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This TV advert from Volkswagen came out around two months' back and somehow I have never seen it. Well, for those like me who have not seen it, sit back, hit the play button and enjoy!
If you'd like to, why not buy
the Under Milk Wood DVD which features Richard Burton as First Voice or the audio soundtrack from Amazon.
How can a company with over 500 Stores in the UK allow this to be displayed on their website?
There I was having a quite glass of Peroni lager when, on clicking through to a Times Online article about Al Gore (my wife and kids are away tonight!), I get hit with this (interstitial):
WOW impressive! This is personalisation at its best. However, if that wasn't enough, on trying to find this curious advert again I get served up with this:
Well, I'll certainly drink to that (the Dolce Vita that is!).
Shel Israel, over at Naked Conversations, writes about how last week he spotted David Cameron and his entourage in Edinburgh. Never one to miss a photo opprtunity, he stooped down to speak to a homeless man and:
he squatted to shake hands and chat with a street indigent as the tanned Cameron's web-camera rolled. The candidate then left the street guy without dropping so much as a pence in his direction.
What my camera did not catch was the ensuing sequence. As Cameron strolled away, he scowled, then wiped his shaking hand on the seat of his well-pressed pants.
I am currently writing this post whilst trying to get through to Northern Rock. Apparently the reason I have been on the phone for 20 MINUTES is not due to:
No, the reason they have problems answering the phone is due to their marketing team's efforts:
Thank you your patience. We are experiencing a high volume of calls due to our excellent, typical APR of 5.9%
Silly me! I should have known.
Today, I here that the US government is looking to ban this online:
but you can still go and buy one of these online:
Related Articles
Gun violence in America (Guardian)
If you're looking for a steer on what going on in the Internet, take a look at Fortune magazine. In their last two issues they have conducted interviews with the people behind two of the Internet's major players of the moment.
The first issue gives the 'the inside story of disorder, disarray, and uncertainty at Google.' and features an interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google.
As mentioned in a previous article, I have been re-reading a book called Soloing by Harriet Rubin and this has led me to read up a little on Peter Drucker, who she actually interviewed whilst 'Soloing'. One of the questions that she poses to him is how he keeps ahead of all the developments he needs to know. Here is part of his answer, from Peter's Principles:
"Knowledge by definition makes itself obsolete," says Drucker. "Skills last forever.
"My family name, Drucker, means printer," he says. "For centuries, my family never needed to learn anything new. And when archaeologists began to dig out the ruins of Emporia--the greatest trading city of the Mediterranean in Hellenistic times--sometime around 1950, they found the tools the craftsmen used. Except for the screwdriver, which is of medieval invention, there is no tool unearthed from Emporia that is any different from those craftsmen use today. Any shoemaker or cabinetmaker would be just as at home in ancient Emporia as in Berkeley today. A craftsman learned as a child all that he would need for the rest of his or her working life."
But in our knowledge economy, says Drucker, "if you haven't learned how to learn, you'll have a hard time. Knowing how to learn is partly curiosity. But it's also a discipline."
"You don't know anything unless you teach it" has been Drucker's mantra for learning to learn. He's taught American history, Japanese art, religion, and statistics. To teach what you don't yet know helps you learn more than just a new set of facts; you practice the discipline of learning to learn, since new subjects require learning new concepts.
I deliver eMarketing courses at least once a month and can actually relate to exactly what he says. I would also add that to really understand your subject area (in my case eMarketing), you need to be able to apply and put into practice what you have learnt/taught. How could I possibly deliver a course if I haven't gone through the pains and succeeded on client eMarketing campaigns?
I have just started re-reading Harriet Ruben's excellent book, Soloing, where she describes her journey from corporate life to 'soloist'. According to the Amazon review: "The life of a "soloist," as she came to describe this new professional
direction, turned out to be both challenging and exhilarating--and one,
Rubin immediately realized, that she would never trade for a return to
big business."
Towards the start of the book she offers readers a very interesting 'joke':
There was a fisherman working alone in a beautiful, seaside village. He went out every morning in the forever-blue waters and caught one spectacular fish each day. A marketing whiz happened to be vacationing in the village and said to the fisherman, 'Why catch only one fish? If you're out there anyway, why not catch a hundred, sell ninety, and make a big profit?'
"'I love my life the way it is', the fisherman said. 'Why would I want to do more?
"'Because then you could get rich, start a fishery, move to a place like Silicon Valley and bring in sophisticated, technological systems to market all the fish. I'll be your partner and after a year or two or five of endless hours and almost never seeing the sun shine, we can take the fishery public and make millions'
"And what would I do with the millions?', asked the fisherman.
