MDC Group Inc’s Blog

10 Weird Work Stories from 2009

2009 marked another year of unforgettable occurrences in entertainment, politics and current events.

Barack Obama was inaugurated as the first African-American president of the United States. A global pandemic of the H1N1 virus, known as “swine flu,” broke out. Rio de Janeiro was named the site of the 2016 Summer Olympics. Major American icons such as Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett, Sen. Ted Kennedy and Walter Cronkite passed away. Jon and Kate broke up.

In the midst of all of these happenings, other trends were going on in the job market. Unemployment numbers rose and fell. The number of jobless folks increased. Despite all of these dismal reports, a few other events caught our eye.

In case you missed them, here are 10 of the weirdest work stories and headlines we read this year:

1. ‘Oops! Employee flips, damages borrowed  Ferrari’
A 23-year-old woman driving her boss’s borrowed Ferrari in California lost control of the car and flipped it, causing an estimated $125,000 in damage. The woman was unharmed, but her boss was said to be “irate.” (MSNBC.com)

2. ‘34 hospitalized after co-worker sprays  perfume’
When almost 150 people at a Texas bank call center became ill, reporting dizziness and shortness of breath, officials suspected carbon monoxide or some other toxic fume was the culprit. But when two people complained about dizziness after a co-worker sprayed perfume and then others began to feel sick, it was discovered that the perfume was to blame. Thirty-four people were taken to hospitals, 12 by ambulance, and 110 people were treated on the scene. No one knows what type of perfume was sprayed. (MSNBC.com)

3.  ’Man hurt himself to “avoid work” ‘
Steven Reid, a 23-year-old hotel cleaner in Scotland, just wanted a day off of work. Rather than asking for one, Reid claimed he had been assaulted. To convince his boss, he took a razor from his pocket and repeatedly dragged it down his face. He also picked up a boulder and repeatedly hit himself on the head and body. He went to the police station to report “the assault.” When asked about the incident, Reid said, “Looking back, I should have just phoned work and asked them for the day off.” (BBC News)

4. ‘Worker fired for all-caps  e-mails’
Vicki Walker, of Auckland, New Zealand, was fired for sending e-mail messages in all-capital letters. The employer said that Walker’s co-workers complained about her “shouty” and confrontational e-mails. Walker was awarded $11,500 on the premise that the company had no official e-mail style guide; therefore, her messages did not amount to grounds for dismissal. (UPI.com)

5. ‘Bodybuilding firefighters  accused of faking disability’
Two Boston firefighters were charged with fraud after they were caught bodybuilding — despite having filed for disability. Albert Arroyo, 46, and James Famolare, 65, both sought accidental disability pensions after allegedly suffering injuries while on the job. Arroyo claimed he fell while walking in a fire station, saying it left him permanently disabled from the performance of his duties. Famolare claimed that he suffered a career-ending injury while moving a box of files. Arroyo was caught bodybuilding while on disability and prosecutors say he “failed to disclose his repeated visits to gyms where he trained for a May 2008 bodybuilding competition.” (TheBostonChannel.com)

6. ‘Washington Post features editor punches colleague over ‘charticle”
Chaos ensued at The Washington Post when Henry Allen, 68, features editor, reportedly punched one of his writers in the head. According to The Washingtonian, a style editor at the Post assigned a semi-political story to writers Monica Hesse and Manuel Roig-Franzia, asking them to compile a list of disclosures made by congressmen who are being investigated for ethics violations. They came up with a ‘charticle’ with a dozen examples. Allen was outraged, apparently at their creativity, and let them know his feelings. In the midst of Allen’s barrage, Roig-Franzia apparently said, “Oh, Henry, don’t be such a [expletive].” That’s when Allen lunged at Roig-Franzia and started throwing punches. Allen was reportedly banned from the newsroom, just before his Nov. 28 retirement. (Daily Finance)

