Glass Case - Internet Marketing Blog

A good primer for the New Marketing

Chris Peters — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:53:27 +0000

Waiting for Your Cat to Bark?: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing

This is a great introduction to basing your customer experience on personas. If you can analyze your customers to the level where you can write specific stories about them, you can base a better experience by analyzing their needs.

Read on for more thoughts about the book.

Blogging and being in the right place at the right time

Chris Peters — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 18:29:04 +0000

A couple weeks ago, I stumbled upon a slightly controversial blog post about an industry issue just after it was posted. It generated 108 comments, and I'm sure that thousands of people viewed it. Many people read some of the comments, and mine was there first. My comment also included a link to my blog post in response, which I drafted up as quickly as possible.

Read on for actual results of what this did for the open source project that I manage.

Be a big spender

Chris Peters — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 01:10:48 +0000

A piece of advice I gleaned from my Creativing Writing professor in college: be a big spender. When he was teaching us how to write creative works, he encouraged us to work hard on every piece that we wrote.

If you have a big idea, do it now. Don't feel like you have to save your best stuff for later. And don't put it off. If you get in the practice of coming up with great ideas, then you will find ways to outdo yourself later.

It's funny how some lessons can stick with you years later.

Social artifacts

Chris Peters — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:48:02 +0000

If you're into marketing at all (which I'm trying to teach you about), you need to be producing all kinds of social artifacts. There are a lot of tools out there that you need to be learning. A lot of them are online.

I will be sharing ideas about the more common social artifacts: video, audio, articles, presentations, blogging, and document sharing.

Google Wave = Enterprise Facebook?

Chris Peters — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:31:42 +0000

I find it ironic that I wanted corporate communications to be more like Facebook, and then Google announced Wave a couple weeks later.

Read on for more information about the fuss.

CAPTCHAs with a purpose

Chris Peters — Mon, 18 May 2009 11:37:36 +0000

As a user of the Web, you're probably familiar with CAPTCHAs. They're the little word puzzle with the squiggly letters that you are required to type in when signing up for various services.

It’s estimated that 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved around the world each day. In light of this, Carnegie Mellon has created a program called reCAPTCHA that actually puts all of this superfluous work to use.

Read on to see what this is all about and how you can help out.

Enterprise Facebook

Chris Peters — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:43:53 +0000

What if your company's intranet were more like Facebook? Isn't the point of an intranet to spread ideas and information? Have you seen anything recently that does a better job of hooking in users than Facebook and Twitter?

Your intranet could show a stream of alerts for key events (55 orders placed before lunch, a critical backup just completed, Richard is going on vacation tomorrow, etc.) as well as communication between team members.

And it could give your team members a chance to express themselves a little personally. Why not take the water cooler aspect of Facebook and focus it on helping your employees build closer relationships?

It's interesting thinking of the ways that business information can be displayed and interacted with. This is becoming a new passion of mine. It also makes me realize how uncreative I am compared to the visionaries of companies like Facebook. :)

Tips for social media

Chris Peters — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 18:51:57 +0000

I know that many of you already read Seth Godin's blog, and you probably already saw his post about making a living online.

If you haven't taken the time to download and read 279 Ways to Overnight Success yet, I am another person telling you to do it. If you're doing any kind of social media (blog, Facebook, Twitter, flickr, etc.), then you'll want to read it.

For the blog-obsessed

Chris Peters — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 16:02:04 +0000

I was just thinking about how many feeds I subscribe to (huh?) and how many blog posts I read. I almost never leave comments. But blogs are a conversation, or else they wouldn't have the comment area.

When is the last time that you commented on a blog post that you read? It's time to challenge yourself to have a conversation on the next blog post that you read. (It doesn't have to be this post, but that wouldn't hurt!)

First 2 words

Chris Peters — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:31:03 +0000

If you only had 11 characters to describe your content, what would your message say? As it turns out, sometimes that's all that you can get people to "see" when they're scanning for links to click.

This puts importance on how you're using those characters in your page titles, but it also has a ton of implications for things like your headlines, headers, and how you start paragraphs.

Read on to find out why.