Author: themshow

Categories
Prognostication

Fake Steve Jobs – Old Media Fear Naught

Last week I attended a signing by Fake Steve Jobs, for his book Option$. Atlas Ventures opened up the bar and invited a large crew to Rocca, a very cool location in the South End of Boston.

For those not initiated, Daniel Lyons works at Forbes and while experimenting with blogs came up with Fake Steve Jobs, his idea of what would happen if a CEO decided to do a real blog, not the watered-down, PR and Legal approved abominations you occasionally see at large companies. There’s no surer bet for a laugh if you are looking for a feed to add.

Mr. Lyons is living proof of my theory that those best suited for success in new media, are those now working in the established outlets. I’ve heard many editors and publishers berate blogs, obviously deaf to that giant sucking sound that is their circulation. Those already in the publishing industry that aren’t afraid to try something new will be the most likely to succeed as things continue to evolve. The days of subscribing to 10 magazines, buying a stack of CDs, and listening to terrestrial radio are only visible in the rear view mirror.

Another group getting it is Version 2 Communications, the co-host of the event. They had the Flickr and YouTube tags on the back of the name badges, check out the vid with me chewing the scenery as hard as The Shat, with Chris Brogan driving it home with the ultimate punchline.

[youtube]gJPObiZ5qNA[/youtube]

Categories
Email Marketing

Ghetto Style De-Duping

Ok, I’ve been getting flack for not having enough marketing stuff… so here’s some Excel Judo for you to work on.

You have a list of 8,000 contacts in excel, you need to de-dupe them (remove the duplicates). Here’s a quick way to clean up the majority of them:

  1. Sort by email address
  2. In the first open column create an “IF” statement (click the f(x) button and select “IF”). If the email address on this row equals the email address one cell above it then this cell is “1” if not “0”
  3. Copy that formula to all the rows
  4. Select that column and copy it
  5. From the command bar choose “Paste Special” and select “Values” – this strips out the formula and leaves the 1’s and 0’s
  6. Sort the table by this column with 1’s and 0’s and then delete all the rows of 1’s in one shot

Viola! You’re done. Now you could do this with a SQL command, but that’s a lesson for another day.

Categories
Daily Life

Where’s Coach Bob?

Hey Nike – what happened to Coach Bob? Nike has been expanding their blogging program and there’s been some cool stuff up there. I enjoy reading about shoes, professional runners, and until recently, the Wisdom of Coach Bob.

We now have Coach Jay, who has written some interesting stuff, and he’s gone deep this week with biomechanics. I’m sure I will enjoy reading his stuff, but there was something about Coach Bob that gave me that “Mighty Mick training Rocky Balboa” feeling. He told you what to do, but there was always some motivation mixed in there – “Good for you for starting” and “Good for you for not giving up” kind of stuff. For runners like myself, with such great nicknames as “Runaway Train”, “Clydesdale Division”, and “Fat bastard”, I can never get too motivated.

So this is the kind of thing about blogging that freaks out normal people. I’m not some Coach Bob fanatic, I’m not about to go to Beaverton and look for him at the home office. I have a job, mortgage and family, I don’t have time for all that creepy loner nonsense, but I did enjoy reading what he had to say. How about at least a “Coach Bob has moved on to other stuff, Welcome Coach Jay” or something like that. If Coach Bob said he liked Coach Jay I’d be much happier.

At its root, marketing is an art and not a science, people are irrational. What other explanation is there for me worrying about Coach Bob?

p.s. on the subject of running you should get Nike+ and you should check out Steve Runner’s Podcast

Categories
Podcasting

Get your coffee here

Some interesting discussion on SEO in this week’s Marketing Over Coffee…

Categories
Podcasting

Wizzard Media on iTunes

Wizzard MediaThis is either new or I missed it in my normal stupor… but Wizzard Media, (what old school podcasters call Libsyn) is listed as one of the featured podcast networks on iTunes. There’s a great list of networks up there, it’s good to see Wizzard up there (and some member podcasts like The M Show up there – Marketing Over Coffee is not on the list but is a Wizzard Media hosted podcast).

