Category: Daily Life

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Brain Buster The Marketeer

Why Awards are Important

Tomorrow I’m going to grab lunch with David Meerman Scott, he’s had a lot going on in the past month including the best marketing and PR book of 2007. I just swung by his blog and he has a post about an upcoming show about Madison Ave. advertising in the 60’s called Mad Men. I’m interested in this because a former President of Ogilvy is in the lovely Carin’s hometown and I’m going to try and get him on the mic.

Last time I talked with David he dealt me a brain buster about awards. I used to think that awards were a lottery ticket, I’ve sent in many applications for software products, marketing projects, etc. and the goal was to try and win for the PR lift. If you take this approach you have a slim chance of scoring.

The real benefit is the access to the judges. These are often well known and connected individuals within your industry. Many times they are Mavens, who spread knowledge across huge groups of people. Even if you are in the wrong category and determined ineligible, you’ve still had an opportunity to showcase your product/service to a group of people who have more influence than the general public.

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Brain Buster Daily Life The Marketeer

Breaking Rocks

My first “pure” marketing job was with a company called DCI, they ran a number of very successful tech trade shows such as Data Warehouse World, and one of the biggest SFA (Sales Force Automation) shows out there. It was a good business model, young people came in at entry level pay grades and followed a proven system to develop, promote and run the conferences.

Everyone started with some time over in customer service and then moved to a show team where you worked on the marketing and then handed off to the operations team at showtime. I learned about graphic design, direct mail and printing. There are 3 people in my life that taught me how to write, and the third one, Carol Meinhart, worked there. The first two taught me how to get everything out of my head and on the page, she showed me how to trim away all the excess garbage to become persuasive.

This was around ’98 when there was some hot new technology called email which a few crazy people thought might be good to market with. Even though I majored in Economics by then I was a hardcore geek, and had even gone through Microsoft’s network admin program. The geek pen was on the same floor as the CEO and I’d get called over once and a while if there was some kind of stubborn tech problem (usually something really funky because he was very tech savvy, especially compared to previous execs I had dealt with prior to crossing over into tech).

So here’s the punchline – the company was eventually sold after I left (after a life-altering session with Christopher Lochhead, but that’s another story), and then a few years later the IRS was on the place like stink on a monkey. The investigation and trials went on for a long time, and it looks like it may come to an end (although I would imagine now the appeals could begin). The former CEO was sentenced for conspiracy and tax evasion. I would have to believe that almost everyone in an executive position gets the night sweats about this now and then, but for most I’d think that driving $8 million through Bermuda is not the kind of thing that sneaks up on you.

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Daily Life

Virtual Yard Sale Continues

As the move gets closer I continue to unload stuff. If you need a cafe table or a corner bookcase, I can hook you up. I’m also getting rid of a Coach 3×5 card jotter for all you old school moleskein types.

And don’t forget to listen to America’s Favorite Podcast – The New M Show

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Daily Life

Hell week continues

For the first time ever (in more than 2 years) I actually lost a podcast. I’ve never had my batteries run out on my digital recorder and rather than let it do its own shutdown I interrupted it and lost the file. To make the disaster story even better, it was a solo fill-in Marketing Over Coffee, b/c Christopher Penn’s flights were screwed up.

I need to go to bed so I am bailing – entertain yourself with some great haiku/cartoons and another tale of disaster, and yet another.

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Daily Life

JWall’s Run

Just not enough time in the day…

Lots of cool stuff going on, not the least of which was WebInno 13 which was a packed house. More on that tomorrow after I’ve had some sleep, but some of the non-tech highlights included getting some microphone wisdom from David Tames, finally getting to meet Bahlactus (aka Clarence) in person (and forgetting to mention that I laid the smackdown on Galactus last week, finally finishing Marvel Ultimate Alliance), seeing Brogan, and learning about Chip’s new thing. Not to mention another clash of the titans with a supervillian.
The lovely Carin has a broken toe so I had to bail on the dinner afterwords and didn’t get a chance to say my farewell’s but the group was well on the way to taking over the Cheesecake Factory.

Since this post is totally lacking any real content, let me direct you to Mr. Godin, who has a great post that has had me thinking all week. I now have some reusable bags in my car for the grocery store, I never realized how many places will give you credit if you bring your own bag (and a million less bags is a good thing).

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Daily Life

Bitching about MS Word, among other things

The problem is that for some reason, just because MS-Word is so central to most business writing, I have this feeling that it should be immune to code bloat and feature creep. The latest version is what, something like Word 14.0? Why did it take me a half hour to get bullets that would show up properly when I output to a PDF?

It just strikes me as not possible that I would have to layout my resume on pagemaker (or whatever it’s called in CS3), for the love of god, I sound like a 95 year old man bitching about the price of bread.

Just to make things more fun it’s the beginning of the dead zone. Everywhere I’ve worked July and August are the crappiest possible months to work – and yet I actually wonder why people scratch their heads wondering where the business is, while at the same time ignoring emails and calls from salespeople because of vacations, sales kickoffs, trade shows, etc…

I almost saw a pedestrian get killed today in Wellesley of all places (a tony Boston Suburb), I’m getting a little creeped out about seeing so many accidents and other violence… maybe it’s just telling me to go see The Transformers (I hope).

