Month: April 2007

Categories
Daily Life The Marketeer

Villians Unite!

Christopher Penn had some advice today about being an asshole which has been contrary to his superpowers thread. The previous posts talked about how we all have amazing powers now that we can access the web. The A-Hole post talks about some of the powers of the dark side.Villian

All that’s left is to put these two posts together to see why being a Super Villain is much better that being a wuss Super Hero. The reasons are many:

  1. Villains take the initiative. The heroes always play defense hoping to salvage a victory against the nefarious schemes the villains have assembled.
  2. Villains are entrepreneurs, they try to shape the world to meet their vision. The heroes stand for the status quo, worse yet, some of them are working for The Man.
  3. Villains are rarely held back by moral dilemmas they have the mission set and follow it with reckless abandon.
  4. They have something to prove. Vengeance is a great motivator

Enough with the fanboy stuff. Tomorrow we get back to Marketing (and taking over the World!)

Categories
Daily Life Podcasting

Beer and Coffee

Wrapped up a good weekend today, so let’s get you starting the week off right with a new M Show.

I got to tour the Samuel Adams Brewery this weekend and meet Matthew Ebel in person (seen below with Kroosh). We then drove away…

Matthew Ebel and Kroosh

Categories
SalesForce.com

Ultimate Metrics

Some may recall my whining about a month back about all the work it took to get Salesforce.com and Google Adwords integration up and running. The endgame was that there were some problems on my side with a PERL script we use, but it went farther than that – I was editing the script correctly but the FTP tool I was using would corrupt it on the upload… Enough with the propeller head stuff – how does it work?

It rocks much harder than I thought it would. Not only can I now track keywords directly back to the individual leads that they generate there’s another unintended benefit: the SF code tracks ALL referrals. Most visitors to your site will leave a record in your log files about where they came from – the referrer. For example if you followed a click from my blog to Amazon, my homey JB would see that you came from the Ronin’s dojo.

So the killer bonus is that this salesforce code is appending ALL of the referring links. Let’s say one of my execs gets an article placed in an online publication, if someone reads that pub and then comes to my site and requests a white paper, when that lead is added to salesforce there’s a record in the history that shows the link from the publication where it came from. I’ve gone from knowing from where around 40% of the leads came from with a questionable degree of certainty up to 90% with the actual referring URL. Not bad for slapping a few lines of code into the site template.

Now if I could only upgrade to enterprise so I could get the API to play with that data…

Categories
Daily Life Lead Generation Podcasting

Return of the Mack

I’m finally feeling like I’m back in the game. I still have this annoying itch in my throat but that could just as well be allergies as cold. This is one of the joys of New England. Another – on Tuesday, even though there was still snow in the parking lot I saw my first cloud of black flies.

Just in case you stopped by looking for real content, I’ve got a 7 minute chat on telemarketing over at the best marketing podcast – Marketing Over Coffee.

Categories
Daily Life Email Marketing

Almost Back

What a drag it has been this last week. I’m still feeling run down but I’ve been getting better every day. I caught 4 innings of the Sox game over at Fenway last night with the lovely Carin thanks to a ticket hookup from E-413.

On the book front: Email Marketing by the Numbers arrived today, I’ve got 4 blog post-sized entries about email marketing. To celebrate – off to bed before 9 again….

Categories
Podcasting

Barbie vs. Bratz

Just one of the earth shattering discussions on this week’s M Show. My cough is back and I am not happy about that. See you tomorrow.

Categories
Daily Life

Saturday at Williams

The Coffee Shop is Open As my cold begins to fade away I’m able to catch up on work. I’ve spent a good chunk of the day here at a coffee shop in Williamstown, MA. The weather has been perfect after what feels like 37 straight months of rain, cold and darkness. Life in a college town is always a bit brighter than the rest of the world. The tennis team was up early at the cafe and as I fired up my iTunes I was overrun with shared music libraries. And this being Williamstown I not only can sample some of my unknown benefactor Kathleen’s music, which is more than a decade ahead of me, better yet there’s the Richard P. Feynman lectures… Just when I thought I had run out of cool stuff to listen to.
On the marketing front I’ve picked up a bunch of cool content and uses for RSS that will roll out over the next couple of weeks. But that’s all for now, I’m going back out into the sunshine. -J

One other thing – my Pro-Live blogging post vanished for a day, I noticed that I had a trackback address wrong and when I corrected it I think I switched it to “Private”, much to my chagrin. It’s back, but alas, no comment, no controversy.

Categories
The Marketeer

What do you think about RSS?

I’m doing a cross-post today because I’m speaking at an event called PR Online Convergence coming up in May in Los Angeles. One of the sessions I’m doing is on RSS and I’d like to get a feel for any questions or visions of the future you may have about RSS. If you could, please check out my post over there and I’d appreciate your comments.

And of course if you are in the LA area, drinks on me.

As far as the video I thought I would have for today… still some codec problems, but a kind soul in Japan has an open source fix that might save the day for me. Talk to you later…. J

Categories
Daily Life Podcasting

Still sick

Sorry guys but I am still coughing up a lung. I am going to bed now, and although there’s no new sparkling prose you can check out the latest edition of Marketing Over Coffee – The Best Marketing Podcast for 16 minutes of talk about MySpace Bots, Black Hat Marketing and the influence of Web 2.0 on Politics.

I’ll have some new video tomorrow too! Where’s my shot glass full of nyquil?

Categories
Daily Life Geek Stuff

Pro-Live Blogging – Just get the URL right.

There’s been some chatter today and yesterday about live blogging at conferences. I jumped on with this post from Allan Jenkins.

If you’re giving a presentation and you can’t make it compelling enough for people to pay attention, the last thing you should be doing is complaining about the attendees. Or better yet – the audience is your customer and you’d rather stifle their word of mouth until you finish your sermon on the mount? Obviously I’m an irritating snot.
The trend I’ve seen has tables and outlet strips in the front rows so the laptops can grind away. If you want to see the future go to any college campus or conference like Gnomedex to see laptops up and running at every station.

Live blogging is a great substitute for keeping readers in the loop who couldn’t go to the event.

I make no bones about doing it for points, reporters are always looking for a scoop, bloggers who want to be seen as cutting edge would be no different.

A good presenter has to keep the majority of the audience on track, if that audience is from 25-60 years old there’s going to be differing degrees of multi-tasking going on. If you’re pitching to the median there’s always going to be some people with free bandwidth who are not going to miss the point of the show.

Why is it so hard to resist blogging about blogging?

p.s. – 1992 called and they want their Moleskine back…