Andrew has quite rightly identified one of bit10‘s recurring problems, people often fail to understand everything we do. Mostly they pigeonhole us into being experts in the thing they use us for…

Of course this is entirely our fault, we start by hiding behind ‘Full service digital agency’ who ‘Loves doing digital’, but few people realise what this means, then we somehow fail to make the effort to communicate to our customers what we actually do.

This problem is exacerpated by the fact that our customer research has told us that current bit10 customers NEVER look at our website (hence our site now is firmly targeted at new customers).

The solution is frankly simply down to plain old conversation, take the time to chat to your customers to identify their current and future business needs and then point our where you can help them! As per usual everyones enemy… ‘Time’ gets in the way.

For the record, bit10 do:

• Internet, intranet, digital marketing strategy and consultancy
• Creative web design
• Web application development
• Accessibility testing
• Usability testing
• Web analytics
• Online marketing (dm, adword and affiliate marketing management)
• Hosting
• Internet connectivity (University of Warwick Science Park only)

Basically everything Internet! You can see the full blurb here.

And thanks Andrew for giving me an excuse to list bit10s services on my blog!

In a nutshell BT (which accounts for 0.7% of the UK power usage), is investing £250m in building its own windfarms which it estimates will generate 25% of its power needs, or enough to power a city the size of Coventry) .

Firstly good work BT, good to see a corporate taking its responsibility seriously.

The numbers however lead to some interesting thoughts, and it all seems soo cheap, that why aren’t we doing it… over simplified argument coming up.

We are based in Coventry and as of the last Census theres about 300,000 of us living here. If £250m buys you enough power for a city the size of Coventry… unless I have got the zeros wrong on my calculator that equates to £833 per person… I reckon I spend half that per year on power at home… so where do I sign up?

Take this up to a national scale and it equates to £143b, which while not a trivial sum of money still only equates to £2380 per person… so I wonder what the ROI on a wind turbine is?

Now I have had an interesting email through from a really nice guy called Gavin Jenks, who works for Autoglass and has commented on my blog more than a couple of times.

Gavin has asked me if I can delete a comment he made, because he doesn’t want to get in trouble with the powers that be at Autoglass. 

I am really sorry Gavin mate but I have thought about it a lot and I just don’t think it would be right, heres my reasoning:

1. The only thing with a longer memory than the Internet is the taxman, so even if I delete it, the comment will still exist on archive sites, etc. and just put into question other content here.
2. If Autoglass don’t give staff guidelines on this sort of thing then really they can’t do anything against you.
3. If the Autoglass marketing people are any good, they will long ago have discovered these blog entries and read them and if they were concerned about your comments they would have already taken action.
4. I just don’t think its in the spirit of blogging.

Gavin, if you want to retract the comment, please feel free to post a retraction and I will ensure it gets published.

Wow, you know you have hit the bigtime when one of your clients gets in The Register with a full on bit of espionage.

To cut a long story short a client of ours, VBi Limited, got broken into a load of kit stolen under extremely suspicious circumstances.

The ‘baddies’ broke in, gained access to the server room within minutes (the server room, located in a highly unobvious location), and whipped in excess of 30 drives out of the servers.

Sunday 1st April, the phone rang, I will never forget the moment I had a particularly aggressive hangover, ‘Hi Ben, its Chris here, we’ve been robbed!’ (well he used something a little more aggressive than ‘robbed’, but I am trying to keep my blog relatively expletive free’).

We broke out the disaster plan, the first hour was assessment i.e. sent the client, Chris, in to find out how bad it was – meanwhile i engaged on a major recovery program of my own, consisting of Berocca, bacon of eggs and enough water to drown an otter.

A couple of hours later the verdict came back, we had lost pretty much every removable drive – so that’ll be a full on recovery then.

Monday 2nd April, Les and I were in the car at 6am on the road to rainy Blackburn, enroute trying to acquire 30 odd replacement hard drives, Dell frankly were as much use as a server without hard drives, in fact we couldn’t even find the right phone number to get someone who could vaguely begin to think about the merest possibility of helping us within the next week let alone the next few hours.

