Categories
Great Marketing

Redemption

This year was interesting because 2 Darth Vaders came back to the light side for me.

After an incident more than 5 years ago over DSL that had me trying to get the FCC to take notice, Verizon showed up at my house with FIOS. Even though the DVR is crap compared to TiVo, overall I’ve been very happy with the blazing speed and HD Picture. I’m watching the Patriots turn it on right now as a matter of fact.

In a turnaround that took far less time, after bitching about Sprint treating me worse than someone they’ve never known, I decided on a lark to go to the local Sprint store rather than waiting on hold for another shot at the call center.

30 minutes later my new BFF Ludmilla hooked me and the lovely Carin up with new Palm Centros at the $99 rate. Incredible how fast things can move when you are working with someone who knows how to make things happen.

As part of the upgrade my bill ended up getting screwed up. After only 10 minutes on the phone it was corrected. If these big faceless corporations start making all the right moves what will I complain about in 2008?

Categories
Productivity Booster

Time to Subscribe

I’m doing the year end housecleaning today. If you are one of those freaky observant people you may have noticed the new subscription icons in the column on the left.

If you are not already a blog subscriber you must go to Google Reader now and start using it. It’s like an Outlook inbox for web pages, as pages are updated you get a notice in your inbox. No aimless surfing. I’m able to watch 153 websites daily without spending any time on the ones that haven’t added any new content.

The same technology powers podcasts, if you haven’t been subscribing to podcasts via iTunes, what the hell are you waiting for? These two productivity boosters will save you days in 2008 – days you can use at the beach.

Please subscribe… I’m getting back to the cleaning.

Thanks!

ps – If you have content you want people to subscribe to, Ron was kind enough to put together this list of the pages you can hit to get your own custom subscription buttons:

Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/add.html

Yahoo: http://publisher.yahoo.com/rss_guide/submit.php#addtomy

Bloglines: http://www.bloglines.com/about/subscribe

Newsgator: http://www.newsgator.com/thebutton.aspx

Categories
The Marketeer

Best of 2007

As I start my “Year in Review” process, there are some things that I wanted to take note of things I’ve found this year that I’m thankful for. I give you: The Ronis!

Best Blog – Curt Schilling’s 38 Pitches is the coolest thing in baseball. Real-time in-depth commentary from a guy in the game. Check out this post on the Mitchell Report over 3,500 words of insider stuff! Uhh – Sports Illustrated? Hello? McFly? Bueller? Anyone? My only complaint is that load times are sometimes a problem with over 750 comments on some posts (does number 643 really feel they are being heard?).

Best Podcast – None. Podcasting is languishing in the “Trough of Disillusionment“, all of the established casts are doing what they do, and doing it well. I’d say Marketing Over Coffee but that would be really lame to nominate my own stuff. The only other good news I have is that hopefully with the Harry Potter series closed maybe some of those casts will go away. Don’t believe the (lack of) hype, there’s still nothing cooler than getting niche stuff like TWiT, Manager Tools or Tips from the Top Floor, or Rumor Girls Uncut delivered to your iPod on a regular basis.

Best Movie – 10 Items or Less, actually not a 2007 movie, but that’s when it showed up in the Netflix cue and it’s the best thing I saw this year. With sequels being all the rage this summer, it was a sorry year for movies. Honorable mention for IMAX again this year.

Best TV Show – Heroes was interesting and entertaining, and I love the message about the human spirit. The fact that I cannot get it commercial free on iTunes really bothers me. I’m willing to pay cash, and if I didn’t have strong opinions about content producers getting paid it would be far easier for me to steal it off BitTorrent than get it anywhere else. Again – Helloooo? McFly? Anyone?

Best Book – Much like the Oscar’s I’m swayed by things that I’ve read late in the year. I’ve been very impressed with Michael Port’s Book Yourself Solid. If you are a one-person business and are trying to figure out how to grow and land more business, this book gives you step-by-step instructions and activites, it’s not fluff, it’s a real map. There are some other great books that I’d nominate but again it would be kind of manipulative to promote books that I’m mentioned in such as The New Rules of Marketing and PR, Email Marketing by the Numbers, and Join the Conversation.

Best Music – 2007 belonged to Matthew Ebel. In an industry that either sticks to an established (and rapidly dying) model, or just complains, he’s trying new stuff. For him it’s just a matter of time, not if, but when.

Best Email Provider – I’m using ConstantContact so they win.

Best SEO Firm – See above, for MoreVisibility

Best Web App, CRM Solution, and a bunch of other stuffSalesforce.com continues to blow me away. The most powerful piece of business IT out there just keeps getting stronger.

Best Country – China, thank you for saving my portfolio as the dollar continues to fall.

Best Owner of the Planet Earth – Google. Few people realize the extent to which they know all.

Best Comic – Sinestro Corps by DC beats out World War Hulk with its lame ending.

Best Video Game – Bioshock for the Xbox 360. Although this is a good year for game systems with the Wii doing an unprecedented shortage for a second year, I didn’t hear much chatter about great games besides this one. I’ll also give a shoutout to Gamespot, I’ve been a subscriber for years.

Please feel free to nominate others or tell me why my choices stink. Or better yet, make your own awards and give them a cool name. I would really like to see awards from Chicago Mike, Bryan Person, Ron, Christopher S. Penn, Jenny and Sarah.

Categories
The Marketeer

Blogs are Crap, Twitter is Worse

Looking back on 2007 I think the best person I met was Chip Griffin. He’s doing some cool stuff and is a real entrepreneur.

