Marketing Articles About Quality

Marketing Articles About Quality Search Results

Results for: quality

55 items found:

For Choosing an Affiliate Program Customers Want. As an affiliate marketer, you want to offer the best affiliate products and services possible to your target market. The only way to do that is to align you with a quality affiliate program to achieve... (08/26/08 09:01 PM)

Consistency in the quality of your articles is of paramount importance. You also cannot control economic factors, what's going on in the marketplace, recessions, stagflation, and the like. However, you can control your efforts, as pertains to your business. You can contro... (08/26/08 09:01 AM)

How to choose best Fonts for Your eBook Cover. Choosing the right fonts is an important decision you will have to make when designing a quality ebook cover. You will want to choose a font that is readable and appropriate for your audience. The fo... (08/26/08 09:01 AM)

A Business Works To Lower Your Printing Costs. In a business which has been monopolized by some of the best known companies available comes Chris of PrintPrintPrint.biz. Aiming to offer the best quality products possible at the lowest prices available, Chris has started something that will not only catch on but bring with it the potential to become one of the top [...]

(08/25/08 09:00 AM)

Why quality score can save you money on PPC. One of the best and the worst things about the Internet is that it is pretty huge with lots of sites.

In theory this gives everyone an equal chance of being heard, including Internet Mark... (08/24/08 09:00 AM)

How to top Search Engine Rankings through unique article marketing. Are you the one writing many articles and are not able to gain audience attention? Are you the one among those who always try to bring good quality but still worthless? If Yes! This article br... (08/24/08 09:00 AM)

Affiliate Marketing the difference between successes and failure. The very first quality one must possess if you want to try qour hand in afFil)ate marketin' is the willingness to learn a.d be trained. Treading through unfamiliar terriTory is scary stuff if one ... (08/23/08 09:01 AM)

Generating traffic from article marketing quality rather than quantity is the prime consideration.. It is a good idea to set up a spread sheet to record the effectiveness of your article marketing. Try to submit to sites that are considered to be authority sites by the search engines and/or have a h... (08/22/08 09:01 AM)

(08/21/08 09:00 PM)

Business Communication - Skyrocket Your Sales with PREselling. If you want to skyrocket your sales, you need to learn the business communication skill number 1: "PREselling". Due to the lack of keyword focused, high quality content on their web sites... (08/21/08 09:01 AM)

Role of Online Marketing Agencies to Enhance Your Business. What difference would it make if inspite of having a good quality product your site doesn't get enough traffic? Lack of good advertisements and a proper strategy can cause a lot of loss to your co... (08/20/08 09:01 AM)

Design -- more than quality, technology or top-down strategy ?- is the one factor that can make long-term profits for a company..

?Design is the engine that can transform a company into a powerhouse of nonstop innovation,? writes Neumeier of Business Week. "Until now, companies have used design as a beauty station for identities and communications, or as the last stop in a product launch. Never has it been used for its potential to create rule-bending innovation across the board. Meanwhile, the public is developing a healthy appetite for all things design."

(08/15/08 09:00 PM)

The Olympics: Green or Brown?.

AIR POLLUTION

Green: Beijing authorities have claimed five straight years of air-quality improvement since 2002. Last year, Beijing's average daily Air Pollution Index was 100.69. Hoping to keep the reading below that Index for the duration of the games, Beijing has spent billions to close factories, stop construction and pull millions of cars off the roads each day in the last couple of weeks.

(08/11/08 09:00 PM)

I've Deleted All My Alerts And Replaced Them With Filtrbox.

I have been looking forward to this day for a while. I've always been obsessed with following any news or blog mentions of any of the companies I'm an investor and the people I work with. For the past few years I've satisfied my obsession with an extensive set of Google Alerts (via email), Yahoo Alerts (via email) and Technorati Alerts (via RSS). Occasionally I'll add something else to the mix usually through RSS (such as a FriendFeed or Summize keyword feed.) My email rules shunt everything to my "daily" folder so I only have to look through it once a day (when I read through my RSS feeds.)

Last week I deleted all my alerts. I was able to do this because Filtrbox - one of the TechStars companies from last year - is now finding much more than 100% of the information that my alerts were picking up, including 100% of what I got from the alerts. I'd been running the two in parallel for about six months and saw the lines cross about two months ago, but went ahead and had both run just in case. I'm now confident that I won't miss any of the alert stuff.

Dealing with Filtrbox is so much easier and more pleasant. I enter my keywords into one UI instead of Google, Yahoo, Technorati, and others. I get a daily email digest of everything Filtrbox found. I have a history of all the data so if I want to go find an article from a month ago, I can easily find it in Filtrbox. And I get a bunch of cool data visualizations.

I've watched Ari Newman, Tom Chikoore, and team evolve Filtrbox from its starting point last summer at TechStars. I'm blown away - they've really nailed it. Ari and Tom took a deliberately "slow and steady" approach - making sure they really built something deep and robust before releasing it to the world. They accomplished this - and it's ready for action.

As a special bonus for all you Olympic fans (like me), they've put together an Olympic Blog Widget that is customizable and pulls from their data sources. Guys - super cool.

