All Things Cahill

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…

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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…

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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…

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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…). …

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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. 

Chris Willis outlines the lessons from his launch at footnote.com – a good list for technology intensive site launches that dovetails nicely with my experience. The list (go to his site to dive deeper): Make sure it’ll play in Paducah Be a Beta hater Identify the core functionality that defines your story Make sure it works Don’t launch a new site within minutes of a major press release To paraphrase – understand the market, always improve, know your strengths, test and…

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