He just posted talking about Snack Media and I think he’s being far too polite. I think there’s been way too much hype over the past 5 years about the acceleration of media and how the next generation is so great at multitasking. Studies I have seen show that this type of partial attention causes significant fatigue and inability to concentrate. Couple this with the huge shortfall in engineering and sciences and we’re stuck with a dearth of texting, IM, ipod listening, all while driving, Comp.Lit. majors with no money earning or tax paying skills. Show me one job besides stock trader where being able to gather information simultaneously from multiple sources does you any good.

Surgeon? Sorry, I think there’s some books and med school behind that one. Professional video game player? You’ve got better odds trying to get into the NBA. I’m not saying anything new when I say that the successful go deep, not thin and wide.

To further illustrate that blogs are crap I have no references or links to these “Studies” that I have seen that are done by “some people”.

I was just talking with Ron this morning about how happy I am that twitter continues to grow so that all of the chatter that has no value can be flushed out of the blogs and flow down there. Twitter is great for “I’m here right now” stuff, such as having a chance to meet up with Jose when I was in San Francisco, but at best it’s either a shout-out tool or a pointer to more substantial stuff.

I’ll fully admit that my blog is often half thought out, undercooked chicken. But if you are somebody out there who’s asking the same kinds of questions and facing the same problems this is our chance to figure it out together and hopefully have some fun in the process. By no means would I ever say that this is ready to publish.

Please do yourself a favor and add at least one book to your holiday break and go deep, get the information and develop a thought process that is stronger than the average ADD crack addict.

And I will brush away anyone who raises a Scrooge defense by saying that: I don’t consider you, dear reader, among the great unwashed masses that I complain about, and I truly appreciate you subscribing to the copy I write and the audio I record. May you have a happy holiday season, and a bright, fun and successful 2008.

Categories
Lead Generation

The holy trinity

I’m starting to wireframe the architecture for a lead management system. I think I’ve got three legs to the stool – Salesforce.com, our website, and our marketing automation tool. 2008 is shaping up to be very interesting, I’m really looking forward to it.

In other random news I finally upgraded my Palm Treo 600 to a Palm Centro. It’s interesting, they’ve fixed a lot of things that were nagging me, yet there’s a whole new set of stuff that doesn’t work right. I’ve been going the power user route and playing with every single app, and as a result I’ve been crashing it at least once a day. The music software appears to be handcuffed to Windows Media Player 10, which is not going to happen. I’m sure there’s a way around this but I haven’t dug into it yet. It ships with 4 different apps that you can use to handle email, not only are you forced to play with all of them to try and figure out which one works best, but after testing them I think they all have major problems. Unfortunately I don’t have the energy to bitch about that now.

On the plus side the camera is much better…

Tomorrow is Friday, the finish line for the year end sprint is in sight.

Categories
Productivity Booster

Email Challenge

One podcast that has been on my subscription list forever is Manager Tools. I’ve been fortunate enough to experience managing some great teams and have had over 100 people under me in the org. chart, but I still get something worthwhile out of every episode.

They had a recent cast about schedule management and I realized that email has been taking up an increasing amount of my time. I’m going to see if I can corral my email management down to 4x per day. Let’s see if I can kick the habit… If only there was some kind of patch.

ps – I’m trowing twitter overboard too.

Categories
Geek Stuff

Awwww Yeah

The good news is that the holiday shopping is done and all the paperwork is signed and sealed for the Mortgage refinance. Gee, and only 10pm at night!

It goes without saying, I’ve got nothing for you but we can thank YouTube for preserving absurd humor…

[youtube]3XhS80rwjIg[/youtube]

Categories
Daily Life

Busier than a one legged man

So there was no M Show this week, in short I am drowning in holiday BS. Between last minute gift buying, two snowstorms that took a good 7 hours out of my work week, and normal “everybody trying to get that last deal closed for year end” I haven’t had any time to catch up on writing.

Regardless – there’s some cool news I wanted to share. Number one is that Marketing Over Coffee has a sponsor and that will be rolling out tomorrow. This has been a few months in the making and I’m very excited about it. Our partner gets fresh audio content, and we get to extend the conversation to some folks from outside the new media fishbowl.

Number two – (skipping the obvious 8 year old laugh there) Check out the latest from the NOTHING show, and improv podcast made up of the garbage that I’ve posted on twitter for the past couple of months. I think this is the first time anyone has played me in a dramatic production. Too bad I sound like an alcoholic dork. It’s also interesting to note that I usually only twitter when I’m angry, stuck in a line or traffic, or both.

I really enjoy improv and would love to do some kind of audio comedy, of course picking up a new project is a challenge – as you know from my complaining that I have to make an appointment in outlook to be sure I have enough time to get to a stall as opposed to crapping my pants at my desk (never actually happened to me, but I do know other executives that have had that problem). I feel busier than a 4 year old kid in a 3rd world clothing factory.
Ok, I have to go to bed. Oh, and to add a little extra fun – off to the dentist tomorrow morning. The party just never stops bro’.

Categories
Daily Life

Snowbound

I spent 3 hours in my car on Thursday after the snow started on a trip that should have been 25 minutes.

That’s why I haven’t posted much in the past couple of days, that screwed up both Thursday and Friday, I’ve been running around like a maniac. I then slept most of Saturday, finally getting a chance to rest.

Still cleaning things up today but I have acquired some interesting stuff, due to some delivery fiasco I had to go with the lovely Carin to pick up one of my Christmas gifts – a new workbench. It’s very hardcore, I don’t think I’d move it if we ever moved. We also got new cellphones, that’s a post in itself.

Most of the Christmas shopping is done and I shipped off a bunch of junk that I sold on ebay and ended up making $400.

And it’s snowing here again.

Snow

Categories
Geek Stuff

Some Hardcore Geek Humor

Friday viewing:

[youtube]JtNef6masDQ[/youtube]