"'You want millions' explained the whiz kid, 'so you can take your millions, buy a place in a little fishing village like this, and spend whole days doing nothing but catching one perfect fish'"
I actually know a couple of people who couldn't understand why the fisherman wouldn't see the argument of the whiz kid's argument!
I'm looking forward to watching this and just hope it has the massive impact that is required to make some governments sit up and change course!
Just revisted an interesting article by Gore Vidal that I read 4 years ago - called The Enemy Within and written in The Indepedent newspaper. For the most part I would say that he's bang on the button. Here's one interesting quote from it:
We have only outdone the Romans in turning metaphors such as the war on terrorism, or poverty, or Aids into actual wars on targets we appear, often, to pick at random in order to maintain turbulence in foreign lands.
Returning from holidays in Madrid last weekend I bought some orange juice at a service station and the message on the bottle got me thinking. If I'm correct it was Robinson's fresh orange juice and the strapline on the front of the bottle went something like this:
"Squeezed Daily in the UK"
Well, why wouldn't it be? Much of the orange juice we drink in the UK is flown in from overseas (as far as I know there are no orange plantations in the country) and we usually add water to the concentrate to make it into juice.
I am sure that every company involved in the making of fruit juice must squeeze oranges every day - otherwise there would be a production problem and the shops wouldn't have fresh orange juice. However, in this case, stating the obvious on the product packaging makes the product offering a far more attractive proposition.
If, like me you grew up and used Macs at school and college, you may well be interested to know that Steve Wozniak - the guy who "invented the personal computer and co-founded Apple" - will shortly be releasing his autobiography: IWoz: From Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It. I remember first hearing about this extraordinary, and quite unassuming guy, while reading John Sculley´s autobiography - Odyssey: Pepsi to Apple : A Journey of Adventure, Ideas, and the Future. This is really the man who shaped the way that we use computers today and communicate today - his contribution to the way we work and live today is actually quite immense!
Wired Magazine has an exlcuisve interview with Steve Wozniak - IWoz Logs Leap From Geek to Icon - where he discusses the new book and ponders on why Steve Jobs wouldn´t do the foreword. The interview can also be listened to as a Podcast.
The recent issue of Wired Magazine offers some great tips on how to keep a snooping boss at bay and how to look busy at work. The second is written by Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame, and here are some tips from this section:
Complain that you're totally swamped at every opportunity. Use phrases like "up to my ass in alligators" and "jumping from one fire to another" to make your job sound kind of sexy and dangerous.
Emailing looks like work. Email friends and family often.
If you feel like talking instead of working, talk to your boss. That counts as work no matter what you're chatting about. The ideal topic of conversation is how poorly all of your coworkers are performing.
Be sure to get involved in unquantifiable projects. You want to be doing a lot of consulting and advising and attending. Avoid anything with a hard and fast deadline.
Here are some other good "How to" guides from this issue:
Be More Productive Secure Your Data Get Ahead Work Smarter Make Work Less Hellish
In a recent Fortune magazine, entitled The Welshman, the walkman, and the salarymen identifies why the Walkman is so far behind the iPod:
"Menus," Stringer says, "have displaced knobs." That, in a nutshell, is why Apple's iPod, which neatly integrates hardware, music, and an Internet platform, makes the Sony Walkman look like a tired relic of the 1970s.
Rocket science it is not, but how long did it take Sony to work that one out.
Take a look at the World Cup Flickr badge below - it is amazing how frequently the photos keep changing. I set one up a while back on my Madrid site under the tag: Madrid but this one just leaves it standing. It really does look like the whole world is posting their world cup photos to this site and having a great time!
Over the next few days I will be giving the computer a rest but here are some of the articles that I hope to read over this time:
Marketing Sherpa
Exclusive: MarketingSherpa Interview with Web Design God Steve Krug (Audio MP3 + Transcript)
MarketingSherpa's Viral Marketing Hall of Fame 2006: Top 12 Campaigns You Should Swipe Ideas From
Inside Hyundai's Online Advertising Tactics: What Works for Behavioral and Launch Campaigns
How to Conduct an Interactive Survey & Turn the Results into Must-Attend Webcast Content
Seven Inspirational Site Tweaks Newegg.com Used to Raise Online Sales to $1.3 Billion
Marketing Profs
How to Create a Successful Business Blog: 9 Steps to Implementing
How to Create a Successful Business Blog: 8 Planning Tips (Part 1 of 2)
Give Away Your Research—Win Valuable PR and Marketing Prizes
How to Beat the Competition With Your AdWords Campaigns
Fast Company
The Beauty of Simplicity
HBS Working Knowledge
Lessons from the Browser Wars
Does Your Company Belong in the Blogosphere?
