Blogging - The Professional Campaign

This is an email I sent to someone I was trying to help get started on the Web. He’s a profound thinker with much to say and write, and wants to evolve from his current profession into a new one that supports his real interests, as a corporate keynote speaker and writer on his specialized themes.

See what I had to tell him, and please offer your insight and comments.

Top Ten Reasons Customers Are Your Biggest Resource

Even if you own a diamond mine, your customers are your biggest resource. Here are the top ten reasons why.

  1. You know them, and they know you, so there’s no prospecting cost for you to find them.
  2. They’ve already bought from you, so there’s no tense threshold of closing a sale that you have to push them across.
  3. They can spend more money with you.
  4. They can bring qualified new customers to you.
  5. As they communicate and generate excitement among themselves, they can create new, previously non-existent desire for new spending with you.
  6. As they become truly engaged with you, they can teach you how to create new offerings for them to buy.
  7. The more they get involved with you, the more likely they are to stay with you over time.
  8. The more involved with you they are, the harder for competitors to steal them.
  9. The more fun they’re having with you, the easier for you to attract customers from competitors.
  10. Even if you screw up, if you’re engaged with your customers you can ask them to forgive you, and show that you’ve learned from the experience, and the odds are good that you’ll bond even closer.
  11. The more all of this happens, the more chance that your company will endure through uncertain times.

Free Still Sells

Hard though it is for marketers to come to terms with, giving product away for free can make enormously more profits for you than selling it. James Cherkoff knows this completely, and tries to explain it to the incredulous every time some good examples arise. Two of his recent efforts are showcased here.

George Colony Gives Free Advice

Forrester CEO George Colony is someone that other CEOs ought to listen to when he talks at them. which he does in a recent column at ZDNet. Here’s what he’s saying (hint, it’s all about Web 2.0, and Cluetrain):

The Second Best Way to Make Money With a Blog

Seth Godin advances the two best ways to make money with your blog, the first being to build rep and parlay it into access. This is basically getting by on your blag, and it’s what the blog is best known for, the simple leverage of forging degrees of connection out of prior separation.

His second best way is one I admire immensely: you set your blog up as your shop. Seth Godin links straight to a new article, the most useful guide to doing this I’ve ever seen, Blogs as Stores: A Comprehensive Overview of Ecommerce Solutions for Bloggers, by John T. Unger, at TypePad Hacks.

Podtech Embedding in Self-Hosted WordPress

Does anybody know how to embed a PodTech video in a self-hosted WordPress install, i.e. one that is NOT hosted at wordpress.com? PodTech make it so easy for the hosted blogs to embed one of their videos with a few clicks, but it’s not so simple for the WP blogs in the wild.

I’m hoping that Jeremiah - whom I read as a strategist but never quite realized he was with PodTech - will pick this up in his Google alert and supply the answer as rapidly as he did for Thomas on his wordpress.com blog. I guess I could email him, but it would be nice to get this info out in the world for others to use.

schmupgrade

Microsoft’s new operating system Vista would suck if the company were seriously trying to introduce an innovative product. But it knows better. All Microsoft is doing today is holding markets in place as it quietly continues its vast reinvention of itself. It will become a company half in the cloud and half on the ground.

Blogging Out the Meaning.

How do you explore new themes, and expand concepts into familiar and coherent terms that readers can grasp immediately, and do all this on the run, in short, deadline-driven bursts? How do you write an essay in a blog?

Multitasking - always tricky, often silly

Our view switches from local to global, global to local. When we focus on a piece of work, we’re local, when we sit back and review all the projects on our desk, we’re global. One minute the worker, next minute the manager of all the workers (even if we’re the only worker).

So, overload is a condition of management, it means we have too many pressing concerns fighting for conscious activity at the same time. The only solution is to go global and re-arrange the flow of work coming into our local focus, into our field of actual execution…[more]

2006 Planner

In the new year we asked the question, what is your Web marketing plan for the year? The implication was, oh, you don’t have one? And it was a safe bet that you didn’t. We set out the three simple questions that we always ask, and we put them in a quick one-pager for you to download.