Blog

I was thinking this morning (words that send shudders down my co-workers spines and often trigger epileptic fits in bosses)…

One of the talk show hosts I was listening to this morning made a comment to the effect that “energy saving appliances and renewable energy sources will not enter widespread use until they’re economically viable.” Simple statement, but my experience says that he’s dead wrong.

Your see, in the last home I owned (I live in Massachusetts, the archetypal blue state) came equipped with a solar hot water heater that preheated both the water for the home and the water for the heating circulator. During the summer, I rarely had to turn on the boiler to get hot water for showers, and in the winter, the system cut my fuel bills to the point that I probably used around 3 tanks of oil per season. I have no baseline, but I’ve got to think the savings were substantial.

It was a virtually fool-proof system. A small pump circulated a closed loop of fluid through the panels on the south facing roof over the garage, which then circulated through a large plastic holding tank where the heat was exchanged. Then that water was used for domestic hot water, or preheated the water for the heating system. In the time I owned the house, 5 years, I only had the installers out once, and that was because I had no idea what kind of maintenance it needed when I bought the house and called them. They took a look at it, told me not to worry, only call us if it stops heating, and left.

My point is this: most houses come equipped with roofs. If we truly want to cut down on the oil we use, why don’t we similar systems on more houses? I’m looking into having one installed at “Casa Grande.” More soon…

Over the last few days, we’ve gotten a new site live, Stage1Ventures.com – the site is for a venture capital firm who had been using Yahoo Sitebuilder for their site previously.  They liked Sitebuilder, so our new design had to work with it, as well as working on handhelds  like the Treo or other Windows CE enabled devices.

Vario Customer Bill Keefe is now live with 6 sites, including highschoolblues.com, campusblues.com, workplaceblues.com, seniorblues.com and BillKeefe.com – we’ve provided vBulletin and WordPress set up and integration, and there’s still more to come.  The premise of the sites are “social networking with a purpose” and Bill’s really got an idea there.  Take the time to visit his sites, and also read his book “W.A.Y” online at BillKeefe.com.

After a year of development, the CIOLeadershipForum.com has gone live. The forum is a joint project of Cisco and CIO Magazine.  The site is subscription only (so I haven’t bothered to include a link) and utilized vBulletin fully integrated thorughout the site.  We’re offering polls, our own custom developed cms, webinars, metrics reporting, file download tracking, as well as extensive customization of vBulletin to make it work with Omniture site analytics, and other custom features. 

Last, but certainly not least,, SuperiorMechanicalPH.com went live shortly before the end of last year, it features fully css enabled design, use of customized server based image management for sizing and scaling images, as well as localized search optimization.  As with all basic Vario sites, we’ve integrated Google Analytics so that we can fine tune site performance over time.

We’ll try to do a round up of some of our marketing and graphic design projects in the next week or so. 

Read the full post.

James Governor’s got a great take on the future of journalism debate.  Read it in full on his blog – but here’s a taste:

A favourite story among business managers at VNU, a huge European publishing company now owned by 3i, was that during a major strike at the company they continued to put out the enterprise magazine Computing, with more photos, and mostly press release stories, and noone noticed…  readers just skipped the content as they always did and went to the job pages and funnies on the back page.

If you’re a frequent reader, you probably have figured out that I like Skype.  I’ve never been a big fan of the telcos and I’ve found the quality of the overseas calls to be much better than the wire lines.

For the last half of ’06 Skype was offering free phone calls anywhere in the US via your computer.  That came to an end on Dec. 31.  Today I have an email, they will give me unlimited calls within the US for $14.95.  How could I possibly go wrong? 

We’ve developed a mantra in the office – skype first.  Skype to skype calls are free.  Hence the savings for a global corporation are significant.  Now I will be suggesting that we simply pay the $14.95 for every employee for the year.  Why not?  Take a look and give it a try – you can literally slash you phone budget, which is a great thing.

