Jay Ehret comes through with another awesome post: Fearless Marketing Tactic: Wear A Black Cocktail Dress The little black dress may work for some, but you’ve got to have the right feature set. I don’t – I tried it and I was laughed out of the bar. Think about what the real assets of your product are and how to feature them in the best light and you’ll never be far from wrong.
David Churbuck linked to the Ben Worthen story in the WSJ yesterday entitled “Why Most Online Communities Fail“. David points out that a simple typo from a Deloitte powerpoint managed the ruin the story and deflect the discussion from the matter at hand to a moot discussion on percentages. 1. Going out with the claim that 60% of businesses invest over $1 million in online communities thanks to a Deloitte typo that should have stated 6% is not a great…
I started working with Mysql Workbench 5.0.23 today, which they list as the successor to the sometimes buggy, sometimes brilliant FabForce DB4 mysql modeling tool. I”m not the guy to give you a feature by feature breakdown on the product, but I can tell you this: When you create a new product version you should never take what were free features in the predecessor and make them extras you only get in the “standard edition.” In this case, the import…
I’ve said it before, but this post especially requires that I state it clearly again: I am a New England Yankee. That means that I possibly have a heightened sense of propriety and generally would consider a lot of things marketing-wise as crossing the line that some of you might not have a problem with. I’m noticing lately that a lot of marketing types are spending a lot of time on micro-blogging tools such as Twitter, FriendFeed (the new darling),…
Yup, apparently the fine folks at the Harvard Business Review have been looking, and the mantra of web marketing, “The Long Tail” apparently may be long, but it’s also very flat, almost impossible to monetize and it smells really bad (okay, maybe it doesn’t actually smell…). The patterns that emerge in my research suggest that we won’t soon leave what Anderson calls “the water cooler era.” These patterns are far from new: They were described by William McPhee in the…
Say it ain’t so, Joe! Over the past few weeks, it’s begun to look like Social Networking, the current darling of the conference and consultant set, might have jumped the shark. I personally would peg the exact point where it went careening off track as the day that Waste Management (the guys that probably run your local honey truck) opened their own social networking site. But it goes far beyond that. Earlier this week Om Malik wrote a very interesting…
Regarding my post yesterday about the Implied Responsibility of Comms Providers, two things happened over night that bear mentioning. Twitter again was down for a couple hours starting at 4pm EDT, or so. Users were a lot less charitable in their comments. I really think they’re at stage 2 in the matrix I provided, but I’ve seen the first signs that they’re moving from step 2 to step 3, which is a very bad thing for Twitter. Jeremiah Owyang tweeted…
One of the outcomes of my testing of Twitter lately is that I’ve come to question whether or not Social Media has jumped the shark (props t David Churbuck who tweeted on social media jumping the shark this morning – I initially left the attribution out to save the fall out, but since he linked, no need to save him…) What I am finding is that most of the people I am finding in my general circle on Twitter are…
Guess what, superior customer service and knowing your customers needs wins out. Just ask the folks of Home Depot #4552 who got beat by the little guy across the street. From the Boston Globe He and his brothers, who’ve operated their store for 35 years, had heard the stories about big-box stores and their low prices driving competitors into the ground. So the store stuck to what it does best – good customer service, competitive prices, and a willingness to…
I haven’t tried it yet, but there are reports from many sectors that Apple is offering free wireless access for Iphone users at Starbucks locations. Very strange when you consider that we have Edge network access and generally don’t need a regular wireless network. Here’s the method though: there is a minor hack that will allow PC or Mac users to access for free: all they have to do is fire up Safari and then going to Edit->Advanced checking off…