Archive for February, 2008
Infobarter is Dead
It was long ago - back in the days when having a brochure-like web site was pretty much state of the art. Some forms, sure, some downloadable information, but it was a different day. Web sites should be pretty and branding-heavy, for people to look at. We wondered if that Y2K issue would amount to [...]
How to Twitter
Last week I gave a Social Media 101 talk at a conference, and at the beginning of the session I asked attendees about their current use of social media. A number of people were blogging or using social networks, but when I got to Twitter, one person in a room of fifty raised his hand.
It’s [...]
Illegal Legal Advertising - or is it Legal Illegal?
High up in my pantheon of most despised types of TV advertising are the legal ads. I cannot imagine the circumstances under which I would place a call to James R. Sokolove or the offices of Dane Schulman.
The ambulance-chasers seem to get more aggressive - and absurd - every year.
Anyone insult you in the office? [...]
Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin
Friends know that I am not a big fan of business books. In fact, one of my favorite business books every is the The Witch Doctors, which talks about why most business books are nonsense. That said, I do read them - one must keep up, right - and sometimes they are valuable. Meatball Sundae [...]
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #18
This is the eighteenth in a series of posts on the Practical Product Management rules from Pragmatic Marketing.
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #18: Name the product after positioning is finished.
Given that you want to make sure that your product name resonates in some way, this is a good rule of thumb to observe.
With your positioning complete, you [...]
Web Sites from Hell: Verizon
If a picture is worth a thousand words, sometimes a video is worth ten thousand. Have a look at Josh Hallett’s screencast of a trip to the Verizon web site to perform the incredibly complex task of finding out what a phone line costs.
I’ll spoil the ending: he never does find out. Verizon, like so [...]
"No."
Caught your attention, didn’t it?
Caught mine, too, when I saw the little white booklet inserted into The New Yorker with just that one little word on it, black on white.
So, I dislodged the little white booklet, which was a marketing piece from BMW.
And while I hope to get through the rest of my life without [...]
Stuck on Facebook
Got a Facebook profile? Well, if you decide you want to get rid of it, good luck: the New York Times reports that Facebook makes it very, very difficult to ever remove your information from the site:
Facebookâs Web site does not inform departing users that they must delete information from their account in order to [...]
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #17
This is the seventeenth in a series of posts on the Practical Product Management rules from Pragmatic Marketing.
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #17: You need a positioning document for each type of buyer.
In the beginning of technology marketing, when it came to communicating about our products, we mostly spoke techinese. We emphasized the features, and sometimes forgot [...]
The Business Model Shuffle
A recent AP article profiled a company called Baby Plays, the brainchild of Houstonian Lori Pope. The idea is simple: instead of buying lots of toys for your kid (and watching your kid get sick of them), Baby Plays will rent you toys Netflix-style; you get a set number for a monthly fee, and when [...]
