Month: November 2005

In addition to creating plans and budgets for next year, I also have to create and manage monthly business reports to monitor our sales activity.

One of our new promotions has goals that I want to highlight when met. Usually, graphs are the way to do this, but not with over 15 records to monitor. Instead, I am creating a straight-forward table as the published report. But how to highlight when a goal is met? Automatically? My brain said that Excel should be able to do it, and Google confirmed that what I wanted is a standard feature:

Excel — Conditional Formatting: “Conditional formatting allows you to set rules for cell formatting. If the rules (conditions) are met, then the formatting is applied… For example, you can set conditional formatting so that a cell turns blue if it contains a value higher than 75 and turns green if it contains a value lower than 50. “

Now even my boring spreadsheet reports will be easily digested. I’ve already automated much of my reports in the past by assuming Excel must have some way of making it easier, and figuring it out. Be a master of your tools.

Thanksgiving is upon us again. Christmas is fast approaching. It can be a draining season. I know that I am loathing the long drive to Tennessee my family will start this afternoon. Holidays take energy, but they can be rewarding, which is why we love them so.

Same thing goes for budgeting for 2006. Gotta slug through reports, create calendars, joggle the numbers, and get your boss to agree on it all. But the reward is a plan and freedom to act on it for the coming year.

Segue:
I was not keen on ‘business’ podcasts, as I want to be entertained, but I’ve quickly become a fan of Motivation on the Run by Larry Hendrick. His podcast will help me keep going during the budgeting/holiday season.

I’ve been listening for 10 weekly shows (he does the show every Monday “because it is written down”). Larry does this because he is genuinely interested in motivation and leadership, not to sell his services or a book. I encourage my readers to download a show (each is 20 minutes) and hear what he has to say, or at least subscribe to his blog.

If if were easy, there would be no sluggards or clock watchers at your work location. Everyone would be productive and when finishing one job, would jump up and find another to get started on, and the harder the better. Doesn’t sound like your place of work? Mine either, but like I said, it takes hard work and practice.

Just because this question came up a couple times recently, let me provide some definitions:

International business: A group of sister corporations that operate independently around the world. Each unit usually addresses the local market as best they see fit. How about Ford, Pizza Hut, Masterfoods.

Global business: a group of company divisions that work together as a single business entity. Think IBM, Samsung, Sony.

We are seeing our clients act more and more like Global businesses, which creates new challenges and makes doing business that much more complex.

I was asked a couple weeks ago: “What about all those email newsletters the trade publications send out? Does anybody read those?”

I’m not a direct marketer, so I didn’t really have a good idea, but as a potential newsletter advertiser, the question is a good one. DM News provides a good answer, as reported by MarketingVOX:

“This survey confirms our suspicions that a large percentage of BTB e-mail subscribers do not download images and prefer to scan or read their e-mails within the preview pane, and never fully open the e-mail,” said Loren McDonald, vice president of marketing at EmailLabs.”

So as an advertiser, I should be looking for email newsletters that are designed for this type of usage: “EmailLabs suggests that emails include a 2-3-inch preview pane header area containing no images but including key offers, article teasers and ‘In This Issue’ information.”

I usually don’t jump on new stuff, but since I’ve been pondering ‘client-side analytics’ for my websites, I signed up for the new Google Analytics on Monday when I first heard about it.

I added this blog and my company site. The website was a little balky and took some time to show actual data, but I saw my first reports this AM. Some reports were essentially blank, so I had to go back to configure it to suit my needs:

1. Disallowed recording accesses from our office’s IP address. They have these funny Posix regular expressions for controlling filters, which will take some getting used to. This is important because you need a backslash in front of periods if they are part of the expression, because periods are also Posix terms.

2. Had to go to my AdWords account to ‘link’ to the Analytics account. This is important for conversion tracking. There is a new tab in AdWords called Analytics where you can do this.

3. I had to create Goals. This is simply target URLs on the website that you want to measure traffic to. In my case, this is the main web-request form.

The reports you get are overwhelming and I’m not sure which ones are useful to me. Its always fun to look at you data in new ways though. I did find how to see more than the top 5 or 10 page accesses, which was my initial concern. Overall, it looks promising, but I need to pick a couple reports to track results. (Chart shown is for this blog.)

I get this nifty little magazine/promotional piece a few times a year called Product Marketing, which is targeted at technology product management. I don’t market software, but there is always something worthwhile in it. You’ll love this one:

As a sidebar to the cover article, the author makes parallels between Star Trek and marketing called: Is your company The Original Series or The Next Generation? (scroll halfway down to find the whole sidebar)

“Unfortunately, sales people are often like Captain Kirk: action without thought, asking for the impossible and frequently violating the prime directive.

Meanwhile, Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy is like many marketing people: emotion without logic, frequently complaining about what they aren’t: “Damn it, Jim. I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer.”

