Atrium Group

We take a look at how some numbers can transform understanding and energise sales and finally there's a great presentation on Social Media you can download.

Now they say just checking that a company is on the “Safe Harbor” list is not good enough if you want send personal data to these companies. Safe Harbor is a self-certification regime where, essentially, any company that wants to process data relating to E.U. nationals can go online, fill in the form and in so doing claim that they comply fully with a wide range of requirements.

However researchers have found that many companies claiming to be “Safe Harbor” certified are actually anything but. As a consequence the German Data Privacy authorities are saying that German companies should seek a copy of a company’s latest annual certification to the U.S. Department of Commerce and an explanation of how the notice principle is complied with. These are the two minimum checks the German Authorities are asking for. Simply reviewing the online safe harbor list is clearly not sufficient.
If a German company wants to go beyond this and verify the actual compliance with the Safe Harbor Principles then it appears necessary to provide a written statement of an independent third party auditing firm that has reviewed the data importer's Safe Harbor compliance.

Many “cloud-based” services are hosted in the US – SF.com, Siebel-On-Demand, Google Apps, many email service providers and so on and this move by the German authorities calls into question whether any EU businesses can now rely solely on Safe Harbor as the legal basis for transferring data out of the EU.

At Atrium we are increasingly convinced that conforming with the Binding Corporate Rules regime is by far the best approach to take, especially as businesses are now sending data all over the world. Safe Harbor ONLY applies to the U.S. and using model contract clauses (the other approach) can become very cumbersome.

To find out more about Atrium’s data privacy services, click here.

No, not really. Because few people relate to numbers, they make our eyes glaze over. A few years ago we were working for an internet startup and found, through research that the average office worker spends 30 minutes of their day looking for basic information – like phone numbers, postcodes, train times, the weather.
Now saying “you could save 30 minutes of your day” actually doesn’t amount to much. And turning that into 2.5 hours per week seemed too incredible and too long term. But saying “in an average day 7% of your time is wasted” – now THAT struck a chord! Why? Because 7 is a “magic” number (7 days of the week, 7 signs of the apocalypse, the 7 habits of successful people etc.) And because 7% is utterly credible. The result was 22,000 sales leads in two weeks from a VERY modest ad budget!

Now consider this, most marketers would consider a 10% click-thru rate to be pretty good, but what if they positioned it as “90% of the people we email don’t respond”. Now that sounds pretty bad. And it is – but if we’re honest as marketers we should use such “bad” numbers to challenge the status quo, to ask the difficult questions and change behaviour.

One of our clients did this and now has click-thru rates in the 40-50% range. Numbers matter and they can help you win internal battles and external customers! What numbers will you use today?

Click here to download the presentation