Archive: Posts about PR and Marketing
June 20th, 2011, 3 Comments »
Nitobi, the Vancouver-based development shop, is one of our oldest clients. It’s been exciting to watch them grow from their origins as (gulp) eBusiness Applications, and see them take off with the world-class work that is PhoneGap. PhoneGap is an open-source development platform that’s been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and has a robust community around it.
It’s finally time for Nitobi to get some day-to-day marketing help in-house. We’re helping them hire for this position–a Marketing and PR Specialist.
If you work in the tech industry, you’re familiar with the unorthodox tactics companies use to attract technical talent. Whether it’s Electronic Arts’ ASCII billboards or Reddit’s solve-for-S-to-get-the-email-address approach, the developers get all the fun job applications.
I thought it’d be fun to set a slightly-higher-than-usual bar to submit your resume for this role. We really want to find the right person for Nitobi, after all. We’d also prefer not to wade through hundreds of unqualified resumes.
In order to apply for this job, applicants need to solve a skill-testing question. In fact, there are four questions they need to answer, but they need to get the first one right before they can access the rest of the application form.
It isn’t rocket science, but it will hopefully filter out some marketers who have never confronted, uh, math. Hopefully it’s also modestly unusual, so the posting might get spread around a bit.
Smart readers: please don’t post the answer in comments.
3 Comments »
June 9th, 2011, 2 Comments »
I was going through some storage boxes, and discovered it.
In 1991, my two classmates and I produced a yearbook video for our graduating class (at Sentinel Secondary School, hence the name). We sold it for $20 a tape, and probably netted $100 each at the end of the year. It did give socially-awkward 17-year-old me something to do at parties and sports events, instead of actually talking to people.
Yeah, I was a bit of a nerd in high school. This should come as a surprise to no one.
I remember my mother pointing out that we probably shouldn’t be wasting our money on business cards. After all, who did we have to give them to? She was right, but we got them printed up anyway. Totally worth it.
2 Comments »
May 31st, 2011, 4 Comments »
Today I was having a drink at the Wicklow on False Creek. I visited the men’s room, and discovered this posted above the urinal (click to enlarge):
In case you can’t read the text:
Ninjas not your thing? Maybe it’s time to get a Big Brother for your son!
Big Brothers are:
- Carefully screened
- Spend 2-4 hours a week hanging out and doing guy stuff with their Little Brothers.
Little Brothers are:
- Are aged 7 – 14
- Don’t have a positive male role model in their lives.
- Just need a little guy time.
I tried to imagine a father thoughtfully musing to himself while micturating: “Hang on. I’m definitely not a positive male role model in my son’s life. After all, I’m down the pub instead of home playing with him. I need to call these people!” It seemed like the most misguided, laughably strange advertisement I’d seen in years. On top of its peculiar messaging, the pub was almost devoid of men, and full of middle-aged women.
It took me about an hour to realize that the poster had, in fact, been hung up in the wrong restroom.
Or possibly it was just somebody having a little fun.
4 Comments »
April 21st, 2011, No Comments »
I recently received an invitation to attend The Art of Marketing, a marketing conference being held at The Centre on June 9. It looks like an exciting event if only for the speaker line-up, which is a who’s-who of web-savvy marketing gurus. The list includes:
- Gary Vaynerchuk
- Guy Kawasaki
- William Taylor
- Mitch Joel
- Avinash Kaushik
I’m particularly interested in seeing Avinash, as it’s his books I usually recommend when talking about web analytics.
There’s a disappointing lack of two-X speakers on that list, especially considering that the audience (not to mention the industry) is liable to be at least 60% female. Why not Vanessa Fox or Laura Ries?
In any case, it’s an event to look forward to–Vancouver rarely sees five speakers of that calibre on the same day.
No Comments »
March 13th, 2011, 1 Comment »
MARKETER: So, just “Ice” along the top, then?
STORE OWNER: Yep.
MARKETER: Are you sure? There’s a lot of space up there.
STORE OWNER: “Ice” will be fine, thanks.
MARKETER: I don’t know…it’s really an opportunity to make a brand impression about your ice.
STORE OWNER: A…what?
MARKETER: You know, really differentiate your ice from the competition’s. Say something bold! Tell a story about your frozen water.
STORE OWNER: Whatever. Just make it look good, okay?
1 Comment »
March 7th, 2011, No Comments »
A quick post to cover off a few things in my orbit:
- After four or five years of indifference, we launched a new version of Capulet’s website, designed by our friends at Giant Ant Media. I wrote a blog post over at Capulet’s dusty blog about the relaunch. It features some in-progress sketches, and our thinking behind the site’s aesthetic.
- I’m making slow but steady progress in my plan to live Canadian in 2011. My current search is for Canadian-made shoes, both of the running and hiking varieties. There was a piece about the project in the Vancouver Sun today. The photo is rather undignified.
