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Josh Carr |
I took this picture in Provo last summer. This is right by BYU campus a classic example of what not to do with Marketing. This person probably thought they had it all figured out. They were going to undercut the competition and so everyone would see it they are going to hang up some colorful flags. When that doesn’t work they mark down the $7 cuts to just $6 and they throw in a little sympathy. “a venture by 2 BYU students/entrepreneurs”
I can imagine the conversation…
“Haircuts for poor BYU students are all about price!”
“We are going to put that $8 haircut joint down the street out of business!”
Did you know there is an actual science to pricing a product? It’s true and we do it for clients all the time. You can make allowance for inexperienced students but what about this table top ad from Ihop? I took this with my phone so it’s not great but you get the idea.
Sure you saved some money by sending production design and printing to china but you pay for it when all of your customers laugh at you. Sometimes mistakes happen and a print job goes out with a typo but who agreed to put this out in front of customers? Not to mention that the design horrible and un-appetizing.
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you know how you come back from lunch and just stare at your monitor for about a half hour? Well do this instead.
Mad Lib the Inauguration Speech
I didn’t know what I would get out when I put these words in but I REALLY liked the result:
My fellow Americans, today is a bamboozling day. You have shown the world that “hope” is not just another word for “Screwdriver”, and that “change” is not only something we can believe in again, but something we can actually rip.
Today we celebrate, but let there be no mistake – America faces Cathaholic and apparatus challenges like never before. Our economy is hoochy. Americans can barely afford their mortgages, let alone have enough money left over for my friends. Our healthcare system is scrumdiddlyumptious. If your fingernail is sick and you don’t have insurance, you might as well call a Podiatrist. And America’s image overseas is tarnished like a Joe The Plumber Rick Roll. But fishing together we can right this ship, and set a course for Omaha.
Finally, I must thank my cheeky family, my spongy campaign volunteers, but most of all, I want to thank Rumpelstiltskin for making this historic occasion possible. Of course, I must also thank you, President Bush, for years of caroling the American people. Without your maniacal efforts, none of this would have been possible.
Personally I think this has more to do with the world famous Michael Arrington ego than anything else. But in another really angry post "Death To The Embargo" Arrington declared that he is tired of getting scooped and so he is throwing all rules out the window.
We’ve never broken an embargo at TechCrunch," he writes at a post titled "Death to the Embargo." "Not once. Today that ends. From now our new policy is to break every embargo. We’ll happily agree to whatever you ask of us, and then we’ll just do whatever we feel like right after that. We may break an embargo by one minute or three days. We’ll choose at random.
In the last year, argues Arrington, companies desperate for attention have become especially aggressive in their pitching methods, for instance by providing embargoed announcements to just about anyone with a URL. While reputable outlets like TechCrunch hold the news until the embargo date, it looks as if they’re being scooped on a regular basis by less scrupulous competitors.
The benefits are clear," he says. "[S]ites like Google News and TechMeme prioritize them first as having broken the story. Traffic and links flow in to whoever breaks an embargo first.
We have personal experience with this. Techcrunch had agreed to cover a new product announcement for one our clients. This was a huge huge win for us and we were so excited. Then 12 hours before the Emborgo ended another publication went live with the story. They were small unimportant and didn’t really send us any traffic. Because of this Arrington flipped out, trashed the PR agency on twitter and wouldn’t run the story. It went from a huge win for us to nothing at all. We still had a great launch but it could have been amazing if Joe Nobody wasn’t trying to scoop everybody else. I don’t know what the solution is but not playing by the rules hurts everyone not just Arrington and his ego.
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So yesterday we went a little crazy with the sproutmarketing twitter account (you can click on that link to follow us). We took all the sproutians twitter accounts and looked at who they were following and then invited those people to follow sprout proper.
It worked great and many of the people we were following also followed us. But I think we went a little too crazy because the they shut us down for a while. So if that link at the top isn’t working try again tomorrow 
This is what you really came to see. This is a map made with yahoo pipes that will show you where your twitter friends are located.
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This is an amazing interview with google ceo Eric Schmidt.
The Future of business a conversation Eric Schmidt
My favorite quote from the video:
"You can have a long tail strategy but you better also have a head because that is where all the revenue is."
I don’t think this statement conflicts with Chris Andersons ideas on the long tail because each trend will have it’s own head and it’s own tail. For example I have a friend that runs a profitable website that sell clogging supplies. He will never show up in search for "dance" but he doesn’t even want to. He does want to show up for "clogging," "clogging shoes," etc. he wants to be the head of that microtrend.
Think about how this applies in your online business (all businesses are now online businesses – that fact is impossible to ignore).
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