Susan Getgood

Random: like cobbler’s children, no shoes and please, Good Technology, do something

September 7, 2006 by Susan Getgood

This has been a very odd and busy week, and I do promise to get back to something like regular posting soon. For today however, I have two simple but unrelated topics.

First, like the cobbler’s children with no shoes, I am a marketing person who has not had enough time to spend on her own Web site, newsletter and blog design. Content is fine. Design not so much. So, I am starting to look around for designers who can help me with all three. I still want separate things, for a number of reasons, which I will document here as part of the process (later, not today), but I do want them to tie together thematically. I’ve got a few names from here and there, but I figured I’ve got some of the brightest, coolest blog readers on the planet, maybe they know the perfect person to help. Or could even do it themselves. Email me at sgetgood@getgood.com!!

Second, the tech support calls for bloody Good Technology have started up again. Two in the past week. The people who call don’t seem brain-damaged, which means the documentation for the product must be really lacking.

To refresh your memory, this began when I started my business in 2004 and took the “no robots, no spiders” code off getgood.com, which up til then had been a personal family site, and turned it into the site for GetGood Strategic Marketing.

On a regular basis, I would get telephone calls and emails from people looking for support for their “good link.” Did I have a clue? No, because I don’t have a TREO. I just told people they had a wrong number. Eventually, I did match it up to Good Technology, which makes a piece of mobile communications software for TREO phones. But I didn’t know why they were calling an independent marketing and communications consultant for help.

Then one day, I learned that the download link for something to do with this product is “http://get.good.com” Ta-duh!!! Now we knew why people were making the link from Good Technology to Getgood. You can read about this magical moment of discovery here .

I’ve emailed the PR person at the company relating my tale of woe (yes, as a marketing person, I know who cares about this sort of reputation thing) but to date, no answer. I’ve blogged about this before, in the hopes that maybe the company was monitoring blogs, but I was much nicer in my previous posts. I even posted information about them on both the Web site and the blog to help their customers. Not working.

So, here I am. Knowing the power of blogs, testing the power of blogs. I am not being so nice today.

Good Technology: please do something about this problem. I am very nice to your customers. I give them your URL and phone number. But this is both my business and my home. I am fed up with getting support calls from your customers who are having trouble with your software. I know that the problems are equally likely to be operator error as crappy software. And I understand if you can’t change the file name; you probably have tons of this software in the field.

But maybe you could put YOUR PHONE NUMBER somewhere so people stop looking up getgood.com and calling ME.

Thank you.

UPDATE, late pm: In the interest of fairness, I did email Good Technology’s PR and sales contacts about this whole thing this afternoon. I’ll let you know if I hear from them. Or if I don’t 🙂

Update, 9 September: I do realize that this a problem that affects only a few people, me and the occasional customers who get confused, but it would be nice if Good Technology at least apologized for the nuisance and thanked us for being pleasant to the customers. Instead:

Your message

To: Internal PR Person; Sales; PR Agency Person [names redacted because this is not about them]

Subject: Get.Good.Com versus getgood.com

Sent: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 15:31:55 -0700

was deleted without being read on Fri, 8 Sep 2006 23:19:07 -0700

Tags: Good Technology, Susan Getgood, Getgood, goodlink, Treo, customer service

Why it is important to speak up

September 2, 2006 by Susan Getgood

This week, there was a big hullabaloo over the upcoming Office 2.0 Conference. The short story: the conference was dominantly male speakers, only one woman. The organizers were initially unclear as to a) why this was a problem and b) why they should correct the situation. For the story, check out Shelley Powers, Jeneane Sessum, Elisa Camahort, Tara Hunt, the Head Lemur and Stowe Boyd.

I’m not going to go into a long analysis of the situation because these other bloggers have already done a superb job at explaining everything. The end result, at least from what I read this evening, was that more women are being added to the program. Thanks to some squeaky wheels, maybe we can put this one in the sort-of win column.

