PlanetVM

I have been amazed at some interactions on Twitter recently between vendors and their customers. Not so much vendors, per se, but their representatives.  The dialogues I witnessed were, I believe, just passionate rather than malicious, but it is important to accept customer input, comments, feedback – even if you do think they are moaning, bitching or just being plain rude.

As we all know and recognise Twitter is a massive public forum and it really provides immense value to us all in terms of knowledge transfer, insight and edification.  When imparting information, intelligence or just thoughts, you should always bear in mind that others may not share your point of view, or indeed may have diametrically opposed thoughts.  But if the person you are interacting with is a customer don’t be inflammatory in public – either DM them or get their contacts out of your CRM system and call them.  No matter how well you know a customer, or how many beers you’ve ever drunk with them, if you don’t agree with them, don’t state it publicly for the whole world to see and never retaliate by accusing them of moaning!

We are all guilty of responding to email too quickly and our reply being read in the wrong context, but that email had a limited audience.  So it is always worth re-reading a Tweet before responding just in case its tone could be misconstrued. While you might know you are right and the customer is wrong, they are the customer, you are merely their supplier. But as your company’s representative you have to portray professionalism at all times and that is a skill, whereas passion is an emotion – and emotion is a dangerous thing at times.



Well Tom asked me to provide you, his readers, some basics surrounding my black art – Marketing!  This post, therefore, is intended for readers that would like to understand how marketing can help their business, have a fundamental belief that it can, but yet don’t have a clue where to start.

Whilst marketing as a science is deployed in organisations in very different ways – depending upon budgets, size of company, company objectives etc. – there are some basic rules that apply across the spectrum.  I will share some of them with you in the hope that even if you’re an SMB with absolutely no budget assigned to marketing, there are ways that the “black art” can assist you. read more »

I refer to a blog written by my fellow virtualization marketer VMCarrie where she discussed the trap of hiring an individual to “own” social media, or SoMe as I term it. As Carrie correctly points out, it is not just one person’s responsibility and it’s not a full time role for someone.

Contributing to this new wave of communications should be many people’s responsibility. But how do you engage the right people? How do you remove some people’s fear that they will express the wrong opinion? What boundaries are there, or should be, in place? Who sets those boundaries and guidelines?

This post is just my opinion and one that I share with my clients – some listen and some don’t read more »

How not to win friends and influence people – don’t trash your competition read more »

It is with great pleasure that I welcome Jane Rimmer as a new guest Blogger on PlanetVM.NET.

Jane is not only a good friend of mine but is a damn fine marketeer to boot,  over her career she has held senior marketing positions at the giants of our particular section of IT including amongst others  Citrix, Sun and most recently at VMware as Director, Marketing EMEA, She was actually employee number 2 in Europe

She is currently the owner of Hiviz Marketing, which she set up to provide outsourced marketing services to the IT industry so that they can exploit her knowledge and experience as and when organisations need them.   Now sit back and wait to be bamboozled by a mistress of the Marketing Art.