This classic came up on my iGoogle home page today, where I have the Quote of the Day widget turned on:
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.John WanamakerUS department store merchant (1838 – 1922)”
Have we all gravitated toward the half of advertising that we can [...]

A trap in the jungle:I wanted to start this blog citing a movie where someone gets lured into net or lasso in the jungle, and hung upside until rescued. As I started thinking about it, a number of movies blurred in my mind. Why do so many movies use this gag? Because it is true.
The [...]

You know I say ‘the devil is in the details’. All the best marketing can be screwed by salespeople or service/support staff who do or say the wrong things.
I was sent a copy of the book, How to Talk to Customers to review. It was written by customer-service consultants Diane Berenbaum & Tom Larkin, distilling [...]

InfoCommerce has cranked up their blog with news, not just their weekly newsletter. This morning I found them with this news from GlobalSpec, introducing a new tool called PartFinder that “can assist those users in re-ordering parts, placing new orders, ordering replacement parts or finding a second source for their desired parts. Users can search [...]

I was just flipping thru my bookmarks and found one I had made for Barnstead International. Firefox (and IE) use the page title as the default title for the bookmark, right? Well, this bookmark was 114 words long!
Turns out that every page in the site has this same 114 word title. It might be a [...]

I’ve been tinkering a bit with our website’s guestbook form. I’ve always prided myself in how simple it was–not one asterisk indicating required details! Its short enough that all the information should be obviously needed, if not required. Eight fields, total.
For the address, in particular, there is just one multi-line box. No pull-down state menu, [...]

The Dip, by Seth Godin, does what a book from a guru should do—it points out the obvious and kicks you in the gut with the truth.
Seth is pointing out facts that we’d rather not acknowledge. He creates insecurity where there once was security and confidence. That we are likely trapped in the mediocrity of [...]

I was writing yesterday in a predefined template. Templates are great for organizing your information, which in my case, I considered a help. I had lots of details and data to include that would easily be broken down according to the template.
It didn’t work.
Okay, it helped me get started with my ideas and information. But [...]

Hans De Keulenaer, at B2Bridge (a European business blogging site) interviewed me via email on the occasion of B2Blog’s 5th year. He called me a lustrum blogger. I had to Google that word, but now I understand. Thanks Hans for the opportunity to share.

Have you been reading Seth’s book-promo-blog, The Dip? As someone who feels stuck in a couple ‘dips’ (and don’t we all?), I’ve eagerly followed along. (In short, ‘the dip’ is the point between ‘good’ and ‘great’.) Heck, I’m a Seth fanboy.
Seth sent out a request for ‘quitters’, those who got out of a dip and [...]