All Things Cahill

Steve Yelvington had a post this morning about new web services available from Amazon, the online book/commerce folks.  The implications are startling.  Here’s the basics of how it works, as I understand it (and I admit, my understanding limited). They are allowing users to create virtual servers, which will be paid for based upon the actual computing time used.  The servers are virtual and can be configured online, and require use of Amazon Simple Storage Service which allows for expandable…

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We’ve discussed a couple fairly heavy weight topics in the past few days, so it’s time to shift gears and offer a bit of advice that can help even the newest of businesses.  “How did you hear about us.” Those are the 6 most underused words in marketing, but often the most important.  Many small businesses are afraid to ask, fearing the customer will find it an imposition.  I look at it from a different perspective.  On some level you…

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We’ve got opinions, and we find a lot of important information during the course of a day, week and month that we really want to share with the Vario community (note that I don’t refer to customers, this is a broader audience than that).  It gives us the opportunity to simply cite bits worth reading, and also offer our own take, including concrete examples from our experience (see Saturday’s post on metrics).  But a blog is more than that, it allows…

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In the past week, I’ve spent a lot of time ripping apart Site Traffic Statistics, as well as planning metrics packages for a new site.  Strangely enough, both David Churbuck (formerly of Forbes.com and V.P. of Internet Marketing at Lenovo) and Chris Murray (former Director of Technology at CXO Media) both blogged about metrics – these are two guys I have immense respect for and you should read what they have to say.  Here’s my take on why analytics are…

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Twice yesterday, once on my own computer and once on a friends machine, I saw an incideous bit of malware/spyware.  It was masquerading as a “windows system checker” and popped up a window on the computer.  The window itself looked just like like a regular window, but by click on the red x to exit the window, it began to install the software.  My various levels of spyware protection saved me, but Mike B. wasn’t so lucky.  We’ll find out…

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Bug fixes to the latest release.  They moved fairly quickly from the 3.5 release to the 3.6 level.  I’ve still got several sites down at the 3.0.x level.  (For those unfamiliar, vBulletin is my favorite forum/discussion software.  I’ve integrated it into many sites…like http://www.reel-time.com )  None of my sites are at 3.6 – although I have an install coming up that will no doubt use the latest greatest (certainly if I have any say).  Is anyone running vBull at that level…

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I picked this up from Churbuck.com yesterday.  John Hagel on New Marketing – Vario-teers may notice some eery similarities…I agree with his approach.  To start with marketing strategy and again at the risk of over-simplification, conventional marketing is built upon the three “I’s”: Intercept – target and expose customers to your message wherever you can find them. Inhibit – make it as difficult as possible for the customer to compare your product or service with any other options. Isolate – enter…

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We’ll be sharing information of general and specific interest here, as well as news, both industry as well as the occassional personal bit.  Feel free to comment on anything, we care about your opinions and we wouldn’t post if if we didn’t want to talk about it.  Standard rules apply, be nice, be kind, or be gone.  For first timers, this is the blog from Vario Creative.  We are marketing, we are design, we are the web.  We’ve got a…

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