(08/07/08 09:00 PM)

Launching of a Common Platform For All Writers and Publishers: www.writerslinkup.com. Lots of internet magazines, numerous websites where does all that content come from?? With all these publications coming up there?^TMs a growing need for good quality content. We at writer?^TMs ... (08/06/08 09:00 PM)

Doubling Down.

Fred Wilson - my friend and co-investor in Zynga - titled his post on Zynga's $29 million financing Raising The Stakes so I couldn't resist titling my post Doubling Down. And I'll echo what Fred said - I'm amazed with the hand that Mark Pincus (Zynga's CEO and founder) has and am delighted to be sitting at the table playing it with him.

Zynga just announced that Kleiner Perkins has led a $29 million round that includes new investor Institutional Venture Partners and the old investors (Union Square Ventures, Foundry Group, and Avalon Ventures.) Bing Gordon from KPCB has joined the board - Bing recently joined KPCB and was previously the chief creative officer at Electronic Arts where he had been a key executive since 1982. The TechCrunch article has some good info in it including the news that Zynga has acquired Yoville.

When we made our initial investment in Zynga last November, the idea of "social gaming" was just starting to emerge. Mark and the team at Zynga started with Texas HoldEm Poker (hence the poker theme in the first paragraph) but rapidly expanded into a number of other socially-oriented games on Facebook that you could play with your friends. When I wrote about some of these games in my post Wanna Play Zynga Games With Me? I was just starting to understand the potential power of social gaming. Over the past six months, I've become an incredible believer in the appeal of social gaming as a broad idea and see it as a disrupting force in the overall gaming industry. Oh - and as a user it's also a ton of fun to play these games with people I know all over the world.

While gaming is nothing new (and continues to be a fantastic business), the science of social gaming - figuring out how it works, making the games compelling, and dealing with the broad platform issues that come with massive scale - is really hard. While the popularity of Facebook seeded the social gaming phenomenon, it is now rapidly evolving onto new platforms such as other social networks like MySpace as well as connected devices like the iPhone via the iPhone AppStore.

While I've had a bunch of fantastic experiences as an investor, the tempo, pacing, quality of the people, and success of Zynga has exceeded anything I've ever experienced. I attribute it all to the genius of Mark and the fantastic people that he's surrounded himself with. And it's cool to be doubling down with investors like Bing, IVP, my friends Fred Wilson and Rich Levandov, and the entire team at Zynga that are the real folks making this happen.

(07/23/08 09:01 PM)

Freelance Web Content Writing Services That Can Help Your Website Improve Rankings. If you are like most website owners, you realize the importance of having quality content on your website. You also probably know that you need to keep the content that you have fresh and up to date a... (07/21/08 09:01 PM)

The Important Role of Content Writing in Online Marketing. Website content writing is a powerful tool for all of your online marketing endeavors. The quality and relevancy of that content writing is what makes the difference between a successful online market... (07/21/08 09:01 PM)

Copywriting Services That Speaks Their Quality . When copywriting services are perfect, you can tell from a glance the quality in them. It is very important that we have these services at their perfect. I mean, there is no other way we can be sure t... (07/15/08 09:01 PM)

Engagement Without Velocity is a Lot of Work. Coincidentally, I’ve been hit with a pretty singular view of the concept of engagement on a number of occasions this week, so I thought I would take it up myself. The riff running through all of the conversations is that numbers are not the point in marketing, it’s the quality of the numbers that count, the [...]

(07/08/08 09:00 PM)

Here Comes The Sun and More Daily Stuff.

If you follow my tweets you know that I am starting to get desperate for some sun. I could never live in Seattle. There's a rumor that we'll see the sun in Homer again later today - if it comes out to play I'll post a picture of it (did you hear that Mr. Sun - that's called a blibe ("blog bribe"). Here are some interesting things I've collected over the past few days of my cloud induced web reading.

Boulder Olympians weigh politics, pollution as they prep for Beijing: I'm really glad I didn't quality for the 2008 Olympic Marathon. If I had, I'd currently be struggling with whether or not to compete. I sure hope no one dies.

Frontier going under the knife: It looks like there might be more to the Frontier bankruptcy than Frontier getting shafted by First Data. Unlike Southwest, apparently Frontier didn't hedge oil prices (nor - apparently - did any of the other major airlines.) Oops. My prediction - Southwest cleans up in the Denver market and United goes bankrupt again.

Thank you, Adobe Reader 9: Here's a scathing review of everyone's favorite bloatware, Adobe Reader. Oh - it's also sort of a virus if you've ever gotten stuck in the "update - oops - didn't work - try again" infinite loop. I've switched to Foxit Reader - much nicer.

You Just Dont Get It: Outstanding short post from Mark Cuban. If you tell me that "I don't get it", you are either (a) being lazy or (b) being lazy. You are also indirectly calling me an idiot, which isn't necessarily a good way to get someone's attention for your idea.

Secret report: biofuel caused food crisis: I put this one in the "well duh" category. The real irony is that the World Bank - through a confidential report - suggests that global food prices are up by 75% due to biofuels, while the US claims the number is only 3%. Who knows what the real truth is - like most "economic indicators", we will only know what really is going on sometime in the future when we look at back and study the past. Regardless, don't believe everything you read and hear in the media or from our world leaders. "Well duh!"

