I just got this email from Staples today. My wife and I are trying to organize our home office, so I thought I would foward it to her. There’s no “forward to a friend” button. I could forward the email myself, but these HTML emails never look right when I send them.
There was link to a web page version of the email, so I clicked it. I figured I would send her a link to the web page. Here’s the URL:
http://e.staples-deals.com/content.asp?wci=version&wnd=0&status_id=4611513700_73148130
Long URLs like this always seem to break when you send them. No dice.
Viral marketing is a relay race. The most important part of the race is the hand off. Using batons that are hard to hand to the next person isn’t smart.
4 Responses to “The Baton”
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The Casual Fridays blog is about business in blue jeans. It's about doing the REAL hard work of today. Pausing, thinking and asking the questions others won't ask.
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Mario Vellandi
January 13th, 2007 at 1:30 pm
Dustin,
Use Tinyurl.com
it’ll make a world of a difference for those long ones.
Scott
January 13th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
Forward to a friend is so fundamental. You have to wonder why they didn’t do that. Most services offer it, and someone with their resources should automatically be doing it. If it is annoying to someone as savvy as you are, imagine how it might be for someone who is not very good with links and the web?
DUST!N
January 14th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Exactly Scott. I try to imagine my grandma using these tools.
Mario, I love TinyURL. I use it all the time (and I recommend others use it for shortening long URLs). My grandma doesn’t know TinyURL. What does she do? Even though I use TinyURL, it is 6 memorized steps going from email to website to another website back to email.
It makes me ask Staples, “Where’s the Easy Button?”
Casual Fridays » Blog Archive » Hollerin’
March 9th, 2007 at 10:09 am
[...] Do you make it easy for people to hand off your message to others? More on this here. [...]