Category: Daily Life

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Daily Life Productivity Booster

Defend Against Social Networks – The Rule of 2

As a hip, swinging Web 2.0 kind of guy/gal, I’m sure you have the same problem – every other week, at minimum, you get an invite to join YASN (Yet Another Social Network). After a while your inbox is crammed with notices and spam from a bunch of websites have names with no vowels, and no traffic.

Fear naught, the answer is here! The defense is “JFunk’s Rule of 2”. Anytime I’m asked to join YASN I make a mental note of the name of the network and if I ever get asked again (this is where the 2 part comes in…) I’ll join. I figure that if a social network can’t get on my radar from more than one source, it’s probably not going to make it anyplace.

Not the most earth shattering post, but for some reason I feel much better on passing up an invite for YASN… “Oh, I’m sorry, we just have rules about these things, It’s not that I have anything against giving my personal data to some group nobody has ever heard of before”.

In other news we had the work Yankee Swap. I got a candle (not a guy’s gift), swapped for some lottery tickets (which always move on), swapped for a Mag-lite flashlight. I was happy with that but then that got swapped out for a cheaper no-name flashlight. I would have preferred the Best Buy gift certificate I threw in the ring, alas…

Categories
Brain Buster Geek Stuff

Brain Busting Dilemma

This just happened and I had to sneak over here for a quick post. My plan this morning was to go to a holiday gathering of former co-workers from DCI. I just heard about Crayon’s holiday party in Second Life… I’m actually considering passing on the real world event for the virtual one.

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Brain Buster Lead Generation The Marketeer

Virtual Telemarketing

As a follow-up to my post on “Just calling to check in” I was checking my voicemail and a message started up with the classic p0rn theme playing (you know the one, a little slap bass and guitar scratch – bowmp, ba-bowmp, wacka-wacka). After a few seconds a woman’s voice came on trying to sell me something, I can’t even remember what the hell it was.

It just struck me as odd that this virtual voice was “talking” to my voicemail. Just as weird as the lovely Carin talking back to our GPS as we drive around Boston. We hear a human voice and the device IS alive. If I could find a way to automatically delete any voicemail that’s machine to machine that would be it, I’d be in my beach house on Nantucket.

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Daily Life Lead Generation Productivity Booster The Marketeer

Just calling to check in

About a year ago I attended a session on how to sell on the phone by Jeff Hoffman of Basho Strategies. He brought up a point that’s become a pet peeve of mine – people calling just to check in. Any time I get a call from somebody trying to sell me something, they’re “just calling to check in”. I immediately noticed I do it all the time. Whenever I’d call someone to bug them about something, or try to sell them something, I was really calling just to check in.

I’ve given up answering my phone, everybody gets to leave voicemail and then I can sort through them every hour or as necessary. As soon as I hear “Hey, it’s X and I’m just calling to check in…” I hit the delete key and move on. I’ve picked up at least an hour a week. I’m wondering if there’s a future in phone sales at all, or has my heart just turned to stone? Is it wrong for me to make change when I throw a $5 in the homeless guy’s cup over at the off-ramp to the Pike on Storrow Drive?

Categories
Brain Buster SEO and Paid Search

Big Google is Watching You

I had a chance to chat with one of the Crayonistas last night and he tipped me off to this:

http://www.google.com/psearch

I feel like Shatner… “This is going to be big, REALLY big”

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Daily Life The Marketeer

Live, from Second Life, IT’S THURSDAY NIGHT!

So I just got off stage from talking about paid search at the Second Life Case camp. It was a lot of fun, but I have this problem talking about new media, I have an irrational fear of running out of content so as a result I always set up too much content and end up presenting like an ADD crack addict that’s just shotgunned 3 triple espressos. At least it feels that way, hopefully it sounds a little better than that.

I’m working on the company newsletter and starting to flesh out a blogger relations program. Tomorrow will also release the next SCM Podcast from AccuRev, for those of you into learning about SCM and SOA (Rock on!). There’s also the holiday gift story that is still evolving so I am unable to speak about it at the present time (but when I can, it will be worth it, I have some venting to do). With that, thank you ladies and gentleman, you’ve been great, try the virtual veal, it’s excellent!

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Daily Life Email Marketing

Holiday Battles

Yesterday was consumed by 3 items: an email campaign, an unbelievable story involving our corporate holiday gift (when it’s done I will tell this tale, for now all I can say is that I want to jam a coffee cup so far up someone’s (*&@#$ that they can taste it), and my evening trying to get my Second Life avatar not to look like a blue Celine Dion.

A lot of those moments when I sit back and remind myself of a quote from Winston Churchill (or maybe Roosevelt?), something about “All that matters is persistance, that’s the only way things get accomplished”.

My open rates for the email campaign are a little bit low, I’m averaging mid-twenties, ConstantContact is saying the average across all their customers is 37%. I’m thinking that since many small businesses use CC that there are a lot of small lists that perform better (like my M Show mailing list that has something ridiculous like 60% open 50% clicks). The good news is the clicks are twice the CC average, and most importantly I always see a good list of Company names that have some F-1000 cache.

I’m at CaseCamp Second Life tonight, but I’m sorry, it’s sold out. I’ll probably record my session and post it later.

On the plus side Shel Holtz picked up my Web 3.0 video, and then Steve Rubel posted his link in his daily links – thanks to both of them. Not bad for a newbie blogger!

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Brain Buster The Marketeer

Web 3.0 – Part 2 – Killing Banner Ads

As a follow up to a previous post on Web 3.0, my friend Ron mentioned that I wasn’t as clear as I could be in explaining how page views are being wiped out. I found it was much easier to make a movie about it than explain it. What do you think?

[youtube]e4UEvSwfa5s[/youtube]

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Brain Buster Geek Stuff Productivity Booster The Marketeer

Multimedia-Content Management System

So I got a demo of Brainshark about a week ago. The idea of a Multimedia-Content Management System was a bit of a brainbuster for me. To boil it down – now that anybody with a decent computer and the right software can create some kind of multimedia presentation, you need a system to manage these presentations, better yet make them simple to create and host. It was funny because I talked to some people over there a couple of years ago before I started working at MarketingSherpa.

I had to go with a hyphen to make it clear that this is not a Content Managment System (CMS) with a Multimedia interface, but rather a tool to manage media that includes audio and video. I was impressed with the system, but the content generators I am working with now are extremely technical so simplifying the process is not a pain point for me (yet). We are using Camtasia to generate video files and I’ve found that a Shure SM-58 mic into a Mobile Pre USB does a great job of capturing audio.

The UI reminded me of Macromedia Breeze, a tool I have not had a chance to try out. Last time I tried to get a copy it was around the Adobe acquisiton and it was hard for me to even figure out who to call to buy it, I just gave up.

Enough rambling, I’m off to bed… did you listen to the podcast yet?

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Daily Life Podcasting

The M Show – I hate the holidays

It’s Sunday, so yet again you can cruise over and check out the latest M Show, your favorite Business Podcast, which will be posted as soon as the upload finishes.

Find out why I hate the holidays, the government, and why I have to short change charities this year so I can bear my tax burden.

You can also build your own movie trailer here.