b2b marketing & sales thoughts by nick rice
I’ve always been inspired by good displays of complex data sets. Edward Tufte discusses this better than almost anyone. His books should be standard fare for all designers IMO.
Worldmappr applies the visual display of quantitative data to wealth, population and carbon emissions. Via 37signals.
GDP Wealth
Carbon Emissions
Total Population
Here in the US, clean drinking water is completely taken for granted. Even the nastiest public restrooms have running water that 99% cleaner than the drinking water in most third world countries.
It’s said that “Man cannot survive on bread and water alone”. And I agree, but you absolutely cannot survive without it.
Get involved, conserve water and help to stop this global crisis.
From BrandWeek, “Good Things Come to Brands That Give”
Let’s see, loyalty, referrals, profitability, ownership! Yep, pretty much covers all the bases of strategic growth.
See the Top 50 socially & environmentally responsible companies (PDF)
If you’re not on board but would like to learn more, give me a ring. We’ve helped others, chances are we can help you.
Welcome to the March 21, 2007 edition of Marketing (r)evolution Carnival hosted at Strategic Design by Nick Rice.
Advertising
RachelAPP presents When advertising is taken one step too far posted at Food for your mind, saying, “An article questioning a certain type of advertising…”
James Archer presents Attention Mapping: The 10-Point Exercise posted at Forty Media, saying, “A customer’s attention: it’s exceedingly difficult to acquire, experts measure its in milliseconds, it vaporizes if mistreated, and it’s worth far more than gold or diamonds. Scared? Don’t be—it’s putty if you know how to handle it.”
Adrien presents Time Warner Top Media Ownership Rankings posted at AccuraCast Search Daily News.
Branding
Derrick Daye presents Exploring Brand Equity Measurement posted at Branding Strategy Insider, saying, “”You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” This is especially true of a brand and its equity. A robust brand equity measurement system will accomplish the following objectives…”
Derrick Daye presents The Anti-Brand Movement and its Antidote posted at Branding Strategy Insider, saying, “It seems that people are tiring of crass commercialism, corporate greed and the pervasiveness and power of mass brands across the land.”
Creativity
Alex at The RE Forum presents Innovative Marketing Ideas posted at The RE Forum, saying, “Against all standard business advice, an Atlanta woman has generated an incredible buzz around her product. In this day and age, when it becomes more and more difficult to get the attention of potential customers, this story has really stuck with me.”
Marketing
Vahid Chaychi presents Why Your Google Adsense Revenue Is Dropped? posted at Internet and Search Engine Marketing, saying, “My Adsense revenue dropped dramatically after few months whereas my websites traffic didn’t have any decrease. I researched and came to this conclusion that users didn’t like to click on the ads like they were used to do it before.”
Susan Borgas presents Full or should it be Short Feeds? posted at Arts & Stuff, saying, “What are your habits when reading RSS feeds in readers such as Google Reader or Bloglines? Do you dislike not being able to see the whole feed because the blog owner syndicates the first paragraph or 255 characters, whichever is shorter. If you tut tut or grumble about blogs that do this please consider not doing the same with your own blog.”
Christopher J. Brunner presents Is Viral Marketing Effective? posted at The Small Business Buzz, saying, “The post explores the effectiveness of viral marketing.”
Steve Faber presents BofA’s New Credit Cards to Help Fight Identity Theft? Probably Not posted at DebtBlog.
Lead Optimize presents Bad Salespeople Kill Sales Leads posted at Lead Optimize.com, saying, “Bad salespeople kill your marketing effectiveness and hurt the whole team - cull the bad ones and give new ones a chance.”
Susan Velez presents Tired Of Paying For Marketing? posted at The Secret To Life.
Vahid Chaychi presents Spend Five Minutes and Drive Loads of Traffic to Your Websites posted at Internet and Search Engine Marketing, saying, “Google Local is one of the Google free services that can drive a lot of traffic to your websites and local business. It is free to register your business with it and doesn’t take more than five minutes of your time.”
Christopher J. Brunner presents Choosing Powerful Text for Your Business Cards posted at GreatFX Business Cards, saying, “How to draw in potential clients by adding powerful text to your business cards.”
BF presents How to Get More Customers by Finding Out Who You Are posted at The Marketing Adviser, saying, “This is an article about one of the first steps to creating a great marketing plan.”
Christopher J. Brunner presents Business Card Etiquette for Entrepreneurs posted at GreatFX Business Cards, saying, “Outlines the proper way to hand out business cards to get the best response.”
Christopher J. Brunner presents Marketing with a Dash of Controversy posted at GreatFX Business Cards, saying, “How viral marketing has brought success to the Heart Attack Grill in Tempe, Arizona.”
Vahid Chaychi presents AdSense Arbitrage Secrets Revealed ! posted at Internet and Search Engine Marketing, saying, “AdSense Arbitrage works but you just need to know some secrets about it. These secrets are not revealed in the expensive e-books you see their ads every where over the web. You need to know how to choose the keywords; how to design the website and how to advertise in PPC search engines.”
Strategy
Vahid Chaychi presents Get Inspired by the Success Stories and Interviews posted at Internet and Search Engine Marketing, saying, “You may get disappointed while you have started a new business and it has not given any good result yet. Most people give up at this point and stop working. One of the best things that prevents you to give up, is reading the success stories and interviews of successful people in your niche. Learn how to find and read them every week.”