Dispatches: A Post-Wimbledon Dialogue: I love tennis. I used to be really good (as a junior) - I'm now able to occasionally torture - but not beat - someone that is a 4.5. Watching Federer and Nadal play is a joy that harkens back to my childhood watching Borg and McEnroe play (I loved Borg because my game was like his but rooted for McEnroe because I was an angry and volatile tennis player.) This is a brilliant recap of some genius tennis.

Electronic Papyrus: The Digital Book, Unfurled: I love my Kindle (I haven't read a physical books since I left for Alaska last week.) I'm not sure that I love the Readius, but I'm definitely game to try it.

Time for a run. The sun is still not out.

(07/08/08 09:00 PM)

Month 1 of TechStars and Other Fun Things.

Month 1 of this year's TechStars program is over. Andrew Hyde captures the sights and the people of TechStars in a fun three minute video.

While you are at it, if you were a Lego fanatic take a ride down Lego Memory Lane.

Finally, in the continued emergence of the Kindle as a serious thing, Princeton University is now publishing Kindle textbooks. No more giant backpacks full of books and lecture notes.

(06/28/08 09:01 PM)

It's The Little Things - Or Why Windows Mobile Contact Search Sucks.

There is a great Bill Gates email from January 2003 titled Windows Usability Systematic degradation flame that is making the rounds on the web. I love a good rant and even though this one is dated, Gates says in great detail what a large number of Windows users have summarized over the years as "shit - why won't my damn computer do <blah>."

I'm a heavy computer user and have some variation of this thought on a daily basis. One of my special talents is finding bugs and breaking things - just ask any of the companies that I've invested in who their most "useful" (where useful is a euphemism for "annoying") alpha tester is. Think of me as helping improve software quality on planet earth.

Now - software quality is a complicated thing to measure. Not all bugs are overt ones. Let me give you an example of a particular pernicious Microsoft one that no one seems to ever prioritize to fix (no - I'm not going to pick on Windows Calculator again, although I could.)

I use a Windows Mobile-based Dash. I expect I'll try the iPhone again on July 11th now that it actually syncs with Exchange, but until then I'm tethered to my Dash. I love the form factor and have trained my muscle memory to deal with having to press multiple keys to do things that I should be able to do with one keystroke - mostly due to design flaws in Windows Mobile. I've used some variant of Windows Mobile for the past eighteen months (I think starting with Windows Mobile 5; I'm currently using Windows Mobile 6.1.) If I were Mr. Windows Mobile UI Designer, I'd change a bunch of things, but it works well for what I need it for, which is primarily email, calendar, tasks, contacts, phone calls, IM, and twitter. And sync. My data needs to transparently sync with my Exchange server without me having to do anything. Oh - and my BlueAnt bluetooth headset. And I'm sure there are a few other things.

Here's the problem - the sort algorithm on contact lookup is terrible. I have a large contact list (5048 as of today). Searching for "Stan Feld" should be immediate since that's how it's listed in the address book. Progressively typing S then T then A then N should bring up "Stan Feld" immediately. Typing "Stan Feld" into the To: field on the email program should be immediate.

Nope. The delay is anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds. At some point I decided to try to figure out the underlying algorithm. My guess is that it's doing a full table scan of first_name + last_name for each letter typed. There doesn't appear to be an index - either fixed or dynamic - and as a result the time for most searches is approximately linear based on the number of letters typed.

Now - if this problem was in Windows Mobile 5 but fixed in an update, I'd let it slide. I've done at least three (I think four) major updates of the software since I've had my Dash. There has been virtually no improvement in this feature.

Whenever someone asks me about my Dash / Windows Mobile, I tell them that I generally like it except for this one thing. I then describe the thing. Occasionally I'll show the thing. And then I feel stupid that I'm still using this phone since I spend so much time looking up contacts or completing names in email fields.

Having written my share of sort algorithms, I expect this is less than 50 lines of code regardless of which language it is written in. It is sophomore in college computer science type stuff, not PhD stuff. Optimizing this to improve performance by 10x - 100x is maybe a day or two of a single programmer's time.

This is not a Microsoft-specific problem. I could have picked on anyone. I've got a long list of Apple issues like this, plenty of Google issues including some remarkably silly ones, and - well - don't get me started on the Yahoo ones. All of the companies I invest in have problems like this. It's just an endemic part of software. And one that users shouldn't have to put up with.

It's also not limited to software. When filling up my car recently, the gas pump clicked off at $75. I'd noticed this happening periodically, but now it was happening every time. Gas is now over $4 / gallon. Each of my cars has a 20+ gallon gas tank. $75 doesn't fill up the tank in any of them (and in at least one it doesn't come close.) There was a point in time when I'm sure someone decided that a way to mitigate credit card fraud at the gas pump was to limit the amount of each transaction to $75. Now all that does is inconvenience a large number of customers with a mysterious cut off point.

If you develop products (especially software) for a living, never forget that people remember the little things.

