Marketing Virgin

Three of my closest friends are newly engaged…congratulations Emma & Art, Travis & Carrie, and Kara & Will! I think this means I need a raise in preparation for next year.

Will & Kara - engaged in Oahu

Emma and Art - engaged in Buffalo, NY

Last Wednesday, our Marketing Communications and Product Marketing teams took the day off to go on a hill country wine tour. We classified this as a “marketing teambuilding activity”.

We tasted olive oil at Bella Vista Ranch, sampled eight varieties of wine at the beautiful Driftwood Vineyards, and capped off our trip with fine Italian food and a wine tour at Mandola’s Estate Winery in Spicewood.

It was the perfect day…which required the perfect nap afterwards.

Interested in a RSS feed that’s user friendly? Try Google Reader. I just setup my subscriptions for my favorite blogs. Don’t forget to add Marketing Virgin to yours!

I wrote an article as a guest blogger for theb2blead.com, a site that specializes in Marketing and Sales tips that is run by Reachforce. You can view it by clicking here.

Thousands of companies leverage social media for positive viral and word-of-mouth marketing. There is, however, negative implications for companies when what is being said is damaging. Google Alerts is a tool that is now being used by organizations who want to track the communication about them on the Internet. A user can simply sign up to receive links to any site that publishes a word or phrase they are interested in. For example, if you’re looking for news on Barack Obama, Google will send you daily links to all sites that publish his name.

This begs the question - can companies manage such communication?

A few months ago, I wrote a post about a bad email I received from a software company. There were three flaws with the email:
1. I received an e-mail  for a class I had already taken through them so I should not have been on their distribution list
2. The e-mail addressed me as “Dear FirstName”
3. This was not the first time that this company has made this mistake

Out of frustration, I decided to exercise my freedom of speech (and press) and write about it. The image of the e-mail that I had included on my website had an embedded code with the name of the company, thus, it showed up on Google Alerts. The entire company was heated over my post. I was even contacted by a representative, asking me to take down the post and telling me how disappointed in me they were in me.

Does a company have the right to make a mistake and then place blame on a blogger for pointing it out? Does a company have the right to restrict what is said about them from independent parties?

There is no such thing as control in social media. Welcome to the game…you better be willing to take a fall if you want to step up and play.

In honor of Randy Pausch who passed away today. We have so much left to learn in life…
Click here for video 

I am heading out to the Cisco Live show so unfortunately, I will not be posting anything next week <sigh>.

It seems like everyone and everything is “going green” these days - including the promotional giveaway companies.
Companies like Cisco are leading the way by hosting “green” tradeshows where no paper or freebies are allowed. The huge IT conference, Interop, places bins on their show floor so attendees can recycle their badges.

I recently received a sample of a re-usable bag (much like those you find in a grocery store) that was branded with a company logo. The promotional giveaway company selling them wanted $3 a bag. $3 for a recycled plastic bag? Talk about capitalizing on a current trend!

Have you received any “green” tchotchkes lately?

BusinessWeek published a great article about the future of blogs titled “Beyond Blogs.” From social media to social networking to the inevitable, glorious “Google juice”.

Check it out here.

I went one-on-one with the author of HTML, XHTML and CSS for Dummies, Jeff Noble. Here is how it went…

What is your background?

I could never figure out what I really wanted to do for a living. I sort of stumbled into web design in college, I think it hit me when I started to skip classes to work on my first website (this really terrible site about me and my roommates) that I might have other interests, you know… outside of sociology. Which sounds made up, but it’s a real degree… if not, the University of Texas might have some explaining to do. So anyway, I’ve run my own website design/multimedia company (www.conquestmedia.com) for the past 7 years. I’ve been fortunate enough to find something that I really enjoy and get paid for it. Most everything I know I’ve pretty much taught myself, but it certainly doesn’t hurt to surround yourself with knowledgeable people that you can bounce ideas off of when you get stuck.

How were you selected to write this book?
Good question, so far my story is that the folks at Wiley Publishing scour the globe looking for the biggest dummy of them all to write their “For Dummies” books, there is a ton of paperwork, tests, a physical challenge, etc. They picked me, which is both a compliment and sort of an insult as well. Kidding, I actually met Ed Tittle a few years ago and he liked my work and asked me to be a part of the book. Now let me just say, Ed is a really cool guy, but I get some crazy trade offers in exchange for website designs so I wasn’t really sure it would ever happen. I’m happy to say he was actually serious. Thank you, Ed.

What makes this book different from books written on HTML and CSS?
Well the book is written for beginners with little to no HTML/XHTML/CSS knowledge. From personal experience I’ve found programming can be a bit overwhelming starting out when you open up a page and you see a bunch of crazy looking tags everywhere. It’s really easy to get discouraged and this book will help guide beginners through that difficult first step.

If people would like to contact you, how can you be reached?
www.conquestmedia.com or jeff@conquestmedia.com
I’m available for website design consulting and contract work. All that I ask is please keep the cyber-stalking to a minimum. Thanks!

Pick up your copy at Amazon.com today!