Month: June 2009

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies Tagged with , ,

Oh, this is bright! I got an e-mail from a company I’ve never heard of, about VOIP phone service. By coincidence, I’ve been researching some stuff in that space, so when they offered “The Top Ten Reasons Companies are Switching to (company name),” I actually clicked over to see it (something I normally don’t do in response to unsolicited sales messages).

So they spent all that time and energy to get me to click, and what do I get when I reach the site?

The Top Ten Reasons you should switch to (company name).

Please complete the following form in order to view The Top Ten Reasons you should switch to (company name). Thank you.

They want my name, email address, company, phone, company’s approximate number of phones, number of office locations, and state before they will deign to show me their sales pitch?!? Sorry, guys. I DON’T think so! Utterly clueless!

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, Media Ethics, Social and Economic Justice, Transparency vs. Secrecy

Very disturbing article on Total Health Breakthroughs about a deliberate campaign by Merck to intimidate, defund ,and otherwise make life miserable for doctors who dared to speak out about the nasty and sometimes-lethal side effects of Vioxx.

I am not in a position to evaluate the claims this article makes, but if there’s any truth to it at all, we’ve got yet another very serious problem in our health care system.

Isn’t it time we put actual healing in front of corporate profits? And isn’t it time that drug companies and others are held responsible for the consequences of their products–and their strategies?

If you’re in the US, tell your representative in Congress to support HR 676, the Medicare for All bill.

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By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News Tagged with , , ,

Fascinating article on BNET about how Microsoft’s much-ballyhooed Bing search engine is no Google killer–because, as I’ve been saying for years (including in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First), branding is not about how much money you pour into the marketing, but about the superior service or product or experience you can deliver.

Which is, after all, how Google achieved search dominance in the first place, as anyone who remembers searching with clunky tools of the mid-90s will attest.

The article does have a solution for Microsoft, though: it identifies a core weakness of Google’s and gives Microsoft an exact recipe to exploit this vulnerability.

I won’t spoil the surprise. Go read it.

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By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

Man, this is ironic!

I just deleted two comments from the same post, and marked them as spam. Here are the texts:

Things You Should Know About Gardening
,Gardens come in different varieties like the plants you find in them. There are several gardening tips that can be used for all type of gardens. A good way to take care of them is to consider that plants might have some feelings too.

And

Today’s cars can typically be expected to pass the 200,000 mile mark with consistent automobile maintenance. With the price of automobiles, you will want to protect that investment by performing regular maintenance. If you can do much of the work yourself, you will save a lot of money in labor. Invest in a good set of tools and choose quality parts when performing your own automobile maintenance.

Both, incidentally, with the same anonymous Yahoo address. Both in “response” to a post called “Black-Hat Sploggers Leave a Bad Taste.”

Just what does this yo-yo (or maybe I should say, this yahoo, in the Gulliver’s Travels sense) hope to accomplish by spamming a post about spamming bloggers? No way are those links ever going to show up on my moderated comment page. All they do is make work for me. Oh yes, and make sure I will never, ever do business with them.

Want a better way? I recommend my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World. If you buy it directly from me, it includes a nice little e-book called Web 2.0 Marketing for the 21st Century, which tells you the right ways to do social media marketing. I’ve been building my business with social media all the way back to 1995, and I have to tell you I don’t suffer these clowns easily. Oh well, it gives me a chance to mouth off. 🙂

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By Posted on Posted in Peace and War, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

It is so amazing for me to watch a major foreign policy and development speech by a sitting US president and actually agree with more than 80 percent of it–yet that was the case for Obama’s speech in Cairo, Egypt. Even under Clinton, I was lucky if I agreed with him 25 or 30 percent of the time, and the number was far lower for speeches of the other presidents in my conscious lifetime.

As a progressive, I issue this challenge to other progressives: hold him to the grand rhetoric of peace, international cooperation, multicultural tolerance, and yes, feminism in the Arab world and at home…and to keep him maintaining his acknowledgment of the important roles of Israel and Iran as well as the Arab and Muslim countries.

But what was that he said about being in Iraq until 2012? Waaay too long.!

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People Tagged with , , , ,

Want to make a REAL impact on carbon footprint, as well as put money back in the pockets of those suffering in this troubled economy (or perhaps those who never participated in the economic boom in the first place)?

I got an e-mail describing a wonderful sustainability project in Cambridge, MA–one that would be easy to replicate anywhere: Weatherization Barnraisings.

Steve Morr-Wineman, one of the initiators, wrote that a group of people organized…

a local energy co-op called the Home Energy Efficiency Team (HEET). In August we organized our first event – a weatherization barnraising. It was a simple idea: bring people together to weatherize a house by doing things like insulating doors, windows, and pipes, and installing programmable thermostats and compact fluorescent lightbulbs. We publicized the event with a simple flyer, got on some listserves, and then it just took off through word of mouth – and 40 people showed up.

Since then we’ve been doing one weatherization barnraising a month, and people just keep turning out; 30-40 every time. We’ve assembled a pool of skilled team leaders, gotten contractors to come for free to some of the events, and have expanded the range of weatherizing we can do. The multiplier effects are huge, because people are learning skills they can use to weatherize their own homes.

The Boston Globe even ran a story on the community weatherization project, noting that the group is looking at doing public buildings as well, including a school.

If you’d like to start your own weatherization group, Morr-Wneman and his friends have posted a free how-to manual at https://www.audreyschulman.com/HEET/manual3.htm

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By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with ,

Harvard Business Review just released a fascinating study on Twitter. The only problem is, it’s completely unreflective of my own experience. This is the comment I left:

“Is Twitter a communications service for friends and groups, a means of expressing yourself freely, or simply a marketing tool?”

It is all of the above and much, much more. And it lends itself much more to qualitative than quantitative research–because each individual user’s experience of Twitter is entirely different depending on who they follow, what times of day they log on, and how much time they spend.

Thus, while this aggregate study offers some very interesting data, it’s hard to know what subset of Twitter users the data applies to.

To me, this very idiosyncratic experience is actually part of Twitter’s charm. I’m following over 800 people, and that means I see little snatches of conversations and threads, different each time I log on (typically, a few times a day for just a few minutes each time). While some prolific Tweeters (Guy Kawasaki among them) show up regularly, the randomness of who’s in my window leads me in all sorts of wonderful new directions. I often say I became a writer because I’m interested in practically everything, and in 140 character-bytes (and their associated links), I get to satisfy those interests in little bits and pieces.

In fact, I must have incorporated research from 20 different articles I first found on Twitter into my next book.

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary Tagged with , ,

Some of the comments regarding abortion doctor George Tiller, who was brutally murdered in his church yesterday are just disgusting. Bill O’Reilly, who has been attacking Tiller for years, called him a Nazi and a baby-killer, and made this crack:

And if I could get my hands on Tiller — well, you know. Can’t be vigilantes.

Randall Terry of Operation Rescue called him a mass-murderer.

From what I’ve heard about Tiller, he was a sensitive, caring man who believed in a woman’s ethical right to control her own body.

I can respect the truly pro-life, such as Catholic Worker pacifists who oppose both abortion and war. But I have always found it odd that so many of the people who scream loudest that they’re pro-life, at least as far as unborn fetuses are concerned, suddenly lose their righteous stance when it comes to

  • Sending kids off to die in wars
  • The death penalty
  • Vigilante “justice”
  • Sometimes-fatal torture in prison
  • Bombing civilians

    • If you’re really pro-life, then BE pro-life! Even after birth.

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