(06/25/08 09:01 PM)

Five Secrets to Email List Growth. Building a list of responsive subscribers via a Web site that has a bit of traffic and quality content is surprisingly easy. But sometimes, when working with users, we're surprised to see low conversion rates. So, we take a look into just why that might be. Here are five factors to consider when growing your list. (05/27/08 09:00 AM)

Optimize Email Deliverability With Best-Practice Strategies. If you're a marketer, every undelivered message translates into lost revenue. Luckily, there are ways to improve the odds of delivery and decrease the chance of running into problems in the first place. The key to email deliverability lies in earning the trust of internet service providers, or ISPs. Because these companies need to provide quality service to their subscribers, they devise standard protocols and policies regarding unsolicited bulk email. (05/20/08 09:01 AM)

ITSMA: Elevating Demand in a Crowded World . Generating demand has become a top priority for most companies in today’s slower environment. The most successful programs are much more targeted than in past years and favor quality over quantity. You're invited to join me at ITSMA's (IT Services... (04/30/08 09:01 PM)

How to LIVE RICH. A good friend and ex-Dell colleague passed away on Friday, April 25, 2008, after a courageous and inspiring battle with brain cancer. I want to celebrate and share the piece of his life I knew, and the words of wisdom he left for all of us. Two months after I joined Dell in March 1999, a curly-haired Harvard grad moved into the cube next door. Over the next seven years Rich and I worked together to help build Dell’s consumer eBusiness to a $3.5B business, and then on Dell’s CRM and segmentation strategy (he worked on corporate strategy while I worked in Consumer division). But what he worked on is not as important as HOW he accomplished his goals. Rich exemplified leadership. In fact, he had the rare quality of being a Level 5 Leader, as outlined by Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great. He excelled through confident humility amidst a (typical) corporate environment of politics, ego and alpha aggression. He always put decision in terms of what was right for the business, and helped others grow in the process. Everyone loved to work with Rich or for him. So many of us were awestruck at Rich’s knowledge and wisdom. Rich often put up ‘observations’ on his small whiteboard in his cube. One time he made the observation that time and quality of mission statement are inversely related – graphed on the board, the more time spent on the mission statement the less it resonates. So true. And so funny.... (04/29/08 09:01 PM)

Why cost-per-lead budgets fail and fewer leads are better. A reader asked me to explain why fewer leads are better and why “cost-per-lead” budgets fail. These are two great questions that have the same fundamental answer: quality first then quantity. The truth is that sales people care very little... (03/05/08 09:01 PM)

Lovely E-Mail.

I get quite a few e-mails each day. Some are from people asking about my services, others want me to answer their questions, and still others write rather lengthy stories about various hardships that they want to overcome by getting grants that don't exist. Then there is the e-mail I received yesterday asking for a donation so that the sender could attend a conference in Las Vegas, which she can't pay for because she doesn't have any consulting work. Hmmm, I would like donations so that I too could go to Las Vegas.

But every so often I receive an e-mail that just plain makes me happy. I got one of those yesterday too. Here it is:

I am 30 yrs old with little to no experience in writing up
proposals. I am currently working in a middle management position in a
small company. I feel I have an idea that would greatly benefit the
company I am currently working for. After approaching one of the senior
management with it, he told me he liked it and to write up a proposal.

I have been searching the internet for the past week and a half
attempting to gain insight and advice into how to create a quality
proposal. I am not the type of person how expects, or even wants, to
have someone else do my work for me. Most of the sites I found offered
to create a proposal for a fee. It is my belief that unless
circumstances require otherwise that a person should learn to do things
for themselves. It was a nice surprise to find on your site a starter
list of sorts that I could use to begin to make a proposal on my own.
Your "Proposal Preparation Checklist" and Proposal Pointers and
Pitfalls" are wonderful tools and I wanted to take a moment to thank you
for freely distributing them. It is a welcome relief when someone sets
forward information to allow people to empower themselves. The links
you have provided to other websites are also wonderful. Just skimming
over the Checklist and Pointers, I have already noticed some points I
would never have considered.

So again, thank you so very much. I really appreciate the effort you
have put into your site and also the information you have offered freely.

What a beautifully-written thank-you note. And to boot, it expresses my own mantra -- "do your homework" -- just perfectly.

It's just so nice when something like this pops up in your mailbox!

(03/01/08 09:01 AM)

Lovely E-Mail.

But every so often I receive an e-mail that just plain makes me happy. I got one of those yesterday too. Here it is:

So again, thank you so very much. I really appreciate the effort you
have put into your site and also the information you have offered freely.

What a beautifully-written thank-you note. And to boot, it expresses my own mantra -- "do your homework" -- just perfectly.

It's just so nice when something like this pops up in your mailbox!

(02/21/08 09:01 PM)

Lovely E-Mail.

But every so often I receive an e-mail that just plain makes me happy. I got one of those yesterday too. Here it is:

So again, thank you so very much. I really appreciate the effort you
have put into your site and also the information you have offered freely.

What a beautifully-written thank-you note. And to boot, it expresses my own mantra -- "do your homework" -- just perfectly.

