For a huge change of pace I am not hitting you up for money. Thanks to the listeners of Marketing Over Coffee (and my family – thanks John and Helen), I’ve hit the goal so that I don’t have to pay any more than the entry fee out of my own pocket. But as a valued reader of this blog, you can still help out, and help someone you know.

During the race volunteers will be making care packages for service men and women in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are saying they will have far more care packages than recipient names. They’ll probably all be sent regardless, but, if you know anyone serving there send me their information and they will be sent one of these care packages. It would be best if I get the info before Tuesday, you can email me at john at them$how dot c0m ($=s), or friend me up on twitter @johnjwall and DM me.

I’ll also have to post some pics of the official Marketing Over Coffee race shirt…

I had to wait before entering the driveway at the Microsoft NERD center because a guy in a black cop car was going the wrong way out the entrance. As I pulled in around some other cars I noticed the Governor entering the building. Of course I don’t have my good camera, and am just barely dressed well enough just to show up. The good news is that after I’ve finished the book I’ll be setting up a time to talk with Jeffery Bussgang for a Marketing Over Coffee session.

Aside from that it’s been a challenging week, my sister-in-law’s mother passed away yesterday, and my father-in-law was in the hospital yesterday also so there’s been a lot of running around. Hopefully it will be a restful weekend before The Last M Show on Monday.

Sorry for burdening you with my personal tales, to make it up to you here’s a good interview with author Daniel Pink from crack team at the Spark Podcast. Mr. Pink (so psyched I could squeeze that in) has a new book talking about how motivation works. You can watch the video here: Interview with Daniel Pink, or get the audio by subscribing to the John Wall Gigadial station.

The idea of having a Google Premier customer service one is a very good one, the problem is that it is completely contrary to Google culture. Just like their search algorithm, determining when accounts are compromised and locked needs to be a fully automated one for it to scale. The other issue is that just because you have a premier service account representative, that doesn’t change the fact that the problem is probably technical in nature and the rep is only going to be able to say “Yes, we are working on it as fast as we can.” If it’s down, it’s down and no amount of inbound complaints will change that.

If you go with the paid service at leads you have a Service Level Agreement (SLA), but really this is just an insurance policy. If there’s a big problem you will be compensated, but you will still have to go through the pain.

An Attorney I used to work with had a unique job working for an organization that was unlike any other. He used to say “I’m the best there is, and I’m also the worst, because I am the only one.” Having your week messed up is a huge hassle, but I’m sure none of those guys are getting a new Hotmail account set up now.

On the other hand, it’s easy for me to keep a level head not having been locked out. I was wondering you feel the same way about this that I do – when I am locked out of an account or technology doesn’t perform as it normally does it really bothers me. Literally ruining my day and putting me in a bad overall mood. I’ve been robbed a couple of times and I put technology failure right up at the same level. How about you?

What would you consider to be a typical setup for a small booth? Signage? Table? etc. Is there anything that is a MUST have for a trade show booth besides marketing materials?

The biggest mistake people make is not having a plan for what they want to accomplish at the show. It should be either to get leads, in which case you want to give something away or hold a contest to get all the names you can, engage leads already in the pipe, where you are really going to party with a short list of people you are trying to close business with, or you are going because you are a big company in your space and it would be noticed if you weren’t there.

Aside from that Trade Shows are basically a big waste of time and money.

Depending on your answer to the above, that will dictate what you need to do. If it’s #1 you’ll want signage pushing your giveaway or contest. #2 just have a banner with your company name and a big comfy couch for when the big wheels come along. For #3 burn thousands of dollars on an custom booth so that your competitors look small and weak.

Pay no attention to the other vendors or show standards – figure out what you want to accomplish and do that, the rest of it is a waste of resources.

Stunts on the show floor is a category all its own…

Sharing booth space is a great way to get into shows without spending much. Partnering can save you tons of money, especially on shows that are new, or you’ve never tried before.

For signage, these guys do a good job at the right price – make sure you get the lamp to attach to the banner. I’m a big fan of avoiding the “show up and throw up” – logo and 5 words beat big paragraphs – it’s just to attract attention, not do the selling.

There were two companies I found interesting, and I thought instead of just throwing out links I’d make some comments (i.e. unsolicited advice) to see if that would generate any conversation.  The first was Conversion Associates with their product Lytiks. Some very interesting stuff with provisioning VOIP lines so that you can generate phone numbers for your website and have that information integrated into your web analytics. There were two things that came to mind after talking with them, one was from a branding side, I’m not big on companies less than $20M having to grow both a company name and a product name, but that’s a minor point (which saves a lot of money in the long run).

The other was on the product marketing side – I think Salesforce.com integration is critical anyone making this type of software. There are three reasons why this is important:

1. Having a second dashboard or tool to login to significantly reduces usefulness for the marketing team, and unless it can integrate into a screen for a sales rep it’s either useless or another set of reports for the marketing team to run every week.
2. The AppExchange gives you access to a global market of people buying this kind of stuff all the time.
3. If you are successful on the AppExchange it will be obvious and you won’t have to prove your case to suitors. (On that note – has anyone seen any data on SF.com acquisitions of partners?)

This is also one of those segments that’s very new and regardless how the product does the members of the team will learn a lot that can be applied in many ways. Congrats to them for cutting a new trail.

The other company was Homefield, that has a really cool product that allows sports teams to review video in a collaborative environment. Instead of getting everyone to the cafeteria one night a week to watch a DVD of last week’s game everyone can go online, watch and comment.

