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Tag Archives: brand loyalty
The operating system with no faults can throw the first stone.
It has come to my attention over a longish period now, as I get fed feeds from Hacker awareness sites and technology sites about weaknesses in Operating Systems and the fact they are being attacked by hackers and general no-gooders. The sites also feed me with, If only statements. If only the Operating system did this better and If only they didn’t do this.
Can perfection be achieved?
I think the problem is Operating systems by their very nature are developing all the time and when a corporation says we are launching our new version of an Operating System what they are not telling you is that they are already developing the next one in the background as the one they are about to launch is out of date. That’s because technology and we way we use it is changing so fast even they can’t keep up. Not only that we have greater expectations of what we want it to do and each rival vendor is trying to outdo the next one without infringing copyright laws. And there the problem arises as the developments are all copyrighted and each company is suing another company for infringement and also working with them at the same time to develop where they go from here.
Chaos you may think and I think you would be right.
So perfection is very subjective, as perfection to one person is so much different for another person and because the operating systems are always emerging and developing they will never ever tick all the boxes. This used to be the case with hardware and I would tell people, when you buy a computer it will be out of date before it is out the box. This is still the case most of the time. But Operating systems are now the drivers for what we want and how we want to use technology.
Operating Systems have the upper hand
Operating systems now have the upper hand, especially in mobile, with maybe Apple still holding its loyal users to their hardware and OS. Everyone else wants a nice user experience and not a flaky one that causes them to waste time and effort performing a simple task. So Android and Apple OS have taken the market, with Windows Phones really trying last ditch efforts to catch a percentage.
Apple’s software keeps evolving and people are constantly upgrading their devices with various levels of success and Android is much the same with the phone hardware vendor playing more of a part as they are allowed to add functionality to the Android system to give you special features if you buy their phones or tablets. This is called skinning and it varies. Sometimes not much is added and everything works well, and at other times, the Android system has changed so much the phone runs slower and looks different from other Android Devices. You may hear this referred to as bloatware.
Google are still commissioning manufacturers to make a range of what are known as Nexus devices that have hardware but can only have the raw Android install with no additional skinning or tampering with. These at present are my favourite, but have unrealistically gone up in price over their last few incarnations, so we will see.
So moan if you like
So basically we like to moan and make a fuss about this not happening and for goodness sake why can’t this be better. Just remember that the operating systems we use today are so much advanced than we used to use and they are in a constant state of flux all the time. They are never stable and are out of date almost before they are launched. They will get even better, smarter and then we will complain that it is boring and it does it all for us.
Go on shout at an operating system today, you know you want to….
I want to stand on a platform with regard to this matter.
Choosing a platform
During the time of election fever and the stance of many politicians and the media flooding our households, Internet and newspapers with all the spin and comments of election contenders, it occurred to me that many of them are launching the election campaigns on a platform of one thing or the other. If it isn’t the NHS it is migration and immigrants.
It got me a thinking
It started me thinking of what is the platform I stand on with regard to my business and how it operates and runs and then to take it into the techie world, what Social Media and Internet platforms do I use to get the message flooding to my customers and potential customers worldwide.
Platforms there are so many
It is the case that there are so many platforms, as with the election there are so many stand points that people take and you don’t know at times which one to believe, so we base our beliefs and decisions on past experience and their record if they have done the job before. When I set my company up I knew I did it out of passion. I wanted a company that had a drive and passion for what it did and did it well and honestly. So that was my initial platform if you like, I then structured the offering my company had around this. My testimonials from clients were my gauge as to whether I was achieving this each and every time. Then learning and tweaking happens. No one is perfect and it is the driving force behind our actions that should be considered.
So honesty, integrity and doing the best job as promised was my platforms and I hope I have achieved them as often as possible.
The other thing I did as an organisation was start to business network, before I even setup as a company I attended some networking groups to find out what business was saying about the climate and how they were getting on. I wasn’t setting up blind as they say. This paid off and I have continued to business network to this day. It is a great place to bounce ideas around, meet great people and pick up so much information and ideas.
What about online platforms?
With regard to online platforms, I have always been as you can imagine, the company is called IT Turning Point, very aware of what technology is doing and where it is taking us. The Internet has been with us for years and introduced so many changes in the way organisations and customers operate that it has dragged some organisations into the 21st century screaming and kicking.
