Well, I never knew there was a department of typography and graphic communication at the University of Reading … fantastic. And they have been joining in with one of my pet subjects: ONLINE SHOUTING.
Most people know that excessive use of capital letters is wrong. It’s commonly understood to be online shorthand for screaming.
There is an interesting article about this on the BBC Magazine site.
See this:
Ryanair can confirm that a Ryanair staff member did engage in a blog discussion. It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again.
And now read the rest at No Pork Pies.
I think this attitude, along with the suggestion that Ryanair may charge people to use the toilet, will be an excellent business gain for easyJet.
Reading Rockets
Reading Rockets have set a fine example to sports clubs with their recent marketing activity. Via local schools they distributed flyers for a home match that gave the pupils free tickets. Accompanying adults got a £1 discount against the full £7 regular tariff.
Basketball is a bit of a minority sport and I expect their budgets are pretty tight. This campaign gave them a free distribution route for their message.
The really clever bit though is this: if there had been the same offer in the local paper it would have been ignored by us. This mechanic delivered pester power, tickets and information in our hand and all delivered by a trusted third party.
Now, as they had empty seats there, all the extra visitors were incremental revenue.
And from a personal point of view the best thing of all was it was really good family fun. Unlike football matches the language was clean throughout. It was fast paced with music and commentary. And Reading Rockets won their 20th consecutive match against Bristol Academy Flyers.
We make all sorts of assumptions about communication media for different age groups. Recent examples that help me keep a broad focus:
1. Charlie, my 6 year old son, not only now uses Outlook for his personal email account he is also sending me messsages with images embedded. The one on the left arrived the other day.
2. My mother, who has enjoyed free bus travel for some while now (to people outside of the UK: that means she is over 65), sends me texts littered with text speak. You know the type of thing, cu l8r and similar abbreviations.
3. I actually found someone in their late teens that doesn’t use Facebook/Twitter/MySpace. I am sure he is not alone.
The lesson to me was useful: don’t make assumptions. I’m sure I’ll need reminding of this again very soon!
New Media Age, 31 May 2007, tells us that, “British companies are losing money because they ignore emails from their customers.
Egain’s State of Customer Service study found that 38% of ‘major UK companies’ don’t bother to respond to emails despite the fact that their numbers are increasing.”
Retailers had the best track record, responding to 70% of emails, but telecoms had the worst – 58% of emails were simply ignored.
Well, no suprises there then!
This is a very interesting report http://www.yougov.com/archives/pdf/CPW060101004_1.pdf
Titled “The Mobile Life Report 2006 – How mobile phones change the way we live” this document is packed with quantative and qualitative data about mobile phones.
Think I’m a ’smart connected’. What are you?