Have a Happy Easter!
Happy St David's Day to you all!
Tonight sees the return of the successful BBC series The Apprentice (first aired in the States I believe). 14 hopefuls will compete against each other for a six-figure salary working with Sir Alan Sugar. The last series was quite enjoyable and I'm sure that this one will be equally the same. If you don't know what the series is about, here's a brief synopsis:
Fourteen hopefuls, two eagle-eyed advisors and one self-made millionaire. Yes it’s the show that pits Britain’s hungriest business brains against each other to see which one is worthy of a six-figure salary and the chance to become Sir Alan Sugar’s apprentice.
Over twelve weeks the candidates will take part in the toughest recruitment-drive on television. Sharing a luxury townhouse on London’s "millionaire’s row", they will be split into two teams and given a weekly task with which to expose their entrepreneurial nous.
The BBC has a mini site dedicated to the series where you can view previous episodes, get clips from both this and the last series, biographies of the hopefuls and the latest news.
So, which of the 14 will be the first to hear the words: You're Fired
I just saw a great ad on TV tonight which I felt I had to blog about - I think it was doing the rounds in the States a good few months ago. The ad is from IBM and shows a truck screeching to a halt before a woman sitting at a "customer services desk". Here's the dialogue:
Trucker 1: Would you kindly tell me what you're doing in the road?
IBM Helper: I'm with the Help Desk. You're lost. You're headed to Fresno.
Trucker 1: Fresno, right.
IBM Helper: This is the road to Albuquerque.
Trucker 1: How'd you know we were lost?
IBM Helper: The boxes told me.
Trucker 1: The boxes?
IBM Helper: RFID. Radio tags on the cargo. Helps track shipments.
Trucker 1: (to trucker No. 2, all under end titles) The boxes knew we were lost.
Trucker 2: Maybe the boxes should drive.
Trucker 1: Very funny.
I think it's just a very simple way of getting across what this technology stands for.and it probably makes people want to find out a little more about the technology.
Fortune Magazine has an interesting article on Steve Jobs, which not only looks at how the stories surrounding Disney linking to Pixar, but takes a closer look at Steve Jobs, the Master of Disruption. It discusses how Steve Jobs has managed to create two different models :
Apple's trick has been not just its game-changing tech breakthroughs (music and computers made easy) but its relentless push to disrupt itself before others have a chance to do so. "The thing that most people don't realize about Steve is that he is not only really good at taking technology and turning it into good-looking, easy-to-use products, he's really good at doing it faster than anyone else," says Paul Saffo of the Institute of the Future in Palo Alto.
The article goes on to give a an example of how Apple did the unforgvable - making a successful product obsolete within 18 months:
The first one released four years ago had a monochrome screen and a five-gigabyte hard drive. Now it has a color screen and a 60-gigabyte hard drive at roughly the same price. What other business would obsolete a successful product like the iPod mini after only 18 months to introduce the nano?
I think that Tom Peters used to talk about destroying your business before anyone else does. Steve Jobs seems to follow the same mantra and makes sure that he keeps moving the goalposts for his competitors all the time.
We always hear about the guys at major corporations who are making millions of dollars for their shareholders (and themselves). Well, why not take a look at Fast Company's list of 25 Social Entrepreneurs who are making a difference to people with serious social problems both in the USA and overseas? Here are some excerpts:
.".developed a network of microlending institutions that provide the poor with loans as small as $100 in order to start their own businesses."
"..runs after-school programs at 24 schools in 13 cities, staffed mostly by about 2,000 volunteer architects, attorneys, journalists, and other professionals who use their passions to inspire students."
"..certifies "fair trade" products--coffee, tea, cocoa, sugar, and other foods produced without exploiting growers' labor. It also connects farmers' cooperatives in Latin America, Asia, and Africa directly to U.S. distributors, eliminating middlemen who otherwise would capture a chunk of the profits."
"..provides livestock to poor families in developing nations to use for farming, food production, and fertilization. It also teaches animal husbandry and skills for flexible and sustainable rural farming."
There are some truly great and inspiring stories in here.
Well, seeing as it's Friday, I thought I'd post this one from Hugh over at Gaping Void. It certainly put a smile on my face when I first saw it!
