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Editor in chief of AjaxNinja.com.

Understanding the Insignificance of Your Web Traffic

I suspect that this morning’s Wall Street Journal piece by Mark Penn, America’s Newest Profession: Blogging, is going to go viral in the blogosphere, but not for the reasons that he intended. Rather, it’s going to go viral due to the disputes over this section of his article (emphasis mine):
It takes about 100,000 unique visitors [...]

Poll: What do you do when someone Tweets a pirated version of your product?

I work for a software company, and naturally we’re concerned about piracy. Our internal research indicates that whenever the most recent version of our product is successfully cracked we end up losing roughly up to 10% of our revenue until we thwart the crack or release a new version.
So I have a small dilemma when [...]

Everyone in Your Organization Should Understand Marketing – Working Smarter

I figured that you all might enjoy this, but I put up a quick post over at Working Smarter entitled: Everyone in Your Organization Should Understand Marketing.
Here’s a quick taste:
Everyone from the System Administrator to the Shipping Clerk needs to understand how their work helps the organization advance – they need to understand their organization’s [...]

Mike Arrington, A Man in Full

One of the advantages of changing Marketing Ninja to a personal format instead of an instructive format is that it allows me to discuss issues that are important in the scope of marketing but not wholly marketing unto itself. The meat of this post is an issue that is tremendously more important than marketing [...]

How to Calculate ROI

I posted an entry on Working Smarter explaining how to calculate simple ROI in order to properly prioritize projects and get your co-workers to buy-in to new initiatives. I figured that my readers here might find this helpful; here’s an excerpt from “How to Calculate ROI:”
Return on Investment means a lot of things; it means [...]

The Law of Unintended Consequences and No-Follow

Of all of my del.icio.us favorites this week, I found these two stories about the highly negative impact that rel=”nofollow” has had in search to be the most fascinating.
First, let’s learn about how nofollow inadvertently creates “SEO blackholes” which end up favoring less accurate mega-sites like About.com, Answers.com, and WikiPedia instead of more accurate, more [...]

Poll: Does it Creep You Out When Companies Follow You on Twitter?

Everywhere I look I see PR people recommend following your customers on Twitter – and they mean this specifically:
You see someone mention your product on Twitter via Twitter Search.
Follow them.
Observe, converse, and engage.
Sounds simple enough, right? But for the life of me I can’t get into it – I manage my company’s Twitter account and [...]

Super Soaker Teaches Us Why Focus Groups Are Important

Did anybody at Super Soaker stop to ask “hey, isn’t this product idea a little ridiculous?” at some point in the product marketing cycle?

Youtube: Oozinator – The Questionable Super Soaker
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And This is Why the Stock Market is Crashing

I couldn’t help but notice this comment from Christoper Buckley’s Daily Beast entry this morning “The Audacity of Nope:”
Next, I suppose this is because I don’t live in a rich area, and in fact don’t know anyone who is rich as John McCain would define it, but I don’t care how high taxes go on [...]

Would You Adopt Something Just Because It’s Free?

A simple Tweet from Talent Zoo CEO Rick Myers sent that little hamster in my brain off onto a furious wheel-rotating rampage this morning. I’m the sort of person who is very hesitant to get my company to adopt something that’s “free” because nothing is truly “free.”
Everything has an associated cost with it, whether it’s [...]