Edmonton
• CIR Realty
• Maxwell Realty
• Ontario Real Estate Association
• Banff Western Connection Conference
• Ottawa Real Estate Board
• Association of Nova Scotia Realtors
• Toronto Real Estate Board
• Canadian Real Estate Association
• …and many more

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What Audiences Say About Tod’s Presentations

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Despite grand platitudes of how Twitter is ‘shepherding a new era of corporate transparency and a spirit of engaging with customers,’ the fact remains that even the best corporate examples of such engagement on Twitter remain trivial at best.

Just because a company launches a Twitter page and assigns a marketing intern to tweet replies back to anyone who tweets them does not mean they have engaged in any kind of conversation or dialogue. They most certainly haven’t changed any paradigms, shifted any culture, or launched any new eras.

An @Reply Is Not a Conversation

Social media “evangelists” frequently fall into the mistake of trumping up this kind of direct contact as more than it is.

A conversation is not an answered question nor a thrown kudos. An example:

This friendly response to someone’s tweet is, to be sure, a nice little gesture on Rescuetime‘s part. But it’s just that. A nice gesture. Good customer service. Put down that pipe, Shaggy; it’s too early to spark that bad-boy.

What do you think?

So, you need to convince people to turn on images. Of course you could always ASK them to, but you’ve not offering any real incentive to do that.

That’s where the ALT tag comes in.

Create an image and put in its ALT tag something like “To tell if you won the contest, turn on images!” or “Turn on images to see this photo of our CEO drunk at our last Christmas party.” (Okay, maybe not that last one.) Your “sell” has to be something that your email target would really want to see, and something that you can deliver only in text, like the URL of a special web site that only your subscribers would get access to.

That way, they’ll only see the information if they turn on images. And up go your visible open rates!

I had the chance to interview co-author Julien Smith for about 20 minutes about his ideas. The interview is in this post. (Chris Brogan is Julien’s co-author.)

Listen: Tod Maffin interviews Julien Smith about being a \”trust agent.\”

(This is an except from a radio show pilot I did for the MediaOnTap Conversation Radio Network. If you’d like your company to be heard on the show in a sponsorship capacity, contact Allan at info@mediaontap.com)