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| Bruce Law |
“Do less with more,” I said, meaning shrink what you are planning to do so your budget looks sizable again…and do it well. Don’t just scale everything back across the board and keep the same initiatives intact. “If you just scale back wholesale, I warned them, “you’ll risk doing nothing well and it will be like putting a nickel in the Coke machine—no Coke, just a wasted nickel.”
In times of downturn, focus staves off dwindling marketing budgets. Focus on existing customers, existing markets, existing channels and existing strategic relationships. Shore up those trusted vehicles that makes sense. That’s assuming that what you’ve been doing along the way has been working.
If on the other hand, you’re in the middle or revising your marketing approach because what you were doing in good times wasn’t working, then I urge you to do new tactics with precision and measure everything along the way so you don’t burn cash with nothing to show for it.
And as always, I cautioned my audience against committing what I affectionately call, “random acts of marketing” in this already random market. Nothing hurts companies more than wasting marketing dollars on random stuff.
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| Josh Carr |
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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| Josh Carr |
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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| Alex Koritz |
I’m a certified political junky. As such, I’m a regular watcher of Sunday morning’s political shows. I always look forward to the special guests, or pundits, that will be on the show – whether it’s a political scientist or a best-selling author. Over the years, and certainly during the last election, these guests have become more and more infrequent. Now the pundits are the media themselves. Do we really want to hear Chris Mathews give his expert opinion, or one of his journalist panel guests? Or do we want to hear an academic, author, or certified political scientist?
The point is this: The press’ job is to facilitate the information – not be the source of the information. It’s nearly impossible for them to give an objective view if they’re also giving their “expert” analysis.
| admin |
I have been thinking a lot about how we communicate and share our ideas. Take a look at these Pool Balls; they both convey the same information each in a individual way. It’s obvious which of these balls would be easier to play a quick game of pool with. It can be just as easy to tell if your marketing makes sense for your customers, especially if you know your target audience. If 75% your customers appreciate a simple and straightforward approach, it would be dangerous to launch a brainy rocket-science marketing campaign.
So you have your messaging down. A perfect message can be completely ruined without the right design. Communication is key!
