Today I went to a lovely humanist funeral. 

It was a celebration of the life of my ex neighbour who died peacefully in his sleep at the age of ninety.

Sid had led a wonderful life.

His pleasures were simple, and it was so interesting to learn more about this industrious man who must have been the longest serving paper delivery boy  in history. 

It seems he’d delivered the Sunday papers for fifty years, to customers in the middle of the fen countryside.  Sid collected eggs and vegetables along the way and provided almost a social service for his customers.

I shall remember him for his incredible memory, and his ability to communicate.

Sid loved nature and telling stories.  Until his third stroke cruelly took his speech, he’d been able to paint pictures with his words. 

He never wasted anything, was plain speaking and incredibly hard working, I have no doubt if he’d ever embraced technology, Sid would have been very successful as an entrepreneur.

A gifted story teller, he was straight talking, always offered value, repurposed everything and seized every opportunity he could to make money.

However, like most people of his age, he had no time for computers, and that’s probably just as well because they can be terrible time wasters, especially e-mails.

I am on so many “lists”, my in-box gets inundated with e-mails, and there’s no way I can read them all.  Regretfully, most of them get deleted without ever being opened.

I feel bad about it but it seems I’m not alone.  These days most e-mail gets deleted.  It seems less than 27% are ever opened and it takes 48 hours or longer for people to respond to the e-mails they do actually read.

Contrast that with sms text messages or voice mails, which get opened almost immediately, and responded to within minutes – apparently!

I wouldn’t know because although I have a mobile, I never use it.  It’s pay as you go and I  have no idea what the number is without looking at the piece of paper taped to the back of the handset.

I have the phone for emergencies only and luckily I’ve never had one, which means I’ve never learned to text.

My friends and family always  despair because I never think to switch my cell phone on to check  to see if I have any messages, which means PhoneFollowUp, the brand new idea from Joel Therien and Mike Potvin, (the brains behind GVO), won’ t curren

tly be any good for me.

Also, I’m a bit like Sid and tend to have verbal diarrhea, so I’m not sure I could get my messages across in less than the 160 characters allowed in this brand new system.

Having said that, I use Twitter and that only allows 140 characters,  so there could be hope for me yet.

Anyway, PhoneFollowUp is certainly the future of internet marketing, especially if people want to increase the retention in their “lists” and ensure their messages get read.

After all, if you’re a marketer, people won’t buy if they never read your messages, will they?

At the moment PhoneFollowUp is only available in USA and Canada, and has been described as the “newest revolution in marketing”. 

With one click of the mouse you can automatically contact clients via phone, text and e-mail, which is clearly a great way to boost e-mail marketing, especially as it has NEVER been done before.

I’ve watched the training videos, and with Joel and Mike behind it, I have no doubt it will only get better.  They may be the head of the company, but one thing I’ve come to know about them from my GVO experience is they listen to their customers and soon respond to any feedback.

I suspect this new voice, text and e-mail combination of PhoneFollowUp.com  is the next wave in internet marketing .

Wonder what Sid would have made of it?

Take care,
Jean Shaw