A few years ago I took a screen writing course and the lecturer made an excellent point regarding the controversy surrounding movies which are credited as “A Joe Blog Work”  – in which case Joe Blow is generally the executive producer, and in all probability had no hand in the original creativity that went into the work.  Think about it, the only original creativity in a movie is the screen play (if that itself isn’t derivative of some other work…).  In truth the directing, acting, even the sound track are derivitive works, not true orginal creativity.

So it occurred to me the other day that for the most part blogs tend to be derivitive works.  We link to one another, commenting on something that has been said or done by someone else, adding our bit of wisdom to the corpus conscientia.  A noble quest, but at the same time, where is the original creativity? 

For the most part, we are indeed adding to the general knowlege. Of course there are those that simply use links to generate traffic…but web veterans see those sites for what they are.

So I had a look closely at the blogs I read and realized there’s one among us that avoids the low hanging fruit and offers new content, with a minimum of derivation – offering virtually all original content.  None other than Maureen Rogers (also of OpinionatedMarketers.com – one of my frequent links) on her PinkSlip blog.  Give her a read and enjoy – I do, and think about what you can do to increase the original thought level of BlogVegas.

Read the story on MediaPost. 

They’re going pretty much the way all the pundits have been pointing for the past year or so – integrating their print and web teams, and using the website as the primary driver for breaking news.  All journalists will have to take a crash course in web journalism. 

To illustrate their need to fix the online channel

 He  (Editor James O’Shea) used auto advertising as an example to sketch the revenue crunch created by the shift from print to online advertising. “In 2004, automotive print advertising at the Los Angeles Times totaled $102 million. And what will it be this year? $55 million.” While the company made up some of the difference in Web ads, O’Shea said the paper was losing more in print ads than it was recouping online.

John Whiteside’s got a great post at OpinionatedMarketers.com on the MarketingProfs “Six Ways to Prepare Better Collateral for Sales Teams.”   Read it and fix yours up – *Now*.

His timing is great – I just had to go through a raft of sales collateral due to an acquisition and the lesson was clear – we’d waited too long.  I’m forwarding both links to the rest of the team, and thought I’d share them with you.

From the MarketingProfs:

We’ve all been through this: After months of hard labor, your campaign has generated leads that now sit, undisturbed, under the sales guy’s fantasy football crib sheet. You’re angry because he’s not leveraging the leads you worked so hard to get. His defense? They’re “bad” leads not worth pursuing.

Seth Godin had a great post about common metrics mistakes.  Here’s his list of the common stuff we measure, followed by the actual stuff we’re trying to figure out.

Good grades in school (the ability to solve problems in life)

Lots of raw traffic to your blog (conversations among prospects who become fans or customers)

Burning calories (feeling better and looking good)

Clickthrough rate on ads (conversion rate to customers)

High salary (long-term happiness)

Class rank (actually learning something)

Number of stock options (future prospects of your employer)

This quarter’s commission (reputation in the industry)

Technorati rank (number of RSS subscribers)

He’s right on the money – it’s the forest for the trees thing – at somepoint or another all of us will forget the actual goal and start managing towards the metric. It’s kind of like the difference between having sex and having your buddy tell you about the sex he had – if the telling of the story is better, you’re doing something really wrong.

One of those annoying little points of clarity came screaming out at me today…I was reading Kristaphere and came across this about social networking metrics:

I think the fallacy here is thinking one can accurately discern human behavior and motivation from quantitative measurements. I’m from the old school. If you want to know why customers did something: ask them. Directly. Listen to their answers and act accordingly. No, you can’t point and click to get this information or have a pretty line graph in a nanosecond, but you’ll have the most valuable information available for making decisions. How many times do you shop on-line or in person and say “I wish they’d ask me what I think about…..” but you never share it?

After I wiped the ginger ale off my computer screen, I had to think “these are the truest words I will read all day…”  Remember – metrics are nice, but they don’t take the place of interacting with (and understanding) the customers – at least when you want real results.

For all you marketers beset by the “you’ve got to check out Second Life for marketing” – here’s a tremendous send up.  For the record, I barely have time for my first life, so forget about pitching me on Second Life.  And I certainly will not be trying to sell my boss or anyone that it’s a good marketing play to expend any marketing effort in a game.