is not to have a plan. I could write some pointers, and I’d just be covering some ground that Jeff Pulver has already laid out in a straightforward fashion.
And this is not to say that your plan has to be all business. I only had 3 goals at Podcamp Pittsburgh and one of them was to get this picture:
photo by Kimberly Reed
If you are at Podcamp Boston and you need a picture with somebody, just ask, I’m sure we can find them in the crowd.
It’s the weekend so I’m free to write a geek post after another week of marketing. I was lucky enough to skip out of work for a few hours and catch a presentation from Jeff Hoffman of Basho Strategies. He’s a world class presenter and the best salesman that I have ever met, he understands the dynamics of the deal and I would recommend him for anyone that needs a speaker for a sales kickoff or workshop.
After significant debate we have replaced Carin’s dying Dell Latitude LS400, a fine machine, rather dated, but still great (the monitor is the only weakness that you can’t get around – 800×600 doesn’t cut it anymore).
In order to reduce the tech support load that I bear for the family we will slowly transition everyone over to Macs.
Rather than religious debate, here’s what I know:
The other thing is that so far I have no downside to report. Not having dreamweaver is one thing but I can boot windows up so I may mess around with that.
It’s so powerful that you only have to read step 1.
I’ve been fortunate enough (if you want to call it that), to have now spent more that 10 years doing website redesigns. There have been perhaps 7 times during my career where I’ve considering stabbing someone in the throat with my pen to stop the insanity during a meeting, and 5 of those were during website-by-committee meetings.
Seth says those are instant deal breakers – he’s making the world a safer place AND keeping me out of prison. I can’t thank him enough.
Today is officially BlogDay, you can get the story and original recommendations in my previous post.
Just a few other things I read that are always great:
I’m a salesforce.com insider by reading SalesforceWatch.
On the small business tech font, and for Tales of Chicago check out Chicago Mike.
Most readers know I’m still going through Sex and the City withdrawal, The Pink Shoe Diaries help me cope.
As a comic fan (aka – Fanboy, aka – dork) Title Undetermined makes me laugh.
I’m also giving a second plug for Mike Champion because he needs a dose of the Google Juice, and mentioning GameSpot which is not a blog but still full of great info.
I just posted the latest and best marketing podcast, and I mentioned Salary.com. This service has run me anywhere from 29-79 dollars a year and the least it has ever generated for me in a year is $3,000. If every investment of mine paid off like that I’d already be on my beach house in Nantucket.
It simply takes most of the voodoo out of the compensation question – instead of pulling an number out of the sky I can go see what the average marketing guy with 15 years in business, graduated from the one and only UMASS, working at a software company of under 100 employees in the Boston area gets. And go from there.
Market opinion is very squishy, market data has to be challenged with other data.
With the holiday next week I was setting up my calendar for the week after that and found that the next WebInno meeting is coming up that Monday, July 9th. If you want to see what’s going on at the cutting edge of internet technology in Boston these meetups are required viewing. Just sign up on the wiki and show up to watch the presenters give a short demo, and check out the other presenters around the room and mingle at one of the better Tech who’s-who in Boston. I’ll be there and have managed to convince some other Boston bloggers and podcasters to show up so swing by if you’d like to grab a drink.
One of the presenters for next week – Digitalbrix has an interesting value prop – a SaaS offering that allows users to build simple games with out writing code like javascript, flash, etc. I’m very interested in checking this out some more, anyone that has done any web marketing has had a point where someone on high gets the itch to try and create a Flash based game.
David Beisel (the webinno organizer) connected me to Naveena Swamy, a founder at Digitalbrix and I had a chance to chat with her for a few minutes about what they are working on. Casual gaming is a huge market so there weren’t many surprises about the growth potential there, but there were two things that stretched my brain a bit. One was that I mentioned that this would be a powerful tool, and she said that a more important point was that it allowed greater collaboration. With a more powerful tool there’s now less friction between the artist, game concept designer etc. This can be expanded to include everyone playing the games which then generates an entire community.
The thing that resonated even more with me was the ability to use a system like this for prototyping. I can see this as a huge value in designing marketing campaigns. Rather than pick a vendor out of a hat and throw them $10,000 for one campaign, put together 4 or 5 concepts to test before making a final decision. That changes the game completely. Now where am I going to find some free time to play around with this myself?
I’m trying to do a “Year in Review” and I’m thinking about what has had the most impact in the past 12 months. We’re talking about things that will change your front line marketing tactics. Here’s my rough list:
I’d really like to hear what you have to say about this list and what would be on your list. Anyone that provides useful feedback will be acknowledged in the final report with a link at the bare minimum. There are a couple of large brains that I am going to call out by name, but don’t let my link baiting discourage you from giving your opinion:
Christopher Penn, Mitch Joel, C.C. Chapman, Joseph Jaffe, Ron Ploof
As a marketeer, I have never heard these words.
Just kidding, I get it at least twice a month. This is the age old struggle between sales and marketing, and with marketing being the creative side there are thousands of responses: “The sale begins at ‘No’, you order taking monkey”, “I give the good leads to closers” etc.
It’s all in good fun, kind of like complaining about cafeteria food, you do it regardless of whether the food is from the best chef or a can. If you are hitting your numbers everyone is happy, if not everyone is pissed off.
But there are things you can do to improve your leads. I’ve been working on our process to screen leads via a survey on SurveyMonkey (a web-based survey tool), and it’s working wonderfully. You get a new list, send them a few questions and you manage to filter out maybe 20%: 5% look a lot better than average and 15% is crap the sales guys don’t have to eat.
Keep in mind I can give a sales guy a hard time, but that’s because I share their goal – they should be able to blow their number out before the 3rd month of the quarter so they don’t have to come in to the office for the last month if they don’t want to (and I don’t have to listen to them). They should really never have to work Fridays, and Mondays should be exclusively for golf. This is the path to a happy workplace.
For more great info on lead gen I turn to Brian Carroll, he’s a thought leader in this space. Here’s some more info on Sales and Marketing playing well together.
The purchase and sale agreement has been signed so it looks like we are off to a new home! I’ve already begun going through stuff to try and ease the move, and I thought it would be fun to throw my own virtual yard sale. Actually the stuff is on eBay, but I thought it would be interesting to see if any readers were interested. If anybody reading this buys any of the stuff I’ll waive the shipping fees.
Three items for sale:
A Netgear Wired 5-Port Switch, if you are going to wire up some machines for gaming or just want more wired ports at your desk (perfect for trade shows booths or conference rooms).
A Linksys Wired Router, same deal as above but with more features (but I’ve had some trouble getting Apple TV and the XBox 360 extender to work with it, LOL).
And the best for last: A Wacom drawing tablet. Drawing with a mouse is like trying to draw with a potato, a must for illustrators.
Enough with the commercial break, a post about marketing in 20 minutes…
Dan York passed on an interesting rumor.