Microsoft

Gates following his “gut feeling”

The Ad-Writing Acid Test

The Ad-Writing Acid Test

A quick but revealing story. Ten years ago. The Pillsbury mansion near the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Chuck Anderson and I are sitting in his second floor office admiring the Institute and ignoring Chuck’s office walls. Those walls are covered with our ideas of an ad. After two days, our creative director notices the stench and boldly enters Chuck’s office.

Then he mumbles and leaves.

The next day he returns, he sees we haven’t progressed.

He says something I still remember vividly. “If it’s this hard to write the ad, the product is flawed.”

It’s true. If you cannot write a reasonably good ad for your service- an ad that makes an attractive promise to your prospect- your service needs fixing.

Write an ad for your service. If after a week your best ad is weak, stop working on the ad and start working on your service.

Extracts from “Selling the Invisible”

The First Rule of Marketing Planning

The First Rule of Marketing Planning

Unless warned otherwise, the people responsible for marketing a service almost will take up where they left off the last time they thought about marketing.

Everyone will assume that the company is in the right business, basically organized in the right way, and staffed as it should be staffed, give or take a few thorns in everyone’s side.

And everyone’s focus for marketing for the year immediately will turn to “How do we sell this?” Instead, everyone should start at ground zero. They should ask, “Is this viable anymore? Is this what the world wants?”

Have we added capabilities or skills that suggest that we should enlarge our scope, to serve new markets? Should we develop or acquire related skills and capabilities? Or should we narrow our scope, and leverage these specialized skills and services we are developing to prospects looking for those specialties?

Whatever questions you ask, you should consistently follow the first rule of marketing planning: Always start at zero.

Extracts from “Selling the Invisible”

The Butterfly Effect

The Butterfly Effect

In 1963, meteorologist Edward Lorenz announced a stunning conclusion.

For decades, people had viewed the universes as a large machine in which causes matched effects. People presumed that big causes had big effects, and little causes produced little effects. Lorenz doubted this.

The question posed to Lorenz sounded strange but simple. Could the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Singapore affect a hurricane in North Carolina?

After considerable study, Lorenz answered yes.

Lorenz’s postulation of what is now called the Butterfly Effect was one of several findings in the last twenty years that reflect the unpredictability of everything: weather; the likely outcome of direct marketing programs, and the distant but often enormous effects of tiny causes.

One group of people was not surprised by Lorenz’s discovery, however. Those people had seen the Butterfly Effect at work everyday. They were careful observers of service companies- a world where my efforts often produce enormous, though sometimes distant, effects.

Remember the Butterfly Effect. Tiny cause, huge effect.

Extracts from “Selling the Invisible”

You Are Competing with Walt Disney

Bad News: You Are Competing with Walt Disney

I [The Author] stride into a coffee shop one morning, hopeful.

Four people are in line, but I decide I can bear that.

Unfortunately, nothing is in line behind the counter. A server hands Customer One a large decaf. The customer had asked for a small regular. The other server is flirting with Customer Two. It’s touching and nostalgic to me, but not entertaining enough to make me overlook the delay.

Four minutes later, I get my large latte.

Twenty years ago, I might have accepted that delay. Twenty years ago, I also accepted rest rooms carpeted with wet paper towels, waiters wearing catsup-stained aprons and chewing Bozooka bubble gum, and ten-day delivery from catalogs.

Then McDonald’s came along and raised everyone’s standards for rest rooms, better restaurants raised our expectations of waiters, and Federal Express raised our standards for catalog delivery. Those services changed our expectations forever.

Now we expect cleaner rest rooms, faster services, and more attentive waiters.

More people ever day have experienced extra ordinary service. Many have seen Disney World; they know how clean, friendly and creative service can be.

They have seen world-class service, and now every service has to accept it. Printers, for one wretched example, cannot expect their customers to tolerate service that meets printing industry standards if those industry standards fall below customers’ expectations, which they routinely do. The printers’ customers have been to Disney World, and that experience has raised their expectations.

A service that does not jump to meet these rising expectations will have a small revolution and a customer exodus on its hands.

Ignore your industry’s benchmarks, and copy Disney’s.

Extracts from “Selling the Invisible”

An automated suite

An automation suite that triggered my interest.

- ROI Maximizer
- Micro Level web analytics
- Insights about the customer at every level

Video demo for further highlight.

http://www.pardot.com/files/flash/

Netflix or Bigflicks?

Netflix or Bigflicks?

Back in 1997, while most people were still fumbling with programming their VCRs, Netflix founder Reed Hastings became convinced that DVDs were he home video medium of the future. He raised $120 million, attracted hundreds of thousands of customers, and took the company public in 2002, gaining another $90 million. Netflix has distinctive capabilities that promise to keep the company on top even as competitors like Blockbuster and WalMart try to muscle in on its turf. One of the company’s investors says that Netflix is really a sophisticated software company masquerading as a DVD rental service. The company has fine-tuned its file recommendation software, merchandising, and inventory control system to such a degree that new orders are automatically generated even as the old orders are returned. In addition, all 12 of the company’s DVD distribution centers can be polled before a customer is told that the movie he or she wants next is out of stock.

