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How frustrated are you when you have to reboot your PC in the middle of the day? A full shutdown and reboot cycle can take a several minutes - instead of staring at your screen watching the icons flicker to life, the hourglass grind away, etc., why not capture a few minutes of productivity?
You’ll spend less time thinking evil thoughts about Bill Gates, and you’ll get a mood boost from being productive!
Scott Thurm recently wrote a piece in the WSJ Marketplace section - Now, It’s Business By Data, but Numbers Still Can’t Tell Future.
He talked about the growing trend of trying to run companies more analytically, more “by the numbers”, and the success some of those companies have had with this approach including those profiled in Tom Davenport’s book “Competing on Analytics” (reviewed here). He quoted Robert Sutton (one of the authors of Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense, reviewed here) who contrasted running a business by the numbers with running it based on “faith, fear, superstition and mindless imitation”! However, Scott then goes on to identify two key risks inherent in an analytic or data-driven approach.
Project Management is essential for complex tasks. So how do you know when it becomes a Project? It’s not always easy to decide.
Paul Argenti’s excellent keynote talk at the IABC Research Foundation luncheon today included a few references to social media, but mainly these addressed the impact of social media on public perceptions of organizations.
Sugar Ray Leonard was one of the all-time great counter punchers. As a ringside pundit once noted, Leonard would “make the other man come get him - and when he actually cornered him, Leonard would make him pay.”
Online PR needs to become more like Sugar Ray - and in fact, it already is.
Dear Kalena…
We run an ecommerce site and my boss would like to take advantage of the strong demand for a couple of our products in particular. One of the ideas being tossed around is creating domain names that incorporate these keywords so that search engines find them more quickly (i.e., www.sitenameproduct1.com, www.sitenameproduct2.com)
What are your thoughts on this approach? Is this considered ‘black hat’ and could this get us in trouble with the major search engines?
Thanks
Kelly
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After spending all winter under a dead gray Michigan sky, I recently had the opportunity to fly to sunny Las Vegas to attend ePrize’s Interactive Promotion Summit at Caesar’s Palace.
I spend the majority of my time neck deep in the search world, so it’s always interesting for me when I get a chance to attend a conference that’s focused on another form of online marketing. It was especially important for me to broaden my horizons since we all just learned that SEO will be dead in mid-July.
The summit featured speakers and attendees who are highly involved in the interactive promotion world. Like most of us in the search marketing world, these people typically have achieved a good depth of knowledge in both the marketing and technology fields.
The event kicked off with a Sunday evening networking event sponsored by Conde-Nast and continued through Tuesday with speakers discussing topics ranging from their own interactive promotion strategies to one speaker who focused on the science of happyness!
The one message that seemed to come across clearly from each presenter was that it’s almost impossible to have a successful online promotion without backing it up with media that drives traffic to it.
I knew that I’d find a way to tie SEO/SEM into this whole thing! The Yahoo! people obviously saw that as well. They were a main sponsor of the summit and Dick O’Hare, Yahoo’s VP of Global Strategic Partnerships and Emerging Markets was one of the main speakers.
Marcus Buckingham provided the keynote presentation on the subject of leveraging your strengths (he’s written a number of books on the topic). It’s his belief that people spend too much time trying to overcome their weaknesses, and not enough time enhancing and utilizing their strengths. As he spoke, you could definitely feel the audience getting more and more introspective as we all began to evaluate how much of our day is spent doing the things we do really well.
After leaving the presentation I turned to one of my employees who was with me and asked how much of his day he thought was spent leveraging his strengths.
His reply was a humorous, “none.” I guess we all have some work to do. I’d still rank Awecomm very high in terms of people leveraging their strengths, but I think there may be a correlation between the corporate hierarchy and the amount of time that people spend doing what they do best (e.g. my developers are incredibly talented developers, when I promote them to manager, the ratio changes).
The whole event was beautifully orchestrated by a small team of marketers from ePrize, who I think could not have done a better job. Unlike so many conferences, the schedule was well constructed, the food was good, and there was plenty of time to network with the great marketing minds that were there.
If you can manage to get an invitation next year, I would definitely recommend attending this event. All-in-all it’s a great demonstration of how all of the different forms of online marketing intertwine.
I’ve written before about the search marketing difficulties of large sites, but today I want to make a bigger point.
Doing anything small is hard for many large companies. If you work at a small company, this might mystify you-after all, big companies have the talent and resources to do big things that your company would never attempt, so why can’t they do small stuff?
Call it corporate myopia.
They can see clearly the things right in front of them, the things that they habitually do. But they can’t see that far into the future. For some reason, big companies don’t believe that oaks from little acorns grow. They just complain about how small those acorns are.
Small companies are happy to watch acorns take root and begin to grow. Small companies can work small and succeed small. The very best small companies eventually live to see that tall oak grow and they become large companies. Read the rest of this entry »
When it comes to lead generation, the dating analogy is nothing new. But I liked what Tom Myer at the tdog.blog said on the topic of lead nurturing in his post, “If you don’t remember me on the second date, why should we go on a third?”
Myer writes:
“If lead generation is like dating, and we’re all out there on the singles scene, most of our effort goes to landing first dates. We do everything we can to catch someone’s eye, fetch up the nerve to ask them out, and work really hard on making a good impression that first time around. We may also have well-meaning friends and families setting us up on blind dates (aka referrals), and we may also run into those people who have heard good things about us from other people and want to get to know us better (aka word of mouth). (Yes, it’s a neat metaphor, and I’m not the first to notice it, but I digress.)
All of this dating stuff aside, lead nurturing is like getting to know someone better (except in the business context multiple relationships are not only condoned but encouraged!). If you spend all that time and energy getting a “first date”, why would you blow it by not remembering important facts about your prospect on the “second date”? Also, if you’re on that second date, why not take this chance to get to know them a little better?”
My Interview with Analysts series is back again.
Here is my interview with Scott Baldwin.
What is your current position and the name of the company you work for?
My job title is Manager, Web Services at North Shore Credit Union (www.nscu.com). We’re one of Canada’s fastest growing credit unions.
How long have you been working in this field?
I have been working in Web Analytics for over an year now. Unlike many of those you’ve interviewed, Web analytics is not my only job role and accounts for about 20% of my time. At work I wear many hats including web, usability, SEO/SEM, Internet marketing, project management and much more. I’m trying to make web analytics a larger focus but we don’t have the people or budget to enable me to move over full-time.
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