The Best Known Have Died

That may seem like an odd title, but tell me quick, NO GOOGLING, who is the top scientist in the field of bacteria today? Me either, no idea, yet we all know Louis Pasteur. Who owns the art nouveau movement now? Right, same thing.

So do the best known, most memorable have to have died? Can your sales demo be the most memorable, even if you don’t die during it? I would hope so.

Like the old question, are you famous, or infamous? Do you care? I hope you do, because when doing a demo, you want to be famous and avoid infamy.


The first thing to keep you from being infamous is the truth. By telling the truth, or at lease what you think is true. See my blog on Distorting Reality for more on this. The truth will set you free, and keep you free of a bad name.

Second is be a person first, and a sales second. I know you are a salesperson, but think of yourself as a person-of-sales. Please never forget to be a person.

Third would be to ask for more than a reason to tell. My wife tells me I’m guilty of this one, I think she may be right. Leading questions. I’m sure you don’t need to report...”You do!?!” (said with shock and surprise), well let me tell you about our all new report 6000 module... Sometimes you should ask to actually hear their answer, not be answering their answer before they are done speaking.

And truth be told, we may argue over who the greatest LIVING baseball player is, but we know all of their names. Why do we know? Because they performed and produced. That is what it takes to be known before you die.

Super or Bowl Marketing

We all love the Super Bowl ads. I’m not sure when it started, but I know that the ads are often the most talked about Super Bowl happenings. Millions are spent by these companies and their brand managers for 30 seconds during this game. Is it worth it?

As with all marketing, and never forget that that is what those ads are, some work, and some don’t. Which ones do you remember now after 24 hours? Which ones do you remember AND remember the brand it was for? Which ones do you remember AND remember the brand it was for AND thought it was good or positive? That one may have been worth it.

The Dot Com era was the golden era of Super Bowl ads. Also the biggest waste of marketing dollars ever. Great commercials, no idea who they were for or why. Viral video, huge social media numbers wasted. If you want to entertain people, start a movie company, otherwise market your brand.

Great marketing equals Super branding. Poor marketing equals dollars down the Bowl. Whether you are doing 5 cent Google adWords or 5 million dollar Super Bowl ads, wasted message equals wasted dollars.

Marketing Up With The Joneses

We all know about keeping up with the Joneses. I don’t know if you have seen the movie, The Joneses. I linked to it if you haven’t.

It is all about creating demand by selling the dream. That, and staying true to yourself, but we’ll save that part for another blog. How do you market? How do you measure it? Are you tracking all of it?

Even the “ripple” effect? The intangible marketing that your employees do every time they meet with, talk to, or interact with anyone? Believe me, this does more than any radio ad you have ever run.

Sell the dream of whatever you sell, every time, everywhere, everyone.

Paper, Plastic, or Private?

Does your local supermarket offer a discount card? You know, swipe your card and get a discount on your pork and beans. Do you know what the supermarket does with your card swipe? Makes money, that’s what.

They take that data about the shopping cart full of food fun you just bought, yes even those items, and build a database based on certain demographic data about you and your family. They then sell or trade that data to the food producers and distributers.

So have you read about the change in Google’s privacy statement? You can read it here. They are going to do the same thing as your grocery store. Collect data and sell it. Really what they have been doing. By tracking what you do, they make your searches more relevant. Sharing this data with advertisers should make your ads more relevant.

So do you want paper, plastic, or private?

Spotifying the Gap in Your (Social) Life

Spotify took some heat from privacy advocates for the way they were handling the interaction with Facebook. They quickly patched that by allowing you to listen privately. So if you do want to listen to, oh I don’t know, Boy George or “disco hits of the 70s”, you can do so without seeming to be uncool to your friends, real and virtual.

Got me thinking about other things you might do that you might not want a digital trail, but isn’t the lack of a digital trail going to raise a red flag? If you wanted to ditch your girlfriend and go to the football game with your friends, how you going to do that? Even if you don’t check in, tweet, post, take a picture that is geocoded, how you going to stop your friends? Even if you stop them, where did you say you were? Where are the check ins from there? Groupon? Foursquare? Even if you said you were sick, you should have checked WebMD. You my friend, have a digital gap that needs to be filled.

This reminds me of the the way the Russians used to find our quietest subs, by looking for places in the ocean that had no noise. Those areas had no noise because our subs were so quite they made no noise, and so big, they blocked the background noise. We solved that by placing mics on each side of the sub that picked up the ambient noise and broadcast it on the other side of the sub through a speaker. Effectively filling the gap with noise. That is what we need, a gap filler.

So if we, the digital social generation, ever want to do anything cool on a “sick” day again, we had better develop a way to post ambient life noise, or the lack of  a digital trail may get us in trouble.

We Ain’t There Yet…

Mashable reported yesterday that Gmail was down for some users. Story HERE. I guess my take is so? I am a believer in internet based services. Software, hardware, infrastructure, anything as a service, in fact I’ll even let you call it cloud. But just because some service I use is not available all the time is not news. The fact that someone thinks it is news tells me, we ain’t there yet. We still think it is a voodoo fad.

Without checking, I’m sure somewhere in the United States today, power, internet, cable, and water are out somewhere. Mashable did not do a story on any of those. Why? Those are accepted technologies. We know, even understand that the cable will go out, we are only really pissed if it is on game day. Being geeks, we might even Tweet that we are upset with the cable Gods, but we don’t question the decision we made to move from over the air network TV.

I would also guess, (without checking), that most companies who switched from an in-house email solution to a hosted solution have had less downtime with their hosted solution, than the reboot time for their previous email solution. My point? We are there, it is time for the media to treat these web based technologies the same as installed technologies.