Time to start spending intelligently

How often do we hear about $50 million in paid search, millions in TV or tons of money in some other acquisition tactic?

Not enough attention (or funding) is paid to website optimization. You can spend all the money in the world to find and get people to your website, but if you aren't spending against optimizing and improving your site's performance, you're throwing your $ away.

Great tools like Omniture's Test and Target, Google Site Optimizer exist just to help your site convert better. All offer A/B and multi-variate testing capability that will really help you drive the most benefit from those millions you're spending in acquisition.

So, are you spending the way you should be?

Getting in touch with my individual crowd

So my new favorite site is CrowdTap. Currently in beta, they just secured a $7 million round of financing from VCs. Te platform is a crowd sourcing community platform, or a crowdunity platform. It allows for self serve for community development, content sharing, WOM generation, polling and quick hit research. Pretty cool for a self-service platform.

When Social Media Goes Right

So, once I ended my tenure at Starwood, I decided that for me to be successful, I needed to practice "personal distribution". What does that mean? "Burt", the brand, is about creativity, ideas, relationships. Since I believe that Social Media is a tactic, not a strategy, it was one of the tactics I employed for self promotion. My FaceBook account, LinkedIn account, blogs, twitter, youtube, flickr, etc all became ways for me to promote myself.

What has it gotten me? For one, a job at Knowledge Universe. On top of that, I have been a published photographer (http://amzn.to/cZ2MUE) in two books, and was most recently asked to speak to a group of 200 about Mountain Climbing. Its actually pretty incredible when you think about it. I have spent some time marketing myself, and not in push marketing. But, as people look for information, they are finding me!

The web offers a ton of free distribution. As we all know, anyone, or any brand, would be crazy not to take complete advantage.

Megatron, what I love about Social Media

My new favorite use for social media is the Facebook page, bit.ly/90I8jZ. The fan page was set up by a guy who obviously bet his sister that if he got 1 million fans, she'd have to name her unborn child Megatron. Well, it spread like fire. He is at 1.3 million as of today, 3/13. Whats amazing was the speed with which the page ramped up. I looked on Tuesday and it was in the 800k range. Every time I refreshed, it grew at least by 5k, usually more. Finally, by Friday, his sister was toast. Read the comments, highly entertaining. People demanding birth certificates, asking if the middle name will be skeletor, and having a good time.

Nice to know the tools exist to help give children ridiculous names!

Happy New Year! And not to beat a dead cable company, but...

First of all, happy new year. I know I haven't written anything in a while, but, I am all fired up now. I am PASSIONATE about the customer. I know it sounds trite, but its true.

So, this morning I get a call from Comcast asking about my recent installation (yes I am aware its from a 3rd party research company, and, we are forced to use Comcast as they are basically a monopoly in Portland). They went through a bunch of standard customer sat. questions. "Did you get a welcome kit?" "no". "Did the installer explain how to set up voicemail?" "no". I asked if they would correct anything based on this call and send me a welcome kit, etc. The response? "I don't know. Hopefully the company will look at it". SO WHY DID I WASTE MY TIME ON A SATURDAY MORNING TALKING TO THEM????????

So frustrating. New marketing 101 rule. If you ask your customer's a question make sure you respond to their answers! DON'T waste people's time! Get your research company to identify issues at a customer level and react. You would be amazed at the loyalty you can drive.

New Job

Hi,

Interested in moving to Portland and helping to run the web program for the #1 company in the early childhood education and child care space? Check out the job description. http://bit.ly/5Hkk9g

Great Deck on Netflix's Culture

Just saw this presentation and love it for its honesty, simplicity, directness and a lot of the thoughts in it. The questions is poses for judging yourself and your teams really makes you think about the standards you set.

Culture

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