It's just so nice when something like this pops up in your mailbox!

(02/20/08 09:01 AM)

20 Articles on Social Commerce & Word of Mouth. I haven't kept up the pace of posts here compared to previous years. Part of this is because it's been an exciting, busy year. But the other cause is my writing time is fractured between this Decker Marketing blog, our company blog (Bazaarblog) and writing other articles / columns. So, I thought I'd point you to articles I wrote elsewhere over the past year or so that you might find interesting... Some of my columns on iMedia Connection: The Big Idea Behind Social Commerce How to Market Social Media to Execs Get Web Analysis Fundamentals Right Positives About Negative Product Reviews Other articles / interviews: Word of Mouth and Your Business: Bridge the Gap Bazaarvoice's Sam Decker on Fueling WOM Implementation Social Commerce Interview with Sam Decker Sam Decker on Customer Centricity and Culture Selected blog entries from Bazaarblog: Why Customers Write Reviews Can Customers Trust Online Reviews? The NPV of Reviews 16 Insights from Ted Leonsis (AOL) Summary of Answers for "What about Negative Reviews?" New Frame of Reference: Value is in the Quality of Co-Creation 18 Customer-Created Marketing & Merchandising Tactics 10 Clues You have a Marketing ROI Culture "Operationalize" Customer Centricity A Story of Customer Centricity: Discovering Your Customerrs' Perspective Defining Social Commerce The "Waggle Dance" and 7 Steps to Reaching Customer Centricity (12/26/07 09:01 PM)

Seattle Networking Takes A Turn for the Better. We have lots of great networking happening in the Northwest. I was appreciative of a new effort, though, to bring quality and thoughtfulness to a social networking mixer - like the one I attended a couple of weeks ago. It... (12/11/07 09:01 PM)

Be Masters of Reality. At last week's Forrester Consumer Forum, Richard Edelman suggested today's PR has to be 'masters of reality' rather than focus on spin and hype. This was underscored by his tagline, "Be it. Don't Buy it." I think that's a great mission for marketers in general. In a world of higher transparency the best products and companies will succeed. The true reflection of their quality and character will be amplified. As masters of reality we will realize that products need to be great, word of mouth follows, and marketers (as masters of reality) will leverage the truth. (10/14/07 09:00 PM)

Innovate, Create, and Re-create. Michael Port blogged about my son, Leon, who recently went from being a professional athlete to a corporate gig. Michael's right, I AM a proud parent, and really impressed with the quality of the article written by Brian Compton of... (10/12/07 09:01 AM)

Brand Management Position Available in Eau Claire, WI. Hey Folks, I recieved an email today seeking some referrals for a brand management position in Wisconsin. The role is based in Eau Claire, WI If you're interested, please contact: Leasa Sanders McIntosh leasa [at] shouldbeskiing.com 303-757-4103 Position Details:

Develops marketing strategies and programs to drive corporate revenue and communicate corporate vision/strategy.
Leverage market knowledge, customer understanding, marketing research, competitor assessments, and analysis to develop clear customer acquisition, retention and recapture strategies.
Partner effectively across the organization, including corporate sales, development, operations, technology, and finance.
Manage multiple projects simultaneously with attention to detail, tenacity, and a focus on results.
Identify new product and market opportunities and develop/execute plans to realize revenue goals.
Analyze program results using qualitative and quantitative techniques.
Develop and manage marketing budget.
Works to build and maintain relationships with all internal management team members to provide the highest level of service to our clients and their consumers.
Provides feedback, including appropriate reporting to key management personnel in order to identify continuous quality improvement opportunities.
Develops sales support materials, including presentations, brochures, and proposals.
Develops materials to support internal communications and strategies.
Develop client communications and strategies.
Performs other duties as assigned.

(10/04/07 09:01 PM)

Practical Strategies for Generating Quality Leads Teleclass. I'm doing a bunch of in-person speaking events this Fall. If you're not able to make any of them, I wanted to let you know that I'm going to be a guest this Wednesday with Michael Stelzner as part of... (09/18/07 09:00 PM)

JibJab's "Starring You" Now Live. JibJab has finally launched its Starring You series, where you can upload your head into a JibJab animated video (you can see me and my wife shaking it above). This an example of giving average people the tools to create high-quality content (see previous post). I broke the Starring You story a month ago in one of my Disruptors videos.... (08/16/07 09:00 PM)

Universal Music Tests the DRM-Free Waters. DRM Elimination Crew Suit Originally uploaded by GregoryH The future of digital-rights management (DRM) took another blow, as Universal Music tests the effects of selling its music catalog in the unrestricted MP3 format. The good news is that it looks like it will sell its MP3s at the regular 99-cent price per song (instead of charging more for the lower-quality MP3 format, as EMI is wrongheadedly attempting to do). But Universal Music is playing its own games with this move by making its MP3 catalog available to every online music retailer except iTunes. That's just it's way of trying to shake Apple's hold on the digital music market. Universal MP3s bought from Amazon or Rhapsody will play on your iPod, but if you buy the same songs from iTunes, they will be wrapped in Apple's DRM software. This is doubly ironic, given Steve Jobs' public stance against DRM. But he cannot take the DRM off of Universal's songs sold on iTunes. Only Universal can. And since Universal is the largest music label, by keeping iTunes out of the MP3 camp for now, it might gain some leverage at the bargaining table with Apple. Or it might just piss off Steve Jobs, which is never a smart thing to do. (In other Universal Music news, video-sharing site Veoh filed a preemptive lawsuit against Universal before the music giant could sue Veoh for abetting copyright infringement by its video-uploading members. First YouTube (with Viacom), and now Veoh. It won't be long before... (08/10/07 09:01 AM)

