Category: The Marketeer

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The Marketeer

Who is John Wall?

My wife’s friend is a teacher and she has a sign that says “You are special and unique, just like everyone else”. So for the record, I am unique as the only John J. M. Wall III and in fact, the M. has never really been made public and even the Goog doesn’t have it in the index yet.

For some reason, it’s been all about me this week. Bob decided to name this week’s episode of the Beancast after me (because of the snappy jingles he introduced for each co-host this week).

Then, high school basketball phenom John Wall signed with the University of Kentucky, causing “John Wall” to trend on Twitter. Two people mentioned it to me this morning, Mike Volpe over at HubSpot who blogged about it, and my nephew Ben watching SportsCenter at home. I mentioned to Ben that some of the hoop scouting blogs said he had “shady handlers” and was arrested for breaking and entering a few weeks ago. He said “Yeah, sounds like the kid’s going to the NBA”. I don’t believe any of the negative press about John, from what I’ve heard about the moral and ethical standards of college recruiters I believe that people would say anything to make him look bad in the eyes of other schools.

In an even more bizarre coincidence I went to UMass during John Calipari’s run, and I have the picture to prove that this is not the first time Calipari/Wall has been on film. For those who don’t follow College Hoops, Calipari energized UMass as coach starting in 1988, and is now at Kentucky and got the Blue Chip recruit for the Blue Cats.

Calipari and Wall circa 1996
Calipari and Wall circa 1996

UMass basketball is a topic for another post, but let me at least say that when I was a Freshman I could walk in at any time during a game and get to be within 5 rows of the team, by the time I left people were sleeping out over night in the cold to enter ticket lotteries. I’d like to say that this is because I am the ultimate UMass hoops fan, but the truth is that one of my classmates was on the Women’s team and they played before the guys and I used to watch both games.

The hot recruit from Word of God, NC is not even the closest match, there’s an Attorney in Maine named John J. Wall III, a California photographer, the guy who owns JohnWall.com, and a CEO who grew his first company to $150M (that’s the record I’m shooting for and I’ll be happy with 1/5th of that). There’s also one of those emails that your crazy Uncle sends you with a long letter about sending liberals to some other country or something, written by a John Wall. I usually ignore the Facebook requests from that one, although I give special attention to ultra conservative groups asking for my help to overthrow the government and add them to my firewall block list, as well as the conservative students that all seem to be female, from southern schools, in sororities and tend to have interesting spring break pictures. I may have friended a couple of those, or at least passed the links on. (Hello people?!? One day you may be looking for JOBS….)

Bringing it back to the stuff I normally write about – it’s interesting how technology deals with the brand mismatch. I knew that this college recruiting season would be a big deal almost 2 years ago, the first time John started getting attention from college scouts and showing up in my Google Alerts.

After months of tuning my Alert has been honed to:

“John Wall” -basketball -recruit -God -duke -kentucky -miami -“California Nature”

As a result I’m still getting info about me and I didn’t get a single alert about him signing today.

On the other hand is my own brand. While it is true that I no longer own page 1, I’m still listed there. When I first saw this coming I also did a little research and noted that the Michael Jordan who teaches stats at Cal Berkeley always has a spot on the first page, regardless of what #23 is up to. That and the fact that there are injuries to be avoided and rings to be won before the chance of the press really piling up for Wall, and as much as I think it would be great to see him go up to the big show, the odds are tough (but I think he can pull it off).

As long as I continue to generate content (especially in the off season), I’ll show up in the places I need to. There’s also another post in the fact that I am not looking to grow market awareness, I’m already at a point of having to turn down projects to work on because there are not enough hours in the day. My focus is not on getting more eyeballs, but generating more value in a fixed period of time for my stakeholders and myself.

The JohnWall.com URL has been gone for years, I do have john-wall.com and all other relevant URLs on watch lists so I’ll be notified if they come up. I do use my name in the Title tag over at The M Show, but podcast blogs are already in the hole when it comes to Google juice with the normal cast getting 75% or more of the action from iTunes. And don’t tell anyone but The M Show was written off about 6 months ago, I still do it for fun and the remaining “subscribers” that I just call friends and family.

