The topic of influence continues to be a focus of marketing this year, as it was last year. People are flinging content at prospective customers as fast as possible, but one of the most important aspects of influence continues to be largely ignored: counter-influences. Here’s a simple example. Imagine for a moment that you’re a…
I’ve been doing a test over the last few months with my email newsletter. This is a very simple, very basic tactic: announce the newsletter to folks when it ships. It’s simple. It’s barebones. Does it make a difference? I took a look at my basic analytics and found that on the weeks when I…
I’ll play devil’s advocate on CC Chapman’s excellent post recently asking where the advanced conferences are. There aren’t any. And I mean that in all seriousness. The more advanced you become in any field, the less general information is going to help you, because you’ve learned it. The more advanced you become in any field,…
One of the most asked questions I get is about industry standards. “How do we compare for likes, retweets, email open rates, website visitors, and every other marketing metric versus industry standards?” The answer is: it doesn’t matter at all. Not one bit. Why? Because industry standards have nothing to do with you or your…
Recently, a number of folks have made a big deal out of yet another “Best day to…” chart, this time about Facebook. As I’ve said in the past, there is no overall best day to do anything. It’s a fiction. There isn’t even a best day by industry – consider that Smallville Credit Union and…
… when you are talking about an outcome that is non-monetary. Awareness of a cause is not a monetary outcome. Certainly you can save money on the promotion of the cause, but your end goal is awareness. It’s non-monetary. You either generated more awareness or you didn’t. Election to office is a binary, non-monetary outcome.…
Does this sound familiar? In your quest for marketing goals, marketing ROI, or marketing measurement, you find yourself with hundreds of different data points and no clear sense of what any of them mean. You have a bucket of web analytics, from conversions to unique visitors to bounce rates. You have your marketing automation metrics,…
If you’ve never seen the movie Office Space (which I recommend heartily), you missed the character of Bill Lumbergh, played by Gary Cole: For all of his many, many, many faults, the Lumbergh character does something vital that you need to incorporate if you want to be a successful marketer: he gets out from behind…
My main character I’ve been playing recently in World of Warcraft is my marksmanship hunter, which is probably the most complex class of character I’ve played in the game. Why? In order to get the maximum performance out of the marksmanship hunter, you have to memorize and execute a very tight, very fragile rotation of…
Let’s get some basic productivity things out of the way right away, shall we? 1. Backups. If you have never thought about backing things up, there’s never been a better time to start. Take your pick of a gajillion different cloud-based storage devices or the “getting cheaper by the minute” portable hard drives, but back…
