Categories
Great Marketing

Big Rich and the Milk Bones

One day we were walking the dog and a big contractor truck drove by and honked his horn. The driver was on the side of the vehicle farther away from us and I could see him throw something over the roof of the truck towards us on the sidewalk. I caught one of the Milk Bone dog biscuits and the other hit the ground right next to Hannah, the world’s greatest dog.Hannah

This happened a few times and it was always great to see the dog freak out over the bones from heaven. On Thursday we saw the truck at the local convenience store and noticed that Big Rich has a tree service. We had a tree in the backyard that was threatening to take out the back half of the house so he came right over to look at it. The short version of the story is that by the time I got home from work that night the tree was gone with no indication it had ever been there except for a stump.

There’s also a picture on my fridge of Big Rich with Charlie Daniels (signed by both). That’s pretty cool, and I wouldn’t call any of it traditional marketing.

Categories
Podcasting

M Show Goulet Tribute

I didn’t get around to the normal cross-channel pimpin’ yesterday. You can check out my singing voice on the latest M Show! (the last 20 seconds if you don’t want to put up with the rest of the world class content.)

Categories
Brain Buster The Marketeer

What is Utterz?

So I was called out on twitter this weekend. I posted:

“Sorry, I can’t see any value in utterz… anyone…. anyone…”.

All I’ve seen are posts in Twitter that link to the Utterz recordings. In true new media style I got a twitter back from the founder!

“simedia @themshow fan of your blog. how can we improve utterz to provide the value you’re seeking?”

And I’m stuck. As I refuse to be someone who just complains about things on the web, I’ve painted myself into a corner and have to put up or shut up. The good news is that I was at a conference at MIT for the weekend on software development (yes, I know, the non-stop excitement of the new media rockstar lifestyle), so I did have time to set up an account, take the tour and test drive.

My initial befuddlement was viewing Utterz as some kind of twitter add-on, a MyChingo variation (which is called Mochilla now maybe? I can’t keep this stuff straight, I’m just a simple caveman…).

After a short run I’m thinking it’s a Twitter replacement – a similar tool for the content producer, but with greater functionality. The question then becomes how will these two brands compete? One thing is obvious, that Mitch Joel hit on earlier this week – there’s a lot of funky things going on with cell phones becoming more powerful multimedia devices and it’s time to start playing around to see what kind of trouble we can get into.

If you’ve done anything cool on this front your comments would be appreciated.

Categories
Geek Stuff Graphic Design

Friday Night Fights!

Clarence was asking where the hell I’ve been so I had to break out the HUGE GUNS for FRIDAY NIGHT FIGHTS!:

I haven’t seen anybody show these off, I hope I’m not recycling. Your eyes do not deceive you – that’s The Greatest vs. The Man of Steel (getting spanked by the Dynamite Right!). This was a DC Giant Size from the 70’s that hasn’t been reprinted because of the legal rights to the images. The cover has over 100 celebrities including such 70’s-tastic stars as Sonny Bono, Jimmy Carter, Frank Sinatra and Telly Savales.

Categories
Podcasting

Do You Want to Be President?

My initial title for this post was “Podcasting is Not Dead” and I offer:

Exhibit A: Adam Curry interviews Presidential Candidate Ron Paul

I challenge anyone to come up with anything better in audio this week. (ps – If it has commercials in it, it automatically loses.)

This pushed me to check out the other candidates and I got pulled down a political bend… If you are outside the US, or just not interested in Politics, we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled marketing programming on Monday.

It looks like Adam is now supporting Dr. Paul, so I thought “Well, let’s say Adam’s discussion is not really an interview, but rather just Dr. Paul getting some time on the stump.” Even so, this cast has great value – I appreciate hearing Dr. Paul’s positions in his own voice rather than 5 second sound bites, or 1 minute debate timeframes.

Regardless of your political opinion this is a great way to get your message out (did I mention it’s commercial free?). To make it clear for candidates: I am a professional who makes campaign donations and votes. I am in my car for almost 1 hour every day and you can send me any audio message you want and I’ll listen to it.

If you listen to podcasts you might want to subscribe to my Gigadial Channel. Any time I find an interesting podcast I add it to that feed (not just political stuff). The Paul/Curry interview is in there now and I’ll add anything similar for other candidates that you tell me about (john at themshow.com). It’s like having a trained monkey filter out all the crappy podcasts for you! If you don’t need to check it out and will take my word for it, here’s the feed.
For kicks I thought I’d dig around to see what else is out there:

I am subscribed to the John Edwards Podcast and nothing has come down the pipe since July. Bummer.

Barack Obama also has a cast that I was subscribed to. Another one to add to the podfaders.

It looks like Hillary Clinton is re-purposing media, but at least there’s something in the feed.

My Homie Mitt Romney has his speeches up but no feed – bummer – you’re doing the work, grab the free stuff! If only my M Show interview requests hadn’t end up in the black hole…

Fred Thompson is doing some very interesting stuff. After checking out his page, he gets a post all his own on a future date. He’s got some audio up there and he’s also using Blip.TV among other tools. Very interesting.

I like John McCain just because he used to be on Imus so I could hear from him (that is – I liked hearing him, not that he went on Imus just to talk to me). Same deal – he has some speeches up there, nothing to subscribe to.

Chris Dodd was on Imus more than McCain, and if it weren’t for that I wouldn’t know anything about him. He’s got a blog going but I couldn’t find a podcast.

There are other candidates, but this was supposed to be a 5 minute post and now I’ve been surfing and writing for an hour. Remember – podcasting is not dead.

I saved a lot of time compiling this thanks to Wikipedia – check out the GOP and the DEMS.

