www.financialservices.house.gov Is Good Marketing

The Emergency Economic Bailout Stabilization Plan of 2008, a.k.a. Financial Bailout, is posted on the government's website for all to read. Put on a fresh pot of coffee before hunkering down to read it because the document is well over 100 pages.

The move to upload the entire bill, though, is a good move by the government and a lesson to be learned by marketers. When you have a lot of information about your product or service you should make that information readily available to all of your customers. As mentioned in previous posts, the FAQs page in your website might be the most important one you create, so take some time to think it through before writing it. I enjoy seeing instructions - the more detailed the better - and The Top 10 Questions Most Commonly Asked. If your product or service is complicated, i.e. high-tech or industrial in nature, you might even want to add a keyword search on the page to make the user experience as enjoyable as possible.

Log onto your FAQs page right now. Add those questions (and appropriate answers) that your customer service department and sales reps repeatedly get asked over and over again.

Small Town Gains New Marketing Image

Recently, my colleague and pop-culture aficionado Scott wrote about the image changes that New Jersey might need to undertake now that the Sopranos have fired their last fictional bullets. Well, on a related note of combining pop-culture productions stories with "destination marketing", a town in Vermont has been dubbed the Simpsons' "official" home, ahead of the premiere of the Simpsons Movie, according to this Forbes article.

The town won it on a whim, having gotten their submission in to the online polling forum at the last minute. But the town couldn't be happier.

So this sleepy little town of just 9,300 has a new claim to fame, allowing it to become a tourist spot and destination of note for Simpsons' fans the world over. This was a well designed campaign by Fox to generate this generous publicity for a small town, and undoubtedly the town, in turn, is thrilled to receive it.

Never a "d'oh" moment in Springfield, Vermont... can your company say the same thing? May be time to make your business a "destination".