We wrote about frictionless organizations several weeks ago. Frictionless firms are the ones that remove unnecessary hassle and complication from their interactions with clients and other businesses.

Yahoo thrust itself into the opposite category this week when it stopped allowing people to forward their Yahoo email address to another address. Accounts already set up for forwarding kept that capability, but no new Yahoo email forwarding accounts can be created.

This seems like an overreaction to the disclosure of a major hacking attack on Yahoo and the subsequent doubt over the company’s acquisition by Verizon. Rather than let prized email subscribers flee to the competition, Yahoo is locking them in.

That’s the worst possible reaction to crisis. Customers of any type–even those on free plans–should be nurtured without restriction. They stay if you care for them well. They leave if you don’t.  They leave for other reasons too, but locking an unwilling party into any deal can create a horrible relationship between business and client and bad word-of-mouth for the sake of a relatively small amount of incremental revenue.

We don’t have contract lengths. Every single client–even retainer clients–have a 30 day opt out clause. The 30 days is only to give both companies time to disentangle and transition work.

Take a look at your policies regarding customers especially during adverse times. Are you easy to do business with and as frictionless as possible? And how easy is it to stop working together once a client creates an emotional break with your organization?

Your Marketing Spotlight for October 31

Your Thought-Provoking Moment

Header photo by Chaz McGregor.  Other images are thumbnails from content on newsworthy websites and serve as links under the provisions of fair use.

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shining flashlight into night sky

Articles about AT&T’s massive Time-Warner acquisition and the U.S. Presidential election crowded out other news this week.

These big stories drowned out marketing news, especially from social media, that might be prominent in other weeks. Organizations can miss important developments that can improve their success when this happens.

And it was a busy week for the Facebook-Instagram organization as Facebook commerce went global. There was also news about Google privacy changes from nonprofit ProPublica.

Our mission is to always stay in touch with the organizations that affect our daily lives. Global news can drown out their voices. Those are the weeks we have to know about things that happened that can affect our work and your company.

Your Marketing Spotlight for October 24

ICYMI: The Most Clicked Marketing Stories from Recent Posts

Facebook Messenger adds buy button

Common Ways Scammers Try To Hack Your Data

Nearly 85% of Smartphone App Time in These 5 Apps

Header photo by Dino Reichmuth. Other images are thumbnails from content on newsworthy websites and serve as links under the provisions of fair use.

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As we evaluate Silver Beacon in its ninth year, we reflect on why we keep a small hands-on client presence instead of building the company. We spent some time in September asking ourselves hard questions about our motivations and our work with nonprofit organizations.

Every iteration ended with some form of this idea so we wrote it down:

We believe that the Internet can be a powerful tool for helping organizations make the world a better, more positive place in which to work and live.

This is our energizing motivation. It is the reason why we do this kind of work in this way. And this week, we’re launching a program to build on that belief.

We know that many of you serve on boards or volunteer with an organization. These groups feed the hungry, help people displaced by extreme weather, and teach people how to read. Help us identify worthy nonprofits and help those organizations you care about. We’re giving a complete digital audit to a deserving nonprofit. One of you will nominate the winning organization.

There is no fee or any payment involved. We’ll pick the first winner based on what you tell us about a deserving organization.

Send an email with the details of what they do to george@silverbeaconmarketing.com. Make sure you tell us WHY you’re nominating them.

The winning organization receives a free evaluation of their website, search engine efforts, social media, and messaging. We charge $2,300 for that service and do a lot of these audits.

We’ll also tell our readers about the project, and the things we find and recommend. Maybe you’ll find some tips for your own organization, or it will inspire you to nominate a project that is meaningful to you in the future. Hopefully it will remind everyone that there are good things being done by good people every day, and that we can all help them succeed in some way. Please send your nominations by Wednesday night.

If you’re working with someone or trying to reach an organization, let me know, and we can work with you on the deadline.

Your spotlight stories from Silver Beacon Marketing for October 10:

Header photo by Mary Vogt. Other images are thumbnails from content on newsworthy websites and serve as links under the provisions of fair use.

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