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Daily Life The Marketeer

Messaging goes beyond what you write

“Stay on message” or “What is our messaging” are tired old marketing phrases. Spending a lot of time crafting the first paragraph of your boilerplate company description, or for your website or press release is boring stuff. I’ve been thinking more about Jordan’s Furniture and other experiences that make me want to buy one thing over another.

I stick to a high protein diet because my body doesn’t seem to handle processed flour or sugar very well. As a result I tend to get tired of eggs for breakfast 7 days a week and have a protein shake instead. I was at the local nutrition store and they were out of the magic powder I normally buy. The guy working there said I should try another brand since the one I buy is from a company that does more marketing than research and they don’t have the best reputation.

On a side note – here’s a missed opportunity. I asked if they had samples of other products and he said no, but there was a money back guarantee. Like I’m going to buy some 5-gallon pail and take the time to drive it back to the mall if it tastes like oatmeal sludge. If they just had one open and I could give it a try, I could be riding another brand now.

The young man looked like he was student-aged and I would say of average build (except now it seems that means 15 lbs. overweight), as in pretty good shape. This was at lunch near work and there’s a similar store near my home (run by a different company though). I found the massive container I needed of my fave and went up to the register. The dude working here was about 6 ft. and probably around 220lbs, and could easily crush a monkey skull with his bare hands (i.e. jacked). He asked how I liked the Syntha6 and I said it tasted good. He said he really likes the products from that company and he’d have to try it. I’m no longer concerned if I’m with the right product.

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Daily Life The Marketeer

Seth Godin’s Next Big Thing

For the past 5 years I’ve had a major shift in my philosophy towards work and education. Forget being well-rounded – find one thing and do it better than anyone else. I was excited to see that Seth Godin has a new book coming out and a blog to go with it. If you are a fan, check out The Dip.

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Brain Buster Podcasting

Spiki and the new M Show

It’s Sunday and that means a new M Show…

I ran into my first Wiki Spam today. That’s my brainbuster – Spiki

Here’s why you should listen to the show: (Go there now)
M Show 142 – Massive, Clothes, Racing Against the Clock

Intro – Julien Smith from In Over Your Head

News:
Massive Running the Game
Time to look like The Economist
L.L. Bean – Web beats Stores
Boston Now – Coming soon
Ben Edelman continuing to rock the house.

Talk:
Worn out clothes
Idiocracy
Wiki Spam – Spiki?

Entertainment:
Racing Against The Clock

Support the M Show by using this link to shop at Amazon

Feedback to john@TheMShow.com

Categories
Daily Life

Blizzard of Snow and Paperwork

Today was one of those days where I had no events running so I was able to try and tame the paper snowbanks that had built up around my desk. I have a bad habit from a prior startup of just throwing invoices in the trash until I get a personal call or notice. Every day I say a prayer of thanks that I’m no longer in an environment like that (and of course M Show Productions, LLC pays bills realtime thanks to the miracle of PayPal and the internets).

My drive home was a disaster, snow has been falling since lunch, and unfortunately my new Garmin died on me this week so I had to ship it back for repairs. I think that BJ’s actually sold me a unit that had been returned b/c there were already some locations loaded on it. I’ve returned a bunch of stuff to BJ’s though so I thought I would cut them some slack, and it has worked fine for a month so I don’t think it has anything to do with that.

Obviously I’m rambling here after a busy week at work, have a good weekend!

-J

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Brain Buster The Marketeer

Big Webinar is Watching You

We ran another webinar today and there’s an interesting new feature. GoToWebinar can tell if the participant’s window is active or not. In other words, if someone is watching the webinar and they switch to another window (to surf the web or check email). A flag shows up on the presenter’s window and there’s an overall score for the percentage of people that are presumably paying attention. Pretty cool… and fun to fire off a quick IM to friendly attendees that aren’t paying attention.

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Graphic Design The Marketeer

Goin’ Double Wide

Back in the dark ages (about 5 years ago), designers would still worry about 800×600 screen size. My latest logs show that’s about 2% of my traffic. We’re blowin’ it out, and that means room for Revver – hello higher quality video!

revver(119372)

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SalesForce.com SEO and Paid Search

IT’S ALIVE! and Google too.

After literally months of struggling we finally managed to get the SalesForce.com / Google integration going. I’m definitely geeking out, but how cool is it to look at a closed deal and say “one year ago you searched for this specific term, we paid $2.75 for that click and it turned into a 6-figure deal”. Lots of cool stuff, now all we need is for some data to pile up.

In other Google news I was invited to take part in a beta for cost per click (CPC) ads in the content network. Up until now you could only pay cost per click for Google search results, not their affiliate sites. There’s also supposed to be some way to choose which sites in the content network you want to be featured on. I couldn’t find these features, but it’s not the first time I’ve been unable to find stuff in Adwords (and I’m not alone).

And finally, I’ll be rolling some site upgrades out in the next 24 hours…

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Brain Buster SEO and Paid Search The Marketeer

SEO is Dead

Last week I had heard some rumblings about Google continuing to use individual search history to influence results. There are differing opinions on this but I am all for it. If, after months of searching, Google realizes that I can’t speak spanish, then it would be great if I never had to see any results in spanish.

But this begs the question: What will SEO vendors do when there are no consistent results? At first I thought they would become some sort of modified copywriters, a few best practices, but mainly focused on writing quality content. Now I’m thinking it may even go beyond that – who’s willing to tie conversion results to the work they do?

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Productivity Booster The Marketeer

Jordan’s Furniture and Seth Godin

Seth Godin had a great post last week about performing a show as part of business. It reminded me of the profound advice up on the wall at my local Jordan’s Furniture – “There’s no business that’s not show business”

Categories
Podcasting Productivity Booster

iTunes Sorting and The M Show

Normally this would be my normal Sunday plug for the latest M Show (go listen to it, or better yet – subscribe!), but while tagging the file I found something cool in the newest version of iTunes.

You can now create separate tags such as Artist and Album for sorting in iTunes. You need to be a bit of a compulsive freak or have a huge music library to have seen the need for this (I’ll leave the judgement on me to your discretion). Let’s say you have your favorite artist’s new album and you rip it to iTunes. Then you’re searching by artist and you pull up the album and, Lo and behold, 3 tracks are missing. This often happens if the missing tracks are duets or have a famous backup singer, while you are searching under “Lawrence Welk” the track is actually buried under “The Lemon Sisters and Lawrence Welk”.

I used to just dump the second artist (in many cases I had no idea who the hell they were anyway), but now for those tracks with two famous artists you can choose which one you want to file the track under. Or, for the compulsive, have it in the library twice, once under each artist and still have it show as “The Lemon Sisters and Lawrence Welk”.

Happy Sorting!