05 Aug 08 Marketing Brilliance: How Not To Design - Stop Sign By Committee

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This is absolutely perfect and i have more than once been on the committee or even a one man committee driving a design into the ground. Perfect!

Creating A Stop Sign - Watch more free videos

02 Aug 08 Marketing Brilliance: Smart Marketing Doesn’t Have to Be Commercial

Before I address this strategy, let me say that I am not the right market for this. I am not a Christian and am not a candidate for conversion, but sometimes a marketing tactic and strategy is so right and so well done,  that you have to recognize that and acknowledge how smart it is.

In this case the tactic is guerilla marketing oriented and it works brilliantly and in this case is for a non-commercial product.

My wife, son, and I were driving in Kendall, FL today looking at houses, when we saw a group of poeple holding signs in an interesection a few blocks ahead. As we got closer we saw they held signs saying Free Pepsi with the Pepsi Logo on it. I immediately assumed that this was a Pepsi giveaway, was thirsty and decided to roll down my window and accept the freebie from the college aged young woman handing them out. As we pulled away, we noticed a business card on top that said:

You looked too thirsty to pass up!

We hope this small gift brings some light into your day. It’s a simple way of saying God loves you - no strings attached! Let us know if we can be of assistance.

On the reverse side was the name of a church, their web address, a map to it, and their phone number.

It was a simple, low-cost, well executed message that left a very positive feeling with the person receiving it. I am usually completely turned off by church evangelism, but in this case, I respected the message, the method, and the respect they showed me.

Whether they see it right away in tomorrow’s church service or over time, this is an excellent method of drawing attention to their product/service.

01 Aug 08 Ubuntu MID Edition - Very Nice

I love this release from Ubuntu. A mobile open source Ubuntu. Features and capabilities look excellent.

I use Ubuntu on my notebook PCs and love it. Certainly not perfect, but better than Windows any day. I of course have been a bit of a Windows expert for a long long time and still operate as one for family and friends, but looks like Vista will be the end of that for me, because I love Linux.

Ubuntu MID Edition | Ubuntu
Introducing Ubuntu MID Edition - full Internet, no compromise

Ubuntu MID Edition targets an exciting new class of computers called Mobile Internet Devices. Ubuntu MID, based on the world’s most popular Linux distribution, and MID hardware from OEMs and ODMs, is redefining what can be done in mobile computing.

Ubuntu MID Edition, a fully open source project, gives the full Internet, with no compromise. Custom options may include licensed codecs and popular third-party applications.

* Full Web 2.0/AJAX fidelity, with custom options of Adobe Flash®, Java, and more
* Outstanding media playback so you can enjoy videos, music and photos with superior quality and easy navigation
* A suite of applications that work seamlessly to meet every need of a digital parent, student or anyone who is on-the-go
* Facebook®, MySpace®, YouTube®, Dailymotion®, 3D games, GPS, maps, in short, the full Web 2.0 experience delivered into your hands as a compact and powerful device that’s easy and fun to use

The product of Canonical collaboration with Intel® and the open source community, Ubuntu MID Edition is the software that makes it all possible.

31 Jul 08 Marketing Five Ways to Boost Online Campaign Performance

Event Registration (EVENT: 115323)

This event will be live on August 13, 2008 at 1:00PM EDT.

In this webinar, marketers will learn how to increase their spend on SEM to dramatically boost sales and branding, while maintaining - or even increasing - overall ROI. Wister Walcott, VP of products at Marin Software, will outline five simple and practical strategies to help you “spend more and spend better” on your paid search marketing campaigns.He’ll explain why SEM consistently delivers the highest bang for your buck - some studies show that SEM converts at twice the rate of email and banners - and show marketers how to obtain the highest ROI on paid search, even while increasing spend. In these unpredictable economic times, it pays to invest in the marketing methods that deliver the best sales results. So sign up now for this informative and insightful webcast, and learn how to get more out of your search marketing spend today.

30 Jul 08 Site Review - Dream Templates - Unlimited Website Templates

If you’ve ever built a web site and searched for templates for the design of your site, then you know that there are thousands of template sites out there, that seem to all offer the exact same thing at prices that seem ridiculous. One company - Dream Template though is taking the website templates game to a new level. Now instead of paying for each template one at a time, you can get an unlimited number of templates for $59.95 from their library of over 1000. This would be a good deal for mediocre templates, but their collection is excellent, full featured and goes beyond web templates to include flash-based templates, Powerpoint templates, Word, brochures, icons, and much more and they all include the core graphic files you need to use them properly. I just noticed they also have Word Press templates and others for a number of content management systems.

