Merry Christmas Marketing Messages

With Don’t Tell’s Merry Christmas message sent and a few Christmas messages in my inbox I’ve been wondering what do you prefer:

1. A christmas message and nothing else (which is what Don’t Tell has done), or
2. A christmas message with a few sales pitches + product lists etc.

Personally I like the plain and simple “Merry Christmas” with a photo, or just best wishes. I really don’t like being sold something on Christmas because to me Christmas is about others’ happiness, your family and your friends.

I’m quite surprised I haven’t received more Christmas wishes from other companies…

First Half Goals For 2009

Rather than set myself a goal for the year I’m going to go by halves because it will hopefully give me more focus and be more suited to the state of everything I’m working on and doing.

Goals for the first half of 2009 are:

1. Become a better communicator
2. Grow my network of business leaders, intelligent individuals and great people
3. Launch and grow a special “little” project I’m working on
4. Grow Don’t Tell (www.donttell.com.au)
5. Achieve at least 2 High Distinctions at University

I’ve got more specific definitions of what it means to achieve these written down in my big red book (read little black book) so I’m looking forward to crossing some of these off with a big smile in June 2009.

On Setting Goals

This morning over coffee and brunch a very good friend of mine put something to me that I found insightful and directly applicable.

It is an extension to SMART goal setting. Set your goals based on what you intend to do rather than what you intend to achieve. So, set a goal like “Demonstrate product to 50 customers by the end of the month” rather than setting yourself a goal like “Sign up 5 customers by the end of the month” . 

If you fail to achieve the goal of sign up 5 customers in the month then: you can blame it on external factors in a way that removes responsibility from yourself; external factors may have actually caused the failure; you had an unrealistic idea of who your customer was; or the something else or something else or something else.

On the other hand, you can go about demonstrating your product to 50 people and successfully complete it without being affected by external factors. If you don’t achieve this goal then the only one you have the blame is yourself. Just remember to have an intention behind the goal.

In technical terms I’m probably confusing goals and objectives. Oh well.

iPhone Market and Australia

I just thought I would include a small excerpt from a whitepaper I’ve just written on iPhones:

Gartner predicts that Apple will sell approximately 12 million iPhones by the end of the year having already passed the original target of shipping 10 million iPhones. In the Asia-Pacific, SingTel registered more than 170,000 iPhone 3G activations across the group since launching the device in July, 2008. Not bad considering mobile phone sales were down 22% and Apple is a new player in the highly competitive cell-phone market.

These 12 million iPhone users are downloading 6 times the data of your average mobile user when web browsing as well as spending an average of $19 more per month on mobile services compared to other mobile users. What is also important is that growth in browsing is 9% per day. It has been reported that “iPhone users are almost 20x more likely to use web search engines than the average mobile user”.

Here are some links to go along with it:

• http://www.slideshare.net/momosyd/200809-momosyd-amethon-james-cleary-australian-mobile-internet-insight-presentation/v1
• www.amethon.com/Content_Common/ns-200809-Australian-Mobile-Internet-Insights-Report.seo
• http://amethon.typepad.com/amethon_insights/2008/10/australian-mobile-internet-insights—q3-2008.html
• www.telecompaper.com/news/article.aspx?cid=643758

I’d love to hear if anyone else has some statistics or thoughts. (Although I bet anyone reading this already knew what I’ve just told you.