Behind the Scenes at Global-Roam

I just came back from a convention by the Australian Institute of Management (AIM) on “making a name for yourself.” The speaker was Scott Ginsberg, who has quite literally been wearing a nametag 24/7 for several years (he even has one tattooed on his chest). He was really quite interesting…

But forget all that. Because I won a prize. I got given all his books. Here’s me with his books with the greatest cheesy smile I could pull:

Yes, I know, your high opinion of Global-Roam has been shattered. You’ll never look at NEM-Watch or NEM-Review the same way ever again. You’re wondering if our figures can be trusted or if we just have a super-computer running a random number generator. You only just noticed our fascination with hyphens when I put three just then in the same sentence…

I only wanted to photograph the books, but then the boss caught me, and next thing you know you have this image to think of every time you ring our support line (don’t worry, if you ring and I pick up, I wont be offended if you ask for Todd).

But really, I’m just trying to be melodramatic so that if Scott Ginsberg has google alerts set up he’ll see this and continue my 100% success rate on getting authors to comment on my blog posts. That’s “Scott Ginsberg” who, by the way, looks like this:

Yes, Scott is insane, and proud off it. He’s also a very good speaker, and wont bore.

Scott is an expert on “approachability.” Hence the name tag. His talk was mostly on creating a name for yourself, and getting people talking about you (basically, creating word of mouth).

There are a few key points that stuck out:

1. Fans are awesome

Rather than creating “customers” or “clients” we should be aiming to create “fans”. People who are fanatical about our company and our products. These people are a far better at advocating for us than anyone else. They also push the hardest to help us make our products and services as good as possible (thanks for the positive pressure).

Global-Roam has a few fans. You know who you are (post a comment to say hello). You are all very helpful in making us better than we could ever be on our own. We appreciate the help, and like to think we are in the struggle to “make the electricity market understandable” together.

As part of our ongoing business restructuring process (discussed here) I have had a promotion-of-sorts and it is now my job to turn our clients of NEM-Watch and NEM-Review into fans. Then it’s my job to manage the influx of input our fans provide. Scott’s talk made me think about my job a little differently.

2. We need to stand out

In order to get word-of-mouth you need to be worthy of it. The only way to be worthy is to be remarkable. This means being different to everybody else.

How can we make people remember our appearances at trade shows, the loading screen of NEM-Watch, or blog posts written by yours truly? How do we create differences, not just in our quality of service but also in our customer’s experience? What would make it fun for our fans to use our products or work with us?

These are key questions. What would make this blog remarkable enough that you’d forward it on to other people?

3. Identity is key

Ultimately, Scott Ginsberg’s talk wasn’t about name tags. It was about identity. As part of this Scott got us to image a world where everyone did what we said and use this to create a “personal philosophy.”

Scott’s philosophy includes:

• “People buy people first”
• “Make the mundane memorable”
• “Fans, not customers”
• “Don’t sell, enable people to buy”

We’re still trying to work out our identity. As you may know, we’ve been on the slow road of changing our company name for some time now (I promise the new one has no hyphens in it), our business cards are ugly, and our company slogan is impossible to remember (something involving 3 “C”s ?). We really need to decide who we are, and then present that image in everything we do.

Are we a bunch of computer geeks who can fix your electricity related issues with magic coding powers? Are we “glorified librarians”? Are we “the NEM-Watch people”?

In Ontario, perhaps we need to identify with our Australianness (yes, that is actually a word).

Whatever our identity is, we need to find it, and work with it in everything we do.

How do you think of us?

That’s all my thoughts about Scott’s talk right now. For more information, you can go to his site here.

Tags: Scott Ginsberg, word of mouth

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 5th, 2009 at 1:41 pm and is filed under 04 - Sales & Marketing, Buzz Marketing, Event Review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.