7. ‘Teller fired for foiling robbery’
Jim Nicholson was fired from his job as a bank teller at a Key Bank branch in Seattle after chasing down a bank-robbery suspect rather than giving into his demands. A potential robber approached Nicholson, gave him a bag and told him to fill the bag with money. Nicholson asked the robber to see his weapon and was told, “It’s a verbal ransom.” Nicholson threw the bag on the floor, jumped over the counter and took off after the would-be robber, who ran out of the bank and down the street outside with Nicholson in pursuit. With the help of another civilian, Nicholson caught the suspect and held him until police arrived to take him into custody. His heroics didn’t last long, as he was fired for breaking bank protocol that employees are to comply with a robber’s request to prevent others from getting hurt. (MSNBC.com)

8. ‘Postal worker helps himself to $86,000 worth of Gamefly  games’
Reginald Johnson, 34, of Germantown, Pa., admitted to stealing 2,200 Gamefly games, valued at $86,000, while working as a mail-processing clerk between April and September 2008. Gamefly is a video-game rental service that sends games to subscribers through the mail for $15.95 or $22.95 a month. Johnson allegedly traded the games to a GameStop for store credit. When federal workers tried to arrest him, Johnson led them on a car chase before crashing the car and getting caught. (Philly.com)

9. ‘Worker sued over $29,000  tip’
Sara Gaspar, a former Notre Dame employee, is being sued by the school for spending a tip that was supposedly given to her by mistake. Gaspar was given a $29,387 tip after being paid for catering work in April. Notre Dame now says that it was a typing mistake and is demanding Gaspar repay the money. The problem is, it has already been spent, which resulted in the lawsuit. (WiredPRNews.com)

10.  ’Hotel-casino worker exposed to secondhand smoke sues employer for $5  million’
Kanie Kastroll, a casino dealer at the Wynn Las Vegas, is suing the hotel for not protecting its employees against secondhand smoke from customers. Kastroll claims she developed asthma and other health problems because of secondhand smoke. She also says that the casino doesn’t allow employees to request a smoke-free table and that management allows gamblers to blow smoke directly in the dealers’ faces, forbids dealers from protesting, requires them to tell patrons that smoking is allowed and encourages smoking by offering free cigarettes to gamblers. Kastroll says that employees who don’t follow these rules are disciplined. (AllHeadlineNews.com)

By:Rachel Zupek
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7 Signs Your Marketing May Need to Evolve

A lot of marketers get both confused and fed up with all the talk about things like new media, social media, inbound marketing, user generated content, and the age of conversation. I mean, how is a person suppose to apply all these somewhat vague and hard to pin down terms and trends. Well, there’s no denying that the world and certainly the world of marketing has changed. If you’re trying to wrap your head around what that might mean for you, here are seven very concrete ways to start viewing the evolution of your marketing strategies and practices.

1) Your marketing strategy is a sales strategy – far too many small business folks view marketing as selling. I’ve got nothing against sales, you must have them, but what you must have, before a sales presentation is ever made, is a crystal clear, very easy to understand difference. You must claim and communicate at every turn the way that your products, services, and processes are uniquely here to make some narrowly defined target market’s life better. Oh, and it can’t be boring, there must be something remarkable enough about your business or strategy that people go out of their way to tell others about it. Do that and selling not only gets easier, it gets somewhat superfluous.

2) You use mail-in rebates – OK, really this one’s kind of a pet peeve of mine, but it applies to any kind of odd or confusing issues around pricing, buying your products, contacting your company, or engaging your services. Any practice that doesn’t make sense or makes your customers jump through hoops, either because it makes your life easier or you’re intentionally trying to trick people into buying, is so last century.

3) You are the low price loser – This is the opposite of the low price leader. See, the low price leader uses technical or operational advantages to profitably thrive in competitive pricing scenarios. The low price loser simply tries to compete on price alone instead of competing on value. Value means many things, but far too often business owners undervalue or under-educate about true value and are forced to differentiate based on price. Differentiate, activate and army talkers, add value, and charge premium prices.

