Archive for September, 2006
Tories Try New Media
Over in Britain, the Tories - hoping to end years out of power when Tony Blair steps down as Prime Minister and new elections are held - is taking a step into the world of blogging, the Guardian reports.
Under the direction of Conservative Party head David Cameron, they’ve launched Webcameron. The site includes a [...]
After the honeymoon
In the technology world, it’s common for a a company to buy a smaller company that’s doing cool, innovative things. Maybe their products are unique; maybe they’ve dominated a smaller but appealing niche.
What’s also sadly common is that after an acquisition, the acquiring company often wipes out what was powerful and unique about their new purchase.
I thought about [...]
g Whiz: Why it’s so important to know your market
A new luxury hotel opened last fall in Galway, so we thought we’d walk out and take a peak. Our Irish friends had told us that it was worth it - kind of.
The g Hotel is the brainchild of one Philip Treacy, a Galway native and, according to the g brochure, “the world’s most famous [...]
Time to Go Organic?
What works better - organic search optimization (tweaking your web site so that you come out high on search engine results) or sponsored search (pay per click programs, like Google Adwords, where your message appears next to search results)?
ClickZ reports on a new study that indicates the two techniques produce similar results:
If you gathered [...]
World Pastry & Bread Champion
Who among us marketers has not at one time or another touted our company as “a leading” something-or-other. As long as we were mentioned in some industry-rag round-up, or got a slice of the market-share pie from IDC, or had Gartner say something (anything), hey, we’re definitely “a leading provider” (”The” leading something-or-other if we [...]
Sniff Test
I spent half an hour at Logan Airport the other evening tearing through Vanity Fair - actually, it was more like tearing up the magazine - to get rid of the noxious perfume drenched inserts that were making me sneeze and giving me a pounding headache. Who was the marketer who thought up that [...]
Abandoning Your Leads to Die
MarketingProfs has a nice piece on a classic marketing danger zone: handing inquiries off to the sales team. The most important cautionary paragraph:
If you merely dump prospects on sales without first agreeing on the meaning of “lead” and then qualifying each prospect based on your definition, you and sales may end up at loggerheads when supposed [...]
Blog to Blog Advertising
Here’s an interesting approach to blog advertising: on Techmeme, sponsors pay to have their latest blog posts appear in a “sponsored post” section on the site.
As ad models go, I like this one. The sites that are sponsoring Techmeme are likely to be of interest to some of their readers, and rather than run gimmicky banners, [...]
Abreviations Are the Bane of Technology… and Marketers
Any technologist knows a good abbreviation or acronym can propel an obscure technology or term to rock-star status. (Well, at least that’s what seems to be the commonly held opinion among some techies.)
Apparently, Tim Berners-Lee didn’t think so when he created the World Wide Web.
Legend has it that Berners-Lee (or should that be BL or [...]
From Starbucks, a Lesson in Thinking Like a Customer
Over at StarbucksGossip.com, a blog that exists solely to comment on Starbucks, there’s been a little debate raging about customers who make their own iced lattes.
Scanning the coffee menu at Starbucks on Fourth Street in Santa Rosa reveals that the cost of a tall iced latte is $2.45.
Don’t want to pay that much? Order a [...]