Bigflicks now seems to have adopted Netfilx model of operation in India. It’s quite interesting to see business modules being copied from various countries. From printing solutions, Restaurants, Fashion apparels to DVD home videos.

Consumers are in for a big treat. J J

Innovation and Creativity

Innovation and Creativity:

Successful companies may need to adopt a new view of how to craft their strategies. The traditional view is that senior management hammers out the strategy and hands it down. Gary Hamel offers the contrasting view that imaginative ideas on strategy exist in many planes within a company. Senior management should identify and encourage fresh ideas from three groups who tend to be underrepresented in strategy making; employees with youthful perspectives; employees who are far removed from company headquarters; and employees who are new to the industry. Each group is capable of challenging company orthodoxy and stimulating new ideas.

NOKIA

Finnish mobile-phone giant Nokia has managed to remain the frontrunner in the mobile-phone industry with annual sales of $30.8 billion across 130 countries and a global market share of 38 percent, by installing a culture of innovation at all levels, using small, nimble, creative unit to let new ideas bubble up through the ranks. Innovations are as likely to come from a junior application designer as from a seasoned engineer. One example of how the company creates its culture can be seen in the company cafeteria where employees view a slide show as they eat. It’s not jus any slide show, but one of pictures taken with camera phones by some of Nokia’s 1,500 employees – part of internal corporate competition that rewards staff creativity. Nokia even has a watchword for its culture of continuous innovation: “renewal”.

Email Glossary

Let’s begin with email terminologies or should we begin with a test?

Well, here it is:-

Name any term that’s used in an email world, strating with the letters ‘J, K, N,Q,T,X,Y,Z’.  Write to me.

Here are some terms commonly used:-

A  : Accreditation-based systems: Third-party whitelist programs that certify senders to convince ISPs that those using the systems are legitimate mailers who should not be blocked. Examples include: Bonded Sender from ReturnPath and Safelist from Habeas.

Authentication: Technical standards through which ISPs and other mail gateway administrators can establish the true identity of an email sender. Examples of proposed authentication standards include: SPF (PO Box, AOL), Sender-ID (Microsoft), DomainKeys (Yahoo), and DKIM (Cisco and Yahoo).

B : Blacklist, public: A list of IP addresses believed to send spam. Public blacklists are created and maintained by third parties; sometimes used by ISPs as another filtering mechanism to block email delivery.

Blacklist, private: A list of IP addresses believed to send spam, compiled by an ISP based on user complaints, mail sent to spam trap addresses, and “unknown user” rates. Each receiving ISP uses its own private blacklists to block email delivery.

Bounce: A message sent by a receiving system that “bounces back” to the originating server to alert the sender of the non-delivery.

Bulk mail folder: Folder within email clients to which questionable email is often directed. Also referred to as “Junk” or “Spam” folders in some email clients.

Blackhole: Term describing what happens to email that is blocked without a bounce response to the sender.

C : CAN-SPAM: Federal legislation governing unsolicited commercial email that went into effect on January 1, 2004. This law does not prohibit unsolicited commercial email, but it does regulate how it must be sent. Lawmakers intended to protect the end user and to make prosecution of spammers easier.

Challenge Response: Method of approving senders to specific email addresses that asks the email sender to answer a question proving he is a real person and not a “spam cannon” attempting to send email. Primarily used by Earthlink and selected client-side filters.

Commercial email: Marketing or sales oriented email that is sent in bulk.

Confirmed Opt-in: The process that double-checks the desire to be included on an email list after a primary registration occurs. This is typically executed via an email that requires the subscriber to click on a confirmation link, which also serves as a method of positively confirming the validity of the email address.

Content filters: Software filters that block email based on words, phrases, or header information within the email itself. The goal is to identify spam and filter to the Bulk or Junk mail folders, although this often results in “false positives”.

 
D : Delivery monitoring: A process, usually using third party tools and techniques, to measure true delivery rates by campaign and ISP. Also tracks the amount and type of email tagged and/or blocked by server and client-side filters.

Dictionary attack: A type of spam program that bombards a mail server with millions of alphabetically generated email addresses in the hope that some addresses will be guessed correctly.

Domain: Internet addresses made up for words that correspond to the Internet Protocol (IP) numbers computers use to find each other. Domains always have two or more parts, separated by “dots”.

DomainKeys: Email authentication system proposed by Yahoo! that checks an encrypted “key” embedded in each email sent against a list of public records to positively confirm the identity of the sender.

DNS: Domain Name System (DNS) translates domain names into an IP address to find the owner’s site.

DataChampions : www.datachampions.com  Email Marketers

E : Email delivery rates: The percentage of email that gets delivered as intended; compiled from seedlist-based monitoring services and SMTP log files.

