I’d like to thank the PseudoDictionary for accepting a ‘metrollectual’, a term Darrel Austin and I coined over instant messaging a while back.
Month: December 2004
Monday, 6 December 2004
Saturday, 4 December 2004
First Crack 12. The Winter Blanket at Marysburg Books
Special Guest: The Winter Blanket. We talk about the last 4 miles of the Hiawatha LRT opening today – from downtown to the airport to the Mall of America, winter striking Minnesota this week, and the band’s upcoming Polar Bear tour. We close with a live premiere of their new song – Neil Young Blues.
Links mentioned:
- Winter Blanket
- Fractured Discs
- First Avenue
- Quad Cities Brew n View
- Marysburg Books
- Hiawatha Line’s Last 4 miles Open
- Sweet Maria’s Pictorial Guide to Coffee Roasts
Intro: PodCat from Daily Best of Podcasting
Listen to Winter Blanket at Marysburg BooksThursday, 2 December 2004
Clicks vs Impressions
Eminent writer Bob Bly dissects the difference between direct marketers and non-direct marketers.
In my experience, his analysis is spot-on.
I had a client where both mentalities struggled for dominance. The incumbent mentality (non-DM) was all about branding, impression, design, and well known for it. A team of direct marketers was brought in to handle the website. They brought measured click-throughs, ROI, incremental A/B test, all that.
These new tools brought success – but at the price of completely disenfranchising the non-DMers. Not good, at all. In fact, it’s a huge lost opportunity considering the internet gives non-DMers these DM tools out of the box. This means, the brand managers and advertising buyers can know – exactly which 50% of their ad dollars are wasted. About time.
Wednesday, 1 December 2004
Care and Feeding of Your Harshest Critics
Marqui is paying people to test drive and blog about their content management system.
From Marc Canter on the origins of the idea:
When I first came up with the idea – the question was poised “what if they blog something negative?”
My answer was “that’s a good thing! Can you imagine how powerful it will be for us to listen to and react to that criticism and show that we responded in a timely manner by actually fixing the problems?”
That’ll be worth its weight on gold.
Exactly. People are going to criticize your company’s offerings whether you allows them to or not. By listening to your harshest critics – i.e. most passionate customers – you’ll learn more about what the world expects from you.
I’ll be tracking the Marqui program.
On a related note, we launched the MNteractive Directory earlier this week. The MNteractive Directory is a wiki containing the Minnesota’s interactive design talent.
Wikis, by their very nature, are editable by anyone. Like Cantor, one of the first questions poised was, “What if someone changes something of mine?”
My response is two-fold:
- Everything is backed up, so an unnecessary change can be easily reverted.
- It’s your responsibility to not put up information that needs to be changed and not change things unnecessarily.
The world is becoming more and more transparent. Therefore we are need to be more responsible and open to criticism and praise. For that is the order – 1. criticism 2. praise.