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Monthly Archives September 2008

Web 2.0 Startups Need to Grow Up if They Want to be Involved in B2B

There are a lot of things that annoy me about Web 2.0 – the lack of sound business models, the buzz-driven approach to investment, the return of pastel colors, but I don’t think anything bothers me more than the cutesy culture that pervades this entire quadrant of the IT sector.
Yahoo and Google started the [...]

Posted 18 September 2008 † Aaronontheweb § Marketing Strategy § Social Media ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: ,

Time to Stop Drinking the Panic Punch – More Regulation is not the Answer to our Country’s Financial Problems

You’d have to be an idiot to claim that Wall Street is performing well at the moment; the reality is that we’re in a textbook definition of a bear market. However, for reasons that remain inexplicable, people are knee-jerking to the bad news with shrieks of “WE NEED MORE REGULATION” and “FREE MARKET ECONOMICS HAS [...]

Posted 17 September 2008 † Aaronontheweb § Market Analysis § Public Policy ‡ Comments (4) ° Tagged: , ,

The First Cardinal Sin of Marketing

I use the word “first” because I’m sure there are other cardinal sins that marketers commit, but at the moment I want to focus on one that is particularly egregious. So what’s the first cardinal sin of marketing?
The first, and arguably most outrageous, cardinal sin of marketing is to sacrifice long-term objectives in order to [...]

Posted 16 September 2008 † Aaronontheweb § Bad Marketers § Marketing Strategy ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged: , ,

How Do You Fight Bad Marketers?

Seth Godin wants us to pretend that if a company employs unethical marketing tactics that customers en masse will recognize it for what it is and turn against said company. Yes, if a customer gets an unsolicited email from a company that doesn’t fulfill its promises he and his friends will drop whatever it is [...]

Posted 13 September 2008 † Aaronontheweb § Bad Marketers ‡ Comments (1) ° Tagged:

This is Why Small Businesses Don’t Tolerate Solicitors

I had a run-in with a bad marketer during my short lunch break today. I’m a big fan of supporting local businesses – they add character to the neighborhood where I work and I simply wouldn’t enjoy working there were it not for these businesses. So today I decided to extend my patronage to a [...]

Posted 11 September 2008 † Aaronontheweb § Bad Marketers ‡ Comments (4) ° Tagged: ,

Dell and Microsoft Should Take a Page from Governor Palin’s Handbook

Preface: This is a post about marketing, not about politics. Should you be inclined to submit comments, please bear this in mind. Political comments aren’t going to get published.
What do Dell, Microsoft, and Governor Palin all have in common? They let their competition succeed at defining them. This is a major marketing problem; short of [...]

Posted 04 September 2008 † Aaronontheweb § Marketing Strategy ‡ Comments (3) ° Tagged: , , ,

TwittAds: A Company that Does Not Understand Advertising

TechCrunch basically made the point yesterday: TwittAds is a bad idea. I wanted to add my two cents from a the perspective of someone who spends a lot of time asking himself “would my company want to buy ads on this site?”
The point of TwittAds is thus: put advertising on your personal Twitter page and [...]

Posted 03 September 2008 † Aaronontheweb § Advertising § Bad Marketers § Twitter ‡ Comments (4) ° Tagged: , ,