Categories
Daily Life

Podcamp is not Barcamp is not Band Camp

So this is my last time rambling about Podcamp. C.C. Chapman has had about 1,000,000 comments on his post talking about podcamp not being free. I’m a bit of a heretic, I remember talking with Bryper about the first podcamp and saying that they should charge for that one to weed out the trick-or-treaters that show up for free stuff and nothing else. There’s a lot of discussion about what makes a conference and what makes a camp. These are all academic arguments that the average person probably isn’t even aware of, never mind give a whizz in the River Kwai about.

Some of my favorite highlights – Eric Rice calling it Podshow 2.0, and Tim Bourquin welcoming everyone to the world of paid conferences. I think that aside from the names, Barcamp and Podcamp are two very different things. From what I’ve seen, Barcamps involve a lot of collaboration, where podcamps are all about education. I can easily see why someone who’s been to Barcamps or Brainjams would not be as excited about Podcamp, it’s not the same experience.

Ok, even I’m getting tired of the “Inside Baseball”. In closing, maybe I don’t get to sleep on the floor for podcamp, but there are still human connections made. There are a lot of people who go to podcamp who know nothing, or next to nothing about new media and they would like the guided tour, not pandemonium.

Me and NicoHere’s a picture of me and Nico, my graphic designer / wordpress genius. I’ve worked with many designers for professional projects, but Nico works on my personal projects. I put the rough graphics of Ronin Marketeer together and then he got it all to work correctly (I hate dealing with tables and I’m pretty lame with stylesheets). I knew there is a point where I’d lose interest in tweaking the code and it would be faster and less headache for a pro to take care of it.

The cool part is that we did this site almost a year ago, and from across the planet – he’s in Argentina. He surprised everyone by flying 30 hours to show up at Podcamp Boston. That alone makes podcamp cool enough for me, and yes I’d be willing to $20 to register for it to show I’m serious about attending…

I also a chance to catch up with all my Canadian friends (why the hell is Canada so much more hip than the US?), and was fortunate enough to meet Anna Farmery from the engaging brand. Next time I’m breaking out the recorder.

For more audio discussion on Podcamp, Technorati, and fighting Sploggers, check out the latest Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

Categories
Daily Life

Goulet

Robert Goulet has passed from this world, read more about Goulet here. I didn’t know he was local, but always appreciated his big band, partying sound.

Just prepping for Marketing Over Coffee tomorrow, if Mr. Penn is not wiped out from the VON festivities that everyone is twittering about. Talk to you then…

Categories
The Marketeer

In Defense of the Thought Leader

Christopher Penn proposes deep sixing the term “Thought Leader”

I agree that the term is lame (it really doesn’t involve leadership – much like podcasting not requiring an iPod), but I think it does define a very specific role: a person in a company who is an expert in the field who blogs, speaks, and presents about the industry and future trends in general rather than just pimping their product. These actions give their company credibility and increase the perception that they are truly experts at what they do now, and will continue to be experts into the future.

These types of people generate a competitive advantage over companies that don’t have any thought leaders.

With this definition there are no thought quarterbacks or generals leading on the field, but there are experts on football who have their own shows that give out in-depth analysis about the sport and get paid for it. There are retired generals who speak on news shows and write about what war really means, and they usually get paid to consult.

I think the bottom line is that the terms consultant and analyst are overused, tired and worn out. Thought Leaders are New and Improved!

Categories
Great Marketing Lead Generation

What’s Your Cost Per Lead?

Over the past 20 years ROI has been a measure of successful marketing. Many management teams want to see the ROI of each sucessful campaign. Seth Godin (sweet Red Saber post BTW) has argued for a long time that this is the “safe” path, and will ultimately lead to your destruction. If you only make the safe choices, somebody that you compete with is going to take a chance, and will eventually send you back to asking customers if they “want fries with that?”

So how do you get around this? It may be impossible if your management team is already expecting ROI on everything you propose, but you need to change the ground rules. View all of your marketing efforts as a whole – given your entire budget, how many leads do you pull in? How good are they? How many close, and for how much?

With metrics like this you can determine a cost per lead, and determine how much revenue each lead generates. Now you know the overall ROI of your marketing programs. You can see how every program performs in both terms of cost and quality. You’ll be able to make some informed decisions such as – perhaps Google clicks are not worth the huge dollars and you don’t need to be spending so much there. Are yahoo clicks worth the same amount as those from google? Which trade shows are worth going to?

The end result is that if your overall activites are generating a positive ROI you now have an excuse to to some R&D, and you should refer to it as such. Now you don’t have to try and make up numbers about what a YouTube video might do for you, or some other program that you’ve never tried before. You just say that this is an experiment and it may fail, but we will learn if it’s possible for it to generate enough return to add to our marketing mix. The great part is that as soon as you get the data you’ll be able to compare it to the rest of your programs.

The Evolution of Marketing
I’m thinking about the evolution in Marketing as an organization grows. As an enterprise is born marketing exists to serve as lead generator. As the enterprise expands, the earlier sections of the sales cycle can be outsourced to Marketing Automation. Ultimately Marketing moves into branding if it becomes necessary to influence the public, shareholders, or other groups that are not directly purchasing the product. Different skills and toolsets are used during the evolution. I’m too tired to ponder upon this more. Good night…

Categories
Daily Life

Podcamp Boston 2

Clarence and JuliaThis is my fave from the show, Clarence and the blur draw you in, but you eventually can’t avoid Julia.

Lots of great discussions yesterday at Podcamp and I’m getting ready to head back into town. Unfortunately we were not able to find anywhere quiet enough to record Marketing Over Coffee, but that ended up being a blessing. On the ride home I realized that without picking up a bizarre specialized cable, I’m not going to be able to record anyway.

I’ll be doing a session at 2pm covering any basic questions anyone still may have. For more photos, check out the set.