links for 2007-03-28

• Keep It Simple, Stupid!

• 21 Surefire Tips for a Successful Blog Launch

• Top Marketing Blogs

• Better Sales From Faster Download Speeds

The spaghetti sauce incident

I am spending my day preparing a presentation on new marketing that have to be ready on monday. I was looking around the web for inspiration for the perfect presentation and found a few good ones. I then tried to remember which presentation, online as well as offline, I could remember. For some reason (maybe because I am a bit tired today) I could only remember about five that made a real impression on me.

For some reason the first that came to mind was Malcom Gladwell’s presentation from TED2004 where he explains what every business can learn from spaghetti sauce. He uses the 18 minutes to prove a very important point by telling a funny and interesting story without the use of PowerPoint or any other visuals. So if you are sitting infront of your computer and need a little entertainment or want to know how spaghetti sauce changed the business world - enjoy.

Malcom Gladwell - The Freaking Point (mp3)

Out of the box recruitment

With the current employment situation in Denmark where great employees are hard to find I often wonder how little effort is put in to recruiting new people for important positions.

I once spoke with a sales manager who told me that the difference between an average sales-person and a great sales-person is 20 to 1. If this is true, there should be no boundaries on how much you are willing to spend on having a great sales-person on your team as supposed to having an average or even good person on your team.

The gaming company Red 5 has made a recruitment campaign that is likely to have a near 100% response rate (at least in as far as getting in touch, if not necessarily accepting the position).

Red 5 figured out that if they had to steal the best gaming developers from their competition they had to a little more than to put the average job description on monster.com

They FedExed boxes to the people that they wanted to hire. Inside the box was… a smaller box and inside that box was a smaller box… and so on. If you put all the boxes together the puzzle would say:

not the end
a beginning
a new beginning
not a new world
but an old world
made new
no change is peaceful
and though life struggles
it also strives
to forge a new path
through the darkness
to rise to the call of glory
not the end
a new beginning
with new eyes to greet it.

Inside box number five (which was red) is a tiny iPod shuffle, nestled in more protective foam, with a name engraved on it; the name of the intended recipient. Printed on the inside flap of the box is an invitation to listen to a pre-recorded track on the iPod itself.

“You’ve got a passion for detail and a flair for gameplay that we admire very much,” Mark says, addressing the person by name. “At Red 5, we’re assembling a team of incredibly talented individuals dedicated to pushing the envelope.” He then suggests this person may be just what Red 5 is looking for and describes how they may go about logging on to the company website to learn more.

I can imagine that pile of high quality resumes are piling up on the desk at Red 5 and my guess is that they are more worth than a pile of iPod shuffles.

A blogpost from a guy who recieved the box
Red 5 explains why they did it
An other blogpost from someone who recieved the box

10 commandments

Christian’s 10 commandments on media planning, production and implementation.

1. NEVER ever spend a million kroner on print adverts. Use it on charity instead, it’s way better publicity.

2. ALWAYS question the choices of media channels no matter who’s in charge, they will thank you later.

3. NEVER ask the big media planning bureau’s for help regarding you media mix. They don’t get it anyway. Instead, use your common sense and talk to your colegues, friends and family instead.

4. ALWAYS prefer a spectacular failure than a mediocre success.

5. ALWAYS meet your deadlines. Nobody else does, it’s an easy way to stand out from the rest of the crowd.

6. NEVER try to sell a product if the demand isn’t there. Don’t waste precious time trying to convert people who don’t get it anyway.

7. NEVER use the clients money on expensive online software solutions. The open source society have always made a free or inexpensive solution just as good or even better.

8. ALWAYS trust people who gets things done, in advantage of people talking about getting things done.

9. ALWAYS be 100% sure that you and your client have the same expectations to the final product before you start to produce it.

10. NEVER think you can change anything with a campaign, if you don’t have a kick ass story or product to sell.

links for 2007-03-18

• 7 tricks to Viral Web Marketing - Baekdal.com

• Viral Video Chart - Today’s Top 20 Viral Videos

• Seven Ways to GO VIRAL « Lightspeed Venture Partners Blog

• 3 Rules For Managing Viral Marketing - What Every CMO Needs To Know at ExperienceCurve

• Seven Deadly Sins of Advertising Via Viral Video « Will Video for Food

Google Analytics Basic Tutorial

Many of our clients are not in the market for big solution when it comes to analyzing their blogs or websites. We always offer our to install Google Analytics on the solutions we create.

Google Analytics is a great tool to get the basic information about the traffic your site generates, however the getting started with the program and understanding the basic terms used can be a bit tricky.

Conversation Marketing has made a five step video tutorial that makes a good introduction to Google Analytics and understanding how to use the tool for analyzing your traffic.

If you want get your hands dirty with Google Analytics this is a good place to start.

Google Analytics Tutorial 1: Set Up
Google Analytics Tutorial 2: Essential Stats
Google Analytics Tutorial 3: Digging Deeper
Google Analytics Tutorial 4: Goals
Google Analytics Tutorial 5: Search Analytics

I have currently signed up for the beta vesion of the analytics tool reinvigorate. I’ll share my experiences in the near future.

Podcasts about New Marketing - or podcasts I listen to

I have just updated our resource section with links to the podcasts I listen to in the field of New Marketing and around it. I deleted a few podcasts last week that I might give a second try in the near future.

These are the podcasts that are currently in my iPod.

Across The Sound
Ad Age Audio Reports
American Copywriter
Crayon cast
HBR IdeaCast
Managing The Gray
Marketing Voices
Six Pixels of Separation
The M Show

links for 2007-03-15

• The Viral Garden’s Top 25 Marketing blogs - The Viral Garden

• ::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon » The Way You Make Me Feel

• Brands Should Blogvertise

• Where do remarkable products come from?

Copenhagen Kicking - or the video that went missing

In the last month I have read at least ten stories about Wonderful Copenhagen winning The New York Festivals‘ gold award for best tourist film. This is quite an achievement and of course Sales and marketing director Ole Andersen is very proud “The prize is a major recognition of our international marketing of Copenhagen”.

Today I spend over 30 minutes trying to find this film on-line but apparently it hasn’t been uploaded by anyone. Can somebody please explain to why an award winning video that only has one purpose “To promote Copenhagen” is not on You Tube, Google Video, Metacafe or any of the many other video sites that are out there ?

BTW - I did a little search for “Wonderful Copenhagen” You Tube and found 15 videos. Three of them are from the riots at Undomshuset.

Clutter

Watch the movie (.mov)

If this video doesn’t prove the point that regular advertising is having a very hard time reaching consumers I don’t know what does.

“Clutter is a term used to describe the phenomenon of a marketplace being full or even overcrowded with products. It also refers to the extreme amount of advertising the average American sees in their daily lives. Clutter is a major problem for marketers and advertisers.” Wikipedia

According to The New York Times an average person living in the city is exposed to about 5,000 ads a day. Try to think about how many ads you can remember from the last 24 hours.

I said it before and I’ll say it again “You can’t buy attention”