Thankfully, we have Scotty as a stand-in for our product managers. Scotty initially tells Kirk that whatever he wants is impossible and fifteen minutes later, says, “Okay, you’ve got warp drive.””

Then he compares to the characters from TNG (The Next Generation). He says about Bones’ contemporary:

“Beverly Crusher, in the marketing role, is a good doctor, as was McCoy, but she also understands the business of the starship, can and does serve as an executive officer with understanding of all roles, and uses scientific metrics to evaluate the health of the crew.”

And wraps up with this gem:

“Here is the difference: Picard can be trusted with accurate information while Kirk cannot. Picard never makes promises that his crew cannot keep while Kirk frequently does. And the crew knows it… in both cases. The “old school” acts more on instinct and hope while the next generation acts on procedure and knowledge.”

And so, which ship are you on? What’s your crew like? And are you acting appropriately?

The title of this post is also the title of my presentation at ICC on Monday. Poking a stick at the directories, wasn’t I?

Thankfully, I don’t have to try to remember what I said during my ‘sanity check’ presentation. My blogosphere buddy (and now in person) David Shaw does a great job finding the high points: “My summary: For Dave, Google is outperforming industry-specific directories dramatically, not only in clickthroughs, but in quality of search results. And that’s a serious problem for any b2b publisher. Some more key takeaways…”

Dave laments the small audience I drew (speaking opposite Sherpa Anne Holland), but the feedback I have gotten back says I delivered the goods, which is satisfying enough. And talking to Pat and others afterwords says I had the right audience.

John Blossom has detailed slide-by-slide notes, as I noted yesterday. If any regular readers want to see the presentation, drop me an email. Because it has some real traffic numbers, I don’t want to publish it here. But I can post the core of the presentation, which justifies my title (besides the traffic numbers):

What’s Wrong with directories:

• We are sold on clicks and category rankings
• Users judge (directory) sites on relevant results

• We assume you have an unique audience
• You focus on skimming Google to boost traffic

• We (advertisers & directories) want to use categories
• Users are used to using search

Hence: Google rules:

• It ranks based on relevance
• Traffic is not contrived
• Uses search to drill down

Go ahead and argue with that! But its easy to be the critic. The directories have the really hard work of finding solutions to these issues–I’ll be watching.

Most trade pubs run annual buyer’s guides, relics of pre-internet days. But you’ve got to imagine that a focused list of suppliers would be of value to their readership still. And so I diligently respond to update requests from magazines, especially when their buyer’s guide includes an online listing with a link (yay PageRank).

I’ve just had two to take care of, one of which was a 5M Word file I had to download and then email back. Its almost painful to think of the office assistant who gets stuck digging thru each of these responses, all 21 pages. (I’m sure I’ve complained about this kind of thing before.)

So I was excited to find out at the InfoCommerce Conference that there is software out there that can help publishers manage such projects, priced under $10K. And for you entrepreneurs considering creating a directory website (or book), this has to be a great way to launch.

bg2go is the only self-service print and online buyer’s guide and directory solution: “bg2go is completely self-service. Companies can sign up to be listed in your directory, update their listings, change categories, and even purchase enhancements in both the print and online editions of your directory using bg2go’s integrated credit card processing software. You maintain control over what gets listed in your directory, all the while making it easier for companies to do business with you.”

For the sake of marketing managers everywhere, I hope bg2go sells a bunch of software! Good luck, Don McAlpine.

Wow, going to the InfoCommerce Group’s annual conference was a terriffic experience. My thanks to Russ and Roxanne for inviting me to speak.

The exciting part was meeting so many different people from such diverse companies, all there interested in the same things I am. And it was really cool introducing myself to people who then say “hey, I’m a real fan of your blog”–that’s what the first person I met said, in fact (thanks Greg!).

It was also great to meet other bloggers, some who had the energy to ‘blog the conference’. Check these out:
John Blossom of Shore Communications posts detailed live notes on each presentation, including mine.
Barry Graubart (who I didn’t meet) summarizes his experience at Content Matters Blog.

I’ll post more stuff later.

Via MarketingVox, here is a cool new b2b search engine: VerticalSearch.com

Doing searches with it, it looks like the content comes almost exclusively from B2B media publications. Well, now that I’ve read their mission statement, they that’s exactly what they have indexed to start. But they are ambitious:

“Soon we will be adding tens of thousands of B2B company sites to augment the B2B trade press sites. And, as VerticalSearch.com evolves, watch for useful community tools and features that will allow each vertical B2B community to share domain expertise, product offerings, and business and job opportunities by sector.”

Sure, this kind of thing has been tried before, it some form or another. But as I work on reviewing the online directory business, I keep seeing something similar to VerticalSearch as where directories should be headed. Let’s see how well they can do.