Just saw that Bono and Bill and Melinda Gates have been named Time Magazine's Person(s) of the Year 2005 for:
"being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow"
Managing Editor James Kelly said the three had been chosen as the people most effective at finding ways to eradicate such calamities as malaria in Africa, HIV and AIDS and the grinding poverty that kills 8 million people a year.
Well, you can't argue with that. I saw Bill Gates speaking at the Live 8 concert in July and couldn't help thinking that it can't be bad that the richest man in the world is also prepared to give virtually all his wealth away in coming years to help people who are in greatest need.
Fortune Magazine has got a great feature in their latest issue on leaders and leadership - How to Become a Great Leader. There are many good articles in this issue (listed below) but the one article - The Education of Andy Grove - really caught my intention. Andy Grove, for those who don't know, survived both the Nazis and the Communists in Hungary before finally settling in the USA, where he completed his Doctorate. Andy Grove is an inspiration to us all and this article has some fascinating insights into what it takes to become a great leader.
Further articles from this issue
Grove of Academe
A photo shoot and a chance encounter spark a $26 million gift to his alma mater.
10 Top Leaders Tell Their Secrets
Demand
criticism. Let subordinates have the floor. And think more like Vaclav
Havel. What you can learn about leadership from Paul Tagliabue, A.G.
Lafley, Stan O'Neal and other heavyweights.
Throw It at The Wall and See if It Sticks
At
Intuit, failure is very much an option as long as you learn from it.
How a Silicon Valley legend and a GE veteran teamed up to lead a
thriving culture of innovation.
Advice From the Master
From the pages of FORTUNE: Peter Drucker on the making of great business leaders.
Quoted Often, Followed Rarely
Thirty
years after he published the "bible of software engineering," Fred
Brooks talks about managing teams of people and why projects so often
go wrong.
The Man Who Bought Elvis
Investor Robert Sillerman is combining the King, American Idol, and other entertainment assets to build his next media conglomerate.
Technorati Tags: andy grove | leadership
WonderBranding picks up on an interesting stat from CNN Money about the huge upsurge in Internet activity last Monday (28th November). It appears that traffic to the top 100 etailing stores on Cyber Monday was 35% higher than on a typical Monday. They go on to report that 43% of online retailers will offer special promotions and discounts.
If you're a Mac fan, you may want to head over to Cult of Mac - a blog packed with Mac and iPod news and culture. A couple of the articles which caught my eye were the one about Apple's iPod Nano Advertising campaign in Tokyo:
You can apparently pick up these iPod Nano cutouts from the wall of the Tokyo underground. Each one has an image of the iPod Nano on the front and URL details on the back. With each wave of passengers the staff have to constantly replenish the walls.
The other article which caught my attention was about a product called iBelieve. Designed by Scott Wilson it will allow you to convert your iPod Shuffle into a crucifix. It costs $13, $2 goes to the Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund and various Children's charities.
The Church of the Customer have an interesting write up about a FedEx client who appears to have incurred the wrath of the mighty corporate company. It would seem that José Avila decided to use his FedEx cardboard packaging boxes as furniture in his new house - he apparently didn't have the cash to buy new furniture having moved from one part of the US to another - and then posted some of the pictures on the web. This is the story according to Joe Jaffe, who seems to have generated a lot of buzz surrounding the story:
* Jose moves from California to Arizona
* Doesn't really have the cash to go to IKEA, so in the spirit of creativity and armed with the tagline, "it's ok to be ghetto", he decks out his apartment with Fedex boxes
* Sticks a few pictures on his website and before he knows it, the web lights up with activity and interest...
* Word gets out to Fedex who find Jose's efforts to be a distraction from the development of their next Superbowl spot or a raging debate about the recommended Pantone colors from their next branding logo styleguide.
* Fedex issues a Cease 'n Desist, citing everything from the Digital Millennium Copywriter's Act to Box Theft. Site taken down.
* Jose connects with Jennifer Granick over at Stanford who fights Fedex's imbecilic behavior all the way to the blog. Site back up.
* Avila maintains his position that it's ok to be ghetto and soaks up publicity from Countdown to the Today Show.
He believes that José Avila:
"a pink-haired, unassuming software engineer who could quite possibly be the marketer of the year (or at least the hour)"
When you read something like this you can't help but wonder at how incompetent some of these large corporate giants can really be. Instead of promoting the story and using viral marketing to push the brand for them, they wheel out the big legal guns and try to beat the poor customer into sumbissions.
Stupid buggers!
