Marketing Virgin

To my family along the coast and my friends in Houston, stay safe!

I have talked to a few interesting people through this blog. I just wanted to give out my personal email address in case you have more in depth questions: andreakstout@gmail.com.

Don’t hesitate to contact me. Thanks.

I’m back from my one-week vacation in the desert (it was a blast, thank you). Today I spent the afternoon organizing my new office. Check out my view!

Office 1
Office 2
View of the infamous 360 Bridge
View of Lake Austin

Oh…and here’s a picture of my friends and I from the trip…
Vacation!!

Because I earned it!

See you back here on September 8th.

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.

Carrie & Travis - engaged in Austin

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