Archive for October, 2007
Return to sender: why I may not be reading the mail you send me, e- or otherwise.
I get a lot of e-mail and snail mail, mostly from organizations trying to sell me something, or trying to get me to make a donation to them.
Some I open and read; most I don’t.
Leaving the non-profits looking for my check (or credit card number) out of the mix, what makes me open the e-mail [...]
Can You Measure the Value of Integrity?
People don’t like us much, and they don’t trust us.
That’s a hard truth for marketers: ours is not a much-loved profession. Lynn Upshaw of the UC Berkeley business school talks about this topic in a recent MarketingProfs piece:
A Yankelovich study a few years ago found that as many as two-thirds of Americans believe that businesses [...]
Facetime
I had to laugh the other day when I came across a web site for a company that made web conferencing software and saw a big ad for their annual User Conference splattered across the top of their home page. Join us in Orlando!….
After all, their value proposition was all about saving time and money, improving efficiency, [...]
Yet Another Advertising Obituary
Does a week go by without someone announcing that advertising is dead, and now we must shift all of our marketing efforts to social media (even though half the country isn’t even using these media)? Not usually. I thought that this MarketingProfs piece was going to be another of these premature obituaries for advertising, but [...]
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #2
This post is the second in a series inspired by Pragmatic Marketing’s 20 Rules of Product Management rules for technology marketing.
RULE #2: An outside-in approach increases the likelihood of product success.
Pragmatic describes this approach as:
…developing solutions in the context of the total customer experience. Product managers, executives, and marketers in technology companies regularly meet with people [...]
BT Wants You to Give it Away
Generally speaking, telecoms don’t like it when you share a wireless network. If you’re sitting in an apartment building and decide to make your home wifi network open and unsecured, then the neighbor can use it - instead of paying a monthly broadband fee. In fact, your terms of service likely prohibit doing this, though [...]
Skype: Doublespeak over IP!
Apparently Skype isn’t just for free phone calls, it’s the cost-effective way to spread untelligible business babble! Forbes writer Daniel Lyons, in his Fake Steve Jobs persona, comments on Skype founder Nikklas Zenstrom’s weird comments on Ebay’s acquisition of his company - in which, it’s become quite clear, Ebay paid far too much:
Zennstrom says Ebay [...]
No Web Dessert Before Dinner
Back in the 90s, many marketers dreaded the inevitable web eye-candy request from an executive. You remember them: “Can’t we have… I don’t know, something that moves on the home page? It’s so boring.” Yep, the well-crafted copy that explained what the company was about and why a visitor should care, the images chosen to [...]
If a rat head is "rendered commercially sterile," does that mean it’s OK to eat if you find it in your green beans?
It is always instructive to see how a company responds when they’re in the negative news.
Earlier this year, Bigelow Tea did an excellent job using their web site and blog to communicate to their customers during the Don Imus flap. (Bigelow had been a sponsor of Imus’ show, before it went down in inglory for [...]
Another Twitter List
And not a dumb one this time. I’ve complained before about some of the ridiculous “marketing via Twitter” lists that have turned up; Ann Handley at MarketingProfs offers up a pretty sensible one that serves as nice place to start thinking about how Twitter can be useful.
I still am skeptical. Twitter is entertaining, and I [...]
