Nothing better than drinking Mulled Wine on public property at the German Christmas Market. Back to business tomorrow!
Check out your Monday M Show
Category: The Marketeer
A stumbling block on the path to the holy land today, the code snippet we need to integrate SF.com with our Google Adwords campaign conflicts with some existing javascript we have on our custom web-to-lead forms. As I have no Perl skills to speak of beyond the “cut and paste somebody else’s stuff and pray it works” I’ve had to call in some bigger guns, i.e. Salesforce support level two and our own Ronin Coder. Perhaps there will be more luck tomorrow…
On the plus side, Joel delivered the web traffic today…
Categories
Joel Digs AccuRev
A great surprise for me this morning forwarded by Chicago Mike : AccuRev has made the homepage of Joel on Software. This should be an interesting day as far as web traffic.
That is – not dead at all. Today was a big email day for me sending out two blasts. I’m currently using ConstantContact which is the best value for the price – free to start and not expensive after that. I’ve used ExactTarget, which is a great product (and perhaps in my future due to integration with Salesforce.com), and in fact Chris Baggott from over there is coming out with a book next year and if some of my pieces make the editoral cut I’ll be published there.
Contrary to what you may hear, email is very much alive, just as is direct mail as I can tell from the 35 catalogs that have come in through the mailslot at home in the past week. Perhaps no longer the silver bullet, these tactics still deliver.
ConstantContact has some benchmark figures across the service that are interesting: Global Bounces are at 18.3% (although probably understated since I get some Out of Office messages direct to me), opens at 37%, and clicks at 8.9%. I do better on bounces, lower on opens, and much better on clicks. My personal mailing list (for The M Show, listen now!) has under 1,000 names but performs at a level of magnitude much greater (9x cleaner 4x clicks). This is quite normal for smaller lists, I have more stats on that but I’m not going to dig that up now, leave me a comment if you want more.
I’ve spent the past 5 years looking for a font browser. Like any other Ronin Marketeer, I have a portable hard drive of digital tools that I’ve gathered. It includes some insane amount of fonts now over 10,000. Yesterday I again hit a point where I was so frustrated that I decided to take a time out to see if there were any tools out there.
I found Suitcase by Extensis. This gift from the gods allows you to grab a folder and it will build a library, complete with samples to view of all the fonts in the subfolders. I’m doing the 30-day trial but unless it does something ridiculuous I’ll be a new customer in no time
Ok, this is not a best practice – it’s more of a security risk, but if you are in and out of SalesForce.com this will save you a lot of hassle. Here’s the link to setup on your desktop or toolbar:
https://www.salesforce.com/login.jsp?pw=[password]&un=[username with %40 instead of @]
for example, if your email was bob@bob.com your username would be bob%40bob.com
Please promise me that if you are going to use this that you will at least set up your laptop with a password at login so that when you lose it at the airport you’ve not giving away the keys to the kingdom.
In other news we are testing the SalesForce and Google AdWords integration. It’s not working. Something about 2 conflicting forms on the same page. A surprise project for this afternoon!
I have been watching the Google OneBox and there was an article about it in today’s Search Engine Watch. I’d give a direct link but it’s a paid subscription service (and well worth it).
The OneBox is the space above the first entry of organic results (results on the left side of the screen). A couple of months ago I started noticing paid ads show up there and now they are putting maps, movie times, and book recommendations up there. My gut tells me we’ll probably see video up there very soon too.
One weird thing – it only appears to show up the first time, if you refresh a page you are on it’s gone.
In other big news I got notice that SalesForce.com is getting scheduled maintenence around Jan. 15 to get the first ’07 upgrade. This will have integrated Google paid search, but you can get that already if you dig for it.
Shoutouts to Christopher Penn for his ninja search info and Bryan Person for helping me get the feeds straight.
Categories
M Show Sunday
It’s Sunday and that means The M Show gets recorded… A very slow week with the Thanksgiving holiday here in the states, but a few intersting things like the OJ project being scuttled and a statement that The Boston Globe is not for sale.
Steve Rubel had an interesting post on widgets – components that designers can add to webpages. Relevant as I contine with my initiation into WordPress…
Take a listen on Monday Morning!
I first started doing SEO back around 1997, since then it was a priority for some of my masters and not for others. Currently we are campaigning hard, and for the first time I am working with a retained outside firm (I know, not true Ronin).
Things seem to have really tightened up, there used to be a ton of “tricks” you could use and most of them have been locked down. Now it’s borderline with basic usability…
We just started an update on the Paid Search side, I will probably be talking about that at the Second Life CaseCamp coming up.
The good news is AccuRev is sending me off to Search Engine Strategies in Chicago the week of December 4th, so if you are a fellow Ronin please give me a shout.
Other good news: Jason Calacanis will be there on Tuesday so I’m looking forward to hearing what he’s up to after having recently left AOL. He also had a great post this week outlining some metrics for what a successful blog should be doing numbers-wise.
Technorati Profile
So I spent a bunch of yesterday trying to do some more advanced stuff with Salesforce.com If you are into lead generation or supporting a Sales team this is the best thing out there. I worked with Act for more than 5 years and supported a 10-user Goldmine installation for another 4 years and SalesForce is the disruptive technology taking it to the next level.
We have a system that’s very close to end-to-end. Leads come in on the web, get emailed around and the records go into SF. I can track them by marketing campaign, but that’s about as far as I get. I’m either at the end of it’s functionality, or I need to get some training sessions. The individual is marked as in the campaign (say, white paper banner ad on Joe’s site). But this data doesn’t roll up to the record for the company they work for. So if Bob clicks on the banner and we end up selling to Charlie, I have a disconnect.
Yesterday I exported everything I could get my hands on and used Access to get around some of the reporting shortcomings. It actually got me to the data I wanted but it was way too much work, I need to begin automating it. Anybody with experience here PLEASE comment.
Gearing up for a ride home filled with podcasts and then chowing on the turkey…