Related Articles
Furniture Causes FedEx Fits
Technorati Tags: fedex
10 years ago Netscape went public and to mark the event Wired magazine is decicating much of its recent issue to the events that shaped the past 10 years of the Internet. I haven't had a chance to look at the latest hard copy version of the magazine - I'll pop in to WH Smith tomorrow - but the Wired website has some interesting snippets and a timeline. Here's a taster:
[1995]
The Whiz Kid - Marc Andreessen: "It's a lot more fun in retrospect. Startups are stressful, and Netscape was no different. The funny thing is, back then we thought the horse had already left the barn. Netscape's predecessor, Mosaic, already had 1 million users. We thought the market might be saturated. Even as late as '95, the Net was populated by early adopters, defense contractors, techies, and academics.Mar: Jerry Yang and David Filo incorporate Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle (Yahoo!) and raise $2 million in funding from Sequoia Capital.
[2000]
The Music Swapper - Shawn Fanning: "This was such a weird time for us. We were living in San Mateo, about a block from the Napster offices. Rolling Stone had come to photograph. At that point, Napster had already experienced massive growth, but it didn't seem real. Then the mainstream press came around, and it was just a whirlwind, total craziness.Dec: Pets.com is the first publicly held dotcom to bite the dust. Woof!
[2002]
The iPod Evangelist - Steve Jobs: "We'd decided that the iPod was too big to keep in the Mac universe, which turned out to be the right decision. A little less than a year after this photo was taken, we shipped our millionth iPod, which wouldn't have been possible without the Windows market.Jan: 544 million people around the globe now use the Internet.
[2003]
The Candidate - Howard Dean: "Dick Cheney was holding a $2,000-a-plate fundraising lunch, so we asked Americans all over the country to join me the same day for a lunch in front of their computers. It sparked a huge response, and, amazingly, the online contributions from that day matched what Cheney made from his fundraiser. It showed that our campaign, and that of other Democrats, could remain competitive thanks to a growing base of people donating small amounts.Jan: Starbucks offers overpriced Wi-Fi to go with its overpriced coffee.
When you review the past ten years in their entirety, it is quite staggering how the Internet has changed everyone's lives. If I remember rightly, it was around this time (1995) that I first discovered the Internet in some Internet Café in Madrid (that's a plug for my other blog!).
Steve Rubel has come across a site, called Google Logo Maker, which will convert the words you type into Google-style logos. Have fun!
Technorati Tags: google
WOMMA stands for the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, if you're not already aware. In Chicago on July 13th, it will be holding the first-ever conference, called Measuring Word of Mouth, on measurement, metrics, and standards in word-of-mouth marketing. I must admit that I wasn't that familiar with the organisation unil I had an email from one of their people - Ben - asking if I could mention the event.
According to their website, WOMMA:
is the official trade association for the word of mouth marketing industry. WOMMA's mission is to promote and improve word of mouth marketing by:
- Protecting consumers and the industry with strong ethical guidelines
- Promoting WOM as an effective marketing tool
- Setting standards to encourage its use
Judging by their line-up of speakers and subjects it does sound like it could be quite an interesting event to attend. There are speakers from the Harvard Business School, Future Now, Brand Dimensions and Nielsen/NetRatings. WOMMA claims that attendees will learn 5 things from the event:
Some of the talks and presentations that caught my eye were:
Optimizing WOM: Which Words Work?
Why People Talk: Consumer Behavior and Word of Mouth
"A Case For Using The Internet To Track Offline, Organic Word Of Mouth"
"The Blog Universe: Influencers, Early Adopters and Online Tenure Rolled into One"
"Customer Evangelists are Not Loyal Customers"
If you're interested in going to the event, please send me an email and I can send you a $50 discount code.
I am currently spending a couple of weeks in Madrid - my wife´s home town and it´s quite interesting to see how different 2 countries - Spain and the UK - are with regards the Internet. On arriving in Madrid one of the first cars that I saw had emablazoned across it the name of a well-known estate agents - Look and Find - yet nowhere was the web address displayed. What´s even more bizarre is that the website has a complete listing of properties for Look and Find across the whole of Madrid and Spain!
Even coming from a town which is around 200 miles from London, I find this is very strange to see indeed. The internet cafe that I am currently writing this post doesn´t have a website address - though it is very busy and quite good (3w.com - c/Tetuan, Madrid). I think every small company - even those with under 5 employess - that I work with have a website in the UK.
This is not to say that Madrid and Spain have not adopted the Internet - ADSL is cheaper here than the UK and one of my colleagues told me only the other day that a friend of his is dealing with a Madrid company that´s at the cutting edge of streaming video and doing things which are far more advanced than anything in the UK!
