The Moorhill Monitor
* Volume
8 / Issue 4 / Date 4th Quarter 1999 *
In this Issue:
[The Year 2000 -
A Letter to Your Boss]
[A Christmas Story]
[Ten Thoughts To Ponder]
[The Six Phases of Web Marketing]
[AS9100]
Moorhill International Group, Inc.
Fostering International Relations Through Commerce
Providing sound implementation strategies
Offering extensive training / auditing services
Integrating D1-9000 and/or AS 9100 systems |
Assisting with on-site baseline assessments
Reviewing existing documentation
Inspiring company-wide adoption methods |
1. The
Year 2000 - A Letter to Your Boss!
Dear Boss:
The "Y to K" problem you mention doesn't really make sense
to me. However, pursuant to your instructions, I have
finished making the necessary corrections to the company
calendars for next year (2000). The calendars have
returned from the printer and are ready to be distributed
with the following new months:
Januark
Februark
Mak
Julk
Source: Y2K
Toolbox, 10/99.
2. A Christmas Story!
It's
just a small, white envelope stuck among the branches of our Christmas tree.
No name, no identification, no inscription. It has peeked through the branches
of our tree for the past 10 years or so.
It
all began because my husband Mike hated Christmas---oh, not the true meaning
of Christmas, but the commercial aspects of it- overspending...the frantic
running around at the last minute to get a tie for Uncle Harry and the dusting
powder for Grandma---the gifts given in desperation because you couldn't think
of anything else.
Knowing
he felt this way, I decided one year to bypass the usual shirts, sweaters,
ties and so forth. I reached for
something special just for Mike. The inspiration came in an unusual way.
Our
son Kevin, who was 12 that year, was wrestling at the junior level at the
school he attended; and shortly before Christmas, there was a non-league match
against a team sponsored by an inner-city church, mostly black. These
youngsters, dressed in sneakers so ragged that shoestrings seemed to be the
only thing holding them together, presented a sharp contrast to our boys in
their spiffy blue and gold uniforms and sparkling new wrestling shoes. As the
match began, I was alarmed to see that the other team was wrestling without
headgear, a kind of light helmet designed to protect a wrestler's ears.
It
was a luxury the ragtag team obviously could not afford.
Well, we ended up walloping them.
We took every weight class. And
as each of their boys got up from the mat, he swaggered around in his tatters
with false bravado, a kind of street pride that couldn't acknowledge defeat.
Mike,
seated beside me, shook his head sadly, 'I wish just one of them could have
won,' he said. 'They have
a lot of potential, but losing like this could take the heart right out
of them.'
Mike
loved kids-all kids-and he knew them, having coached little league football,
baseball and lacrosse. That's
when the idea for his present came. That afternoon, I went to a local sporting
goods store and bought an assortment of wrestling headgear and shoes and sent
them anonymously to the inner-city church.
On Christmas Eve, I placed the envelope on the tree, the note inside
telling Mike what I had done and that this was his gift from me.
His
smile was the brightest thing about Christmas that year and in succeeding
years. For each Christmas, I
followed the tradition one year sending a group of mentally handicapped
youngsters to a hockey game, another year a check to a pair of elderly
brothers whose home had burned to the ground the week before Christmas, and on
and on.
The
envelope became the highlight of our Christmas.
It was always the last thing opened on Christmas morning and our
children, ignoring their new toys, would stand with wide-eyed anticipation as
their dad lifted the envelope from the tree to reveal its contents.
As the children grew, the toys gave way to more practical presents, but
the envelope never lost its allure. The
story doesn't end there.
You
see, we lost Mike last year due to dreaded cancer.
When Christmas rolled
around, I was still so wrapped in grief that I barely got the tree up. But Christmas Eve found me placing an envelope on the tree,
and in the morning, it was joined by three more.
Each of our children, unbeknownst to the others, had placed an envelope
on the tree for their dad. The
tradition has grown and someday will expand even further with our
grandchildren standing around the tree with wide-eyed anticipation watching as
their fathers take down the envelope.
Mike's spirit, like the Christmas spirit will always be
with us. May we all remember
Christ, who is the reason for the season, and the true Christmas spirit this
year and always.
Source: Anonymous, 12/99.
3. Ten Thoughts To
Ponder!
When
a cow laughs, does milk come out of its nose?
How
did a fool and his money get together in the first place?
If
nothing sticks to Teflon, how do they stick Teflon on a pan?
What's
another word for THESAURUS?
Why
do they sterilize the needles for lethal injections?
Why
isn't the word PHONETIC spelled the way it sounds?
What
do they use to ship Styrofoam?
Why
is ABBREVIATION such a long word?
Why
is there an expiration date on sour cream containers?
How
do you know when it's time to tune your bagpipes?
Source: J. McKersie, 10/99.
4. The
Six Phases of Web Marketing!
Web Marketing—when executed completely and
correctly— encompasses, in my view, six distinct phases These phases are
designed to do one of two things:
·
Move visitors toward you, for more personal relationships for
your “visitors of value”
·
Move visitors away from you, to less resource-intensive
activities for non-qualified visitors.
