Category Archives: Marketing

Hunters and Gatherers on the Web

Today we learn via Forbes what we’ve known for thousands of years: males compete, women converse.
Of course that’s an oversimplification, yet it’s almost that basic: women use social networking tools to make connections while men use social networking tools to raise their status, leveraging content-oriented sites like Digg, YouTube and LinkedIn; I believe UC [...]

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Thinking sound, writing with clarity

There are few vendors to consider when looking at world-class sound reinforcement systems. One such provider, Meyer Sound, happens to be right in my backyard.
So I jumped at the chance to present prose that described a new facility, just opened, for the Freight and Salvage, the oldest folk and roots music venue west of the [...]

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A changing wolf

Adaptability.
If ever there was a company built on Darwinian theory, Bluewolf might be the one.
It was formed as the big consulting firms struggled with the end of the mega project era and the beginning of more affordable enterprise services via Web 2.0, cloud computing and platform-driven innovations (they were one of the first salesforce.com partners).
Realizing [...]

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Intelligent branding for resale

Even if you’ve never heard of the Visual Data Group, you’ve probably heard of QlikView, the world’s fastest-growing software company.
Visual Data Group is North America’s Elite Reseller of QlikView, an amazing business intelligence product that uses in-memory analysis and reporting to manipulate millions of database objects rapidly and intuitively.
Visual Data Group is a prime example [...]

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McGraw’s Rules of Progress

Mass distribution of desktop publishing tools will result in a lot of bad desktop publishing.
Even if you never heard the word “hypertext” until 1995 you could still become an industry expert and author on the topic by 1997, even if your last job was in a grocery store.
The “free” and unfettered construction of the Internet [...]

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Tag lines that never were

An in-joke of advertising tag line folderol comes from on old colleague at a prominent Silicon Valley agency. The Fluke Corporation makes electronic test tools and in the early days of computers, monitors were often proudly branded with the company name. I cannot confirm that the Fluke Corporation ever considered the tag line “If it [...]

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Mares Eat Oats and Does Eat Oats

Though very little was said about the similarities between the Obama campaign logo and the Pepsi logo, the Quaker Oats division of PepsiCo now has a new campaign and a tag line that is powerful in its simplicity: “Go humans go.”
There is no doubt the campaign owes a creative debt to Shepard Fairey, but it [...]

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If I have to explain the punch line…

Largely under the radar, a new “free user generated content community website focused on the workplace” launched mid-December. “In the short time that Telonu has been in beta, it has achieved a strong following with large companies via word of mouth indicating the underlying need for a ‘Yelp’ for the business community,” said the company’s [...]

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My Guilty Christmas Card Pleasure

A start-up with a solid idea (and patent) that I was involved in early on was AmazingMail.com of Scottsdale, Arizona. It was created by a retired commercial airline pilot, John Lockhart. And what is AmazingMail, you ask? It is a high-quality postcard created from your computer and sent through the US Postal Service using mailing [...]

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The Two-letter Strategy

A little-known feature of Google’s search engine crawler could turn site stats on its head: Google Sitelinks.
Our process for generating Sitelinks is completely automated. We show them when we think they’ll be most useful to searchers, saving them time from hunting through web pages to find the information they are looking for. Over time, we [...]

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