I´ll continue my observations over the coming week.
If you haven't heard about the Long Tail, then you probably soon will - as it is one of the most bandied-about business phrases of the moment. The idea of the "Long Tail" was first coined by Wired's editor-in-chief Chris Anderson in a Wired article October of last year and refers to:
"how the mass market is turning into a million niches. The term refers to the yellow part of the sales chart [above], which shows a standard demand curve that could apply to any industry, from entertainment to services. The vertical axis is sales, the horizontal is products. The red part of the curve is the "hits", which have dominated our commercial decisions to date. The yellow part is the non-hits, or niches, which I argue in the article will prove equally important in the future now that technology has provided efficient ways to give consumers access to them thanks to the "infnite shelf-space effect" of new distribution mechanisms that break thought the bottlenecks of broadcast and traditional bricks and mortar."
The long tail doesn't refer to the hugely popular 'hit' books, CD's and DVD's which the large retail stores sell to cusotmers (usualy at hugely discounted prices) but the niche products which sell many times less. In a Guardian article on the Long Tail - entitled A Miss Hit - writer Jack Scofield highlights how the average American cinema has no tail, whilst things change greatly with DVD rentals and dramatically with online sales of DVD's:
"Sell movies on DVD, however, and the economics are different. A movie that wouldn't fill a local theatre can still sell 1,500 copies across America. And instead of making a couple of hundred movies available, like a cinema, a typical Blockbuster can stock 3,000 titles. Most sales will still go to the big Hollywood hits, but at least we can see the start of a tail.
Sell movies online and the equation changes again. On Anderson's figures, for example, Netflix offers 25,000 DVDs. The 24,000 or so titles in the tail may not sell many copies each, but they add up. (Most of Amazon's sales are of titles the average bookstore just doesn't have room to stock.)"
The Guardian article cites Amazon, eBay and Google as good examples of the Long Tail in action - the latter due to its Gogle Adsense programme. The Internet has proved to be a great enabler of niche markets and those products that appear at the other end of the tail. Here's a great example of the long tail in action (again from the Wired article):
"To get a sense of our true taste, unfiltered by the economics of scarcity, look at Rhapsody, a subscription-based streaming music service (owned by RealNetworks) that currently offers more than 735,000 tracks.
Chart Rhapsody's monthly statistics and you get a "power law" demand curve that looks much like any record store's, with huge appeal for thetop tracks, tailing off quickly for less popular ones. But a really interesting thing happens once you dig below the top 40,000 tracks, which is about the mount of the fluid inventory (the albums carried that will eventually be sold) of the average real-world record store. Here, the Wal-Marts of the world go to zero - either they don't carry any more CDs, or the few potential local takers for such fringy fare never find it or never even enter the store.
The Rhapsody demand, however, keeps going. Not only is every one of Rhapsody's top 100,000 tracks streamed at least once each month, the same is true for its top 200,000, top 300,000, and top 400,000. As fast as Rhapsody adds tracks to its library, those songs find an audience, even if it's just a few people a month, somewhere in the country."
Dan Farber, writing about PC Forum - PC Forum buzzword alert: Long tail and Ecosystem - goes as far as to say:
"The longtail captures a key phenomenon enabled by the Internet that is the equivalent to the impact of the transportation system in the mid-20th century. The ability to expose and access all forms of data in a friction-free, low-cost manner via the Internet permanently alters hierarchies that ruled over the last millennium."
It still sounds like there's a place for the little man in online sales - now that can't be bad, can it?
Over the last couple of months the BBC has aired a TV series called the Dragon's Den, where would-be entrepreneurs pitch their ideas to a panel of 5 successful business people in the hope of getting some investment. One of the panelists was Rachel Elnaugh, a businesswoman who founded the successful company Red Letter Days 15 years ago and which is now a £25 million business.
Well, it seems that Red Letter Days is looking to recruit some Strategic Development Managers and is cleverly using Rachel Elnaugh's increased media profile to advertise these positions. Here is a taste of the adverts that were placed in last week's Guardian:
If you've been lured into the Dragon's Den, BBC2's new 'business start up' show, you'll have seen me warm to some great ideas - and also singe a few misplaced egos. Now it's your opportunity to face me and pitch your most valuable product - yourself.
This time my den is Red Letter Days, the company I founded, which is now a £25 million business and the UK's leading 'experience' brand.
This fun advert ends with the invitation:
So if you've got a burning ambition and think you can charm a dragon, I want to hear from you.
If you'd like to enter the Dragon's Den, go visit the Guardian website (before 18th February).