The Last Wall is About to Fall at the NYT. Donovan Building Demolition Originally uploaded by Allan M Some newspapers have tried stubbornly to resist giving away their content for free on the Web. But the New York Times is finally about to give up the ship, according to the New York Post. It already gives away most of its stories for free online—all except select Op-Ed pieces on TimesSelect. In an age of seemingly unchecked growth in online ads, subscription walls don't make a lot of sense. And with Rupert Murdoch thinking about taking down the subscription wall at WSJ.com, the Times would not be wise to become the last holdout. Scott Karp explains the disruption occurring in the media world:The new economics of media make charging for content nearly impossible because there is always someone else producing similar content for free — even if the free content isn’t “as good as” the paid content by some meaningful metric, it doesn’t matter because there’s so much content of at least proximate quality that the paid content provider has virtually no pricing power.News and commentary are no longer a scarce commodity.... (08/07/07 09:00 PM)

Picnik; The Slickest Pic App Out There. Temps of the World Unite Originally uploaded by Erick Schonfeld Yesterday, Jonathan Sposato, the CEO of Picnik.com, came by my office to show me the slickest Webtop application I’ve seen in a while. It’s a fully-featured picture editing app that blows away iPhoto in many respects and is completely browser-based. Picnik can ingest digital photos from your computer hard drive or from various photo-sharing services, including Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket, and Google’s Picassa. Once you pick a picture, you can rotate, crop, zoom in and out, remove red-eye, resize, and add tons of effects from heat maps to sepia tones to doodles to borders. What is impressive is that it does all of this faster than a desktop application like iPhoto. For instance, it took me literally two minutes to create the image above from this image I had previously put up on Flickr. The breadth and quality of features on Picnik fall somewhere between iPhoto and Photoshop. Sposato is the programming whiz who managed the team that built the Halo videogame for the first Xbox. Then he created a startup called Phatbits which was bought by Google and became Google Gadgets. Picnik is free and has attracted about 300,000 users. Sposato plans to try to upsell members to a premium version to get access to some of the fancier effects that are now free in the beta version of the site (like heat maps and doodling). It's not clear how many people will end up paying for such extras, especially... (07/12/07 09:01 AM)

Why Facebook will Network Business Users. Facebook launched its open platform in late May, preceded and followed by a lot of buzz. As a (late) early adopter, I launched a profile several weeks ago. I uploaded my contacts and found many professional friends were already on Facebook. People who joined after me did the same thing, and added me as a friend. Today I have 140 friends on Facebook, and growing. I’ve told my team to get on Facebook and introduced colleagues to Facebook. I suppose I’m an evangelist right now, encouraging people to get on Facebook to, if nothing else, experience a turning point in social networking. In the ‘early days’ I was on Ryze, Orkut and eCademy, but I wasn’t very active. Several years ago, I got on LinkedIn. Its superior interface and quality of professional members hooked me. I’ve focused my time there to reconnect with colleagues, find employees, and answer questions. I’ve amassed hundreds of (mostly relevant) contacts. LinkedIn is a superior tool for finding people with relevant business connections or experiences. Now that Facebook is open, how will the landscape of these online networks be affected? For professionals on both networks, which will garner more care and feeding? How will each network evolve, especially after LinkedIn’s announcement of opening its platform to application developers? My prediction is LinkedIn will remain as a business network. It is suited to accomplish tasks: hire people, get answers, find experts/contractors and maintain professional contacts. At the same time, despite its heritage being rooted in fun... (07/11/07 09:01 PM)

How should Chipotle Invest $.26 per Burrito?. I was intrigued by an article in this week’s BusinessWeek regarding Chipotle’s incredible growth (27% YOY last quarter), despite a relatively small advertising budget. McDonald’s spends $820M+/yr in marketing on $21.5B revenue…4% of revenue. Chipotle spends $4.5M on $882M revenue…less than 1% of revenue. I did the math... if you assume the average meal is $8 (with drink, maybe chips), then Chipotle is serving over 110 million burritos (or burrito bowls, as I prefer) per year. If they decided to spend as much as their McDonald’s parent and competitors (4% of revenue), they could spend an additional $29M in marketing. That’s an extra $.26/burrito they could spend on advertising. Or perhaps they should spend it on something else? I’m not suggesting they spend this money. They are growing 26% YOY and pulling in $41M in net income. They are not ‘growth challenged’. More importantly is the positive business results growing on such a small marketing budget? How does Chipotle do it? They create a great atmosphere, built an eco-friendly company, and invest in great food that is served fast. I eat there once a week -- they give me more food than should fit in my stomach for a decent price, and it comes nowhere near the poor quality of first-frozen fast food. As growth slows Chipotle will face the pressures of a public company, typically to reduce costs. Bad idea…see my post on “Marginalizing Quality”. Or, ironically, analysts may ask for them to spend more on advertising. This is... (03/05/07 09:00 PM)

