http://www.marketing-ninja.com The Gruesome Diary of an Online Marketer Wed, 22 Apr 2009 02:44:15 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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 ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/blogging-for-marketers/understanding-the-insignificance-of-your-web-traffic/ 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 ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/twitter/poll-tweets-pirated-version-product/ 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 ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/management-structures/everyone-in-your-organization-should-understand-marketing-working-smarter/ 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 ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/blogging-for-marketers/mike-arrington-a-man-in-full/ 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 ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/results-oriented-marketing/how-to-calculate-roi/ 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 ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/search-engine-marketing/law-unintended-consequences-nofollow/ 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 ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/social-media/poll-creep-companies-follow-twitter/ 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 http://www.marketing-ninja.com/bad-marketers/super-soaker-teaches-us-why-focus-groups-are-important/ 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 ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/market-analysis/stock-market-crashing/ 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 ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/behavioral-analysis/would-you-adopt-something-just-because-its-free/ Although I just Tweeted a link to both of these videos a moment ago, I thought they were so good and so informative that they deserved a repost. A key part of what I do at work is explain to people how visualization makes it easier to understand and ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/market-analysis/awesomely-awesome-cartoon-explains-the-credit-crisis/ Irony thy name is "Yelp." If you haven't been living in a cave for the past two years then you've surely heard of the popular social-reviews site, Yelp. Sites like Yelp and Amazon have helped put a lot of power back into the hands of consumers over the years - the ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/social-media/yelp-doesnt-like-the-taste-of-its-own-medicine/ On the "buy path" in my company's e-commerce system we reserve a tiny slice of on-screen real-estate for customer comments about their pre-purchase experience with us. These comments are then sent to all of the employees who care to subscribe to them (and one customer support person who has to respond ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/product-development/hey-dude-target-market-stuff/ Is this what frontier guerrilla marketing looks like? What kind of horrible Bladerunner-esque nightmare is this? http://www.marketing-ninja.com/viral-marketing/the-horrible-future-of-viral-marketing/ Bloggers like you and me all want to build a following on Twitter for the same reason that we want more RSS subscribers for our blogs - we want to provide value to our audience and engage them with some combination of information and entertainment. One easy form of ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/marketing-tools/how-to-syndicate-delicious-favorites-to-twitter/ You're a smart guy or gal in your company's marketing department. One of your initiatives hasn't been performing well and you decide to investigate. You spend days pouring over ProClarity reports, Google Analytics data, WebTrends, and on and on and on. You figure it out - you discover that your organization ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/personal/when-youre-forced-to-do-it-wrong/ I'm serious. I am by no means a veteran in online marketing. I have the pleasure of working with and learning from people who have 10+ years of experience in online marketing, but I didn't start riding shotgun with them until last year. I've talked to dozens of other online marketers, ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/bad-marketers/are-most-online-marketers-clueless/ Feature bloat meets packaging. http://www.marketing-ninja.com/bad-marketers/if-the-ipod-were-produced-by-microsoft/ My reply to an insightful post written by Jessica Mah, a blogger I had never heard of before - Why 99% of Entrepreneurs Fail: Because they don’t do anything. I've had more ideas than I can count, implemented many of them, but never taken one and ran with it. Most of ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/personal/entrepreneurial-success-requires-entrepreneurial-failure/ If there's one part of online marketing that I loathe it's dealing with the jerks who write me inflammatory, offensive, and often insulting emails for doing something heinous, like sending them emails. I tweeted the other day about a C-level exec at a Fortune 500 company who sent us some ... http://www.marketing-ninja.com/email-marketing/email-marketing-is-not-spam-and-vice-versa/