SEO Werkt!

The key to looking good in photos? It’s all about your jaw, as photographer Peter Hurley explains in this video. Essentially, stretch your forehead forward and down a bit to accentuate your jawline. More »

It’s a bit cliché, but it’s true all the same: the best features are often the ones that make you smack yourself on the forehead and ask why you didn’t think of them (or why nobody else did).

Which the reaction I immediately had when I heard about a new feature that Hipmunk, the flight and hotel travel search engine, is launching this morning. Today the service is adding support for Google Calendar integration, which means it can check its flight listings against your schedule to figure out which ones will work best for you.

Now, calendar syncing is hardly a new concept for travel sites — many of them will let you automatically sync your booked flights and reservations into your calendar. But Hipmunk says that it’s the first travel site to delve into your schedule and find potential conflicts to help you book those flights in the first place.

The interface, which you can see in the screenshots below, makes this pretty straightforward: once you’ve entered your Google Calendar credentials, you’ll see vertical yellow-tinged bars hovering over Hipmunk’s flight search grid. Obviously not all of your scheduled events will warrant changing your flight plans, so you can ignore them if you’d like.  Or you can hit the ‘sort by Conflict’ button, which will actually hide any flights that overlap with any of your commitments.

Likewise, Hipmunk will look at your calendar to figure out where your meetings and events are located, which it can use to suggest hotels that are convenient.

…they already know you’re capable

When I get hit in the forehead twice on one day with a marketing tip — I know it’s time to share.

Incident One: I’m on the phone with a potential new client who is telling me about his previous experiences with finding the right agency.

He’s describing one agency visit and says, “pretty much all we talked about were how many awards they won.  I already knew they could do the job, I just wanted to know if I liked them.”

Turns out he didn’t like them…but apparently they sure liked themselves.

That agency didn’t get it.

Incident Two: Later that evening (around 11 pm) I’m working in my home office.  I notice a drip of blood that has fallen, apparently from me.  The one drip becomes many and an hour (and two rolls of TP) later, when I still can’t stop the nose bleed… I figure I’d better head to the ER.

We have a new hospital minutes from my house, and fortunately, this was my first visit.  I walked in and within 10 minutes, a nurse is coming out to get me, apologizing for keeping me waiting.  In the holding pen (exam room) the nurse doesn’t tell me about his education or skills, instead he empathized with me by telling me how he used to suffer from nose bleeds and how glad he was I came in, rather than continuing to try to stop it myself.

Doctor comes in 10 minutes later — again, does not tell me his med school GPA or diploma.  He introduces himself by his first name and begins to solve my problem.

(Turns out the solving my problem involved cauterizing — really do not recommend that.)

After the “procedure” — both the doctor and the nurse checked back in and encouraged me to come back in if I couldn’t control the pain or the bleeding started back up.

The entire experience — they focused on me.  They anticipated my questions, concerns and even that I felt a little silly bothering them with a nose bleed.  As the nurse was walking me out to the front door, again he apologized that I had to wait here and there.

They got it.

In today’s age — if someone is approaching you to potentially buy something, they already know you/your product is capable.   No one buys anything today without doing a little research on the web or by asking their network.  If you’ve gotten to the “I want to meet you” stage — they’ve already given you props for your capability.  Now they want to know how the chemistry is.

Here are the questions running through their mind at the interview/first visit stage:

1. What would they be like to work with?
2. Do I trust them?
3. Will they make me look good?
4. Do they care?

So pitch the PowerPoint slides that blather on about you.  Don’t lead with the awards or credentials.  Just roll up your sleeves and be valuable by being about them.

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1. Blogging 101 from the expert
2. Viral video — are you the expert?
3. Marketing Tips from a Marketing Agency: Be a drip