Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

I got a response yesterday afternoon from my rants about HighBeam Research. I thought it deserved to be posted here for everyone, as I felt the response was prompt and fair. And this is a little lesson to marketers, Steve found my posts via RSS. Are you listening for mentions of your company and its products?

Here’s Steve’s response, unedited (I left off his direct line phone number, that’s it):

Janet,

I recently read your tweets and blog post about our service.  I am disappointed to read that we have not provided you with the experience that you expected.

I believe that your blog post makes some very good points, and you have pointed out some areas in our communication that need to be tightened up.  We try to be up front with our customers, and your post has pointed out some areas where we can improve.

There are two reasons for the apparent inconsistency:

-          Over the past year we have nearly doubled the content on the site, and in the past 5 years we have gone from about 15 Million total articles to 68 Million articles from over 5,000 sources.  We are offering ever more value to users, and because of this, we have recently made the decision to increase our price. We notify all annual customers about their renewal price, and we offer a very simple cancellation process if they do not wish to continue.  Though we are a small company, we offer an 800 number that is staffed 24/7, as well as on-site cancellation that is easy to find and available at any time.  While our 800 number communication could be better, if you do get billed, the 800 number does appear next to our charge on your credit card statement.

-          We do offer a “stay and save” offer for our customers, as is common in the industry.  As you know, the cost of retaining a customer is much lower than the cost of finding a new customer, so, we offer the lower price here to help retain users.  I think the insight to draw from your experience is that it has the appearance of being inequitable and we can improve that.  We appreciate your comments, and will be working on this area in the immediate future.

We are working to make some improvements to our communications for all of our customers.  I think that our service is still an incredible bargain relative to the offerings of our competitors and we are hopeful that you will reconsider us in the future when you have a research need.

Thank you
Steve Weir
…………………………………………………….
Steven R. Weir
Director of Subscription Marketing
HighBeam Research, Inc.

I asked Steve if he’d mind me doing this, and he gave me permission to do so. He also noted that he’d let me know when they’re able to synch all of their systems to be consistent. End of rant.

This morning I got an email from HighBeam Research letting me know my year-long subscription was almost up. In the note, it politely let me know exactly what would happen if I took no action:

I had found it to be a good research tool especially for clients in the health or biotech space, as it had catalogued many esoteric medical journals, etc. But not for $299.95. I decided to cancel my subscription. The friendly email reminder told me exactly how to do so, by clicking the customer service link in my account.

Imagine my surprise when I was made a special offer for those about to cancel:

I wasn’t surprised to see the special offer, that made sense. But see that last sentence there?

“…your annual membership will automatically return to the regular rate of $199.95 a year after one year.”

Having just been told my credit card would be automatically charged $299.95 for my next year, you can bet my next action was to say, “No thanks. Cancel my membership.”

Have I mentioned that nowhere on the Customer Service page was there an option to either speak with or chat with a representative?  (I could submit a form that would be answered within one business day. Never mind.)

I was a little nervous that canceling my membership early would shut down my account today (rather than waiting until Jan. 3) but was so irritated by their marketing and pricing inconsistencies that I took the chance. It would have been nice for them to spell that out on the cancellation page.

I was happy to find that I still had use of my subscription and a link on the cancellation confirmation page to a “billing questions” email form. So I sent them just a little feedback there… And Twittered about it, and am now blogging about it. I wonder which of my rants (if any) will get a response?

To try to milk people with accounts set up to auto-renew is appalling. I know many companies bank on auto-renew as their main source of recurring revenue… (how many of us ignore these messages/forget to call to cancel, etc.)

But to have your marketing be so out of touch with your billing policies (perhaps they submit forms to each other as feedback) in this day and age, is simply absurd.

I hear Google Book Search is now indexing magazine content. Undoubtedly, even the esoteric medical journals.

I think I’ll be just fine or now without HighBeam Research.

Since I learned Monday how to take screen shots on my iPhone, I’m now ready to show the mobile side of me. I’m not particularly good at leveraging my iPhone to the hilt. Mostly, I use it for mundane things (compared to many I know), I:

• Talk on the phone sometimes
• Read CNN mobile at airports over dinners
• Take photos of my food from the airports to send home

(This is my new favorite dinner from the Go! Bistro at SFO where they proudly serve Japanese Curry with German Knockwurst for $12.99. No, thank you, I’ll have the spicy wontons and a Stella, please.)