Off to edit the latest Marketing Over Coffee for release tonight!

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Daily Life

Vacation until the 4th

Taking it easy through Thursday but you can still check out today’s M Show, and I’ll have some Flickr Pics up later today.

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Brain Buster Graphic Design Lead Generation Productivity Booster

The next level in gaming

With the holiday next week I was setting up my calendar for the week after that and found that the next WebInno meeting is coming up that Monday, July 9th. If you want to see what’s going on at the cutting edge of internet technology in Boston these meetups are required viewing. Just sign up on the wiki and show up to watch the presenters give a short demo, and check out the other presenters around the room and mingle at one of the better Tech who’s-who in Boston. I’ll be there and have managed to convince some other Boston bloggers and podcasters to show up so swing by if you’d like to grab a drink.

One of the presenters for next week – Digitalbrix has an interesting value prop – a SaaS offering that allows users to build simple games with out writing code like javascript, flash, etc. I’m very interested in checking this out some more, anyone that has done any web marketing has had a point where someone on high gets the itch to try and create a Flash based game.

David Beisel (the webinno organizer) connected me to Naveena Swamy, a founder at Digitalbrix and I had a chance to chat with her for a few minutes about what they are working on. Casual gaming is a huge market so there weren’t many surprises about the growth potential there, but there were two things that stretched my brain a bit. One was that I mentioned that this would be a powerful tool, and she said that a more important point was that it allowed greater collaboration. With a more powerful tool there’s now less friction between the artist, game concept designer etc. This can be expanded to include everyone playing the games which then generates an entire community.

The thing that resonated even more with me was the ability to use a system like this for prototyping. I can see this as a huge value in designing marketing campaigns. Rather than pick a vendor out of a hat and throw them $10,000 for one campaign, put together 4 or 5 concepts to test before making a final decision. That changes the game completely. Now where am I going to find some free time to play around with this myself?

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Daily Life

Adventures on 128

I drive on Boston’s Route 128 (known as “The Yankee Division Highway” to a select few, or “The Yank” to the most townie insiders) for about 10 miles each way to work daily. It’s about as hardcore as highway driving gets. The speed limit is 55 but 70 is more like the reality. Having driven it long enough I’ve found two cardinal rules that work well:

  1. Speeding is ok as long as you don’t change lanes. Changing lanes is the most dangerous thing to do on the Yank, everyone passes on both sides and when you are looking at your blind spots to change lanes you’re not watching your own lane which is as dangerous as it gets.
  2. Keep stopping space in front of you. No matter how fast, slow or busy it is, never tailgate. Always have space to stop or a lane to bail to. A split second mistake and you get this:

128

This was today, a Saturday when traffic was pretty heavy. We saw this car zipping all the way across 4 lanes more than once within a mile. About a mile later all lanes were almost stopped and I got this shot. There was another car driving aggressively and it looks like things didn’t work out.

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Brain Buster

America Online – but in Spanish

So I have this AOL email address that I’ve had since 1996. Since about 2000 I had an AOL Visa card so I didn’t have to pay any monthly fees, and now in the past year it’s gone free.

As a side note, I have to give Chase acknowledgment for great customer service. I had cashed in about 30,000 points for a year of free AOL only about a month or so before the AOL card switched over to chase when that program was dropped. I didn’t worry too much about it, but then got a letter saying that since I never got the benefit of those points they refunded them to me under the new Chase program. As a result I was able to trade those points for $375 at Best Buy. One AppleTV and Wireless N router later I am charging everything over a buck on my Chase card.

Back to the story – in the past month or so I’ve noticed that a bunch of the banners on their new mail client have switched to spanish. Uhhh, No habla espanol… I don’t really know what to think of this. Then again, it could be North and South America online, it’s not USA online (or white guy online for that matter). On the other hand I guess I feel like I’ve been kicked out of the community, granted a community I haven’t given a damn about since Gmail showed up, but a community nonetheless.

The other thing is that I’ve always thought that we are probably only 5 years away from some major improvements in automated translation so it shocks me that this is actually a slide backwards. Think about it – it’s quite possible that the web could be used to move everyone in the world to a unified language. Every day you get one new word via your email or newsreader, after a week this word replaces a “non-global” word and you barely notice the transition. 10 years later you’re speaking “Earth”. Who’ll run this? I have no idea. Why? Well, wouldn’t it be great to talk to everyone? Wouldn’t it be great if the word for soda world wide was Pepsi? Is this Google’s master plan? Your adwords being seen by 6 billion?

You’d think that with the 10 years of email I’ve sent through them that they’d see that the only words I’ve used are burrito and sangria so banners in any other language besides english are probably a waste of time. Hell, I don’t think I’ve ever typed the word sombrero (who says I’m not breaking new ground daily?)

Now if AOL could get me a burrito like Super Burrito in Concord, California…