It looks like they are doing well at the collegiate level but one thought that I had was to swing at the fences. Picking off one college at a time via word of mouth is an excellent way to grow organically, but we do have a pro athlete notorious for pouring through video who is also in the startup scene (the case study is pretty fun if you are into baseball). I don’t know any of the details on back end infrastructure but it seems like it might be a lot more profitable to work with 2 or 3 MLB teams than a ton of colleges. That said, it’s a very cool product and (literally) a game changer.

So what happened next? The good news is I did have my backup drive, so I had all the data even though I didn’t have access to the MySQL install anymore. I have an older laptop I use for crazy projects with my Tivo and GPS, and I installed XAMPP and WordPress so I could run the blog from that machine as it’s own web server. From there I was able to dump the database into an export file and then import that up on to the new server. I had to zero out all the tables for the import to work, but that was the only glitch there, it was about as smooth as I hoped it could be.

There are still a few broken things, mainly plugins that may or may not be active, if you see anything odd please give me a yell. Thanks also to the Marketing Over Coffee fans that stepped up to offer help, I really appreciate that.

For some reason, it’s been all about me this week. Bob decided to name this week’s episode of the Beancast after me (because of the snappy jingles he introduced for each co-host this week).

Then, high school basketball phenom John Wall signed with the University of Kentucky, causing “John Wall” to trend on Twitter. Two people mentioned it to me this morning, Mike Volpe over at HubSpot who blogged about it, and my nephew Ben watching SportsCenter at home. I mentioned to Ben that some of the hoop scouting blogs said he had “shady handlers” and was arrested for breaking and entering a few weeks ago. He said “Yeah, sounds like the kid’s going to the NBA”. I don’t believe any of the negative press about John, from what I’ve heard about the moral and ethical standards of college recruiters I believe that people would say anything to make him look bad in the eyes of other schools.

In an even more bizarre coincidence I went to UMass during John Calipari’s run, and I have the picture to prove that this is not the first time Calipari/Wall has been on film. For those who don’t follow College Hoops, Calipari energized UMass as coach starting in 1988, and is now at Kentucky and got the Blue Chip recruit for the Blue Cats.

Calipari and Wall circa 1996

UMass basketball is a topic for another post, but let me at least say that when I was a Freshman I could walk in at any time during a game and get to be within 5 rows of the team, by the time I left people were sleeping out over night in the cold to enter ticket lotteries. I’d like to say that this is because I am the ultimate UMass hoops fan, but the truth is that one of my classmates was on the Women’s team and they played before the guys and I used to watch both games.

The hot recruit from Word of God, NC is not even the closest match, there’s an Attorney in Maine named John J. Wall III, a California photographer, the guy who owns JohnWall.com, and a CEO who grew his first company to $150M (that’s the record I’m shooting for and I’ll be happy with 1/5th of that). There’s also one of those emails that your crazy Uncle sends you with a long letter about sending liberals to some other country or something, written by a John Wall. I usually ignore the Facebook requests from that one, although I give special attention to ultra conservative groups asking for my help to overthrow the government and add them to my firewall block list, as well as the conservative students that all seem to be female, from southern schools, in sororities and tend to have interesting spring break pictures. I may have friended a couple of those, or at least passed the links on. (Hello people?!? One day you may be looking for JOBS….)

Bringing it back to the stuff I normally write about – it’s interesting how technology deals with the brand mismatch. I knew that this college recruiting season would be a big deal almost 2 years ago, the first time John started getting attention from college scouts and showing up in my Google Alerts.

After months of tuning my Alert has been honed to:

“John Wall” -basketball -recruit -God -duke -kentucky -miami -”California Nature”

As a result I’m still getting info about me and I didn’t get a single alert about him signing today.

On the other hand is my own brand. While it is true that I no longer own page 1, I’m still listed there. When I first saw this coming I also did a little research and noted that the Michael Jordan who teaches stats at Cal Berkeley always has a spot on the first page, regardless of what #23 is up to. That and the fact that there are injuries to be avoided and rings to be won before the chance of the press really piling up for Wall, and as much as I think it would be great to see him go up to the big show, the odds are tough (but I think he can pull it off).

As long as I continue to generate content (especially in the off season), I’ll show up in the places I need to. There’s also another post in the fact that I am not looking to grow market awareness, I’m already at a point of having to turn down projects to work on because there are not enough hours in the day. My focus is not on getting more eyeballs, but generating more value in a fixed period of time for my stakeholders and myself.

The JohnWall.com URL has been gone for years, I do have john-wall.com and all other relevant URLs on watch lists so I’ll be notified if they come up. I do use my name in the Title tag over at The M Show, but podcast blogs are already in the hole when it comes to Google juice with the normal cast getting 75% or more of the action from iTunes. And don’t tell anyone but The M Show was written off about 6 months ago, I still do it for fun and the remaining “subscribers” that I just call friends and family.

This will probably end up being one of the topics we discuss tomorrow morning on Marketing Over Coffee, so be sure to check out the Thursday show. One final plug – Chip Griffin had me on as a guest for the Bullseye Media Radio (aptly titled “All Stupid, All the Time”), you can check that out here. Congrats to John and Coach Cal, you’ll be on my brackets for the next couple of years!

Here’s the live Marketing Over Coffee from the PRSA, it was cool to have a crowd bigger than the staff of Dunks for the show. If you are into marketing you may find it entertaining, for everyone else, I’d suggest Hot Rod over this for entertainment value.

I’m also up for using Martinis as a defense for the sub-zero weather this evening. Tweet @karenrubin if you want to see the show at One Broadway in Cambridge, or hit me to reserve a spot at the post show cooldown.

Execution. That’s the hard part. Building a product, leading a team, being profitable – you can’t just talk about it.