The personal site for CEO of Medical Marcom Joe Hage. Online marketing, marketing communications, and marketing strategy.
Too many good things coming together for my soon-to-launch consultancy.
In this 18-minute webinar, I cover how and why I use Dropbox, Snagit, and LinkedIn Answers. Then I cover seven others I use on a daily basis.
If you’re looking to learn a few new tricks that can save you hours of hassles, this video is for you. Enjoy!
Today I’m genuinely excited to interview my Wharton MBA 1992 classmate Hank Eskin, founder of Where’s George? (http://www.WheresGeorge.com) about his work.
Hank founded WheresGeorge.com in 1998 “for fun and because it had not been done yet.” The premise is simple: You can go to WheresGeorge.com and enter the denomination (it’s not only for singles), series, and serial number for US currency in your possession. Then, enter your ZIP code. WheresGeorge.com will determine if anyone else has entered that bill into its system and tell you where the bill has been, how far it’s traveled, how long it took to get to you.
Oh, we have many ways to say Merry Christmas to you this year.
First, eight-year-old Zachary had a solo in this year’s Christmas Eve mass at St Jude Church in Washington.
Second, we stumbled upon a Make*A*Wish Foundation mailbox at Macy*s. For each letter received, Macy*s would donate one dollar, up to $1 million. Here are Zach and Luke’s letters and smiling faces.
Luke's letter to Santa: Dear Santa, From Luke. I hope that the poor get's sum toye and I hope you don't fall asleep wen you giv the pepol toye's at pepol hose'is.
Luke is proud of his letter.
Zachary's letter to Santa: Dear Santa, I love Christmas. It reminds me of the poor. I care for poor and wish more people would donate to the poor, but I understand why a lot of people don't donate. They have to take care of their house. I hope we can help. Zachary Hage
If you share Zachary’s sentiment, he’s trying to raise $300 to benefit charity : water. Find out more. (Bring your wallet?)
Zachary desperately wants to help the underprivileged.
My dutiful wife Beth comes to mass for me twice a year: Christmas Eve and Easter Vigil. Yesterday she sat in the front row and, disappointingly (because the church was not full), she was the ONLY person sitting in the front row closest to the wheelchair-bound priest who celebrated mass from the assembly.
When it comes time to say The Our Father, the parish traditionally holds hands. So when the priest extended his hand to Beth, she had no choice but to take Father Joey’s hand. There she stood, visibly uncomfortable from where I and the kids were seated (in the choir), holding his hand as everybody in the church BUT Beth said the Our Father.
Maybe it was my mind playing tricks on me, but I thought I saw a few Catholics looking at her like, “How come the woman in the front row holding Father Joey’s hand is just standing there and not saying the Lord’s Prayer?”
Surely a family memory to last generations!
Wishing you all a happy holiday season and a prosperous new year, thank you for visiting my little part of the Interwebs. If I can help you grow your business in 2011, email me and let’s see what we can do together.
:: Joe Hage ::
They called it the World Wide Web. You know, like a spider web?
Take the analogy further: A spider makes a web. He waits. Bugs fly into it.
Same thing with your Web site. It is a PASSIVE medium.
The spider is not going out knocking on doors, making phone calls, networking with other spiders for leads on bugs.
So don’t be surprised if you’re not getting appointments, tons of leads, and new prospects because you have a Web site. It takes a lot more than that. It takes resources to do that.
Art by jtpark
Resources to:
No, a Web site will not solve all your problems.
Resources: Three Choices
As I see it, you have three resource choices. Are there others? Leave them in the comments.
Choice One: Do nothing. Expect nothing.
Choice Two: Do it yourself. Work hard, reap rewards.
Choice Three: Pay someone else to do it.
A note to marketers, consultants, and agency types: I had to use this analogy earlier in the week. Clearly explain the role of a Web site, even if you think it’s obvious. It may not be to some clients.
One of the best things about participating in Twitter chats like #blogchat on Sunday nights at 6 p.m. Pacific Time is meeting new and interesting folks like our next guest blogger, Joshua Duncan. Take it away, Joshua.
Have you ever aspired to be deviant? Surprising as it may be, I have spent the last week thinking hard about it.
Now, before you get the wrong idea, let me be quick to add that this has all been done under the umbrella of marketing strategy (as opposed to many other directions).
A recent AdAge had a lessons learned article from the 2010 IDEA conference and one of the take-always was on fostering a “deviant culture.” The idea being that it takes a deviant culture to foster boundary-busting behavior to standout from all the noise.
So what exactly does this mean?
I have to admit that I am still trying to wrap my head around it. Being deviant in my mind is about crossing the line. It is about going past interesting, past outrageous, and past the point of feeling comfortable.
I spent some time looking for examples of deviant marketing that would expand my definition and the only ideas that I could come up with were guerrilla-marketing stunts. Some of these stunts definitely got people talking, but not always in a good way (see the Light Bright bomb scare of 2007 example).
Is this really what it takes to standout in 2011?
Something about this just doesn’t feel right. Being deviant seems like a firecracker strategy where you get a quick burst of attention and then have to move onto something else. Being deviant doesn’t seem very sustainable.
The challenge still remains that it is becoming tougher and tougher to stand out and get attention in this hyper-media drenched society. Being straight laced is more often than not going to appear to be dull.
Is it possible that what they are really trying to say is to be interesting?
Some of my favorite brands have done an amazing job baking personality into their marketing, products and company culture. Take a look at New Belgium Brewery or Trader Joe’s to see some great examples of companies doing it right.
Just because you are in B2B marketing doesn’t mean you can’t have some fun with it. Check out what Cisco is doing with their social media efforts on the B2B side to liven up their communications (have you seen their rapping intern?).
Marketing legend, David Ogilvy, had this to say about a company’s image,
You now have to decide what image you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities and they can make or break them in the marketplace.
My vote is that before you head down the path of trying something outlandish just for the sake of it, spend the time working on your company’s personality and incorporating it into your message. If done right this can become a core differentiator in the marketplace and can be a lot of fun!
So what do you think?
Bio: Josh Duncan is a marketing practitioner currently working at Zenoss, an enterprise software startup. Josh can be found writing about marketing and customer experience on his blog and on Twitter.
Photo credit: Code Arachnid
