Brand & Capture

I have some news to share. You may want to sit down for this one. Here it is…sales and marketing departments aren’t always on the same page. You’re shocked, right? Probably not, unless you are the sales and marketing department, or one of the few companies where these two, often opposing forces, exist in harmony.

If a tree falls in the forest, does anyone care? If your content has no consumers, what's the point? The first step in content marketing and demand generation is getting people's attention. Without that, you have no readers, no viewers, no visitors, no leads, no marketing qualified leads and no customers. Nada. For emails, it's opens. For ads and calls to action, it's clicks. There has to be a motivation on the part of the viewer to do something, and if your content is ignored, there is no chance of getting any kind of conversion. So we should be working hardest on the opening line—the attention-getter, right? But what's the catch? The catch is that we get attention-getting stuff shoved in our faces 24-7-365. We're used to the bold headlines, the free stuff and the last chances at salvation. We're immune to all of it. So what's a marketer to do?

I've been working from my home office for 15 years now, and I've never looked back. It's not like I could actually jump in the car and commute to work anyway. My home is in Texas and my office is in Ohio! Sometimes I miss the comraderie and the impromptu creativity you get from an office environment, but on the other hand, I know how noisy and distracting offices can be. I don't have any data to support this, but I know that my remote working situation has enabled me to be far more productive over the years and has probably saved me a few precious years from the low-stress lifestyle. Now, let's talk about that in light of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's across-the-board denial of work-at-home privileges.

Every year as I gear up for the Holidays, I like to compile a list of my top verbal pet peeves - expressions that are overused and should be retired for the coming year. This year I'm adding a new twist. Instead of just bashing everyone's favorite lingo, I'm offering up some replacements, in case you're at a loss for words. So without further ado, here we go.

Remember when Yahoo was still a big deal and websites were constructed using tables? Yeah, that was a long time ago, but some of us predate the dinosaur. I thought it might be fun to share some of the technology milestones I have witnessed in my all-too-short career. Some of you will remember the good-old-days before the Internet and the iPad, but most of you will have to check with your Mom and Dad to make sure I'm not spinning yarns about things that never were.

As the Social Media Community Manager for Kuno Creative I review anywhere from 50 - 100 twitter direct messages (DMs) per day – quickly deciding which require action and which require deletion. This equates to about 10 minutes per day between all accounts which is nearly an hour every week of time wasted. 

In keeping with my annual holiday tradition of blasting everyone for using way too much corporate mumbo-jumbo or just silly overused phrases in their daily speech, I present to you this year's winners of the Overused Expressions Award. You can also review last year's list and see just how far (backwards) we have traveled this year. Someday I will undoubtedly look back on this effort as my biggest gift to humanity and rationale for making it beyond the Pearly Gates. So without further ado...

Who originally uttered the age-old axiom, “People buy from People”? I first heard it from a former boss and he attributed it to Dale Carnegie. Last week Chad Pollitt reminded us again that “people buy from people” in his webinar with Nancy Myrland. It seems to be a simple enough phrase, but at the risk of sounding like M C Hammer - let’s break it down:

A while back Patric Welch - aka @MrNoobie - posted a blog bemoaning a bad customer service experience he had with Cha Cha which, "gives free, real-time answers to any question both online at ChaCha.com and through mobile phones ..." ChaCha is great when you need questions answered like, "I'm at the corner of 96th and Michigan Road, where is the nearest Subway?"

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has the task of creating and continually re-defining  Internet Protocol (IP) - the language of the Internet. They oversee the function of standardizing technical protocols for the Internet root-servers, allowing communication to flow seamlessly and globally.