ECOA: Email Change of Address (ECOA) is a process that provides updated email addresses for data files based on consumer-provided, permission-based data.

Email append: Process that adds email addresses to postal files by merging files to match the postal address against email information in other files.

ESP: An Email Service Provider is a company that sends and manages email campaigns for other companies as a hosted service.

EmailAppenders: www.emailappenders.com  Appending services

F: False-negative: When spam filtering devices fail to detect spam and allow it to be delivered.
False-positive: When spam filtering devices inaccurately identify legitimate email as spam and block delivery.

G: Greylisting: Process of routing email to a bulk folder if it is borderline spam, as determined by a receiving ISP.

H: Harvesting: Process that crawls the Internet to gather email addresses from Web sites and then uses them to create lists for spamming.
Header: The first part of an email message that contains controlling and meta-data such as the subject, origin and destination email addresses, the path an email takes, and its priority. May be used to filter, track spammers or uncover information about delivery rates.

I: IP addresses: Internet Protocol addresses. The numeric identification number that refers to a specific machine on the Internet.
Internet Service Provider (ISP): Company that provides access to the Internet through connectivity services. Examples include AOL, Comcast, Earthlink, and Verizon.

J

K

L :List hygiene: Process of cleaning email files to ensure all addresses are accurate, current, opt-in and deliverable.

ListGalaxy : www.listgalaxy.com

M : Machine-learning filters: Filters run by machines that determine whether to block email based on algorithms that point to whether the message is likely spam.

N

O: Open relay: SMTP email server that allows the third-party relay of email messages through the SMTP “port” on a server (port 25). While this feature of SMTP servers has legitimate uses, spammers have learned how to locate unprotected servers and use them to send spam.

Open proxy: Software that exists on a server that allows the third-party relay of e-mail messages through ports other than port 25.

Opt-in: Process of agreeing to receive email from a business source. Confirmed opt-in refers to a double-check procedure in which a decision to be included on a mailing list is confirmed.

Opt-out: Process of declining to receive email from a business source or unsubscribing if the recipient is already on a mailing list.

OPTIN-List : www.optinlists.us : Email Marketers

P : Phishing: (Pronounced ‘fishing’) The act of forging emails that claim to be from a legitimate sender, such as a bank, for the purpose of identity theft or robbery. Phishing emails usually link to a replica of a legitimate web page that tries to trick users into submitting personal or financial information or passwords.

Postmaster: The person who manages mail servers at an organization. Usually the one to contact at a particular server/site to get help, information, or to log complaints.

Q

R : Rich media: A category of web technologies that utilize streaming video, audio and other static or animated files to create an advanced media experience for viewing content.

S :Seed list: A list of email addresses that should be included in every email event to monitor delivery across email platforms. Can be executed in-house or through a third-party vendor.

SalesUniverse : www.salesuniverse.com

Sender-ID: An authentication standard proposed by Microsoft, that compares an email sender’s “From” address to the IP address authorized to send email from that domain.

SPF: SPF (Sender Policy Framework) compares an email sender’s actual IP address to a list of IP addresses authorized to send mail from that domain. This list is published in the domain’s DNS record.

SMTP: Simple Mail Transfer Protocol, a server-to-server protocol used to transfer email between computers.

SMTP log file: A file showing all conversations back and forth between servers during the email send and receive process. Used to uncover problems with various deliverability factors such as unknown user rates.

Spam: Widely-used slang reference to unsolicited commercial email messages. Named after the Monty Python “Spam” song.

Spam filter: Systems that watch for spam and block it before it can hit the inbox. Spam filters can be complaint or content based.
Spam-trap address: An email address that is set up specifically to catch people who are harvesting addresses or using directory attacks to send unsolicited email. Used by Brightmail, ISPs and many in the anti-spam community.

Spoofing: Forged email addresses that hide the origin of a spam or virus message. Used to trick people into opening an email because they believe it has come from a legitimate source.

Suppression list: A list of email addresses kept by a single organization that should not be mailed to any longer. Usually owners of the addresses on the list have specifically requested inclusion. Required by CAN-SPAM.

T

U

Unknown User: Bounce error code generated by an ISP when an email address is not registered in its system.

V

Verified opt-in: Formerly known as double opt-in. Requires secondary confirmation from an email address to confirm intended registration to receive email.

W – Z : Whitelist: A list of trusted IP addresses and domains that allows all mail from these addresses to be delivered, bypassing spam filters.

World Today!

My name is Neo Anderson. I’m also known for Coffees, Ideas, and worksheets.

My work involves Research, out-of-box thinking, exercising creative thinking, motivational training, encouraging innovations, process-mapping and Analyzing. Through this blog of mine. I’ve decided to cover all of those areas, as when it strikes my mind.

I hope you would like to know and read all the references posted. Thank you. Let’s coffee… share ideas… with me (Neo)…