Silent calls really annoy consumers. Good news then that Ofcom is clamping down on irresponsible dialling.

Last week, the regulator hit Barclaycard with a maximum £50,000 fine for the “most serious and persistent” case of silent calls they’d ever seen and slapped the wrists of the LibDems for making automated calls without consent.

As Rufus Grig so rightly points out, there’s no excuse for silent call abuse on this level, especially for organisations of this size and high profile.

At Eclipse we welcome this crackdown and the spread of good practice. High levels of abandoned calls give us all a bad name.

In times of economic turbulence, ensuring that call centre managers pick up the phone in the right manner, and with their client front-of-mind at all times, is crucial.

According to Precision Marketing, it’s vital to match an agent’s profile to both the client’s brand culture and the target audience. Agents will then be able to fully endorse the client and its values, as well as deal with its customers in the most effective way possible.

You can put away your hankies. The death of direct mail, widely reported in blog posts, has been greatly exaggerated. That’s according to Eye Candy, who dismisses such talk as ‘a bunch of hype’.

Pulling together some interesting statistics on print media, Eye Candy finds that catalogues are still the primary sales channel for the majority of businesses, and that most people have made a purchase following an email marketing message or in response to direct mail. 

So, direct mail is still very much alive and kicking!

The Matter Box, piloted at the beginning of the year, is now being distributed by Royal Mail to around 30,000 people who said they wanted to experience this freebie boxfull of goodies.Royal Mail wanted to create a bit of a stir and it seems they’ve succeeded – the story appeared in the Mail on Sunday – albeit with a rather misleading headline to what is actually quite a positive story.You can also see The Matter Box being opened on YouTube, and being talked about on all sorts of blogs.

This is clever junk mail – people were actually asked to subscribe to it and are saying ‘yes’ in their thousands! The first box included some great brands - Nintendo Wii, Virgin Atlantic, Nissan, Sony Bravia.

We’ve talked about the power of social media before and most forward thinking companies know by now that they should be paying attention to the business of social networking. We say ‘business’ because social networking has become an integral part of the way we work today. Testament to this is list of major brands, from Absolut Vodka, and British Airways to Innocent Drinks and Whirlpool who are using or being used by social  media marketing which we’ve come across on B L Ochman’s blog which makes interesting reading.