String Cheese Incident playing “Black and White” on Austin City Limits – date unknown. String Cheese is commencing their farewell tour now, so if you like it, go to StringCheeseIncident.com and get out to see this great jam band before their gone… On a side note, I was shocked how hard it was to find a decent String Cheese music video. Note to SCI fans, 30 second cell phone videos aren’t worth your time to upload to YouTube. If you…
As a blogger, you’ve seen it. Tons of spam infesting your blog and wasting your time, and most of it’s coming in via your trackbacks (trackbacks, or pings are an automated means of notifying another blog that you’ve quoted them, by posting a comment and a link back to your blog), hitting your older posts, and basically robbing your site of it’s dignity. I’ve noticed over the past few months that more and more bloggers are simply turning off the…
John Whiteside has a great post up where posits that as marketers, we need to be sure the means of communication is appropriate to the message. He notes that he was contacted on his phone by his auto dealer to remind him his car was due for service, and also by his insurance company just as a thank you for being their customer. His point: That’s not a bad reason to contact a customer, but it’s a horrible reason to…
Seth Godin’s got a great pointer to a Cory Doctorow essay which is a must for anyone moderating forums or online communities, particularly dealing with Trolls. From Cory: Teresa is a troll-whisperer. For some reason, she can spot irredeemable trolls and separate them from the merely unsocialized. She can keep discussions calm and moving forward. She knows when deleting a troll’s message will discourage him, and when it will only spark a game of whack-a-mole. Teresa calls it “having an…
Today I’m thinking about business blogs. The question in mind is this: who should you be writing for? Your customers, the industry at large, or anyone who happens to drift by on the winds of the internet? I’m going to admit that I’m a prime offender here. Although this is generally a business blog, I spend most of my time writing about the engine room stuff of marketing, web design/development and traffic analysis. Much of it is not only stuff…
For those that read about the Alpa Girl marketing yesterday, I’m gonna make a prediction – my Geek Girl is gonna out earn your Alpha Girl! MIT came up with a computer language called “Scratch” (the site is swamped now, read this article in the Boston Globe to get an idea) which uses graphical representations to allow kids (and everyone) to learn the basics of programming and logic. The software has a speedy ramp up and kids generally can have their…
An opportunity arose the other day for a good position (a step up in title, if not in $$$$) but it presented the standard paradox that the marketing hired gun often faces. The company is basically a poster child for a completely wrecked business model. Now, on the face of things, I’d say that it probably represents an interesting opportunity. You see, it would be hard *not* to have a positive affect on the company. They’re doing so little right,…
Vario customer Sam Whitmore 0f MediaSurvey.com was quoted in the New York Times today in an article about the PCWorld editorial dustup last week. Congratulations to MediaSurvey.com. Tip: if you are in tech marketing and need info on dealing with Tech Publications, you should be reading MediaSurvey. Sam is also now blogging here offering a taste of the great information he provides to his subscribers at MediaSurvey.
As a parent of an 8 and a 9 year old girl, I’m learning a lot about marketing lately from the other side of the fence. The funny thing is, some of the things I see working are exactly the types of things we marketing types have been railing against, such as the SecondLife.com type virtual world marketing. The thing is that while I may have grown up in a world without an Internet, my daughters have grown up in…
I just opened my Google Analytics page and found a pleasant surprise, a new interface! I’ve barely cracked the surface, but I’ll give you a quick rundown of the changes I see. New icon based gui, using *much* larger type Configureable dashboard view Emailable reports Ability to schedule reports On the surface, it looks like they’ve made a great step forward towards becoming a threat towards the high end pay packages. I’ll be digging in deeper over the weekend. Read…