Marketing Roadmaps

Susan Getgood

Ways to grow your business? Piss off the moms? Not!

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I do not have a lot to add to the growing controversy about Facebook banning photos of mothers breastfeeding, while still allowing the proliferation of things like pro-ana (anorexia) sites, other than to say

Huh?

Come on, Facebook, our culture accepts far more titillating images on a regular basis in newspaper tabloids availiable on the newstand, for Christ’s sake. Can you say "nipple slip" and "crotch shot?" Hell, you can probably get those in 10 seconds or less with Brittany, Paris, Lindsay or an inebriated coed, with no baby in sight.

Truly, it is time our culture got over the whole Madonna-Whore complex. Women are NOT simply one or the other. We are both mothers and sexual beings, and when a breastfeeding mom is feeding her child, she’s a mother. Sure, she got there by being a sexual being, but when she’s feeding her baby, it ain’t about you.

Get over your boob fixation. Really.

Mostly for professional reasons I did not breastfeed my son, now 7. My job was very demanding and I was on the road a lot, starting when he was just 3 months old. And he has developed just fine.

But my reasons were my own personal reasons, just as every woman’s are.

If you would not frown on someone feeding a baby a bottle, then you should not frown on a woman breastfeeding. And vice-versa.  It is the same damn thing — feeding a child. And if you would frown on a mother feeding a child, what sort of person are you?

Where would you be if your mother hadn’t fed you?

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A new low for the email scammers

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Well, it looks like the email scammers have moved on from dead Nigerian dictators to dead Iraqi ones. From today’s inbox:

Good Day,

Good day. My name is XXXXX XXXXXXX, I am with the US amry and I am serving in the military of the 1st Armored Division in Iraq. my partner and I moved funds belonging to Saddam Hussein, the total is $25,000,000.00  (Twenty Five million US dollars) this money is being kept safe. Click on this link to read about events that took place here

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/2988455.stm [link deactivated]

Basically since we are working for the American government we cannot keep these funds, but we want to transfer and move the funds to you, so that you can keep it for us in your safe account or an offshore account.

We will divide the total funds in three ways, since we are 2 that is involved.

This means that you will take 30%, I will take 30%, and my partner will take 30%. 10% will be kept aside for expenses.

This business is confidential, and it should not be discussed with anyone.  There is no risk involved whatsoever. If you are interested I will send you the full details, my job is to find a good partner that we can trust and that will assist us.

Can I trust you? When you receive this letter, kindly send me an e-mail signifying your interest including your most.

confidential telephone/fax numbers for quick communication, also our contact details. This business is risk free.

Awaiting your prompt reply urgently.

Miss Xxxxx Xxxxxxx

Blecch.

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Social Media Club Boston: Fake Steve, Wal-Mart and Forrester Research

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Last Thursday’s Social Media Club Boston meeting was terrific. And oh so funny.  Kudos to Greg PC for assembling such a great panel, and to the moderator and speakers for doing such a brilliant job.

John Cass has done a great job summarizing the session, so I will just share some photos, soundbites and general observations.

Moderator Monika Maeckle, VP Southwest Region, Business Wire (sponsor of the evening) A delightful and charming woman who did a great job moving the conversation along, involving the audience, but never losing control of the session.

And the esteemed panel:

left to right: Josh Bernoff, Forrester; Dan Lyons, aka Fake Steve Jobs, Forbes Magazine; Steve Restivo, Wal-Mart

As John Cass reported, Dan Lyons was the hit of the evening. Some of his bon mots:

On his Attack of the Blogs article: "I wished I had a do-over."

On Valleywag: "Valleywag sucks."
   

On Jonathan Schwartz, Sun: "How different is Jonathan Schwartz’s blog from a fake blog?"  [Note, if this comment resonates, be sure to check out My Little Pony.]

As John reported in his post, Dan said many people knew who FSJ was well before the New York Times exposed the secret. In a brief conversation after the panel, Dan said he was impressed that they were all able to keep the secret. He said a few of them even helped mess with Valleywag on who FSJ was. Gotta love it. Unless you are Owen Thomas I suppose.

Josh Bernoff was polished and articulate. I really liked his comment that starting a "social media" project by picking a technology is ass-backward. The POST model he shared really resonated:

    First: PROFILE your customer.
 

    Second: Define your OBJECTIVES.

    Third: Develop a STRATEGY — how do you want to change people

    Then, and only then, decide on the TECHNOLOGY.

 

Another great quote from Josh: "Only one group of people that this (social media) is really bad for — liars."

Steve Restivo from Wal-Mart did a great job representing his company, although it was clear that he was constrained by a corporate role, unlike the other panelists, who are encouraged (and compensated I am sure) to have strong public personas. Nevertheless I was impressed by both his acknowledgment of past mistakes like RV-ing Across America and his frank statement that competitor Target does a great job online.

The Social Media Club has chapters in a number of cities; check it out. And if you are in Boston, see you next time.

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Not Good Technology

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Longtime readers of this blog know all about my ongoing saga with the Treo phone and Good Technology.

For new readers, the short version is that Good Technology makes the software for the Treo and the way you get it started is by linking to “get.good.com”  Now, sometimes people have problems and apparently — I don’t have a Treo and never will at this point — there aren’t any support numbers in the documentation. So, being the good netizens that they are, customers go to the Web to look for a phone number. Conditioned to add the www in front of a URL, many land on my Web site, getgood.com, instead of on Good’s site, good.com. And about three or four per week actually call us.

I have blogged about this for nearly as long as I have been blogging.  It took about a year for us to figure out WHY we were getting these calls. You can read my previous posts if you’d like to experience our ongoing discovery.  But earlier this year, we did indeed finally understand what was happening. We thought.

We wondered why folks didn’t understand that a marketing consultant was not the support department for their cell phone. But we figured they probably were just so desperate to talk to someone and get their damn phone working that it seemed worth a shot.

As I’ve written here before, I’ve reached out to both Good Technology and their PR agency using addresses found on the Web site, just to see if maybe they couldn’t do something to stop this annoyance. I do realize that I am just one person, and it doesn’t make sense to redo their software just because I’m regularly interrupted by their customers, but an apology would be nice. Instead my emails are deleted without being read.

So, I’d pretty much given up on contacting Good and writing about it here because it hasn’t done much, well, good. Either they aren’t monitoring blogs or they just don’t care.

I do feel sorry for the callers, so I always explain the situation and give them the correct Web site.

But today we reached the nadir. Something needs to be done. Today, some poor woman from Colorado was on hold for Sprint tech support and was transferred to my number. Apparently by someone at Sprint.

Enough already. Somebody at one of the companies associated with this software, please fix this.

That would be Good Technology, Palm (manufacturer of Treo), Motorola (recently acquired Good) and Sprint.

And an apology would be nice.

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In defense of back linking

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jowyang: Lately, there’s been some critics of linking to yourself (back linking). There’s nothing wrong with it as long as you’re adding value. (via Twitter September 15, 2007)

Agree.

If you are writing about a subject that you’ve covered in the past, and especially if the last time was more than a month ago, I think readers expect the back link to the previous post(s) for the context. It helps them understand where you are coming from without requiring you to repeat the whole previous argument. Those who need the background click. Those who remember just keep reading.

Of course, it helps if you link liberally to other people in your posts as well. If all you ever do is back link, I can definitely see how that might be viewed with some suspicion.

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