In the few paragraphs that follow, I’ll summarize each
of these phases, and highlight a couple of proven tactics for executing each.
Capture Them
The first phase of Web marketing is what I call the
Capture Phase. Its purpose is simple—bring on the visitors. But, unless
you’re an “eyeball site”—whose revenue model is built on advertising
(like Portals and ezines)--you don’t want just anyone coming in. If you’re
in business to sell product or services to qualified customers, then you want
to attract what I call Visitors of Value™--my own web term for qualified
leads. Here are three core tactics you should use to bring people in:
1. The
primary way people find web sites is the search engines (Ernst & Young
reports that half of all buyers on the web find their products through the
engines). You must learn the techniques for achieving high search engine
rankings.
2. The
next most-often-used method is a link exchange program, where people find you
from a link on someone else’s site (to see who’s linking to you try
entering this search phrase—link: www.yourdomain.com—in Infoseek).
3. Banner
ads, are popular, but losing luster quickly. There are a ton of problems with
today’s advertising models, but one day—after the harmonic convergence of
software and bandwidth—this method will be vital to doing business on the
web.
Control Them
Perhaps the most difficult phase. Web sites must
reflect the needs and requirements of the visitors, not project the features
and benefits of the product. My metaphor: your web site must be a mirror of
your visitor, not a movie of your company (take a look at our recent article
on this subject - http://www.searchz.com/clickz/091598.shtml
). Here are three core characteristics you should examine when determining how
to control your visitors:
1. Different
visitors have different levels of web skills: make sure you provide web
threads that work for all levels.
2. Make
the site challenging to the people that visit (and challenging to each level
of visitor skill).
3. Give
your visitors enough options to ensure that they will find something that
reflects their needs and interests.
Qualify Them
Properly done and deftly analyzed, the result of the
visitor control phase will be sufficient information to make initial
qualification of your visitor. Simply put, where they go on your site, and
what they confide to you in opt-ins as they travel, tells you about them. And
that includes whether they meet the core standard for a Visitor of Value: the
traditional qualification characteristics of Money, Authority and Need.
Here are three tactics you might deploy:
1. Create
extremely attractive avenues to lure away the unqualified (e.g., if someone
heads right to the links section you can begin to consider them as not
qualified).
2. Create
extremely focused—and often doornail dull—pages to pull in the qualified
(e.g., if someone heads straight to the CIO section, you can begin to consider
them as very qualified—if you’re looking for CIO's).
3. Pepper
your site with short, smart, well-focused and entertaining opt in
opportunities—and offer appropriate incentives (Chairmen of Boards don’t
really go for pens and T shirts you know).
Compel Them
The next phase is to motivate your Visitors of Value to
do what you want them to do. That may be register, purchase, contact, download
or whatever action is appropriate for your product and sales cycle. We
consider there to be three basic actions you want your “visitors-of-value”
to take. In order of importance they are:
1.
Purchase.
If you’ve done a good job reflecting your visitors’ needs in the mirror
of your product, they will purchase during one of their visits, or begin the
sales cycle for sites whose products won’t be bought online.
2.
Register.
Keep your registration forms short and focused—and scatter them
throughout your site.
3.
Bookmark.
We’re shocked at how few sites even bother to suggest
to their visitors that they deploy a Bookmark (rule one of marketing is “if
you want someone to do something, tell them to do it.”)
Contact Them
Once your visitors leave your site, what programs and
tactics do you have in place to contact them again? How will you motivate them
to return? What do you do with visitors once they leave your site? How do you
create simple, effective, low-maintenance follow-up programs to continually
touch them in a way they will accept? The answers to these and other related
questions form Phase Five Here are a couple of very strong approaches:
1. Personalized
email alerts to new information at your site (original or aggregated). Make
sure your recipients’ name and company appear at least twice in every
email—there are plenty of tools available to let you do that.
2. For key
prospects—and you determine that threshold— create personal site pages
just for them, offering them insights and interpretations of their own
specific needs and how you can solve them. Economies of experience over time
will make this a quick and inexpensive process (it now takes me no more than
three hours total to research prospects and create pages that dazzle them with
the personalized content and artwork—a meager amount of time and effort to
open up a significant business opportunity). Secure it with a password and
then email them the URL and log in information.
Capture Them
The
final phase is really a repeat of the first, with a difference. The key
element here: don’t bring them back to the same web site—once you’ve
qualified them as having significant value to you, why not bring them to
another web site, focused on the interests and requirements of the prospect
category, based on what you’ve learned about them.
If CIO's form a core element of your qualified lead base, why not build
a CIO only web site?
Source: Mike Fischler, 8/99.
5. AS9100 - Look
Here!
We
will soon have a site link to the newly released AS9100 aerospace standard.
This standard will replace Boeing's D1-9000 Rev. A as well as the industry's
AS9000.
Moorhill Monitor
1998 / 1999 Archives
Moorhill International Group, Inc.
P. O. Box 26757
Tempe, AZ 85285, USA
480-491-2007 tel.
480-491-2101 fax
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