Peaches and Powerful Customer Service
It’s Friday evening, and my wife decided that it was time to let grandma take care of our teething baby so that we could go pick peaches and get away for a few hours. Given that most of my Fridays are spent right here, in front of a computer, trying to figure out how we’re going to get through the next week, I cheerfully went along to spend the lovely summer evening with her.
Picking peaches was great–we talked to the owner of the small orchard for awhile about what to look for in a good peach, and I of course asked about proper picking technique (which annoyed my more experienced wife). Anyway, we picked our peaches, drove to their house to pay, and had a short conversation about finding something to eat in the nearby small town. The daughter who weighed our baskets was pretty sure we could go to the cafe on Main Street, so we paid, thanked her, and went on our way to find the restaurant she had described.
As we were driving, I got a phone call from a strange number. It was the owner of the orchard calling to tell us that she had heard we were looking for something to eat and her daughter had been unsure if the cafe she had recommended really was open. So the owner took it upon herself to call all of the restaurants in the tiny town to check their hours. Sure enough, the recommended cafe was closed, but the next door pizza place would be happy to stay open for us if we were already on our way.
Wow. Talk about amazing customer service. Both businesses went out of their way to work together to accommodate us out of town strangers for no good reason. We weren’t asking for anything special and we weren’t spending much money at either place, but both made an incredibly strong impression by making a small and inexpensive but valuable (to the us, the customer) extra effort. It made me want to give them even more of my business and promote them to everyone I see for the rest of the picking season.
Pretty powerful stuff. I sure hope our company is doing one-tenth as well in serving our customers.
Oh, and if you’re anywhere near Whitewater Kansas, be sure to stop at Entz orchard off of Hwy 196 and Webb road, and then head down to Whitewater Pizza for dinner….
Flint Hills Design Launches fhdMail
Today we’re proud to introduce fhdMail, a new email marketing campaign manager from Flint Hills Design.
We’ve been doing HTML email campaigns for a while now, and they’ve been great. But, being the perfectionists that we are, we started wondering if there was a better way. And so we created fhdMail.
We invite you to read about why fhdMail is better than your standard email campaign delivery service by visiting the website. But we’ll give you one concrete reason why fhdMail is better right now: the cute, furry little prairie dog character that we’ve affectionately named Flint. I mean, who wouldn’t enjoy being greeted and guided by this fun little guy in the midst of serious marketing work?
To learn more about how Flint and fhdMail can help your organization do effective email marketing, give us a shout. We know you’ll enjoy it.
The Great 2009 Flint Hills Design Koozie Giveaway
Thanks to all of you who came to our gathering after Bethel College’s Fall Fest football game. We appreciated having each and every one of our guests, and enjoyed the chance to hear more about what you are doing and share some of our work with you. We are also glad for all of the feedback and brainstorming that took place–some of you provided excellent ideas that will definitely influence our work in the future.
What Are You Talking About?
For those of you who have no idea what we’re talking about, we decided to have a little party. We invited around 150 of our close friends to come check out our new building and see what we were working on. We sent out the invites through nicely designed HTML emails and by creating a Facebook event:
HTML Email Invite
Facebook Event Invite
Tracking and Reports
We also decided to track the activity generated by the process, and then turn that into a very brief report that we could give to interested attendees, to show one aspect of the work we do.
Tracking Report
We had such a great time that we’re planning on making this an annual event, so if you weren’t able to make it hopefully you can join us next year!
Joel Krehbiel Joins Flint Hills Design
We’re proud to welcome Joel Krehbiel to Flint Hills Design!
After graduating from Bethel College (KS) with degrees in mathematical sciences and physics, Joel went on to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to earn a Masters of Mechanical Sciences and Engineering degree. He then spent a year in Monteiro Brazil, working with the Mennonite Central Committee’s Serving and Learning Together (SALT) program.
Joel brings an amazing analytical mind to the Flint Hills Design team, and will be in charge of taking our web analytics work to the next level. He will also be working to help us to design more effective marketing campaign strategies, structured for easy measurement and analysis.
Growing Your Social Media Presence
While still young and often misunderstood, social media has quickly grown to become a very valuable (some would say necessary) tool for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Most groups we work with are anxious to “leverage the power of Facebook, Twitter, etc.”
However, I’ve found that many groups have a very shallow understanding of these tools–mostly name recognition from an article proclaiming the miraculous power of social media and demanding all business get involved right now!
I think that many businesses (and individuals for that matter) can benefit from joining conversations online, but I always encourage learning about the options and ways to most effectively utilize the tools before simply diving right in. Perhaps more importantly, you need to understand how much work will be involved in maintaining your presence.
Gardening Metaphor
In addition to common sense, I’ve found that a gardening metaphor can be useful in helping to understand the requirements of a successful social media campaign. In a recent blog post, David Armano provided a very easy to remember and understand version of the gardening metaphor. He breaks it down into three parts:
- Seeding
- Feeding
- Weeding
To add my own explanation to his memorable framework…
Seeding involves
- Identifying your goals and the best tools for the job – choosing your plant varieties
- Setting up accounts and creating initial content – planting the seeds
- Beginning to engage others in the conversation – root stimulator
Feeding involves
- Creating content that provides value to your prospective readers – watering your plants
Weeding involves
- Monitoring your efforts, and removing those that seem detrimental to the health of your campaign – weeding and pruning your plants
Of course, no gardening metaphor would be complete without identifying the fruits of your labor! As in gardening, the payoff can be truly rewarding. Cultivating loyal followers who find value in your offerings can easily be translated into improvements to your bottom line, by establishing your expertise in a field you may realize that opportunities find you rather than you needing to seek them out, and perhaps most importantly, you may find that the effort you put in is multiplied through the natural process of growth!
Cherries from our orchard