Podcast: Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way. It's been well documented that quality of collaboration between sales and marketing directly impacts ROI. The challenge that many organizations face is that their sales process is a black box. No one except the sales team knows what is going... (02/28/07 09:00 AM)

Good vs. Worthwhile. I'd like to elaborate on this morning's post on Worthwhile brands, ask a lot of questions, and then open this up for discussion. My earlier post discussed some initial ideas for defining a worthwhile brand: does it measurably improve quality... (12/16/06 09:00 AM)

Valuing Your Off Selling Time. Quality of life is important as the holidays are upon us. Getting things done - and working smarter is a key to success - so that one can participate in fun, after hours events. For me, shopping during the hectic... (12/12/06 08:47 AM)

My Fight Against Inappropriate Ads. "I've used advertising at this site since its inception. The income keeps me motivated to provide quality content. I experiment with different ad formats from time-to-time, but I try to keep them as innocuous as possible. My greater concern is screening inappropriate advertisers. Because the words 'get rich' are in the name of the site, Google Adsense frequently sticks 'get rich quick' ads in my articles. I hate this." (12/12/06 08:04 AM)

How to Buy Presents Strategically. When you have kids and have gone through a series of Christmas seasons, you realize that sustainment of happiness from a present is usually longer in the mind than it is in reality. Sometimes, especially with toys, the euphoria ends on December 26! This season I'm taking a different approach. I'm approaching present-giving like capital investment. In business good strategy requires allocation of resources towards areas of growth. Capital is invested towards something that has long term ROI, and aligns with the strategic goals of the business. Apply this concept (loosely) to presents. So, for your gift receivers (kids, spouse, family), what gift will help have sustainable enjoyment? And, what gift will help the person and/or your relationship with that person grow? I want our kids to learn experientially. So, I will buy gifts that will teach them new things they would not learn in books, but still enjoy. Example: I recently bought them SIMS City, Zoo Tycoon, and Rossetta Stone. I don't have as much time as I'd like to give to our family. So any gift I receive or give them should be accretive to quantity and quality of time with the family. Anything that builds family memories is good, like a camera for the kids so they can take pictures of the family and our life. A book for me on raising my kids (instead of my typical marketing / management books!). Family games that aren't boring would be a good thing. Gift certificates to dinner or... (12/06/06 09:00 AM)

Sundays Contract Management News and Comment (27th August 2006). NuÃ±ez's wife got AQMD contract (Los Angeles Daily News) SACRAMENTO - The South Coast Air Quality Management District awarded a $125,000 consulting contract to the wife of Assembly Speaker Fabian NuÃ±ez at the same time the district was seeking legislation to cut train engine emissions. Contract Given To Assembly Speaker's Wife (CBS ... (08/27/06 09:03 AM)

Sponsoring B2B email newsletters. Globalspec's newsletter, Marketing Maven, posts a e-marketing 101 article titled What to Know About Sponsoring e-Newsletters that caught my attention. I don't think the subject gets talked about very much. Ultimately, she is making a case for sponsoring Globalspec's industry-specific newsletters.

"A compelling case exists for suppliers and manufacturers to add sponsorship of e-newsletters to their marketing mix. The benefits of the right sponsorship include:"
Brand visibility
Frequency
Low barrier to entry
Audience
Ability to test"

Okay, the Maven is right on these (and she explains more for each bullet), but there are two other issues that come to my mind:

1. Cost. Of course.
Globalspec has always positioned itself as costing about as much for a one year listing as a single full page ad in a trade publication (around $15K). Their newsletter sponsorships (three different positions available) are about $2,500 per issue. This was true regardless of the audience size (30K or 70K), but is on par with pricing I've seen with trade publications.

This expense could be acceptable for an advertiser with a large budget trying to round out their exposure triangle. For a partial-page advertiser like myself, this is a big price to pay for a extremely fleeting exposure. But that leads to my second point.

2. Effectiveness
Just how fast do people scan e-newsletters? Fast. The quality of content and the format is going to effect how the user reads the newsletter, but the process is fast nonetheless. While there is a 'low barrier to entry' as the Maven says, and it sounds good to get your promotion in front of 70K folks at one shot, I don't think that you can just throw money and a simple ad/listing and expect results. Particular care needs to be placed on what your ad says and looks like, and how it fits in the newsletter. Essentially, the same due-diligence should be applied as to a print ad in order to be effective.

