WPNI Blogroll - Business Blogs 2

Free Ebook: Beyond Code by Raj Setty

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:16:47 -0800

One of the most giving people in the whole world has done it again. My buddy Raj Setty is giving away his book Beyond Code FREE in ebook format. If you’re an IT manager or an IT associate wondering how to move “beyond code” and get into something more people focused, this book will help [...]

Steve Jobs’s Stanford Commencement Speech

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 10:35:49 -0800

I just finished watching a great YouTube video of Steve Job’s Stanford Commencement Speech, discussing some of his life experience, as well as some of his personal life lessons. Two of the life lessons from Steve Jobs speech that I found interesting were…. Love what you do… “…sometimes life is going to hit you in the head with [...]

mSpoke Research - Blog Post Popularity

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 12:32:43 -0800

mSpoke’s Chief Scientist Paul Ogilvie has the first post up in a series of research he’s doing focsuing on what makes a blog post popular. The first analysis looks at reading difficulty as a predictor of popularity. His conclusion follows, but go read the entire post: When I set out to write this post, [...]

2008 Election Recount Part 4 - Why Weren't We More Social?

PardonMyFrench — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 09:57:03 -0800

This is part 4 of my series looking at the 2008 Presidential Election. Past posts are: Part 1 The Palin Effect, Part 2 Monday Morning Quarterback, and Part 3 The Death of Microtargeting.

So one of the questions that everyone likes to ask or write about is why didn't Senator McCain's team embrace social networking? My answer is, well we did but we were challenged by money, people resources, and our own supporters.

First a little disclosure. It is no secret that I am not a believer in using social networking sites for PAID online advertising. That's especially true for MySpace which is where I believe good advertisers go to die, especially if they do direct deals with them. Facebook, I have a little more faith in, but I am hard pressed to recommend them for advertising too. YouTube I love and I've run campaigns there; I especially love YouTube because they are powered by Google which always makes me happy. So, standard display advertising is a waste of money on most social networking sites, but I do (and did) believe they are critical for involving supporters and pushing CRM messages. OK, so what do I think happened. Three things....

No Money - as much as social networking costs next to nothing when compared with advertising, it still costs money to develop widgets and content. When compared with Senator Obama, we were at a significant disadvantage.
No People - social networking done correctly needs people to do the outreach. Unofficially I've heard that Senator Obama's eCampaign totaled around 95 and Senator McCain's totaled around 15. At that level of disparity you have to make choices by prioritizing items.
Different Supporters - While I believe there were quite a number of people that supported Senator McCain that would spontaneously create videos, Senator Obama as well as Congressman Ron Paul had a much larger pool of people that would create content. Here's a screen shot of videos when you search on YouTube for Barack Obama and John McCain (filtered out crap). Other than "Dear Mr. Obama" and "Obama's Citizenship Problem" the number of positive McCain supporter videos are nowhere to be found and even if they were further do on the list, they would not have nearly as many video views. Heck, even our best professional fan video - Raisin' McCain by John Rich only generated 152,000 views.

McCain's team had a Facebook page and we pushed messaging through it added widgets, and had 600K+ supporters. To put that in perspective, we had 3.85 times as many supporters as Hillary Clinton. Yes, Obama was a monster when it came to Facebook but then again you could argue he had inside help to get him started. We did some advertising in Facebook and for a very small micro-target it performed great, but didn't scale.

We used YouTube from the very beginning. When the campaign imploded during the Primary season we had to use YouTube to push out video ads. Web videos was a key strategy for us especially before we won New Hampshire.

The blogosphere was also very important but it was a tough row to hoe prior to wrapping up the nomination and then it took some time after that. The vast majority of Republican blogs are very conservative writers and those are our activists. It was BRUTAL during the Primary season. Town Hall bloggers were rough, Michelle Malkin, RedState, Race42008, and so on. I should know because I monitored posts. I made comments. I reached out to bloggers. I mixed it up with people. I interacted with Mitt Romney's army of supporters and took on Ron Paul's zealots. Town Hall's Hugh Hewitt DROVE ME FRIGGIN CRAZY and years later I still find it difficult to read his posts.

I marshalled bloggers to help John McCain win TechCrunch's Tech President endorsement. Heck, who do you think put John McCain's SecondLife together just in case? If you were one of my Twitter followers in the last month of the campaign you saw campaign posts from the Daily Briefing. We pushed out widgets, video contests, tried donation gathering from MySpace, Yahoo! Answers, MySpace Townhall, etc and etc.

So when people say John McCain's team wasn't social, they are wrong. We were very social. Did we run into the greatest use of social networking marketing in the history of the internet in the form of Barack Obama? YES.

If we were more social would we have won the election? No. We still had to deal withan unpopular President, the economy, and money problems. Senator McCain's eCampaign Team was VERY SOCIAL and any marketer should be jealous of what we accomplished; that is unless you were on Senator Obama's campaign.

PardonMyFrench,

Eric

The Most Important Question to Ask a Reporter BEFORE the Interview

BL Ochman — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 12:08:40 -0800

What's the most important question you should ask a reporter before you grant an interview? I've been pitching and talking to reporters for what often feels like 100 years, but I finally learned that magic question this morning.

I bet you'll say yes to all of these questions. I did, until today. It's great to be featured in the media, right? It's smart to be generous in sharing information with a reporter so she/he will think of you as a good source again in the future, right? Love me or hate me, but please don't ignore me.

All of that is sage advice - provided you ask the magic question first. "Will you include the name of my company and a link to it in your article?"

Because, otherwise, what is the point? Do you think lots of people will Google your name to find out how to reach you? Think again!

