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The marketing departments of most large corporate spend huge sums marketing to groups they don’t really know. Marketers  understand which segments they are targeting, and the expected behaviours of their potential buyers, but they know very little about who those future customers are beyond some fairly intangible attributes.

Networking is probably the single most effective way of generating new business, meeting people that can connect you with hiring managers and buyers looking for your skills and services. On average I go to one or two networking meetings a week and have noticed that there seem to be similar types of people at all of them. See if you can spot them:

Chris Bryan was interviewed by Knowledge Peers. Click on the links to see the videos:

Social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and LinkedIn have increased in popularity at an incredible rate in the past two years. Facebook for example boasted 60 million active users in mid-2008, growing at an average of 3% weekly since Jan 2007, (according to Tunheim Partners), with active users doubling every six months. Over ten hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, adding to the estimated 70m videos hosted in March 2008.

If you follow my tweets or link to me on LinkedIn you might have picked up that I am teaching the CRM Topic on an MBA course. As part of this I have been developing the teaching material and case studies, this of course means that I am currently very sensitive to CRM and customer service approaches and issues. So when I was called by County Carpet Cleaners, while I was putting together the customer service module it was manna from heaven.

August is the silly season for news and business. 50% of my marketing mailer had out of office replies. 25% had changed jobs and 25% replied. Remarkable result, thank you everyone.

Notwithstanding all the above I am preparing for a series of assignment briefings this week that I am expecting to start in the next week or so.

The seven houses where I live received a letter from East Hampshire District Council this morning.

It read:

“It has been brought to our attention that there is a considerable amount of garden waste being dumped in the footpath…”

It went on “Under section 33 of the Environmental Protection act…. you are liable to 12 months in prison or a £50,000 fine….”

Computer Weekly published a very interesting article this week: “PAC reveals its exasperation at endless public IT failures.” There is a copy here.