So, in summary, I think e-newsletter sponsorship works when:

It is a smaller part of an overall marketing program
The newsletter format makes the sponsorship likely to be noticed
The advertiser prepares content that gets noticed
Sponsors should take advantage of the points the Maven calls out

Longtime readers may remember I once posted about a newsletter sponsor that got me to click, only to lead to a white paper as a Word file. Hopefully we're all past that by now. (08/25/06 09:02 AM)

Tuesdays Contract Management News and Comment (22nd August 2006). Inaugural Call for Papers: The W. Gregor Macfarlan Excellence in Contract Management Research and Writing Program (PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance) The National Contract Management Association is pleased to invite the submission of high-quality papers in the inaugural solicitation for the W. Gregor Macfarlan Excellence in Contract Management Research and ... (08/22/06 09:01 AM)

What he said--review of online directories. Robert J. (no relation!) just found my blog and left an interesting comment on my last post. In it he left a link to an article called:

Industrial Search Engine Marketing - Industrial Search Engines and Directories.

The author, Mark Forst, offers to "review the major industrial search engines and directories to provide some of my personal experiences and opinions on their quality." He goes on to give pretty fair assessments of ThomasNet, GlobalSpec, KellySearch, and some others. He errs on the side of being polite, but is more judgmental about cost. Oh, and he does name prices, in case you didn't know how much these services can cost.

Mark, if you keep writing handy articles like this, you'll put B2Blog out of business :-) (07/29/06 02:28 PM)

Guess what is the top B2B marketing tool?. Us poor B2B marketers...the top three things buyers look for in a product aren't under our direct control...price, service, quality. We can add sizzle to these, but ultimately, the buyer will discern the truth.

So what is our #1 marketing tool? Amazingly it is something we've only had for ten years...our websites. Results of a user survey by ThomasNet were summed this way:

"Of course, competitive pricing, good customer service and high quality are a given, but the next single most important thing buyers mentioned is a detailed, user-friendly Web site. "

The article has lots of other handy tidbits from the survey:

Comments by users like this:
"Provide enough information within their Web site for me to make an educated decision-? comparative product details, listed prices, and list of distributors that I can purchase from if they don't sell direct."

This factual gem:
36% of the time users will seek out new suppliers for a new purchase.

Look at the top two of '10 Things Buyers Look For In a New Supplier'
1. Easy-to-navigate Web sites with accurate, detailed product and pricing information
2. Companies that are easy to find and have a strong Web presence

This shouldn't really be news to us B2B marketers...but after ten years, we may have grown complacent about our websites. From the details of this survey, I say our target audience has become even more discerning and faster to pass on poor (to them) websites. We can't become complacent!

Read more: It's Not Who You Know. It's Who Knows You (07/29/06 02:28 PM)

Is CPA helpful to B2B AdSense campaigns?. Perhaps you've heard of Google's mantra, "do no evil". I was concerned that their going-public would shift the focus of their company towards profiteering, if not evil. As it turns out, they seem to have been too clumsy (and blessed by Wall Street) to be digging for profits.

Staying squarely in the 'no evil' category, the big story this week is that they are testing AdSense payment based on "Cost per action", or CPA. A click-thru would not be enough, the visitor would have to 'convert', or achieve a goal on the website. Advertisers using this model would only pay for traffic that matters, and risk of click-fraud (i.e. evil) would go away. For the sites hosting the ad, a potentially higher pay-off should offset their PPC income.

This sounds great, but there are questions that seem hard to resolve, especially for advertisers like me (which is maybe why Google is only 'testing' CPA).

The obvious technicality is that for a lot of smaller & B2B businesses, the most common 'action' coming from their website is a phone call. And these are the people who also are paying much more per-click in their current PPC campaigns. Which means they have a lot more at risk for click-fraud yet cannot rely on CPA to help due to the untraceable phone call.

The other problem is simply numbers. AdSense needs thousands of impressions just to create PPC activity worth mentioning. And of those clicks, only another 1-2% are going to convert. And because that conversion for small or B2B businesses is not a sale, we aren't going to want to pay a high bounty for 'just a lead' (unless quality can be determined).

Russ Perkins, at InfoCommerce Group, points out a deeper issue in this week's newsletter, titled Does CPA Add Up To Trouble? that this would once-again upset the apple cart regarding the job of advertisers and the publishers carrying the AdSense ads:

"If CPA takes off with advertisers, and I think it will, we have to watch it closely. If it remains limited to publishers getting paid (hopefully a lot) for generating hard sales leads, that's one thing, and a number of us could do quite well in this environment. If it morphs (as I predict it will) to advertisers demanding to pay only when they make a sale, we as an industry have to draw the line. The purpose of advertising is to stimulate interest, not guarantee profits."

While the CPA program may flourish with e-commerce businesses, I don't see it gaining a foothold in the B2B sphere.

In addition, I will go one further: As B2B advertisers look closer at their spending and conversion rates with AdSense (as compared to AdWords), they will start to pull out of AdSense.

The next smart place to try is Google's Site Targeting, which is paid on a CPM basis, but allows you to choose what sites to run your ad. That kind of human selection should provide a greater chance of clicks and conversions. (07/29/06 02:28 PM)

Don't miss Candlebox.... I went to see Candlebox last night in Baltimore (at Rams Head Live) - the show was AMAZING! They have about two months left on their tour, check them out if you can. Here are some pictures that I took with my camera phone... not the greatest quality, but you get the idea. The good news is that they are working on a new record!... (07/29/06 02:28 PM)

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