Their site is fairly well designed. While cluttered like most of these sites, it is not as bad as some and gets straight to the point of their offer. I could do without the Flash intro, that provides no value as an animation, but its final message about their offer gets straight to the point. There just doesn’t seem to be a need for the delay in getting to it. That said, the message comes across and I get the information I need immediately.

Overall I am throughly impressed with the value of this offering and the quality of the product. Hopefully I can get membership access to try out the templates themselves and update this review with more information, but from the looks of things, you can’t go wrong with the offer.

28 Jul 08 Whether To Use a Hosted Anti Spam Solution…

In the old days, I made use of SpamCop to help me filter and block email based Spam. I found it to be a pretty good solution for my part time small business needs, but when they went down I was out of luck, because I had to go back and reroute my email every single time.  I finally gave up, because I found that a combination of gmail and Yahoo spam filters was doing the job for me.

Today, a new breed of anti-spam solutions have evolved from what I used to use and they seem to be far more robust and reliable than the solutions I used previously.

I recently took a look at the Hosted Barracuda  anti spam solution and it looks pretty impressive.

Our hosted Barracuda solution protects your email using twelve defense layers. With this multilayered approach, our firewalls provide the most comprehensive email protection available against spam, viruses, spoofing, phishing and spyware attacks.

Another nice aspect of this offering, is that if your mail servers are down, they will queue up your emails for you until you come back up. This means you are assured that your email won’t bounce and when you are back up, your users will not have missed a thing. That is an IT administrators dream if you ask me.

In addition, the company offers the Barracuda Spam Firewall so that those concerned about a hosted solution or down time, will be able to install their server device in their own facility for full control email protection.

Some strategic comments on their site:

1. If I am an IT administrator, I want to know exactly what you are going to do for me. How will you make me a hero. Their site is all about them and not about their customers. Stop touting yourself and your abilities and tout what it is going to do for me.
2. They need to focus more on overcoming the concerns that IT administrators will have about their email passing through the company’s hosted filters. That is a scary proposition for a lot of folks and they need to be fron and center about security, privacy, etc. and while that informaion is there, I need to see it and get hit over the head with it from the very beginning.
3. Whee are the case studies? Where are the videos of happy admins who no longer have to worry about SPAM.

This is all in all a typical technology web site. It has some decent information and the products seem valuable, but they need to focus more on the solutions it provides to the problems their targets have.

15 Jul 08 A Slight Shift In Approach…

I love software. I love tweaking, critiquing, and creating software. I like client applications, but I really enjoy web applications. Recently I realized that I am spending a good amount of time commenting upon and providing feedback too application developers/sites via email and it seemed to me, that my insights and 20 plus years of technology, strategy, and B2B experience might be valuable on this blog. Marketing is fun for me, but what I enjoy most is technology and “strategy.

So, I am going to make a slight shift in the content here. I will still provide marketing information, tips, and ideas that I think businesses of all sizes will find useful, but I am also going to start providing revies of applications, strategies, etc. for software that I give a try.

Hopefully the developers will find it useful and those of you visiting will too.

The review will focus upon usability, enhancements, needed features, target markets, etc. It will hopefully be of interest to developers, product management/marketing types, venture capitalists, and founders of web 2.0 companies.

My first two will be reposts of emails I’ve shared with some folks that have a cool CRM and productivity applications.

01 Jul 08 Clarity Trumps Persuasion On Landing Pages

There are so many good things that come out of Marketing Experiments and I am never disappointed when I return to read, listen, and watch. This lesson is no exception. Read the blog post, but then listen to the seminar.

Clarity trumps persuasion — and lifts conversions

The principle: Clarity trumps persuasion.

Sounds simple, right? Maybe even too elementary? Perhaps you’re thinking, “My CEO and six-figure marketing budget don’t need catchy maxims. Give me something I can use.”

Don’t be fooled. There’s a powerful idea hiding in those three little words. But it’s easy to miss because we’ve been trained to persuade. To sell the sizzle, not the steak.

We try to entice prospects into our sales funnels with peppy copy, splashy offers and incentives that don’t cost too much. Meanwhile, behind the curtain of our clever creative, we’re not concerned about connecting with people. We’re chasing sales numbers and revenue goals. So we ignore the fact that our prospects hate being pitched and sold to — just like us, when we’re in their shoes.