The key of course is to decide your best and most appropriate route to market and then target the majority of your efforts there. This of course sometimes takes more than one attempt to get it right and is what I like to call a toe in the water scenario. We try and see if it works and tweak and try again until we hit the sweet spot. I decided early on to have a website and had it up and getting found before the official company launch, so when I launched people had a shop window to visit.
This of course was mentioned on all emails and literature to drive traffic in that direction. The site was optimised at the time for the search engines and we were off.
Social media was my next area of consideration and what should I do here and which platform would be best for me to use. I did the following and it has worked for me over the years.
My company was primarily B2B so LinkedIn to me was essential and getting my profile up to 100% as it was at the time and then making good honest connections with potential customers, existing customers and other companies and contractors that might be useful for me to touch base with and bounce ideas around. A company LinkedIn page was setup as well as my profile and maintaining it and promoting it became a goal.
For more awareness of brand name and getting me more widely known quicker I also thought that Facebook would be a great place to have a business page. So off I went on my next platform and got that page up and running and started to gain likes and awareness.
Remember, I am always aware of where technology is trying to take us and I launched a Twitter account at the same time to take advantage of the profile raising for my brand name.
In the corner of my eye I was always reading techie articles about search engine Optimisation and how you can get found online to make sure my efforts where not all in vain. This kept me informed that Google the main and most popular search engine was changing what it calls it’s algorithm that checks the Internet to find you and me and was placing more emphasis on Social Media activity and content. So this means and still does today that you need your website optimised, but you also need to be active in the realm of social media. You need to have link popularity, which means people are coming to your site from various locations and landing there and then leaving to go to other locations from your site.
Other social media platforms are out there, Google+, Kiltr, Pinterest and Instagram. It was now a case of deciding which platforms I felt I could benefit from and manage easily.
Again tools were there for the managing and these have helped immensely. Such as Hootesuit, highly recommended and there are others.
Email newsletters were the next thing I had always ran since setting up and had made a decision that a monthly newsletter would be the thing. So to this day we send out a monthly newsletter to a database of people who have signed up for it. Again there are laws about spamming people.
Have we reached our goal?
No, is the easy answer, we are always looking at tweaking and changing what we do and managing it differently and we do use other mediums to get the message out there, such as PR articles to business press, etc. We also run an online blog about technology amongst other things.
All these various platforms have meant that we have been able to vary our offering and develop it over the time the company has been running and as long as we keep to the company platforms of honesty, integrity and doing the best job as promised then we will keep it up.
I hope this helps, let me know your thoughts on the whole area of platforms, online or offline.
Technology: – For better or for Worse
This March I thought I would consider our marriage to modern day technology and whether in our vows to our life long addiction to it include for better or for worse.
Where am I coming from? Well like any marriage we make commitments to the bond that is marriage and to our partner in the act. Through thick and thin, for better or for worse, and so on.
With today’s technology we probably spent more time with it than we do with your partners and I wondered what the loyalty factor was and what drives the loyalty. I remember not to many years ago I would not have considered any phone other than a Nokia; you would have to be a fool to use any other handset. The loyalty was in the brand, for better or for worse.
Then Nokia lost grip of where the market was going and made the bad mistake of creating fashion looking phones and ignoring the massive move over the thin clam shaped phones and of course Apple blew the market wide open with the IPhone and the age of the smart phone.
Loyalty then just became about desire and I want the new phone because look what they say it does.
Of course technology is in almost every part of our life, from the box in our living room that we stare at for hours as it streams the latest and greatest programmes to us, to the laptop or tablet that we use to surf the net. Even to the choice of kitchen appliances that are around.
There are so many elements that guide us, is it the budget, well I am as loyal as the money I can spend, so brand loyalty is out the window or is it down their durability, I always buy their stuff it just seems to last for ever and ever.
I have to ask if the consumer of today is better informed than the consumer of the past due to the Internet or do they just succumb to the marketing that the Internet allows. The other thing of course is peer pressure and what difference that makes. Having been in IT for a good few years now and a self-confessed GEEK and I do love the latest bit of technology and if budget allowed would gladly like to try most of them. However I have also become discerning and use the Internet as the sounding board it really is and take in as many reviews as possible as well as first person testimonies of people who have used the kit I am interested in
However, I still see so many people flash out their new IPhone or Samsung and when questioned have done little to no research and in fact the loyalty is not even to the brand but to the trend that could be here today and gone tomorrow.
So is our loyalty to our beloved technology down to a fleeting trend or something else, what are your thoughts.
Ian Thomson
Founder/Trainer/Consultant
IT Turning Point www.itturningpoint.com