New Daily Read If you haven’t seen it or heard about it yet, run – don’t walk – to sign up for either the RSS feed or daily email digest from Silicon Alley Insider, a new publication that’s a sort of NYC based version of ValleyWag. SAI is run by famed analyst Henry Blodget and was started by former DoubleClick CEO and CTO Kevin Ryan and Dwight Merriman, now serial Silicon Alley entrepreneurs (at an epic pace, no less). The writing is easy and has a bit of that tabloid feel to it, but that’s a nice change. The fact that the publication fills a void that’s been open for years since the disappearance of Jason Calacanis’ Silicon Alley Reporter…
Archives / October, 2007
Where There's a Will, There's a Way
Where There’s a Will, There’s a Way Almost exactly a year ago, we welcomed our daughter Casey into the world, and tonight, we are proud to announce the arrival of her little brother Wilson Sass Blumberg. Will’s official birth announcement is here. Everyone is doing fine, and please – no presents!
New Media’s Influence on the Traditional
New Media’s Influence on the Traditional Last week, DMNews unveiled its new look and feel and format (of the print publication) at the DMA’s annual convention in Chicago. Hats off to Publisher Julia Hood and Editor-in-Chief Elly Trickett for diving in and coming up with some great improvements to the publication so quickly after taking the reigns. What I find particularly interesting about the new format is that its design and even content structure seem to borrow heavily from the world of online media, such as: A top-of-page “navigation bar” that tells you at a glance what articles are on the page (email, circulation, multichannel, legislation, lists, etc.) so you can flip pages and figure out quickly where to stop…
The Highest Form of Flattery
The Highest Form of Flattery Competitors copy us all the time. Sometimes it’s big things like product features or strategy. Sometimes it’s little things like marketing collateral or a logo or product name. Those are always a little annoying, but really, there’s nothing one can do about it. As we say at Return Path, it’s the price we pay for being a market leader. And to be honest, I’m sure we do the same on occasion, whether inadvertently or on purpose. But we spotted one today that’s so incredibly egregious and just plain silly, I don’t even know where to start. A competitor — name will be hidden to protect the guilty — just ripped off our boiler plate language…
People are People, Part II
People are People, Part II In Part I, I talked about the diminishing distinction between B2B marketing and B2C marketing, and how getting the right message to the right person at the right time blurs those traditional boundaries. I have a different thought on the same theme today, spurred on by Elly Trickett, who is DMNews‘ fantastic new Editor-in-Chief. Elly wrote a great editorial in the October 1 print edition of the publication that I just caught today entitled “Don’t Forget Your Consumer Side,” in which she recounted a speech she made to an audience of marketers where she asked them to come up with examples of trigger-based digital marketing they had received, and one member of the audience replied…
Impact of a Leader
Impact of a Leader I had an interesting moment of clarity the other day around the impact of a leader that’s not from the business world but that does have lessons for the business world. This may take a couple of minutes to set up, so bear with me. One of my extracurricular activities is raising money for Princeton from fellow alumni. For this effort, we use two basic metrics to track success in any given year’s campaign: participation (what % of alumni give) and dollars (how much $ we raise). While dollars raised are escalating year over year as you’d expect with inflation and with an expanding alumni base due to larger classes in more recent years, participation rates…