Author: themshow

Categories
Gaming The Marketeer

Big Bumpin’

I was a the local Burger King this week feeding my junk food addiction with one of my favorites – the Burger King Chicken sandwich – basically the chicken equivalent of a hotdog, rolled in batter and deep fried. Add a toasted bun, mayo and lettuce and I’m ready for the defib to zap my rapidly hardening arteries.

BK has a great campaign going now where if you buy a value meal you can get an XBox game for $3.99. The games run on both the new Xbox 360 and the original Xbox. Always a sucker for a novel campaign, and a card carrying gamer I had to try one out. I immediately had to laugh as I asked for a copy of “Big Bumpin“. Am I just being too Beavis and Butthead or does this seem outright blatant:
The lit marquis on the game cover says “Big Bumpin'” and you’ve got the king, known for slinging the meat, and his huge (game) cock right there with him. I haven’t actually had time to try it out myself but the reviews on the gamers sites I hit now and then say that this is the best of the three and not bad, especially at the price. So if you hear that 70’s scratch guitar theme later these week, you know I’ll be busy in round of Big Bumpin’ with the King and will deliver my verdict.

Categories
Brain Buster SEO and Paid Search

Big Google is Watching You

I had a chance to chat with one of the Crayonistas last night and he tipped me off to this:

http://www.google.com/psearch

I feel like Shatner… “This is going to be big, REALLY big”

Categories
Daily Life The Marketeer

Live, from Second Life, IT’S THURSDAY NIGHT!

So I just got off stage from talking about paid search at the Second Life Case camp. It was a lot of fun, but I have this problem talking about new media, I have an irrational fear of running out of content so as a result I always set up too much content and end up presenting like an ADD crack addict that’s just shotgunned 3 triple espressos. At least it feels that way, hopefully it sounds a little better than that.

I’m working on the company newsletter and starting to flesh out a blogger relations program. Tomorrow will also release the next SCM Podcast from AccuRev, for those of you into learning about SCM and SOA (Rock on!). There’s also the holiday gift story that is still evolving so I am unable to speak about it at the present time (but when I can, it will be worth it, I have some venting to do). With that, thank you ladies and gentleman, you’ve been great, try the virtual veal, it’s excellent!

Categories
Daily Life Email Marketing

Holiday Battles

Yesterday was consumed by 3 items: an email campaign, an unbelievable story involving our corporate holiday gift (when it’s done I will tell this tale, for now all I can say is that I want to jam a coffee cup so far up someone’s (*&@#$ that they can taste it), and my evening trying to get my Second Life avatar not to look like a blue Celine Dion.

A lot of those moments when I sit back and remind myself of a quote from Winston Churchill (or maybe Roosevelt?), something about “All that matters is persistance, that’s the only way things get accomplished”.

My open rates for the email campaign are a little bit low, I’m averaging mid-twenties, ConstantContact is saying the average across all their customers is 37%. I’m thinking that since many small businesses use CC that there are a lot of small lists that perform better (like my M Show mailing list that has something ridiculous like 60% open 50% clicks). The good news is the clicks are twice the CC average, and most importantly I always see a good list of Company names that have some F-1000 cache.

I’m at CaseCamp Second Life tonight, but I’m sorry, it’s sold out. I’ll probably record my session and post it later.

On the plus side Shel Holtz picked up my Web 3.0 video, and then Steve Rubel posted his link in his daily links – thanks to both of them. Not bad for a newbie blogger!

Categories
SalesForce.com

Boston Salesforce.com Meetup

Salesforce.com is holding an event here in Boston on Jan 23rd at the Hyatt Harborside. Here’s a link for more info, if you are going to be there feel free to send me an email, this is my first one and it would be cool to know somebody else going.

Categories
Geek Stuff Productivity Booster

Embedding YouTube in a WordPress Post

Ok, so I thought that last post would be easy… how hard could it be to embed a YouTube video into a post? One hour later…

Thanks to this dude, Viper, and his WordPress video plugin, it rocks.

Categories
Brain Buster The Marketeer

Web 3.0 – Part 2 – Killing Banner Ads

As a follow up to a previous post on Web 3.0, my friend Ron mentioned that I wasn’t as clear as I could be in explaining how page views are being wiped out. I found it was much easier to make a movie about it than explain it. What do you think?

[youtube]e4UEvSwfa5s[/youtube]

Categories
Brain Buster Geek Stuff Productivity Booster The Marketeer

Multimedia-Content Management System

So I got a demo of Brainshark about a week ago. The idea of a Multimedia-Content Management System was a bit of a brainbuster for me. To boil it down – now that anybody with a decent computer and the right software can create some kind of multimedia presentation, you need a system to manage these presentations, better yet make them simple to create and host. It was funny because I talked to some people over there a couple of years ago before I started working at MarketingSherpa.

I had to go with a hyphen to make it clear that this is not a Content Managment System (CMS) with a Multimedia interface, but rather a tool to manage media that includes audio and video. I was impressed with the system, but the content generators I am working with now are extremely technical so simplifying the process is not a pain point for me (yet). We are using Camtasia to generate video files and I’ve found that a Shure SM-58 mic into a Mobile Pre USB does a great job of capturing audio.

The UI reminded me of Macromedia Breeze, a tool I have not had a chance to try out. Last time I tried to get a copy it was around the Adobe acquisiton and it was hard for me to even figure out who to call to buy it, I just gave up.

Enough rambling, I’m off to bed… did you listen to the podcast yet?

Categories
Geek Stuff Productivity Booster The Marketeer

Second Life versus GoToWebinar

I’m going to be talking in Second Life (SL) on Thursday as part of a CaseCamp. CaseCamp is when a bunch of Marketeers get together and talk about stuff they’ve been trying (at least that’s what I’ve been told, this is my first). I’m looking forward to it because I’d written off Second Life, it’s very cool but First Life is kicking my ass right now so I don’t really have the time to figure out how to get my Avatar to stop dancing or where to buy a shirt for a virtual person. When I heard about CaseCamp though, I jumped on it (it’s all about the content, yadda yadda yadda).

I’m interested to see how it compares to other online collaboration tools. Between the new version of GoToMeeting and a good conference call service that’s a combination that may be an overpowering heavyweight to a challenger like Second Life and Skype, but we’ll put it to the test on Thursday.

My prediction? Yes, prediction. Pain. (Sorry, just carried away with an obscure Rocky III reference, I may even see the new one.) G2M can handle 200+, SL’s servers aren’t in that weight class yet, but I’m only about 3 hours ahead of a SL n00b so we’ll see what I might be missing.

Categories
Daily Life Podcasting

The M Show – I hate the holidays

It’s Sunday, so yet again you can cruise over and check out the latest M Show, your favorite Business Podcast, which will be posted as soon as the upload finishes.

Find out why I hate the holidays, the government, and why I have to short change charities this year so I can bear my tax burden.

You can also build your own movie trailer here.