This will probably end up being one of the topics we discuss tomorrow morning on Marketing Over Coffee, so be sure to check out the Thursday show. One final plug – Chip Griffin had me on as a guest for the Bullseye Media Radio (aptly titled “All Stupid, All the Time”), you can check that out here. Congrats to John and Coach Cal, you’ll be on my brackets for the next couple of years!

Categories
Great Marketing

Superior Design

I’ve used Samsonite luggage all of my life. My parents gave me an old school suitcase when I was a kid (back when one of their competitors had an ad with a gorilla beating the crap out of a suitcase).

When I graduated from college I had a Samsonite Briefcase (yes, and I even wore a suit to work too, every day), and a garment bag that I put 5 years of heavy travel on before it finally fell apart. From there I got a rolling carry-on that I was able to beat up on for more than 10 years. A few weeks ago I noticed that one of the wheels had cracked in half and I knew that it would only be a matter of time before the bag was retired.

As I was dragging it around New York City last week the wheel hit the doorframe as it came in and I saw a piece of the wheel fall off. To my amazement, more pieces continued to fall off and when it was done I saw that the wheel was made up of an outer and inner shell. As the original wheel fell off, a second interior wheel was exposed and the bag continued to roll along with no problem.

You can talk all you want about a product but when one performs like that under fire, the stories are very easy to tell.

I’ll probably be able to squeeze a few more trips out of this bag but I imagine by Christmas I’ll be looking at an upgrade.

Categories
Podcasting The Marketeer

Live! From New York! It’s Saturday Night!

Those are the best words on TV. Nothing else sets up such a sense of excitement and anticipation.

Here’s the live Marketing Over Coffee from the PRSA, it was cool to have a crowd bigger than the staff of Dunks for the show. If you are into marketing you may find it entertaining, for everyone else, I’d suggest Hot Rod over this for entertainment value.

Categories
SEO and Paid Search

Google Aligns Itself with Big Brands?

This is one of the most interesting and well written articles on SEO that I have seen in a while:

Aaron Wall on Google and Branding

Not only does it cover current events but also has some history of the game.

Categories
Great Marketing

Getting Sponsors for Podcamp, Barcamp, or Any Other Event

I had a question come in this week about event sponsorship. There are a lot of grassroots events out there and that in the current economy you might think it would be difficult to find sponsors but it’s actually easier than ever.

As far as what sponsors are looking for, it’s very simple, the majority of them just want to sell more stuff. Companies that are Marketing savvy may be satisfied with access to the audience (meaning, an attendee list with good emails and maybe snail mail).

The criteria for choosing your possible sponsor targets:

  1. Your attendees are their number 1 prospects, when they advertise, the put ads in locations where your attendees read or spend time.
  2. They have a active marketing organization with budget. There are 3 possible types, forward thinking ones that are already in social media (these are your number 1 prospects, because you don’t have to educate them as to the value of an event like this), ones that are doing advertising (they have budget and will be interested in an event like this that will be more effective and trackable than ads in magazines, radio, whatever), and third are companies that don’t actively market (and are a waste of your time).
  3. You have access to them – this can be challenging. It’s not enough just to email somebody or call the front desk, you need access to an upper level decision maker. Front line and most middle management aren’t looking for more work to do, so they will probably ignore you (like the folks at M-Audio who had no interest in Podcamp 1, and missed the bus). Forward thinking middle managers and top level guys are the ones who will see the value in sponsoring an event like this that will have greater return than whatever other forms of ads they are using.

Forward thinking marketers may be feeling budget pressure so many of them are more willing to consider alternatives like social media than ever before (more impact at less cost? yes, now is the time that these words will make people listen).

Once you have a list of prospects you have to get in front of the decision makers, this is where you want to leverage linkedin and the rest of your network so that you get a reference and a personal introduction. The hard work is getting to the right people, once you are in front of them it’s an easy sell: “What if I could connect you with X of your most loyal customers, who are active in the online community and will blog, podcast, and spread your message on Facebook for less than the price of a single month ad in X magazine?”

So the big question to get started is: “Where do your attendees spend their money?”

Categories
Email Marketing Lead Generation Productivity Booster

Manticore and GoToWebinar

I had a Marketing Over Coffee listener ask me about using Manticore (Email, web analytic, demand generation) with GoToWebinar (Online meetings). I thought that this was too much “Inside Baseball” even for MOC, but it fits here.