But here’s what has to change. It shouldn’t need squeaky wheels to understand, and point out, that it is a problem when a professional conference is pretty much all male speakers. Conference organizers should understand from the get-go that the conference needs to represent its audience, and unless the topic is living with penile implants or jock itch, you have to be living under a rock to not know that there are women in the audience. If you want to appeal to them, if you want to argue that your conference represents the topic, you have to include women. And if they don’t come to you, you have to go find them.

Not to pick on anyone, but last spring I attended a conference with a panel about social media and PR comprised entirely of men. This in an industry that is woman-dominant (though certainly not woman-dominated, and if you want more about that, you’ll probably get it here eventually). And the PRSA’s fall conference is no better; the sessions are 50/50 but all the keynotes? Testosterone, baby.

It is not enough to say "we’ll consider them if they put themselves forward." If you want your conference to matter, make it matter. Make it truly representative of the audience. Find the great woman keynoters. Invite interesting women to come to your conferences. Not sure they’ll be great speakers? Put them on a panel with a kick-ass moderator. She or he will know how to bring the best out of the speakers. Need help with this? Call me. Call any of the folks who comment on this regularly (see above). We care tremendously about this issue. We will help you. And really, our bark is much worse than our bite 🙂

In leaving a comment about this on Elisa’s blog, I included the following quote which pretty much summarizes why I have been, and continue to be, so vocal on this subject.

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am not for others, what am I?
And if not now, when?"
Rabbi Hillel
Jewish scholar & theologian (30 BC – 9 AD)

Tags: gender, office 2.0, conferences

In Women We Trust — book review

September 2, 2006 by Susan Getgood

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of being a stop on author Mary Hunt’s virtual book tour for In Women We Trust: A cultural shift to the softer side of business, published by and available from Windsor Media Enterprises.

First, here’s my short review of the book. Next, I’ll post some tidbits from our conversation.

Mary’s thesis is pretty simple, and not totally unfamiliar. Women have significant buying power, and businesses should pay attention. That’s the really familiar part 🙂 She discusses how women are taking that buying power and using it with companies and service providers that sell to them in a female-friendly manner. And she doesn’t mean packaging it in pink.

The key, she says, is to approach and sell to women in a manner consistent with and respective of women’s culture. Women buy differently than men do. In order to sell your product to her, you have to approach her the way she wants, answer her questions, deliver a level of customer service that she demands, gain her trust. She identifies nine "Trust Points" Community, Respectful, Considerate, Fun, Safety, Honesty, Reliability, Thoughtful and Loyalty. If you deliver on the trust points, she says, women will buy. And you’ll reap untold benefits because women will tell each other about their good experiences with you, your store, your products. If you don’t….

Now, none of this is big news. Especially if you are a woman

🙂

What makes this book really worth adding to your marketing bookshelf are the checklists she gives for the Nine Trust Points. Even though the concepts are fairly easy to understand, this stuff is hard for many companies to do. In part because it means giving back some control to the consumer, which is really really hard for corporate America’s command and control culture. The checklists give you a place to start … asking the right questions, evaluating your performance and delivery and service, and so forth.

This would be a very useful book for marketers who want to reach out to the female consumer, and don’t know where to start. It’s a quick read and it will get you going. And if you already know where to go, but just need a little help convincing others, leave a copy on their desks 🙂

Next post: my chat with Mary.

Tags: gender, in women we trust, Mary Hunt, marketing to women

Here chicky, chicky, a short vocabulary quiz

August 29, 2006 by Susan Getgood

One of the pictures below is of a chick and the other is a woman. Can you guess which one?

Flickr image by Awesome Pets

Flickr image by ACME-Nollmeyer of
Acme Photography, Phoenix, AZ

A+ if your choice for chick was yellow and fuzzy.

One of the things that irked me about the item last week on why so many women choose PR as a career was that during her interview with Sam Whitmore, Sharon Barclay, the author of the paper, told Sam that she wanted to find out why so many "chicks" were in PR.

Now I suppose it is hip and cool to use derogatory slang about oneself or one’s group, whether it be race, class or gender, but it always sounds so false. Almost like the group is trying to show the dominant group how really cool they are by adopting, or co-opting, the negative term. As though somehow that might make it a positive.

Doesn’t work. At least not for me.

Tags: gender, sexism, PR, public relations