How often have you gone to a website, been invited to sign up and then found that you would have to pay subscription? Having been directed to the AdAge website from a business blog, it was refreshing to see straight away that subscription was free (though for premium articles you do have to pay).
Next week the Technology for Marketing Conference will be held in London's Olympia on the 8th and 9th (February). They bill themselves as:
UK's premier event dedicated to helping marketing, customer service and sales professionals implement technology solutions to optimise their marketing strategies and campaigns.
There looks like there will be quite a few Internet Marketing exhibitors there - Google will be holding its 'Google University' to let novices, and more advanced users, into the secrets of Google AdWords. Cheetahmail, Webtrends and Vodfone will be participating in seminars in the Email, Mobile and Web Marketing seminar theatre, whilst there is a good cross-section of companies represented on the stands.
I just came across a neat new tool, called Ta-da Lists, which allows you to make lists of things you need to do, such as Bills to Pay, Things to do for the Holidays, Search Engines to Submit to, Blog Articles to Write, Directories to Link to, etc. To-Do lists are one of the suite of elements that belong to Basecamp, the brilliant project management tool created by the same team. The cost of Ta-da Lists is free and is well worth trying out - it even lets you share your lists with others and even to subscribe to your lists in RSS!
Original Source
Ta-da Lists - Keeping is simple. (Marketing Playbook)
For another year running Marketing Sherpa has compiled a list of real-life marketing stories in a FREE downloadble PDF, called Marketing Wisdom 2005. As the marketing blurb says, "[Marketing Wisdom 2005] Includes 105 real-life marketing lessons learned from MarketingSherpa readers including the folks at Timberland, Pacific Shaving, and ING Direct:
Haven't read it yet but if it's like last year's, it will make very good reading.
This year (2004) Inc.com published their 25 Entrepreneurs We Love list. They are now inviting people to submit entries for their 2005 list. All you need do is go to their Entrepreneurs We Love page; check your candidate meets their criteria and submit the details.
A recent survery, by International Demographics, has found that the biggest U.S. growth in the Internet has come not from young people but from the 55's and above. The report is based on the findings of 80 U.S. Metropolitan markets and notes Robert Jordan, president of International Demographics, "Most of the new growth is coming from older age groups, including the aging Baby Boomer demographic. When you consider the huge purchasing power of this group, which continues to buy everything, including the most expensive products, there is a huge opportunity for e-commerce and e-marketing." So, I suppose, it's ignore this market at your peril.
Read the article at Clickz: People Aged 55 and Up Drive U.S. Web Growth
The supermarket is selling the latest Harry Potter book for cheaper than the local shop can buy it; you're buying water melons in winter; the meat you buy was cut up hundreds of miles away yesterday and to top it all wasteful packaging of products is filling up your local landfills. The list of supermarket misdemeanours is endless.
This Christmas I'm going to shop local. I am going to try and 'give up' supermarkets where possible and support my local community. That means local butchers, local fruit and veg from the market, local fishmongers, local farmers' markets, Christmas gifts from local shops and going for a drink in my local pub. This Christmas, why should I support vast corporations that are hell bent on destroying my community.
Please let me know of other links.
Related Links
Farmers' Markets (UK)
AMS Farmers' Markets (USA)
Big Barn (UK)
Farmer's Market Online (USA)
London Farmers' Markets (UK)
California Federation of Farmers' Markets (USA)
If you're a UK business and want to place Google Adwords, Amazon, eBuyer or any other such banners on your site, or if you're looking to promote your site through affiliate programs, then you should take a look at the UK Affiliate Marketing Forum. It has many discussions going on about the best programs, pro's and cons, how to's and much more. A couple that caught my eye were:
Affiliates and Adwords
UK Rail - upto 9% for travel agents?
Play.com v Amazon UK
After allegations of how much British MP's claim in expenses, one Labour MP has offered £5 to any constituent who can prove he is bad value for money. David Taylor, MP for North West Leicestershire, calculated that his £123,042 expenses worked out at £5 per household. As David Taylor says: "Tell me why so I can try and alter the way I work and fit in more closely with the people of North West Leicestershire if necessary."
This story reminded me of something I heard from Tom Peters or Seth Godin, or some other management guru about focusing not so much on your happy clients (who will only tell you things you already know about your prodduct or service) but the discontented ones. If you can work out why they're unhappy, then you can create a much stronger product offering. Incidentally, David Taylor has an 18% majority - initiatives like this one are probably why.
