The good news is that the holiday shopping is done and all the paperwork is signed and sealed for the Mortgage refinance. Gee, and only 10pm at night!
It goes without saying, I’ve got nothing for you but we can thank YouTube for preserving absurd humor…
[youtube]3XhS80rwjIg[/youtube]
So there was no M Show this week, in short I am drowning in holiday BS. Between last minute gift buying, two snowstorms that took a good 7 hours out of my work week, and normal “everybody trying to get that last deal closed for year end” I haven’t had any time to catch up on writing.
Regardless – there’s some cool news I wanted to share. Number one is that Marketing Over Coffee has a sponsor and that will be rolling out tomorrow. This has been a few months in the making and I’m very excited about it. Our partner gets fresh audio content, and we get to extend the conversation to some folks from outside the new media fishbowl.
Number two – (skipping the obvious 8 year old laugh there) Check out the latest from the NOTHING show, and improv podcast made up of the garbage that I’ve posted on twitter for the past couple of months. I think this is the first time anyone has played me in a dramatic production. Too bad I sound like an alcoholic dork. It’s also interesting to note that I usually only twitter when I’m angry, stuck in a line or traffic, or both.
I really enjoy improv and would love to do some kind of audio comedy, of course picking up a new project is a challenge – as you know from my complaining that I have to make an appointment in outlook to be sure I have enough time to get to a stall as opposed to crapping my pants at my desk (never actually happened to me, but I do know other executives that have had that problem). I feel busier than a 4 year old kid in a 3rd world clothing factory.
Ok, I have to go to bed. Oh, and to add a little extra fun – off to the dentist tomorrow morning. The party just never stops bro’.
I spent 3 hours in my car on Thursday after the snow started on a trip that should have been 25 minutes.
That’s why I haven’t posted much in the past couple of days, that screwed up both Thursday and Friday, I’ve been running around like a maniac. I then slept most of Saturday, finally getting a chance to rest.
Still cleaning things up today but I have acquired some interesting stuff, due to some delivery fiasco I had to go with the lovely Carin to pick up one of my Christmas gifts – a new workbench. It’s very hardcore, I don’t think I’d move it if we ever moved. We also got new cellphones, that’s a post in itself.
Most of the Christmas shopping is done and I shipped off a bunch of junk that I sold on ebay and ended up making $400.
And it’s snowing here again.
Friday viewing:
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In today’s Marketing Over Coffee (the best marketing podcast) we got on to the topic of web analytics. There are a few different methods to see how your site is doing and each of them have some benefits and drawbacks.
Have fun measuring!
A friend asked me this question in this vein and I thought the answer was worth sharing, so I took out the specifics to outline some general principles:
First, remember that most CMO’s are insane. In general you’re best bet would be to do a custom presentation based on what you know about them. A generic approach would be the type of pitch an agency would make to a senior marketing person. Something like this:
1. Define the Market
2. Strategy and tactics
2. Concepts
A CMO has a lofty plan they set up by demographics – “We are looking for married women, 35-50, household income over 100k”. By defining the Market you are selling them on how your specific skills can hit the target – “The fastest growing segment of X market is the one that I have the keys to”.
In strategy and tactics outline what will be done and how it will be measured – “There will be these programs, we are looking for X impressions, and Y conversions…”
Concepts are the best place to shine, and also the most work. The easy way out is to show stuff that you have already done for other people, the hard way would be to mock-up what you would be doing for them. It’s a good idea to present concepts in sets of 3, two good ideas and (what you consider to be) a crummy one, that way if your client always picks the crummy one you’ll know that you have some style or communication problems and perhaps you shouldn’t be working together.
It also depends on the purpose of the meeting, better firms know that interviewing agencies is a low cost method of brainstorming so they do no original work until there’s really a deal…
Jason sent in a comment on a prior post discussing deliverability asking about web auto responders. This is a distinction that is important if you are not aware of your IT infrastructure – the mail that gets generated when someone fills out a form on your site may be coming from a different place than your bulk email.
This means that you may get differing deliverability rates, and may have some other strange issues. Although I have not seen any email providers offering this service, I have seen it bundled in CRM systems such as SalesForce.com
I know… Deliverability is not the sexiest stuff…
This week’s M Show is up, sadly that means that the weekend is over…
Just a random marketing stat for Saturday. When buying shirts for software executives I found this distribution:
M 15% L 37% XL 35% 2XL 13%
If you have to buy shirts I’d suggest a similar purchasing pattern (unless you have other data?).
Another point – I’ve always made it a point to get women’s shirts for them if they are working on behalf of the company. Nothing looks lamer to me than a woman who’s been given a company shirt that fits like a feed bag.
Some great topics this week in Marketing Over Coffee (the best Marketing Podcast) – We talk about using Google Reader, a huge productivity booster and a great way to monitor your brand. Chris also gives a guided tour of Facebook Beacon and why it caused some controversy and Facebook Pages.
If you are a Marketing Over Coffee fan, please take a second to give us an iTunes review, we’d really appreciate it.