The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The new Boeing 787 Dreamliner can carry about 250 passengers. This blog was viewed about 1,100 times in 2012. If it were a Dreamliner, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.
How? Take a leaf out of Amazon’s book.
This morning I turned my smartphone on after a battery charge overnight. I had 3 emails waiting to be read. The second one was from Amazon. It told me about a new book I might like to read, “The Jerusalem Puzzle” by Laurence O’Bryan. What is clever about that?
Well, Amazon knew that I had already read the first novel published by the same author on Kindle, “The Istanbul Puzzle”. I really enjoyed that book. I tweeted about it. Amazon knew this. So it knew I was likely to want to read the follow up novel on Kindle. Especially with a price of under £2 when the paperback is over £5. And so Amazon gave me all that information. There is a great lesson here?
I was an existing customer of Amazon. How do we get closer to our customers?
That is a key question asked by many businesses. Amazon is teaching us how.
We need to understand our customers better. Get to know their likes and dislikes. We need to engage with them regularly. We should collect data on them, review it and tempt them from time to time with offers we know they will find it difficult to resist.
How can we apply this to our businesses?
If you have yet to visit a Virgin Money Lounge, I recommend that you do.
There are lounges in Manchester, Edinburgh and Norwich. They are great places for relaxing or meeting people on business. A very warm welcome is always in store.
I am currently reading one of their plentiful books. All are focused on business or business skills, music and sports in the main. It is a clever way of enhancing what must already be one of the most recognised brands in the world. Here is a picture of part of the Manchester Lounge. 
alan4law 