Category: The Marketeer

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Brain Buster The Marketeer

Tales from the Chasm

Mad Marv sent me a link to this post discussing Crossing the Chasm. I’ve talked about the Chasm in many podcasts, the soundbite is that there’s a gap between the adoption of technology by geeks from adoption by the rest of the world.

I’ve found the Chasm to be very helpful because it bundles a lot of concepts such as targeting niches, creating an error-free user experience (ok, reasonably error free), and usability, that can help grow a business.

Here’s a big idea from the post:

The problem is that compared to a few years ago, the speed with which new technologies are coming to the market has increased dramatically. All these technologies are aimed at the early adopters. And they love it and they try it. But the question is what happens when your early adopters run off to play with a new great thing before you have a chance to take your technology mainstream?

For example, some people who used to blog regularly, blog less now because they discovered Twittering (microblogging). Or, early adopters who have discovered Second Life might not have as much time to spend on MySpace anymore.

And from the conclusion:

Early adopters are enticed by new things much more often today than 15 years ago. Expanding on how to retain the early adopters would be good thing to do in the next edition

Unfortunately I don’t have a lot of patience reading analysis that becomes more academic than practical. It’s interesting how the comments go from bubblegum pop (Blue Ocean and The Tipping Point), to academic textbooks (Castells).

Here’s my cranky old man assessments:

  1. If the early adopters run off it’s time to put the office furniture up on Craig’s list. You’re done.
  2. Don’t confuse social apps like MySpace with useful technologies, buzz and crowds are different from products that are sold to customers.
  3. You get your customers one at a time, this is a mindset you need to use to balance your plans for bridging the Chasm if you want to continue to make payroll.
  4. In my experience the VP of Sales gets the axe before Marketing, but your mileage may vary.

I’m off to record Marketing Over Coffee now. Marv, thanks for getting my brain warmed up!

Categories
Email Marketing

Email Deliverability

This is one of the sexiest topics a marketeer can work on. Just kidding.

But it is important. If you are doing any kind of mass email deliverability will become an issue sooner or later. In simple terms there are 4 points where an email can be blocked.

  1. The mail server itself can be blacklisted, at the ISP level all traffic can be denied for a specific IP address (these are named by numeric codes that look like this 123.23.54.12).
  2. Mail can be filtered and rejected through a spam filtering service before it hits an organizations mail server. The company I work for uses Postini which captures a lot of spam, but sometimes cages some of the ham too.
  3. There’s a pinch point at the corporate mail server. Your IS department may set up your mail system to reject everything from a specific IP address.
  4. The end user may set up filters to move your incoming mail to the trash, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Worse yet, they might mark you as spam causing you to be locked out further up the chain next time.

So, what do you do? The first thing to do is make sure you are managing expectations. Keep in mind that a good campaign will have around a 25% open rate and a 10% click through, so you are talking about 3 per 100 sent on a good day.

It’s very easy to test deliverability if your email system uses HTML messages to track opens. Keep in mind that if one person at a corporate location gets a message you can reasonably assume that you are it least getting past the first 3.

Resist the urge to mail yourself. This will work well in the beginning but as soon as you start having problems you are going to be the person trying to get yourself off a blacklist. Vendors that have hundreds of customers using their email services have established relationships with the ISPs that you don’t.

And for the love of God, if you are going to mail yourself, don’t use the same server as your regular corporate mail. There’s no faster path to the unemployment line than tanking email for your whole company because of a spam complaint.

Categories
Daily Life The Marketeer

Whole Brain

No, that’s not where organic food zombies shop, but it is another half baked theory I have. While trying to find good Marketeers I’ve found an interview question that I like: Marketeers tend to fall into two camps: artistic or analytic. Which one are you?

The truth is you need both to be a great Marketeer, but the pendulum has swung hard to the analytical side in the past 10 years. Tomorrow on Marketing Over Coffee I’ll see if I can get some other traits of great Marketeers out of Mr. Penn.

In less serious news you can check out the Flickr photos of my vacation.