Matthew Paulson presents What Your Bank Isn’t Telling You. posted at Getting Green.
almomento presents How to Change Your Money Fate posted at BurstCreativity.
Misc.
lecentre presents Top 10 Reasons Google Sucks posted at Bookworm SEO, saying, “Some critical analysis of Google’s algorithms, business practices and general double standards. Google Sucks.”
Barbra Sundquist presents Top Five Places for Small Business Networking (HomeBusinessWiz.com) posted at HomeBusinessWiz.
Praveen presents Review of “The Rich Jerk” - Get It Free, Plus $1 posted at My Simple Trading System.
Broc Copeland presents 3 Ways to Market Blogs Using MyBlogLog posted at Existential Ventures.
That concludes the 3rd edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of Marketing (r)evolution Carnival using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.
Technorati tags: marketing (r)evolution carnival, blog carnival, nick rice
Here are some snippets from Tim Cook’s speech at the Goldman Sach’s Technology Investment Syposium from late Feb. (from Mac Rumors)
How do you keep innovating?
…I would say is our corporate culture is a very simple culture. We hire people who want to make the best products in the world and provide an atmosphere to challenge each other to make the best products. And that’s deeply embedded in the DNA of the company. …. I can tell you this is why people come to work at Apple.
How do you view the market for the iPhone?
The traditional way that all of us were taught in business school to look at a market was you look at the products you are selling, you look at the price bands that are in the market, you think of the price band that you product is in and assume you can get a percentage of it, and that’s how you get this addressable market. That kind of analysis doesn’t make really great products. The iPod would not have been brought to market if we had looked it that way. How many $399 music players were being sold at that time? Today the cell phone industry, a lot of people pay $0 for the cell phone. Guess why? That’s what its worth! If we offer something that has tremendous value that is sort of this thing that people didn’t have in their consciousness, it was not imaginable… I think there are a bunch of people that will pay $499 or $599 and our target is clearly to hit 10 million and I would guess some of those people are paying $0 because its worth $0 and willing to pay a bit more because its worth more.
How do you handle the loss of a senior exec?
Apple is an amazing company, and I didn’t fully understand until I got there, how amazing it was. And the feeling of not getting weighed down by bureaucracy, and politics and all the ancillary things that any businesses are. So this atmosphere is a very very unique kind of atmosphere and frankly, we don’t have an issue attracting people to work there, and we have so many things going on and innovation is so deeply embedded in this place. While you may see 5-6 or 10 people being most visible, the company is full of off-the-charts smart people. We’ve had some executive departures, but as a grown-up company does, we planned good succession, and I think you can see from our results, the products have kept coming.
It’s obvious how much Apple respects their customer (or should I say legions of mac addicts) and their employees. I’m continually amazed, given their formula of success, how other large companies scoff at Apple. In today’s world cost-cutting is viewed as an innovation. It’s bad enough to focus your efforts internally for growth (as compared to what really drives top line growth - delivering what customers desire on top of an outstanding experience), but when you skip right past your people and only look for cost targets how do you ever expect to right the ship.
I know there’s not an easy or a quick fix. But today’s executives have to actively evolve their corporate culture, their internal DNA, to focus on real long term growth strategies. You only need to focus on two things - your customers and your employees. And by stating that “our employees are our greatest asset” in your mission statement doesn’t cut it. You have to prove you mean it. Set your employees free to innovate, let them really converse with customers. Then you’ll see loyalty and growth from both parties.
If you don’t believe me, look at the Fortune 500 list from 1995. How many of those companies are still on there? How many are still in existence? Einstein said it best, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
Do something different or accept your fate as the dinosaur grazing while a meteor is barreling down with you in it’s crosshairs.
Drew McLellan of the marketing minute asked me to submit a few words to college grads reading his blog. He has a long fruitful list of advice from bloggers on what to expect in the real world. I submitted my thoughts, and hope you do the same.
Keep up the good work Drew!
Found this great post at AWeber Communications on HTML versus text only emails.
There are some good comments (including my own, if I might add) on the benefits and disadvantages of both email formats. At Cre8tive, we typically will send both versions automatically and let the recipient’s server decide which version is appropriate. With Microsoft Outlook 2007 coming, the rules around HTML email coding have changed a bit. With the new version, Outlook will use MS Word as it’s HTML rendering engine instead of Internet Explorer. It does affect how you need to program and layout your HTML emails. You need to be aware of the new rules and issues. Here are the reasons behind the change.
The good thing about text only versions is that they are super stable. You don’t have to worry about horizontal or vertical viewing panes or images being disabled or your CSS/table layout being screwed up. It just works. Unfortunately, it’s not as trackable as the HTML version - but you can track all external links to your mini-site or landing page. And once on your website, you have the full benefits of your installed analytics engine to take care of the tracking details.
I recommend sending both. And in each version, include a full link to a web version as well. And like all good marketing efforts; test, evaluate, tweak, rinse and repeat. The beauty of email marketing is the immediate feedback and the cost effective nature. It allows very easy A/B testing, personalization and ROI tracking. It’s a great way to stay in front of your customers while offering a lot of value in a small package.
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