Do you typically send out your webinar invitations as part of a Manticore Demand Booster Process? It gets sort of tricky because once someone uses the invitation to register for the webinar, then GTW sends them back a personalized URL for accessing the webinar.  As you know, GTW does a great job of managing registrations.  Post-webinar, it can also provide a list of attendees and a separate list of registered no-shows.

It seems that the easiest thing would be to wait until the webinar takes place, then start the demand booster process at that point using the lists of attendees and no-shows.

This is an interesting problem. I thing the big issue is that GoToWebinar doesn’t have an API (at least at my last check with their tech support). You could build all the same stuff (registration, follow up email) on your own site through Manticore and manage it all there.   That still wouldn’t solve the problem though, just change the direction of data you have to load – instead of pulling the reg list out of G2W, you’d be uploading the projected attendees into G2W, and since there’s no easy way to do that unless you want to start scripting something that goes through HTTP, and that makes my brain hurt.

I do send the invites out via Manticore, you can grab the HTML and load it right up. And a tip – if you include the “Register Now” button the tracking of opens will work over in the GoToWebinar reporting.

I don’t do webinars as part of any demand booster tracks, I don’t like anything to be in a track that is locked to a specific date, that really increases the labor required to reuse the track.

Hopefully by putting this out there, somebody will have a better idea…

Categories
Great Marketing

A Source of Inspiration

I have been very impressed with CVS Pharmacy‘s program that goes above and beyond.

Categories
Great Marketing

More Live from Hubspot

Categories
The Marketeer

Live! From Cambridge! It’s Friday Night!

Today at 4pm I will be in Cambridge with Christopher Penn as guests on Hubspot TV. You can watch the show live on their site and I might even be able to keep the twitter stream open, so you can work the backchannel via @themshow

I’m also up for using Martinis as a defense for the sub-zero weather this evening. Tweet @karenrubin if you want to see the show at One Broadway in Cambridge, or hit me to reserve a spot at the post show cooldown.

Categories
SEO and Paid Search

Site Redemption

When I first started this blog it was an experiment. Much like The M Show, I had no idea where it would go or if I would have more than a few weeks of things to write about. Fast forward a few years, and yes, I guess I do have some content.

Thanks to this lack of initial commitment I cut some corners. Rather than pay for two hosting accounts I decided to point RoninMarketeer.com to the same account that was hosting The M Show. Since Libsyn serves up 99% of the bits for that podcast the server had capacity to give.

The problem is that many tools that watch the web don’t really like this. Even with proper redirects any tactic that only a spammer or cheap bastard would use is not going to give you that extra glass of fresh Google juice. My domain started strong with a page rank of 6 (PR6 if you want to sound like a social media douche bag SEO consultant), but then dipped to 5 as the blog gained momentum.

I also noticed that technorati (hint – become a fan!) and lists like the Power 150 had me stranded out in Nowhereville. The final straw was when I hit PR4, not the web equivalent of hell, but definitely the neighborhood where the washer and dryer are out on the front porch and there are vehicles on cinder blocks in the front yard so you don’t have to mow the lawn.

So I had two options – flush it all and start new, which would have been the easy route, or try rehabilitation. Again, seeing this more as an experiment, it seemed like it would be a good case study to fix as much as I could and see what would happen. After all, it’s probable that I will run into people and companies whose online reputation has been screwed up, yet they will be unwilling to give up the current domain name in my future.

Results so far: The problem was deeper than I thought, my feed had been hacked with some hidden links that I imagine where what banished me to the ghetto. Having finally straightened out the domain name issues and cleaned up all the feeds (sorry to the M Show fans that had Ronin posts show up for a couple of days!), today Google shows me with a PR5! So rehabilitation is possible at least to get back to zero, the next question is can you go above the zero line?

What you can do to help: If you want to accelerate this case study (LOL) you could re-subscribe to the feeds over there on the left side of the page above my Lijit widget (I would tell Tara that I’ve finally got it in the template, but she would roast me since it’s taken me like 7 years to finally add it to my blog, but since she didn’t enter the 23rd Annual Marketing Over Coffee Awards, hell, we’re even). Anyway, for the price of less than a few clicks a day you can help feed this hungry blog.

Ok, I can no longer avoid shovelling snow… see you later.