Entries Tagged 'General' ↓

Guy Kawasaki has posted a short and concise summary of how you can use LinkedIn.

It has been one of those weeks where I’ve stumbled upon dozens of sites or articles which beg for a second look. Here is a quick list of my favorites finds from the week of October 20 – 24, 2008:

1. The European Demand Generation Summit

2. An article on Optimizing Your Value Proposition
an article Marketing Experiments

3. Crazy Egg – Visualize Your Visitors

4. Media Budget Ratio: How much should B2B companies spend on Media?
an article by Paul Dunay

5. Webinar Central – Your Guide to Free Webinars

Today is a bit of a milestone for several of my students in their Internet Marketing class as they set up their very own blogs. Blogging platforms like WordPress and Blogger make it really easy to get off the ground with blogging. But one of the most difficult questions students seem to face is the question of what they should blog about.

Blog Broadly or Target Precisely?

Like me, you probably have a lot of different things you’re interested in, things which aren’t necessarily related. How do you combine these into a single blog? Or do you start several blogs?

With Marketing Finger, I chose to go down the wider path. I could have gone broader, though, opening it up to be more like a journal. My Phoenix On Mars blog, on the other hand, gets a lot more specific.  It relays stories about NASA’s latest lander as it digs its way down to Martian ice.

As our Internet Marketing class takes these first bold steps towards publishing on the Web through blogs, students are getting a chance to develop an online voice, connect with other like-minded people.

Check out Ben’s article on The Welder’s Misconception, David’s Flaction, Karina’s blog about handbags, Ashley’s Misadvantures, and Andrew’s Naturally Artificial blog.

To finish off, here is a video which kicked off today’s class, a presentation by Kevin Kelly at last November’s TED conference.  Kevin reflects upon the next 5,000 days of the Internet, how everything will contribute to and connect to the “One”.

As many of you, I’m in the midst of listening to Seth Godin’s new book titled Tribes. It is an enjoyable read, a book which speaks a lot of truth about communities, leadership, communication, and um, tribes.

Seth posted his own Tribes presentation on Slideshare earlier today. It’s not merely a summary of the book, i.e. it will compliment what you’ve read. And this presentation comes complete with the authors notes. Enjoy!

I recently had a chance to chat with Jim Sterne, Chairman of the Web Analytics Association and founder of the eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit.

Jim Sterne’s depiction of the Customer Life Cycle Funnel – four distinct funnels based on successful or unsuccessful customer acquisition, persuasion and conversion – has been widely quoted and referenced since he first presented it in 2000. In the interview, Jim walks us through the four funnels, while also touching upon B2B vs. B2C, and social media marketing.

Shortly after tonight’s second presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, I stumbled upon a word cloud graphic titled ‘Obama at Oct. 7 Debate‘ on Wordle.  As with tag or word clouds in general, the collage shows words used and their relative frequency with word size.  Wordle, a tool created by IBM Research engineer Jonathan Feinberg, is definitely worth a second look.

While on Wordle, I checked out a couple famous speeches including Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream“, and JFK’s “We Will Go to the Moon.” I also couldn’t resist creating my very first Wordle. The tool allows you to paste text, or enter a blog’s URL.  Here is what you get when plotting my company’s corporate blog, ask.enquiro.com.

Word Cloud of Enquiro's corporate blog, as created on Wordle.net

Here’s a tool which will certainly allow for much amusement. And it could also be a great way to communicate feedback on web page usability or content.

Tynt is a program which allows users to add text, drawings, highlights and other fun things to web pages. These can be shared with others by email or through a social network like Twitter.

News of Tynt.com propagated through the social media universe and landed in my field of awareness this evening. I believe it was a tweet from Guy Kawasaki which linked to his Holy Kaw! Posterous blog. On it, a user by the name of Derek indicated he had mercilessly “tynted” the post. Here it is, the very first tynt I ever did see: http://holykaw.com.tynted.com/my-favorite-place-in-the-world

Tynt, just over a year old, has kept a relatively low profile until last week when they announced a new website, new version and integration with Twitter. Technically, the program is still in beta as it works out the kinks. There has been concern over Tynt and search engines, and the fact that this new content may get indexed. Tynt has also strongly been accused of stealing or scraping content for its own benefit. According to them, the program only ever visits the original site and all Tynt content is simply layered on top of the existing site (when the Tynt browser plug-in is used). In the case where the viewer is accessing a Tynt through a gateway (no plug-in installed in the browser) the gateway does not access a stored version of the underlying site, but rather loads the original site (including all images, media, advertising, and so on) and displays it to the user. The original site gets the ‘hit’, the ad view and so on.

Tynt CEO Derek Ball states, “We hope that Tynt can prove valuable to the underlying site by creating more page views and more ad views by encouraging people to share the sites that they feel a desire to comment on.”

It will be interesting to watch how the use of Tynt spreads now that it has embed codes for sharing Tynts as links.

Oh, and don’t forget to check out the tynted version of this blog post:
http://tynted.com/0LVV0rBN30s

Google CEO Eric Schmidt spoke at the Corporate Eco Forum on September 8, 2008 in San Francisco, CA. He used Google Earth to visually demonstrate how one can use the program to measure and observe environmental policies at work. He went on to talk about Google’s role in using sustainable energy and provides some compelling arguments for their economic viability.

I wanted to pass along an inspiring article on the psychology of persuasion which came to my inbox recently.  Mitchell Weisburgh at the PILOTed blog wrote the story after he visited Turkey.  He encountered several rug vendors, and one of them managed to successfully close the deal even though Mitchell had no intention of buying one in the first place.  After the purchase, he reflected on what had happened and how it relates to basic psychological principles.

According to author Robert Cialdini, there are 6 weapons of influence. We can all use them, and they are used on us, either knowingly or by accident:

1. Reciprocation: we try to repay what another person has provided us
2. Commitment and consistency: we desire to be consistent with what we have already done
3. Social proof: we tend to rely on what other people are doing to determine our own actions
4. Liking: we tend to go along with and follow people we like
5. Authority: we feel a sense of duty to follow someone who has authority
6. Scarcity: opportunities seem more valuable to us when their availability is limited

See the original blog post: What I Learned Buying a Rug in Turkey.

Google’s browser hit the market today at noon Pacific time (available at www.google.com/chrome).  According to Clicky Web Analytics, Google Chrome’s market share has already hit 2.74% within 10 hours!

Watch a video from the development team on the thinking and features behind Google Chrome.