The return to normal life (before the 4th) continues with the latest Marketing Over Coffee. Have you checked out the best Marketing Podcast yet?
Categories
Categories
Des Moines Register Gets It
Regardless of your politics you might be interested to take a look at how they are handling the news at The Des Moines Register. They are doing original work and they have the comments open to the public. I think that this type of hybrid blog/news is the future of the newspaper. I’ve always said that good newspaper people have nothing to fear from blogging, they are well trained to be the best of the bloggers – they just have to get the nerve to try and pull the sword from the stone. I have no doubt, as soon as they grab hold, they’ll know they are on to something big.
Categories
A bit of music
Being an enthralled spectator is a fascinating thing – It bears no resemblance to the fear of the performer or speaker. I truly enjoyed this clip, courtesy of Seth Godin’s blog for his new book, The Dip (which has made my summer reading list, one of these days I’ll pick up a copy…).
[youtube]1k08yxu57NA[/youtube]
Ok, the trade show wars are over, I’m finally getting back to normal. After missing both an M Show and Marketing Over Coffee I feel like I’ve just broken out of the Phantom Zone.
The first step back is today’s M Show… Check it out.
The conference is wrapping up today (at least the expo floor). As usual my feet and back are ready for a break – conferences all come down to good shoes.
We’ve been using greeters to scan badges, that has proven to be at least 20% more effective in getting names.
One interesting thing – for lead gen collection most shows use a mag stripe card reader. For this one we were given a pocket PC with a barcode scanner. The lead comes up on the screen and we can rank them hot/warm/cold. There’s also a box for text entry from the blackberry-style keyboard, and better yet a record button to take a voice memo. Pretty impressive, now the next step is to try and talk other shows into using the same thing.
Back to the shop for tomorrow…
Categories
Trade Show Wars
I’m off to set up the booth. This is like the lottery in reverse – you go to the show floor and open the cases and see what’s broken or missing. Best case scenario is that everything is there and working and you breathe a sigh of relief. In a lot of ways it’s a pain but it does get to test your MacGuyver skills to the fullest.
Last year at this show I opened the case and found that the wrong lights had been shipped and they wouldn’t fit into the booth. Thanks to GPS I was at the nearest Home Depot in about 15 minutes buying an assortment of plumbing supplies, tools and a hacksaw to make my own parts. I wouldn’t want to repeat that experience, but it does make for a funny story. Let’s see what today has to offer…
As a marketeer, I have never heard these words.
Just kidding, I get it at least twice a month. This is the age old struggle between sales and marketing, and with marketing being the creative side there are thousands of responses: “The sale begins at ‘No’, you order taking monkey”, “I give the good leads to closers” etc.
It’s all in good fun, kind of like complaining about cafeteria food, you do it regardless of whether the food is from the best chef or a can. If you are hitting your numbers everyone is happy, if not everyone is pissed off.
But there are things you can do to improve your leads. I’ve been working on our process to screen leads via a survey on SurveyMonkey (a web-based survey tool), and it’s working wonderfully. You get a new list, send them a few questions and you manage to filter out maybe 20%: 5% look a lot better than average and 15% is crap the sales guys don’t have to eat.
Keep in mind I can give a sales guy a hard time, but that’s because I share their goal – they should be able to blow their number out before the 3rd month of the quarter so they don’t have to come in to the office for the last month if they don’t want to (and I don’t have to listen to them). They should really never have to work Fridays, and Mondays should be exclusively for golf. This is the path to a happy workplace.
For more great info on lead gen I turn to Brian Carroll, he’s a thought leader in this space. Here’s some more info on Sales and Marketing playing well together.
Categories
Nike’s Coach Bob is Leading the Pack
I usually save gushing about Nike for the podcast, but I was reading Coach Bob today and it just blows me away how good this blog is. If anyone thinks that conversational media won’t become mainstream, you really need to sit down with Coach Bob. I can almost smell the track when I read his column, and as soon as it pops up in my newsreader I go straight to it.
Call me a fanboy, but Nike+ is the coolest thing that has happened to running in the past 10 years. The worst part of this is I can see the potential and I’m just sitting around waiting for the brains at Nike and Apple to put it together. I really want to use it on my full size iPod b/c I like to watch “Heroes” on the treadmill (I’m confident enough to go to the gym before my morning shower, but to look like a slob AND have 2 iPods running at the same time seems too dorky for even me).
I have no doubt there’s a heart rate monitor right around the corner for it, and how cool is that? Your song fades out a bit and Lance Armstrong tells you you’re slacking and better turn it up a notch. GPS is asking a lot at that form factor, but I’d pay extra for that too – completely accurate distance stats.
Enough with the gushing, I’ve got to get back to work, but some cool stories brewing…
Categories
Can you skip the chasm?
So yesterday I was saying that I thought the newest Palm hardware was a waste of time. Over on engadget a lot of people were saying the same type of thing. If you don’t have the backstory – they are selling a mini laptop, it connects to the phone and you get web, email and some other programs with the benefit of a big screen and keyboard.
All the card-carrying members of team propeller head took off our taped glasses and sneered at it (myself included). They had an interesting pitch though – “Geekboys, this is not for you, you must have your multimedia laptops, this is for the rest of the world.” I paused for a moment and had a flash of inspiration – you could give this to a salesperson and they would have a phone and access to Salesforce.com, all they really need. You could even include audio instructions since they usually don’t read too well (an old joke, not mine by the way).
This got me to thinking further – is it possible to skip the chasm? Crossing the Chasm is standard reading for anyone in the software industry, for the uninitiated – for all tech stuff you usually get acceptance from the geeks if it’s cool but then there’s a period of time where the geeks take it for granted but the rest of the world still hasn’t found out about it or figured it out. If you need more you should really get the book
My gut is telling me no, it’s not possible. You need the geeks on your side because they are the evangelists, they help you further develop the product for the mainstream audience (basically by making it easier to use and error free). If you don’t get the geeks the product remains relatively unknown and never sees mainstream light of day. I’d be interested if anyone has any examples of skipping the chasm, or opinions as to whether it’s possible or not.
The purchase and sale agreement has been signed so it looks like we are off to a new home! I’ve already begun going through stuff to try and ease the move, and I thought it would be fun to throw my own virtual yard sale. Actually the stuff is on eBay, but I thought it would be interesting to see if any readers were interested. If anybody reading this buys any of the stuff I’ll waive the shipping fees.
Three items for sale:
A Netgear Wired 5-Port Switch, if you are going to wire up some machines for gaming or just want more wired ports at your desk (perfect for trade shows booths or conference rooms).
A Linksys Wired Router, same deal as above but with more features (but I’ve had some trouble getting Apple TV and the XBox 360 extender to work with it, LOL).
And the best for last: A Wacom drawing tablet. Drawing with a mouse is like trying to draw with a potato, a must for illustrators.
Enough with the commercial break, a post about marketing in 20 minutes…