Marketing Roadmaps

Business Management

Roadmaps Round-up

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Adrants on the promotion campaign for the John Twelve Hawks’ book The Traveler.  Program includes a character blog, and as I said in my comments on Adrants, I’ve long believed that fans of books/tv/film will embrace well written character blogs. This is slightly different, as it is promo for a new book, not a build-on to an existing franchise, but it will be very interesting to watch this play out. From my quick glance, the program looks very well done, and there is certainly no subterfuge.

Amy Gahran over at Contentious has a great idea for a unique gift: the gift of conversation.

From Creating Passionate Users, Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak  Main takeaway: give the right features and make them usable as well as useful. Don’t provide a feature just because you can. Make sure it is something that your user actually wants.

Finally, from Jim Logan, some thoughts about CRM — CRM is an attitude and a set of processes, not a piece of software   Main takeaway: Focus on doing active customer relationship management, using whatever software tools you want, versus on a piece of software as savior.

Roadmaps Roundup – June 9

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Sorry for the lack of posts in the last week. As some of my readers know, I am in the early stages of building a consulting practice. This week I have been beyond busy, between client deliverables and new client prospecting. Anyway, some interesting stuff for this week’s Roadmaps’ Roundup.

First, be sure to check out the Revenue Roundtable — Brian Carroll is lead poster this week and has some good stuff on lead gen and thought leadership.

Frederik over at CorporateBloggingBlog has a GREAT analysis of corporate blogging policies. After reading his analysis, I am more than ever convinced that smart companies will figure out how to give media/sensitivity training for their employees who blog, whether or not the blog is company sponsored. It is far easier to help people understand how to deal with media attention than it is to deal with the repercussions of an employee who got it wrong, irrespective of company policy.  I’m really thinking about this… more to come….

Tris Hussey links to tips for the great 10-minute podcast. This is key for corporate marketers. One hour shows won’t make a lot of sense in the corporate space; how to maximize this new form in short bursts will.

Excellent post from BusinessLogs on full posts in RSS feeds. Mike Rundle makes some excellent points about how people will, and should, use RSS feeds as gateways into blogs. I scan Bloglines every day to read the 300 or so blogs I monitor. If a post really interests me, I almost always clock over to the blog, even if there is a full feed. Either I want to leave a comment or trackback to the post, or I am curious if comments have been left… No matter what, if I had to use favorites/bookmarks to accomplish same, I would be far less informed.  And btw I scanned the full post in Bloglines, but read it fully on the blog.

Super post from Mike Manuel on "Joe Blogger" and the importance of understanding that it is as (more?) valuable to reach the blogger with 5 (or even 50) readers who REALLY believe in the source as it is to reach the "Big Blogger" who may have lots of readers but no more (or even less)  buying influence than Joe Blogger. This is critical: marketers need to remember: it is about reaching buyers, not reaching everybody.

Back on the grid from Camp WorldWIT

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Well, I have been off the grid for the past few days at Camp WorldWIT in Lake Geneva Wisconsin. It was a terrific weekend of meeting smart successful women from all over the country, and in fact from overseas as well. Of course, I had withdrawal symptoms from not having Internet access until I hit the Admiral’s Club on Sunday morning before my flight home.

Some of my highlights:

All three keynote speakers were excellent: Sheila Cavanaugh, SVP at Fidelity, Dr. Sheila Dugan from Rush University Medical Center and Rosalyn Wesley, Director of Corporate HR at Fortune Brands.

Kathleen Ameche’s tale of the process to publish her new book, The Woman Road Warrior.

The wonderful women who attended the panel on which I was a speaker. They had terrific questions about blogging, and I really enjoyed meeting and speaking with them. Below I have posted the additional links I promised during the session.

Sunrise yoga.

Some really great sessions on sales and marketing issues. It is great to meet people of like mind who believe in a sales and marketing partnership, versus a war.

And last but not least, all the terrific women I met during the weekend.

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Links

Typepad  and Blogger,  two well known hosted services for blogs. Blogger is free, but I think less functional for business blogging. I use Typepad.

Two search engines for blogs: Technorati and PubSub

I also want include the WorldWIT blogs: Business Mom,  Networking for Success,  PRGirl,  The Customer Clique and The Male Perspective

As I start hearing back from the women I met at Camp WorldWIT  about their new blogs, I will create a new category on my blogroll, and include the WorldWIT ones as well.