- I stepped back from the Northern Voice organizing committee this year, but I’m helping to organize the Non-Profit Expo that we’ve held for the past couple of years. We run a kind of small trade show for non-profits, enabling them to set up tables and talk to attendees on Saturday afternoon. Do you work for or know of a non-profit or charity? Apply here.
- By the way, tickets are now on sale for Northern Voice. Act now to avoid disappointment. Likewise, the speaker submission deadline is creeping up.
No Comments »
February 27th, 2011, 10 Comments »
The other day I had a meeting with a professional person, a freelancer who worked in an industry tangentially connected to the Web. We organized the meeting via email, and I noticed with dismay that he had a Compuserve email address, as in Wayne.Gretzky@compuserve.com. This an old-school American internet service provider–a Canadian equivalent might be Shaw or Uniserve.
I’m a little ashamed to admit that I’m an email snob. When I get an email from a self-employed professional and it comes from Gmail, Hotmail and the like, and not their own domain, I get a little judgey.
It suggests to me, in a small way, that the person isn’t really serious about marketing their own business.
I asked around amongst my web-savvy friends, and they all confessed to a similar bias. Call it snobbery, call it elitist–there’s at least a hint of the business card scene from American Psycho here–but it seems to be a widely-held opinion, at least among webophiles.
On occasion, I give talks at universities and colleges, and participate in informational interviews. One of the pieces of advice I give to all students, wherever they intend to work, is to establish some kind of web presence for themselves. You are, after all, what the Internet says you are, so it’s best to own a piece of that presence. I just read Gina Trapani’s post about the importance of a ‘nameplate site’.
Differentiate yourself from the pack
So why don’t freelancers get their own domain for their email accounts?
- They don’t consider having a generic email address an issue.
- They’re aware of this perception, and they don’t care.
- They don’t know how cheap and easy it is to set up your own email (and web) domain.
If you wish to be self-employed and work full-time (as opposed to a hobbyist or part-time position) in 2011, you need a simple website and a branded email address. Not only does it look to us web snobs that you’re serious about what you’re doing, but it will also differentiate you from a bunch of freelancers who haven’t taken these steps.
I randomly happened upon Victoria Bushnell’s website. She’s apparently a freelance writer and editor, and she’s got a simple, good-looking website. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about it, and it doesn’t have to be updated often, but it certainly exudes professionalism.
The retort to my advice is usually “but I get lots of work with no website and my plain old Gmail account”. That’s all well and good–I forget to bring business cards to events sometimes, and I still may get work out of them. However, are you getting the best possible work you could? If not, then there’s room for improvement, and a branded email address and simple website seems like low-hanging fruit.
Three steps and you’re done
So, how do you get started?
- Register your preferred domain. I use NameCheap. Pick something simple, like your full name, or your company name.
- Set up your email using Google Apps for Domains, which enables you to use Gmail with @yourdomain.com. Here are detailed instructions on how to do that.
- Create a simple website. I’d recommend using WordPress.com, and then connecting your domain with your new site. In fact, you may just wish to start with WordPress.com by registering your domain there.
10 Comments »
February 23rd, 2011, No Comments »
About 18 months ago, I did a pretty unscientific analysis on Mashable regarding the clickthrough rate for Twitter accounts. That is, when you share a link on Twitter, how many of your followers click it?
I arrived at a clickthrough rate (CTR) of 1.7%. Looking at a couple of other sources, that seems quite accurate. It’s safe, I think, to estimate a CTR of 1% to 2% for Twitter for a small to medium Twitter account (say, up to 10,000 followers).
It’s worth considering Anil Dash’s great analysis of being on the famed (and now deprecated, I think) Suggested Users list. As he notes, he acquired hundreds of thousands of new followers, but “being on Twitter’s suggested user list makes no appreciable difference in the amount of retweets, replies, or clicks that I get.”
As with all forms of marketing, quality of audience matters far more than quantity.
That’s all a bit of a long introduction to this observation, which reminded me of a phenomenon on Twitter and other corners of the social web.
Earlier this week, I had a (quite unremarkable) tweet retweeted a lot. Here it is:
As you can see from this Bit.ly page for the shortened link, it was clicked 3872 times. I’d never actually checked out the top referrers for this page–that is, where people were when they actually clicked the link:
As a second data point, here’s a recent tweeted link that was clicked about a thousand times.
So, that means that 52% of the clicks came from that first big category, and 38% of traffic comes from the Twitter site. It’s too bad that Bit.ly can’t further unravel that first category, eh? How much comes from HootSuite, how much from SMS, how much from chat and so forth. As you can see, most people access Twitter without visiting Twitter.com.
In our workshops and talks I give, I often have to explain to people that they should think of Twitter and Facebook as services or utilities, as opposed to websites. As we can see here, Twitter is water that flows from a lot of different taps, not just from Twitter.com.
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