4) You think a blog is something created by the IT department – Blogging is the tip of the very large iceberg of content creation in the new world of marketing, but it’s still one of the easiest ways for you to play. The fact that anyone can find anything they want about any business or challenge by simply visiting a search engine means that you must be consistently producing content that allows your business to be the one they find online. Committing to producing educational content through the low-cost, easy to operate blogging software is a no-brainer for your marketing department.

5) You think lead generation is about hunting – the problem with going out and hunting down your prospects is that they have developed far too many ways to tune your messages out or simply developed a numbness to much of what they see as attempts to sell them stuff. Today’s marketers are optimizing tons of content, written word, images, audio, and video and placing it online, offline, and in outposts like LinkedIn and Business Week’s Business Exchange so that when prospects go looking, and they still are, these marketers are being found.

6) You think the only way to press coverage is pounding journalists with press releases – Well, I’m not really sure this was ever that effective, but identifying key journalists and building relationships through relevant interaction on their blog, sending industry data, and commenting on stories is a far better way to become a quoted source. Expand your view of the media to include industry blogs (some of which have larger and more focused readerships than a traditional metro Business Journal) and build relationships with these individuals. Consistently submit press releases and articles to online distribution sites such as PRWeb and Pitch Engine.

7) You think the best way to get more referrals is to ask – Sure asking for referrals is a good thing, but being more referable is a better thing. You make your organization more referable when you do something that’s remarkable, that people can’t not talk about. And, you do it by looking at every interaction with a prospect or customer as a marketing interaction. You do it by making certain that in every engagement the customer not only receives the value, but realizes that value fully. You do it by keeping your promise in a way that provides a wonderful experience.

By:John Jantsch
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What Really Triggers a Referral?

Referrals most naturally happen when two people are talking and one of the parties expresses a pain in the neck. If the other party just had her pain in the neck fixed, she may very well say something like, “ooh, you just gotta call Bob, he’s the best pain in the neck fixer on the planet.”

Right? We’ve all done some variation of that exchange in making or receiving a referral.

Problem is, we don’t spend enough time teaching our customers and referral sources the types of complaints, frustrations, challenges, and situations our customers generally espouse when they are actually in the act of qualifying themselves as a great referral.

Here’s what I mean. We ask our customers and referral sources if they know anyone who needs a fully optimized, solutions driven lawn manicure specialist, when we should probably be asking them if they know anyone whose dog keeps getting loose because their lawn service always leaves the gate open.

I believe any salesperson worth their salt has developed a list of phrases, situations, and verbal clues that, if heard during a sales presentation, signal it’s time to take the order.

The same idea is true of a qualified referral.

My belief is that the best way to make it easy for people to refer business your way is to develop a list of “trigger” phrases that experience tells you are the exact words your prospects utter when then need what you’ve got.

For example, if you sell accounting software, it’s rare that a prospect might walk up to a golf buddy and say, I sure wish I had some better accounting software.

But, he might say - “I have no idea how healthy my business is because we never have timely data”, or,”I feel like I’m being help hostage by my accounting firm,” or “we keep everything on spreadsheets and it’s a real hassle to update.”

In many cases these folks don’t have any idea that your accounting software is the answer, but you do, so these utterances are your invitation to save the day.

Spend a couple hours brainstorming with anyone in your organization that has customer contact of any kind or call up a dozen customers and ask them to identify the true value your firm brings them with the goal of creating a top ten list of trigger phrases that everyone in your organization and anyone wishing to refer business could use as the perfect way to spot your ideal customer.

Then, clean this list up and create a document you can use in your marketing education processes. (This might end up being the best internal sales training tool you’ve created to date.)

You can even take it a step farther and publicize this content in some manner in your marketing materials because it’s likely that a prospect might be saying these exact things to themselves as well.

Close the loop on this process by also creating some tools, like gift certificates, special referral offers, or coupons, that your referral sources can use any time they hear a trigger phrase.

Prospect: “I’ve been waiting over a week for my lawyer to call me back.” - Referral Source: “Really, my attorney calls me back within 24 hours guaranteed - here’s her card, because I recommended you she’ll review your first contract for free.”

