Book Short: Great Marketing Checklists Trade Show and Event Marketing: Plan, Promote, and Profit, by our direct marketing colleague Ruth Stevens, is hardly a page-turner, but it is a great read and well worth the money for anyone in your B2B marketing department. That’s true as much for the event marketing specialist as the marketing generalist. The author brings a very ROI-focused approach to planning and executing events – whether big trade shows or smaller corporate events, which are becoming increasingly popular in recent years for cost, focus, and control reasons. But beyond events, the book has a number of excellent checklists that are more general for marketers that I found quite useful both as a reminder of things we…
Archives / May, 2006
The Business of Being a Scumbag, Part II
The Business of Being a Scumbag, Part II From today’s Direct Newsline email newsletter (no apparent way to link to it) comes another view into how the Internet Axis of Evil carries out its mission. Zombie Computer Network Commits Click Fraud A global network of 34,000 “zombie” computers infected with a Trojan Horse virus is being used to commit click fraud against pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers, according to software security research firm PandaLabs. It is thought to be the largest click-fraud bot network detected so far, and comes at a time when advertisers are reported to be growing increasingly worried about wasting their performance-ad dollars on unqualified clicks. The firm reported Friday that, according to data it has observed, the computers…
Agile Reading
Agile Reading While not exactly a laugh a minute, Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit, by Mary and Tom Poppendieck, is a good read for anyone who is a practitioner of agile development — or anything agile. (Note: if you want a laugh a minute, read Who Moved My Blackberry?, which as Brad says, is hilarious — kind of like The Office in book form). As I wrote about here and here, Return Path now does both agile development and agile marketing. The book draws many interesting comparisons between manufacturing and engineering, which I found quite interesting, and not just because I’m a former management consultant — there’s something that’s just easier to visualize about how an assembly line works…
To My Email Subscribers
To My Email Subscribers Just a quick note to let you know that for now, I’ve switched email engines, so the updates from my blog will come to you from Feedburner instead of Feedblitz. I like Feedblitz and think that its CEO, Phil Hollows, has done a very good job with the service. My switch to Feedburner is about testing out the consolidation between RSS delivery, ad insertion, and email delivery. So, you shouldn’t notice too much of a difference — the posts will still be emailed to you daily — but the format and "from" address will be slightly different. All feedback is welcome.
Sticking it to United, Just a Little Bit
Sticking it to United, Just a Little Bit I am sitting in the Red Carpet Club waiting for yet another delayed United flight, and there’s a small thing bringing me a little extra joy. I recently started using Verizon’s Broadband Wireless service, which is expensive at $60/month, but awesome since it basically works anywhere and eliminates the need for hotel, Starbucks, and other Wi Fi hot spot fees (and for a great tutorial on how to use the service to power two computers at once, read Brad’s post here). I’ve long been annoyed at United — and American as well — for both charging a pretty sizeable annual fee to belong to their airport clubs and then soaking me for…
The Business of Being a Scumbag
The Business of Being a Scumbag I’ve written a couple of times about what Fred calls the Internet’s Axis of Evil. But David Kirkpatrick from Fortune just blew me away yesterday with his lurid description of the Internet’s crime scene. This is a must-read for anyone who works in the online medium.
Blogiversary, Part II
Blogiversary, Part II So it’s now been two years since I launched OnlyOnce. Last year at this time, I gave a bunch of stats of how my blog was going. The interesting thing about this year, is that a lot of these stats seem to have leveled off. I have almost the same number of subscribers (email and RSS) and unique visits as last year. The number’s not bad — it’s in the thousands — and I’m still happy to be writing the blog for all the reasons I expressed here back in June 2004, but it’s interesting that new subs seem to be harder to come by these days. I assume that’s a general trend that lots of bloggers…
links for 2006-05-10
WSJ.com – Heard on the Street Amazon, Microsoft, and Google on big marketing spend (tags: Marketing Media Technology)
So, Where’d They Go?
So, Where’d They Go? As we’ve reported a couple times in the past, one of our interesting nuggets at Return Path is a wealth of “ISP switching data” that comes from our very large, active, self-reported Email Change of Address, or ECOA, service (consumer sign-up; client info). I noted the article floating around last week that AOL lost about 1 million subscribers last quarter, the lion’s share in the U.S., of course. So, where’d they all go? Well, according to our ECOA data, which may of course be somewhat skewed by our data sources (but has data from well over 1 million consumers each quarter), AOL users defected as follows: To Yahoo! — 42.5% To broadband providers in aggregate (cable,…
Counter Cliché: And Founders, Too
Counter Cliché: And Founders, Too This week, Fred’s chiche is that "the success of a company is in inverse proportion to the number of venture capitalists on the board". I’d argue that the same statement is true of founders or management. Boards help govern the company and watch out for shareholder interests. Boards give outside perspectives and strategic advice to the company’s leadership. Boards hire and fire the CEO. And — more and more every day with large public companies — boards keep management honest. How can these critical functions occur when a Board has too many members of the management team on it? They can’t. We’ve had outside directors at Return Path from Day 1. I’m not advocating that…
9/11 Redux: Deja Senti
9/11 Redux: Deja Senti I’m not sure if Deja Senti is a real phrase in French, but it should be. It’s at least the grammatical, if not idiomatic equivalent of Deja Vu, but for smells (literally “already smelled”). That’s what it felt like coming home to Tribeca last night, after yesterday’s horrendous fire that destroyed seven abandoned warehouses in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, right across the East River from downtown. It smelled just like it did on 9/11 and for three months afterward while Ground Zero’s rubble and oil tanks were still smoldering and spewing out a constant acrid smell across downtown. There are some kinds of Deja Senti that are quite pleasant — baking bread, campfires, fresh cut grass, even Elmer’s…