Read more on the BBC site: MP's good value cash back promise
There are 2 books on my bookshelf that I regularly thumb through for ideas and inspiration, the first is Claude C Hopkins's Scientific Advertising and the second is David Ogilvy's Ogilvy on Advertising. There is always one page that I keep returning to in the latter which offers advice on how to use typography correctly. It starts off by saying that "Good typography helps people read your copy, while bad typography prevents them from doing so."
When writing long copy, he makes a 10-point list of some "typographical devices which can increase readership.
1. A subhead of two lines, between your headline and your body copy, heightens the reader's appetite for the feast to come.
2. If you start your body copy with a drop-initial, you increase readership by an average of 13%.
3. Limit your opening paragraph to a maximum of 11 words.
4. After two or three inches of copy, insert a cross-head, and thereafter throughout. Cross-heads keep the reader marching forward. Make some of them interrogative, to excite curiosity in the next run of copy.
5. When I was a boy, it was common practice to square up paragraphs. It is now known that widows - short lines - increase readership.
6. Set key paragraphs in bold face or italic.
7. Help the reader into your paragraphs with arrowheads, bullets, asterisks and marginal marks.
8. If you have a lot of unrelated facts to recite, don't use cumbersome connectives. Simply number them - as I'm doing here.
9. What size type should you use? [He says that 14 point is too big but 11 point is just right]
10. If you use leading (line-spacing) between paragraphs, you increase readership by an average of 12 per cent."
(Taken from Ogilvy on Advertising, Prion Books)
Obviously, the Internet was not around in the way we know it when the book was written, however, I still believe that most, if not all, of them have some relevance today for search engine marketing. If only more search engine marketers paid more attention to what has already been tried and tested over decades of testing.
And by the way, if you haven't already you must buy this book. Ogilvy on Advertising (from Amazon.com)
Today, Google finally launched Froogle, a website that helps you find products for sale online. As its help page says: "By focusing entirely on product search, Froogle applies the power of Google's search technology to a very specific task: locating stores that sell the item you want to find and pointing you directly to the place where you can make a purchase." This launch comes hot on the heels of Google's flotation and just over 2 months to Christmas. It will surely be a big success and a very important new sales channel for those with online shops to look at.
Related Articles
Google launches Froogle in the UK (BBC)
Froogle Goes Google in the UK (Search Engine Journal)
Google launches UK Froogle shopping site (Reuters)
If you are looking to make your website a subscription-only site, then you should take a look at how some of the Spanish newspapers have fared in this interesting article from Vin Crosbie: Free or Fee in Spain, Revisited. It would appear that the newspapers for which data is available, El Pais, El Mundo and La Vanguardia have each adopted a different model for generating advertising and holding on to customers, including:
● Registration through paid subscription, coupled with advertising revenue
● No registration but heavy advertising
● Free registration, advertising and compulsory subscription to weekly email newsletters.
In their own ways they have all benefitted through one or all of the following: increased revenue, market share and increased marketing intelligence about their visitors. For me, though, the remarkable stat is that El Pais went from being a free online newspaper to a paid subscription one and still kept 60% of its readership, many of them contributing to the estimated subscription revenue of $2.5 million a year.
If you like Tom Peters, then you may be interested to know that he will be holding a FREE web seminar on August 19th entitled Outsource-proof Your Career. He will be joined by Dan Pink author of Free Agent Nation.
The other day I decided my travel guide blog, Mad About Madrid, would have to generate more revenue to justify the time and effort I spend finding and then writing information to it. Google AdWords is one revenue channel I have but this generates very little income, the same applies to Amazon. Therefore, I started thinking about paid adverts.
Having identified a list of organisations that would benefit from advertising on Mad About Madrid, I tested the water by sending a couple of eMails to their marketing departments enquiring if they would be interested in placing ads on the site. One company responded very quickly and said that it wasn’t their policy to pay for ‘banner adverts’ but they would pay me a percentage commission for every lead that resulted in a ‘sale.’
This got me thinking: The advertiser gets their brand flagged up on a number of Web sites, which can potentially generate thousands upon thousands of page impressions and they only pay a commission when someone purchases a product. In effect, the Web site is offering advertisers FREE advertising. Can you imagine these same companies asking newspapers and magazines to do the same?
That said, I will probably keep my Amazon adverts on this page as I believe that they do add value to the visitor experience and, you never know, some day someone may buy 50 Tom Peters books through this page!!
The rapid rise of web logs (blogs) over the past year has not gone unnoticed by companies, and especially by people involved in Marketing and PR. These people are now involved in developing their own blogs to talk up/add value to their own products and services and also using other p