By John Jantsch
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Finish Strong

The Movie That Inspired The Saints To The Super Bowl

Firms Hold Fast to Snail Mail Marketing

Despite Prevalence of Digital Media, Entrepreneurs Find Old Fashioned Direct Mailings Still Key to Winning Customers

By TERI EVANS

Looking to cut costs amid the recession, Alicia Settle initially thought it would be a good idea to eliminate her company’s annual direct mailing.

Spending about $20,000 on the personally signed letters, which offered customers a discount on early orders, seemed indulgent for Per Annum Inc., which sells city diaries, albums, and planners in the struggling corporate gift market. But after swapping snail mail for email last year, Ms. Settle saw a 25% drop in early orders compared with the same period the previous year.

“We realized we had made a huge mistake,” says Ms. Settle, president of the New York firm.

The affordability of e-marketing, along with the explosion of social media and the desire to trim costs in the recession, has prompted many small companies like Per Annum to slash traditional direct-mail budgets. U.S. consumers received about 5.2 billion pieces of direct mail in the third quarter of 2009, a 27% decline compared with 7.1 billion in the same period a year earlier, according to Mintel Comperemedia, a research firm that tracks direct-mail marketing.

However, some entrepreneurs who were quick to write off direct mail as too pricey or passé are finding it’s not so easy to dismiss.

Ms. Settle says that at first she blamed the economy for the dropoff, until she “started hearing from customers that they never got their ‘reminder’ in the mail.” Ms. Settle quickly sent a postcard mailing in June, which recouped the 25% loss, she says.

Costs are still taken into account. Many entrepreneurs find that the boiler-plate methods of the past—such as purchasing mailing lists and sending fliers or coupons to a mass audience—often aren’t cost-effective. Instead, business owners are creating personalized mailings, which may include special offers or other valuable information, and sending them to a hand-picked list of current and prospective customers.

The idea is to send something that’s more appealing than “junk” mail and potentially more noticeable than an email message, says Eric Anderson, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. That allows business owners “to offer a personal touch the larger firms may not be able to have,” he says.

To save money, Peter Taffae, founder of ExecutivePerils, a Los Angeles wholesale insurance broker, stopped his small firm’s humorous postcard mailings last year. The colorful marketing pieces showcase the insurance broker’s offerings through satirical movie themes, such as “Full Metal Policy,” a parody of “Full Metal Jacket” and “Singin’ in the Renewal,” from the classic film “Singin’ in the Rain.” About 2,000 current and potential clients received the postcards, which cost the company $4,000 to send out every four to six weeks.

“We would visit some clients and notice they were hanging the postcards on the wall, collecting them,” says Mr. Taffae, who says he secured $270,000 from a new client who chose to do business with the firm in late 2008 after receiving the postcards.

“After two or three months [of no postcards], we got a lot of emails and phone calls asking us, ‘Did you take me off your list?’” says Mr. Taffae, who restarted the postcard mailings in November.

William Kapas, president of J.C. Kapas Real Estate Co. in Rochelle Park, N.J., says he has secured clients as a result of his high-gloss, four-color monthly mailings that list who has bought or sold restaurant properties though the firm.

“Our clients look forward to knowing, and it’s a little bit of gossip, too,” says Mr. Kapas, who exclusively uses traditional mail to reach clients. “I think it’s easier to delete the electronic junk mail without taking a second look.”

Mr. Kapas spends about $1 a piece for the monthly mailings, sent to about 2,200 current and prospective customers.

Prof. Anderson says other business owners are trying to figure out how to integrate Web marketing—such as email campaigns, banner ads and social-networking sites—with direct mail. “The introduction of new media has forced [business owners] to go back and revisit the whole playbook on what’s the best way to communicate with customers,” Mr. Anderson says.

Ms. Settle, for instance, plans to use e-marketing to complement the hand-signed direct-mail piece, not replace it.

Meanwhile, Mr. Taffae is starting to take his satirical marketing approach to YouTube; he’s created a parody of F Troop, the 1960s sitcom, to promote his firm online.

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