The latest M Show is up and it includes a chat with Joseph Jaffe, fresh off his campaign to run his latest book Join the Conversation up the Amazon charts. And run it did, getting as high as #26 on the overall charts and #1 in Marketing.
Check out the business podcast here, including a link if you’d like to check out the book.
Bottom of the 8th! Go Sox!
It’s the weekend so I’m free to write a geek post after another week of marketing. I was lucky enough to skip out of work for a few hours and catch a presentation from Jeff Hoffman of Basho Strategies. He’s a world class presenter and the best salesman that I have ever met, he understands the dynamics of the deal and I would recommend him for anyone that needs a speaker for a sales kickoff or workshop.
After significant debate we have replaced Carin’s dying Dell Latitude LS400, a fine machine, rather dated, but still great (the monitor is the only weakness that you can’t get around – 800×600 doesn’t cut it anymore).
In order to reduce the tech support load that I bear for the family we will slowly transition everyone over to Macs.
Rather than religious debate, here’s what I know:
The other thing is that so far I have no downside to report. Not having dreamweaver is one thing but I can boot windows up so I may mess around with that.
As the Sales Kickoff continues I am again reminded of the value of drinking. Social media does an excellent job at connecting people who have similar interests, but ultimately there’s no substitute for face-to-face conversation. The degree and depth of conversation can be accelerated rapidly with some social lubricant.
I also saw this in effect last night at the Blogger Dinner EMC sponsored. The good news is that Len mentioned that this would be a quarterly event so that will be perfect come January when the holiday rush is over and we are trapped in the cold and dark.
The key to drinking though, is to drink, yet never get drunk. Excessive drinking is a career limiting maneuver (or worse – like that guy in your town who has to ride that crappy bicycle to work).
For the best advice in this arena I highly recommend Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin
If you are not up to these advanced tactics, here are a few simple principles to get you started:
I’ll be covering more advanced tactics at Podcamp Boston 2 next weekend, please say hello. The first drink is on me.
Yes, it’s time for one of the most honorably sales traditions (second only to President’s Club), the Sales Kickoff. Q4 is on, time to lock down the conference rooms and drink at night…
Well, it seem like the domain name change has propagated in a flash (translation – it looks like everything is working properly). So, what was that all about last week? The short version was to improve my Google Ranking. Read on if you are into Search Engine Optimization (SEO), or we’ll see you at the next post!
I originally created The M Show and set up a domain name, and I rent the services of a server from the good people at WestHost who make sure it stays running for me. When I created Ronin Marketeer I purchased that domain name and pointed it the blog directory on The M Show server. You may have noticed that you get here from RoninMarketeer.com, but all of the article links start with http://www.themshow.com/wordpress
Everything worked, so I was satisfied and went on my way for a couple of months. Then, one day I was informed that I had made Todd And’s Power 150 (now the Ad Age Power 150). It was great to be on the list but I noticed that my Google Page Rank was a 4. I didn’t think that could be true, but it was. The Google Page Rank is a score that every page gets that is the judged importance of your page. The score runs from 1 to 10, and the normal progression I have seen is a new domain will score a 5 and after you get some links and credibility you go up to 6. 7 or more and you are getting to be big time, last time I looked things like Amazon and Wikipedia get 9’s and Google is the 10 (this may have changed, I don’t pay much attention to scores beyond my own).
I spend most of my days doing marketing activities and I am lucky enough to work with some extremely smart people who take care of my hardware and networking needs. As a result, I only play around with servers and their software that runs on them (such as Linux and Apache) for my own projects.
Every time you type in an address or click a link a request is sent from your machine to the server that sends back the page to you. When information comes back there’s a code that’s returned with the info – a 200 means all is good in the kingdom. You probably have seen a 404 – the “Sorry buddy, no page like that here”. When a server is set up you can change that 404 message to something friendly, but many people never get around to that.
300 Error codes are sent when pages are redirected to another page. A 301 is a permanent redirect – “Hey, this page is always over here” and better search engines will remember that and not come back, in order to save bandwith. A 302 is a temporary redirect, and commonly used for spammy activities.
I had set up a URL redirect to send requests from roninmarketeer.com over to the blog. It was my understanding that this type of redirect was more respected than using CNAME (e.g. “respected” as in – would send back a 301). Unfortunately that was bad advice, and when I checked the codes using Rex Swain’s HTTP viewer, I saw I was getting a 302.
The solution? Rather than having users check in at the domain name and then be sent over to the other domain, I added the domain to the original themshow.com account. The good news is that since both domains were at WestHost the transition was painless, if the domain had been with another hosting company the URL could have gone down for a couple of days as the DNS settings propagated throughout the interwebs.
So now I finally have a setup that Google is supposed to like – we’ll see if the page rank responds…
I don’t know if any other industries use this phrase, but it’s very common in software to talk about “Eating Your Own Dogfood” – in other words: Using the products that you make. You’d think this is basic “support the home team” kind of thing, but it doesn’t always happen, and when the word gets out it is usually a big PR problem.
Now you can get the punchline when I tell you that we use the software development tool that we sell at work, and the server name is Alpo.
This does lead to an interesting situation I’ve only seen twice, and the second time was last week. I get forwarded emails on a regular basis from companies that sell leads and other information, and occasionally from firm that append data.
A data appending service will take your existing lists, and then try and fill in the blanks. This can be very helpful if you have a list of emails and are looking for mailing addresses, or vice versa. There are different methods to do this, ranging from fully automated (we know that HugeCorp uses first initial last name @ hugecorp.com for email, so just do that – and come on people! You can do that with excel yourself, for the love of god!), to completely manual – a team of callers updates and refreshes info.
Be careful of these services to confirm that they don’t use your data to clean up everyone else’s…
So my co-worker David (name changed to protect everyone involved), forwarded me a message from a data appending service.
The email starts “Dear Deborah,”
It’s so powerful that you only have to read step 1.
I’ve been fortunate enough (if you want to call it that), to have now spent more that 10 years doing website redesigns. There have been perhaps 7 times during my career where I’ve considering stabbing someone in the throat with my pen to stop the insanity during a meeting, and 5 of those were during website-by-committee meetings.
Seth says those are instant deal breakers – he’s making the world a safer place AND keeping me out of prison. I can’t thank him enough.
It appears that monkeying with the domain hasn’t broken anything…
I’m off to the Doug Flutie 5k today, and will be rolling out The M Show after that. Enjoy the weekend!
I’m going to be pulling a stunt to see if I can improve my Google ranking, if I screw it up I might mess up the domain name for a while. If you are a fan and you notice that the site is down please drop me a line, if I pull off the stunt I’ll explain everything when I’m done.
Stand back as Evel Knievel gets ready to jump the canyon…
Update: Ok, I’ve made some DNS changes so roninmarketeer.com may be down for a good day or two, this blog is actually hosted at themshow.com so everything but the header link should work and I’ll fix that.
And Ron, planning for Snake Canyon prepares me for the worst case scenario!
Let the sheep obey, you can come hang out with the cool kids. Check out the best marketing podcast, your weekly shot of Web X+1.