It's not only unfair to the interviewee, but as reporter Amy Gahran noted on Twitter, not linking to a source is not transparent to readers.

Nathan Eddy interviewed this morning for a story in eWeek "Six Tips to Build Your Brand" and when it came out, there was no link to my blog, and my neither consulting company, nor my new venture, Pawfun.com, were named. My fault. I didn't ask the magic question.

But after the fact, in a what-the-hell moment, but not without trepidation, I looked a gift horse in the mouth, emailed him and said that I thought there should have been a link. He immediately wrote back, apologized, and added the link. Whew!

I won't make that mistake again. Don't you make it either. Remember the magic question.

All content copyright B.L. Ochman, Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, with the attribution: By B.L. Ochman, What's Next Blog, and a link to the post

A Good Time Had by All

Luis Carranza — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 04:23:29 -0800

Beware of Commodifying Promotions

Mark Ritson — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:01:00 -0800

There are two kinds of brand management: intentional branding and holistic branding. Intentional branding is all about what brand managers intend to do with the brand. Usually, this involves a list of the traditional activities associated with branding - everything from logo design to integrated marketing communications.

Then there is holistic branding, which goes beyond the intentions of the branding team and adopts the consumer's viewpoint. Holistic branding considers every possible interaction, intended or not, that consumers have with the brand.

Too often a brand manager's myopic focus on intentional branding comes at the expense of the holistic perspective. Take one effort from Cadbury's Dairy Milk.

From an intentional viewpoint, Cadbury embarked on an ambitious £20m campaign that focused on the centenary celebrations of the brand, using television, print, radio, online and in-store activity. The campaign was based around the aspirational message 'You dream it, we make it' and it emphasised the rich, smooth qualities of the chocolate bars.

From the holistic view many consumers of Dairy Milk had a single recurring brand experience that was anything but aspirational.

Across the UK, Cadbury ran a buy-one-get-one-free (BOGOF) promotion through WH Smith. As consumers approached the checkout, their first exposure to Dairy Milk and its sub-brands was piles of chocolate bars, often 10-deep, on the front of the sales counter.

Then, as they paid for their newspaper, they were asked by a shop assistant whether they would like to buy two large Dairy Milk bars for the price of one. This was the real Dairy Milk brand experience for millions.

So what was wrong with this promotion? Well, pretty much everything. Using a crude BOGOF promotion such as this instantly commodified the Cadbury brand. While £20m of advertising attempted to build the brand associations of Dairy Milk and make it appear more than just another chocolate bar, the effect of being offered two for one instantly emphasised the fact that this was just another product available in bulk at discount prices. The message: don't buy it because of its richness and specialness, buy it because you get two for the price of one.

Those who did buy the two large bars were unlikely to consume them immediately. More likely, they stocked up on Dairy Milks. This meant that, after the promotion ended, future sales at full price would be hit.

These promotions can send consumer demand haywire. First a huge surge in demand during the promotion, followed by a sudden drop once the promotion ends - the so-called 'bullwhip effect' that causes chaos for inventory management and logistics.

In this case we can't forget Cadbury's other retailers. If you are a local newsagent devoting several square feet of precious shelf space to Cadbury brands at recommended prices, you are not going to be happy with a promotion that kills demand for your Dairy Milk and makes you look overpriced. If you are a major super market player, you will already have made sure that you will be the next store to be offered the BOGOF promotion.

So how could a company such as Cadbury make what seems to be an elementary error? Don't be too surprised - great brands are rarely greatly managed.

Perhaps the marketing team at Dairy Milk was unclear about the difference between sales and marketing. Perhaps its hand was forced, because if it did not run the promotion, Nestle would have stepped in. Or perhaps Dairy Milk is a brand run on good intentions, but with no holistic view of itself.

30 SECONDS ON ... CADBURY SCHWEPPES

- Cadbury was set up by John Cadbury, a young Quaker based in Birmingham, England in 1824.

- Cadbury merged with Schweppes in 1969, and the company currently has a market capitalisation of more than £10bn. Other brands in the portfolio include Trident, Dentyne, Trebor, Dr Pepper and Snapple.

- Cadbury Schweppes has four main production sites in the UK, employing 4500 people. The 60-acre site at Bournville is the biggest and remains the company's spiritual home. Each week the Bournville site alone produces more than 1.6m bars of chocolate a week.

- Cadbury's other production sites include a liquorice and gum unit in Hillsborough, Sheffield.

- 2005 marked the 100th anniversary of the launch of Cadbury's Dairy Milk brand.

Sponsored By: Brand Aid

Teach your customers with online classes.

Wed, 19 Nov 2008 18:46:02 -0800

HP announced a series of changes to their online support offerings earlier today and one of those updates was the expansion of the free online classes they offer. HP’s offering is interesting because they don’t limit the classes to HP products exclusively, but instead offer instructor-led classes on a variety of subjects, ranging from digital photography [...]

Add one more risk factor to your SEC S-1 filing!

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 13:57:43 -0800

I know, I know, it isn’t like you are about to file your public offering, but if you were you should considering adding one more to your S-1 registration statement. The idea behind risk disclosures is to “describe the most significant factors that may adversely affect the issuer’s business, operations, industry or financial position, or [...]

Selling All My Belongings

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 12:51:49 -0800

So New Girl ripped my heart out. Given, we’ve only been dating for two months, and I knew this moment had to come. Unfortunately we were doomed from the beginning. I don’t know what I expected to happen, because I’m leaving for Southeast Asia for a year and she has an acting career to concentrate [...]