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Not sure I agree with the original title of this article. In fact, I don’t and I changed it in my title. The original title was misleading. This is really a short interview with Bogusky on how his agency does some things. There is value in each comment he makes, but I would not call this rules for being a media maverick. As a matter of fact, I quote him below and that quote addresses honesty in advertising. Hmmm…

Alex Bogusky’s 6 rules for being a media maverick

One thing we do as we begin a creative project, instead of working on specific media, we write press releases about our ideas. For example, a press release for the Whopper Freakout campaign would say, “Burger King announced today they would be removing the Whopper from their restaurants.” It would go on to talk about consumer outrage. It’s a good way to determine whether you have a rich idea or not. If an idea is good enough for someone to write about, it’s probably good enough for someone to talk about.

We don’t want to find some trend and then do advertising that basically
lies about the product to attach it to the trend in the hope that it
will sell. If it’s Burger King, and we want to help guys who are being
inundated with the notion of metrosexuality, understand that it’s OK to
have a killer burger — that’s a great path.

While not technically marketing, this is how to sell and how to generate new business and I love this technique for looking at cold calls, but actuaally for ANY kind of prospecting calls. The fears are the same, but this approach is positive and proactive and turns the tables on your own brain and lets you realize that your purpose is to find those most likely to need what you have rather than those that have no interest in speaking with you.

I sent this link to our call centers, because it makes a lot of sense. I know I will use this moving forward.

Hotting Up On Cold Calls | Aussie Rules | BNET

Not surprisingly, the biggest reaction that’s generated by cold calling is the fear of failure.

<snip>……………

Running a close second, is the fear of rejection.

<snip>……………

The third fear is that of giving offence.

<snip>……………

Imagine instead, you had approached the exercise with this goal:

‘To attract people who are genuinely interested in hearing about my work’

<snip>……………

By listening out for those ‘who are genuinely interested’ it is possible to quickly disqualify anyone appearing unsuitable or disinterested. Through these means, you’ll move more quickly to the next call and with a greater sense of purpose. What’s more, you’ll do so without being rendered inactive through fear.

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.

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.

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.