• Send texts home from afield - “je suis ici and safe.“
• Tweet when the mood serves me
• Mostly, I keep connected to my work via email
  • Peeved that my old Comcast email account is POP, not IMAP, since nothing syncs and I have to manually delete messages by hand
  • Frustrated that I have to manually delete messages one at a time, Apple

Actually working online from my iPhone has been relegated to approving blog comments (thank you when you do! It’s always such a joy, even after four years of this, to get comments!), and occasionally searching for information I’ve been meaning to find “when I have a minute.”

The Mobile Clincher

Two things have happened to me recently (if you don’t count the cool iPhone screen shot lesson from @cowperthwait) that make me rethink how I use my iPhone.

1. As a result of my mention of my favorite mobile tools in ReadWriteWeb, a company called Mippin transformed my blog for mobile phones. And I have to say, it’s pretty cool. It looks increadibly readable, kind of like an RSS feed of my blog in a nice, mobile friendly format. To see it in action on your smartphone, go here (when you’re on your smartphone, please.) This isn’t entirely narcissistic, really. It just got me thinking about how mobile data should be, and there are plenty of companies working on that very problem.

Now, the second thing is best told in relation to the first. Mippin gave me a special URL to access my blog from my phone:

http://mippin.com/mippin44571

…Which is fairly unwieldy and pretty impossible to remember for a 51 year old woman from Oregon. Let’s face it, my brain doesn’t keep numbers in storage quite the way that it used to. Curious, I went to my blog via Mippin, and the actual URL is worse yet! It was something like this:

http://mippin.com/mip/prev/list.jsp?id=44571&z=1@1228436219855252

Uh huh… thank goodness they shortened it for me in the first place!

To be fair, the Mippin folks also provided a bar code for me to access my blog. (I had to ask them wtf? and they were very kind to ‘enlighten’ me with the bar code concept. Apparently I’m not the only one… Doh!)

Well, you just know I had to Smub that. (There it is, the second thing to happen to me recently that changed the way I use my phone. And I’ve told plenty of stories about Smub lately.) Now, if you want to see how my blog looks on your mobile you can go to:

http://smub.it/janet/moblog

But I won’t make you wait - with thanks to Cowperthwait - here it is:

I just stumbled a post by Dwayne Melancon over at Genuine Curiosity called “Picture of the Day” that had a great graphic of how to be productive every day. Ironically, a picture popped up on my screen that I really didn’t like at all - my profile, according to StumbleUpon:

Do I really want to simply be described as a 51 year old woman from Oregon, USA in my profile? (Hint: check the headline of this post.)

I’ll fill out profile information for just about any social network site I subscribe to… but never have I had one “mix” my profile information quite like StumbleUpon does. Sure, it’s truthful and transparent. I am a 51 year old woman who lives in Oregon.

But I would never describe myself that way to virtual strangers, would I?

Believe me, I’m not ashamed of my age or where I live. I love my life, my age, my home, my sweetheart, our dog, family and friends… pretty much most things about me, with the exception of my muffin top, which I’m really trying to control through yoga and my eating habits; and a few long-held beliefs that still hamper me. (TMI, perhaps but I’m really not afraid to share. It’s true. Just ask me!)

Just Ask Me

As more people find their ways into social networks, those who develop them must begin to think more about helping their users profile themselves, and create the best possible scenarios for them to do so.

Give me an option as I sign up (e.g. prompt me through a wizard), and I’d describe myself in a much more compelling manner.

• In StumbleUpon, I have to search to find my bio preferences. No. I should be prompted through them as I register.
• In StumbleUpon, the “Display my age” box is automatically checked. No. I should be able to “opt in” to show my age.

My fault for not setting myself up properly in the first place? You bet. I wonder how many others have just gone through the minimums there until they’re hit with their very own “picture of the day?”

Whoa. This may not be earth shattering news to many, but I just found out I can take a screenshot of whatever’s on my iPhone screen at the moment, without a plugin.

To do it, just hold down the little button (the circular one) on the bottom of your iPhone and touch your power button on the top of the iPhone. The screen will go white, and you’ll get a nice screen grab in your Photos app, like this:

With thanks to Jonathan Cowperthwait, a fellow Smubber, who was probably happy he didn’t have to make the screen shots for me; yet delighted me at the same time.