Fortunately our good friends at Serversource, in Northampton, came to the rescue and had all the drives complete with caddies, with us in Blackburn, by lunchtime. Good work fellas!

Thanks to Les and I working our magic, by the end of play Monday we had restored the AD, all servers base restored, by the end of play Tuesday we had completed a full recovery of all services…. CRM, Intranet, Exchange, the whole works. 

Thanks for coming!

Its a good job that I did have a good experience as a quick Google search for ‘Autoglass’, brings my blog entry up as fourth.

This goes a long way to demonstrate the power of blog and other content entries on Google results, its especially interesting for organisations like Autoglass for whom in the normal course of events don’t get much content written them about them. Therefore one good or bad customer review can make a huge difference to their business.

At bit10 we often experience the reverse of this problem for SME’s for whom we do SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for, the classic problem is that no-one links to them with good or bad reviews, therefore their Google ranking suffers terribly, so even if you tick all the other SEO boxes, they will still do badly on a perfect search phrase for them.

A good example is Food4WildBirds, who as the name suggests specialise in ‘Food for Wild Birds’, basically they are the one stop shop for ‘Wild Bird Food‘ and other small animal feed and treats. Great company, great service, and great SEO work on our part, however they still suffer because of the lack of links to their site.

So how do we fix this? Well one way of course is blog entries like this, however more effective in the long term is to get affiliate marketing and linking engrained into the organisation, so they are building relationships and activities that will legitimately improve their Googlerank.

So yesterday I left my car in Coventry ‘Central Six’ railway station car park (for which Virgin kindly tax me 6 quid), I get back from London at 8pm to find the passenger side window of my car broken and suprise suprise my TomTom missing.

Obviously my TomTom wasn’t on display but the cradle was stuck to the windscreen, those clever crims of course realise that this just means the TomTom itself is hiding in car somewhere (in my case in the drivers side mini glove compartment).

I phoned the police to report it, they said this week there was a run on sat navs, and apparently even if i removed the cradle the classic mark on the windscreen is enough to justify a breakin…. sigh mental note to self – carry windolene and duster in car.

Now this is just a royal pain in the ass because my car has frameless doors making a temporary repair impossible. A quick call to Autoglass and they would love to fix it under insurance, unfortunately they can’t do it for another 2 days! (presumably maxed out fixing windows in the aftermath of a spate of TomTom thefts!), I protest and the helpful call center lady makes some calls and says comes back with the 4am in Birmingham option!

Those of you who know me will know that I am positively joyous in the morning and love nothing more than a good early start – NOT!

Anyway here I am at Autoglass – and I am frankly impressed, its a textbook example of both customer care and effective brand and message communication.

The waiting room is warm, clean, comfortable with (as far as I can tell) infinite free coffee, TV and Internet access (hence my ability to blog on the experience!).

The way they convey their brand messages is very open, and quite clever, all over the workshop walls are messages such as ‘professional – be calm and confident’, ‘caring – show respect for customers and their cars’, and many others. Obviously these are directed at their staff, but also get seen by customers reinforcing their confidence…

Good stuff Autoglass - I approve!

It is, without doubt, the first time ever, I have been offered coffee and asked ‘What sort of milk would you like sir?, full fat? semi-skimmed? skimmed?’.

I have been trying to think anecdotally how this reflects on Nominet, good customer service? good choice? too much time on their hands?!

Whatever, I think its great! However I am not sure that bit10 consumes enough milk to justify 3 types of milk which is a shame!

The aquisition brings approximately 270 new customers of varying sizes and an estimated half million pounds of additional turnover.

Woohoo!!! <- Happy Ben

My trauma however is no reflection on the bit10 people doing my project, its more of a reflection on my inability to really know what I want!

We are now on our 3rd major design iteration and probably our 50th minor iteration, and its starting to look fantastic.

The main thing I have learnt from the experience so far is that we employ fantastic designers however they aren’t mindreaders. So unless you are the sort of person who can visualise exactly what you want and convey it in simple terms others can understand (neither of which I can do), then the design process has to be iterative.

Mental note to self ‘sell clients far more design iterations’. :)