Marketing success comes from listening, understanding and then serving well (based on listening and understanding).  Service needs to come before sales.  Sadly, customer service is the often overlooked “ugly step child” of marketing, taking a backseat to “sexier” arenas like pure sales or awareness activities (advertising, social media, etc).  It is my job to re-train your brain and help you help yourselves, so keep reading to see how sexy service can be to your bottom line!  (it can, really!)

My work as the Marketing Therapist is never done.  What keeps me going is the positive web vibes from positive role models like Misty Gibbs, Web Gemologist and Founder of a wild web site called My Inspiration Lounge. Her latest marketing work can inspire you in your marketing efforts (and show you how sexy service AND SURVEYS can be)!

Misty hired Web Marketing Therapy last year for light advisory (which she took and used all our tips thankyouverymuch) and since then, has been rocking the wild web building:

-Awareness
-Educating and Distributing Information
-Connection (yep, relationship making baby!)
-Building Sales
-Offering Great Customer Service

Misty is dedicated to building a community of inspired women – in the name of healthy marketing, she looked within and tapped a gargantuan marketing asset – her community!  Recently, Misty reached out to her organization of women (via her email list) and did a simple online survey that yielded some very sophisticated (and sexy-service-centric) results.  Learn the Three Things Misty Learned From Surveying.

My healthy marketing advice to you is simple – rely on WHAT YOU HAVE and cultivate your assets.

Look within to be successful as you branch out to = meaningful marketing!

Start meaningful marketing by listening to your existing customers.  To learn what your customers want, ASK THEM! Tap tools like online survey tools to ask clarifying questions.  I am a fan of Zoomerang, other online survey sites include Survey Monkey and email companies like Constant Contact and My Emma have survey tools bundled in with their email services.

If you want to make money and make marketing matter, serve your customers.  Get over your ego that you know your customers needs and do not fear that you may get negative feedback.  All feedback is great feedback.

Listen, learn and grow!

Example of the Email Misty Sent to Survey Her Customers - Ask, Learn, Adapt then Succeed!

FriendFeed is a Mashup that brings FB, Twitter and gChat together!

and for a “flutter” of a second, I felt hip to a web buzz…until I read Wired’s

FriendFeed – A Mashup of Twitter/Facebook/GChat

Chris Snyder of Wired writes, “Social aggregator FriendFeed unveiled a major redesign Monday with a big focus on real-time feeds much simpler than Facebook and a new design (like Facebook) that bears a striking resemblance to Twitter’s profile pages.”

but it looks like this FriendFeed may be in need of support…

“Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed have been in something of an arms race to keep up with the latest advancements in social feeds and microblogging. FriendFeed was one of the first to implement filters and aggregate content from third-party services.

FriendFeed is getting backlash on the new design on their beta site, just as Facebook has with their new design…

I’d love to know anyone who used FriendFeed, pros, cons…

And I have to laugh at all these redesigns in social media….hello!  We are in an era of vocal users that are empowered with word of mouse marketing…maybe you may want to ASK (ahem, surveys, feedback, site voting tools??) for feedback BEFORE you start tweaking??