Categories
Daily Life The Marketeer

Using the Sneak Preview to generate buzz

I’m off to the lake and coverage is a bit spotty so just a quick post from the road. Christopher Penn and I discussed some interesting techniques to give you some search engine and Technorati juice in the latest Marketing Over Coffee, the best marketing podcast coming out of dunkin donuts in Framingham.

I’ve got to check in with Hollywood Steve but it seems like the sneak preview is a great way to get a movie rolling. The key is to find the Mavens that will generate interest in the movie prior to the opening weekend, which seems to be all that matters these days. (Queue flashback music) I remember back in the days when theatres only showed one movie and it stayed around for months if it was good. Although I could get misty eyed over the “Lost Golden Age” I think it’s more like how people revere the early baseball players but all of them know, deep down inside, that a lot of those old drunks would get their asses kicked if they had to play in today’s supercharged steroid swilling, dog maiming leagues. (climbing down of cranky old man soapbox).

Carin and I were invited to a sneak preview of No Reservations, starring Catherine Zeta-Jones and the girl from Little Miss Sunshine (the movie that made Carin laugh so hard she couldn’t breathe). No Reservations is a great date movie, and it even has a few moments that are above and beyond. I worked for a number of years in foodservice so I have a great appreciation for that environment. (Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential is a great read for more on that).

It was a packed house but we were lucky enough to get to sit with Clarence, who’s got a unique voice that is just fun to listen to, much like Julien Smith. Also in the house were C.C. Chapman, Steve Garfield, Doug Haslam, Kroosh, and a few others I can’t remember right now. I was a little bummed though, I had to get home to take care of the dog so we weren’t there early enough for drinks beforehand and we had to get home right afterwards so I could pack for vacation and the 5am alarm for Marketing Over Coffee (did I mention that’s the best marketing podcast?).

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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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Productivity Booster The Marketeer

Steriods for your Career

I just posted the latest and best marketing podcast, and I mentioned Salary.com. This service has run me anywhere from 29-79 dollars a year and the least it has ever generated for me in a year is $3,000. If every investment of mine paid off like that I’d already be on my beach house in Nantucket.

It simply takes most of the voodoo out of the compensation question – instead of pulling an number out of the sky I can go see what the average marketing guy with 15 years in business, graduated from the one and only UMASS, working at a software company of under 100 employees in the Boston area gets. And go from there.

Market opinion is very squishy, market data has to be challenged with other data.

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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.

Categories
Graphic Design The Marketeer

Some Great Marketing – QOOP

I took a bunch of pictures over the 4th and uploaded them to Flickr and noticed a button that said “Make Stuff” when I looked at my photoset. This took me to a site called QOOP (no idea how the hell to pronounce it). That let me put together a book of 49 shots for around $25.
My QOOP BookI really like the way it came out, the book is 5×7 and the pages are full bleed (there’s no border on the pages, the ink goes right to the edge like a magazine).

What impressed me the most was some marketing thought behind it. Even though they have a terrible name – I tend to come from the “cup of soup” school of marketing, (how about mymagazine, myphotobook, anything besides a word that doesn’t mean anything) they did make a fantastic move: After I wrapped up the sale I was offered a second copy of the book for only about $5, I couldn’t refuse it at that price and of course I’m going to pass it off to another possible customer (and now write about it). It’s difficult to get pass along to work with every product, but with photos it’s incredibly easy.
Inside my QOOP bookThey also do posters and a bunch of other stuff, I may check out some of the other services.

Categories
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?

Categories
The Marketeer

Lists, Lists, Lists

This has been my past two weeks. I’ve got three webinars going this week so no matter what I do it involves pulling a list of some kind. My eyes are getting tired looking at columns of data.

Time for a haiku!

making many lists
the marketeer’s noble deed
victory in sight

One bright spot, I stumbled upon a long lost extended mix of “Better Be Good to Me“, some classic 80’s goodness.

Thursday night I will be running for AccuRev in the Chase Corporate Challenge. If you will be at the race, drop me a line and we can grab a beer after if I don’t have a coronary event.