Category: The Marketeer

Johnny T. (who, by the way, works for a company that produces some great events (even if some of his customers are trying to kill me, but that’s a story for another day)) had written in about trade shows last week and I wanted to get to the second part of his question: Are the Company goals the same as my goals?

Ahh, the glory of blogs. Would any editor let that last sentence stand?

I digress… The short answer is yes. The company’s goals are exactly the same as mine, come back with X leads. The only exception I could think of to this would be occasionally I’ve had sales guys tag along just to meet a short list of contacts, that may even have deals already in the pipeline.

This got me thinking more about how there really are no company goals. All of the individual employee goals roll up to the company results. The art is getting the desired company outcomes broken into individual goals and then making sure that they roll up again to the correct outcome.

And that makes me wonder if you have profitable individuals, is it possible to combine them and add efficiencies (shared office space, infrastructure, sales horsepower) to create a business? Or is that just an agency?

I won’t have a whole lot to post for the next couple of days, I’m at the SDWest Conference is Santa Clara, CA. It’s the cutting edge of Software Development and is actually a show with an insane number of sessions and an expo floor with tons of development tools. Unfortunately, as great as the show is, if you are reading this from a marketing slant there’s not much that will interest you.

Some relevant stuff – the floor is run by GES, if you are into shows you know that means that things will go well. We’re using badge scanners, it seems like mag stripe readers have finally (thankfully) died off. We’re rolling out a new booth design so I’ll have some pictures later. Like most shows, all the stress is prior to opening and the first 2 hours on the floor (a cocktail reception for this show). If everything is running smoothly by then it’s hard to screw up the rest of the show (but not impossible).

Something always goes wrong every show, so far I’ve lost a credit card, we’ll see if that’s the worst of it…

As part of the ooVoo project Charlie had a few questions that we weren’t able to get around to, but they were great so I wanted to throw them (and my two cents, of course) out there…

Where the Big 3 are wasting their marketing dollars (Or teaching Goliath new tricks).

It’s not as much wasting dollars as underfunding the riskier things that have the opportunity for huge returns. Seth Godin has written a lot of stuff about “The Safe Route” being the riskiest possible path. Media continues to fragment – Newspapers and 30-second spots continue to lose power. Find your social niche now, start a blog, shoot some YouTube production level video, actually talk to people.

Is the Tipping Point Toppled? (re: Fast Company article)

My friend John Blue brought this up this weekend also, my response: Yeah, Watts stuff is interesting but I think he’s 1) building a platform around being contrary and 2) severely underestimating the power of the connectors – in tech circles Engadget is much more than 40 times more powerful than the average chump, I’d bump it up by an order of magnitude and see if his model sticks. That and I think you have to rate the content itself -  He hits a home run talking about having a hard time getting “some company’s shitty product” to go viral….

Web 2.0 for beginners (How to dip your toe in the brave new world of the web)

I’d recommend David Meerman Scott to go in depth and for a quick read, Chris Brogan’s new ebook.

So the real question is “Do I have any original thoughts of my own?” tune in tomorrow for my reviews of the remixes on the Michael Jackson Thriller 25th anniversary edition.

This just came in, I never saw this coming…

We’re Going Blu-ray

Dear J-Funk,

You’re receiving this email because you have asked to receive high-definition movies in the HD DVD format. As you may have heard, most of the major movie studios have recently decided to release their high-definition movies exclusively in the Blu-ray format. In order to provide the best selection of high-definition titles for our members, we have decided to go exclusively with Blu-ray as well.

While we will continue to make our current selection of HD DVD titles available to you for the next several months, we will not be adding additional HD DVD titles or reordering replacements.

Toward the end of February, HD DVDs in your Saved Queue will automatically be changed to standard definition DVDs. Then toward the end of this year, all HD DVDs in your Queue will be changed to standard definition DVDs. Don’t worry, we will contact you before this happens.

You can click here to change your format preferences.

We’re sorry for any inconvenience. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please call us at 1 (888) 638-3549.

-The Netflix Team

So tomorrow I am going to a meeting of the Boston Chapter of the American Marketing Association. It’s an informal event that will have a discussion on The Impact of Social Media. I’ve been to one other event with this group and it made me take some time to think about networking events and how they work.

It’s true that there’s no substitute for face to face discussion, but the problem is getting to the right faces. Both at a live or online event you at least know that the attendees have something in common (in my case, Marketing in Boston). One of the major advantages to networking online is that you can learn a lot about a person before you take up their valuable time. It also gets around the first 5 minutes of awkward conversation, and filters out things like spouses that have no interest in being there, or people who just show up for the free food.

I’ve found 4 levels of people at live events:

1. Weird Loners – They don’t know anybody and are hanging out trying to meet people. To the other 3 groups this are high risk contacts, they may latch on, be insane, and not let go.
2. Possible Stalker – These are loners who have done some homework and have a list of people to talk to. They’ll do 100x better than the loners, but the other attendees may have a look of panic during initial conversations as they assess the threat level.
3. The Connected – Know enough people to have a pleasant time, try and meet a few new people, catch up with old friends.
4. Group Organizer – Has all the cards, knows the majority of the people and why they were invited.

So what does this mean?

• Fly with a wingman – if you are going into unfamiliar territory having just one familiar face in the crowd, by definition, excludes you from being a weird loner.
• If that’s not possible, at least be a stalker – have 3 people you want to meet and learn enough about them so you have a starting point for conversation – “Hey, I noticed you blogged about X, could you tell me more…”
• Crack the code – Figure out who runs the event, who sponsors the event, why and how were people added to the list. This will help you determine who the power players are, if you can find one real connector, then you never have to go to a mass event again, you just ask the connector for some help in pointing you in the right direction.

Just like in any Jungle or Poker Game, if you have no plan everyone else is planning on you to be the meal.

And of course bribery. I’ll be giving out some $5 coffee cards, I have yet to find anyone that can resist free stuff…