Over the past couple of days, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to businesses large and small, in virtually every industry from non-profit rescue missions to Fortune 500 companies about their digital marketing, and one of the greatest consistent gaps I’ve seen is that few are using a CRM, or customer relationship management system. For…
Listen to the average marketing strategy meeting at a company and you’re liable to hear something like this: “We need to adopt service like Zappos!” “We should do what Chris Brogan does with Twitter!” “Do we need a Comcast Frank?” “What if we could reduce costs by making customer service self-serve like Dell?“ It sounds…
I had the pleasure of presenting recently to the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council about building strong, large online communities. The discussion ranged from World of Warcraft gaming sites to Marketing Over Coffee to many others, and we reviewed the methods and skills needed to build and grow a community. Instead of using slides, I chose…
I was talking recently with Jon Merz, author of the Kensei (if you dig vampires, definitely grab a copy) about how some authors can move much more inventory than others with the power of the email list a little while back. He was wondering how it was that some authors are able to throw out…
In classical mechanics and physics, momentum is the product of mass times velocity: p=m*v Want more momentum? Add more mass. Want more momentum? Add more velocity. Want to be unstoppable? Pile on mass and velocity. We talk about momentum in marketing. A campaign has momentum, a meme has momentum, a project needs momentum. How do…
If you’re the sort that enjoys analytics (or your job makes you “enjoy” it), you’ve probably encountered statistical normalization many times, even if you don’t know it. What is it? The short description is removing outliers so that you can see statistically valid trends. Remove outliers, remove bad data, and smooth over data points so that…
I’ve had a welcome popup running on my blog since the end of November last year. For a long time, I debated the wisdom of installing it on my web site. After all, I personally don’t like them much on other sites I visit, but I had to remind myself of the cardinal rule of…