Nice job!

Categories
Productivity Booster

Computer Based Training Ghetto Style

If you’ve ever done any training you know that there’s a point you get to where you are on total autopilot. You’ve given the presentation more than 10 times and you have the material down cold. You know where the questions come up and where the jokes go.

A great way to leverage technology to add time back into your schedule is to video any training that you can. Why give 5 one-hour sessions when you could run 5 fifty minute videos and then do 50 minutes of live Q&A – adding 4 hours back to your day? And giving the attendees the ability to go back and rewind what they don’t understand without holding up the rest of the class.

When I originally started we used Viewlet Builder from Qarbon, which is great for capturing screenshots. Now we use Camtasia, which captures all activity on your screen. (Although I need to go in and see if Viewlet Cam is any good).
On the audio side we are using Mobile Pre USB boxes which can float from laptop to laptop, along with Shure SM58 mics which sound ok and are nearly indestructable.

For the content, try to keep clips under 5 minutes. Break your presentation into manageable sections so users can watch them a la carte.

When you do the final edit you can use some of my trade secrets to creating great sound. Scrap the source audio, export it to WAV format and use SoundSoap and The Levelator to clean it up.

Don’t worry about them being perfect, odds are you are going to have to record them over in less than a year anyway. It’s much better to have 10 videos that have some ummms, ahhhs and flubs in them than 3 perfect videos. Video content really pulls, the more you have out there the better.

Categories
Great Marketing

David Meerman Scott on Viral Marketing

David Meerman Scott has released a new ebook on Viral Marketing, it’s free and packed with info. His first ebook spread like wildfire, which then fueled demand for his best selling book “The New Rules of Marketing and PR“.

Did I mention that the eBook is free?

In there you’ll also find some links to his audio presentations on CD, and you might recognize the other guy!

Categories
The Marketeer

AMA Boston Tonight

I’ll be at the AMA Boston meeting this evening. Registration is closed but if you are in the vicinity of Vlora perhaps you can still get into the bar and some of the later discussions.

More info on the AMA here.

Categories
Marketing IT Dept.

Banner Armaggeddon

I didn’t realize that banner ads were already dead.

I’d noticed a massive drop off in the past year, and was finally tipped off as to what was going on by Josh, a guy that I work with. He had installed a firefox plugin called AdBlock Plus.

It works insanely well. You can choose what you want to block, or better yet, add the subscription service that checks a database of known ad servers and the ads go away. I’ve only had it for a week and I can’t believe the stuff it cleans up.

I haven’t seen any dancing figures or a classmates ad since it’s been installed. Even cooler – since I’ve made the switch to GMail, all my email newsletters get the same treatment – banners wiped away.

It will be interesting to see the response to this…

Categories
Daily Life

Snow Day

We were hit pretty hard by a Noreaster today – that’s when a storm is out over the ocean and the wind and snow blow down into where we live from the North East. It can get pretty ugly if the storm just sits out over the ocean spinning and sucking up moisture for snow.

But it’s not like I’m in elementary school and get to go sledding, the only change is that I don’t have to drive to work. Thanks to all of the excellent technology we have in place I can do everything that I can do in the office so it’s a regular workday minus the co-workers, coffee machine and lunch break. In short, I actually get more done.

The hard drive on Carin’s MacBook died as I was trying to load it up with the iTunes library from the other machine in the house. If we hadn’t picked up the extended warranty that would have run us about $370. Through this we have also learned that the iWeb application is just a crappy little toy. Any website editor that won’t let you import anything is just barely above worthless.

The customer service was perfect though, we brought it in at lunchtime, we were back home with a machine with a new drive in it in 45 minutes. So we’ll see if Carin wants to go with Dreamweaver or if I should just build a WordPress template for it.
The latest M Show is also up from yesterday and getting ready to roll with Marketing Over Coffee on Wednesday…