All posts in David’s Blog Round Up

DBRU: Growth hackers, dead squirrels, best practice and vagueness from IBM

by David Sealey on September 6, 2012 in David's Blog Round Up with 1 Comment
squirrel

Having caught up on Twitter, LinkedIn and Alltop, I thought it would be worth providing a list of some of my favourite articles today. Is there anything I’ve missed?

Growth hackers – just admit it. You’re really a marketer

Does a little bit of you die inside when someone refers to themselves as an SEO/PHP/Ruby/Pizza Ninja? Me too. So I really enjoyed this post by LayeredThoughts on the new must have job title in start-up-ville 2.0.

“Growth Hacking” is BS…It’s All Just Marketing

Rand Fishkin’s follow up is also well worth a read:

Growth Hackers: The Ninja Rockstar Pirates of the Marketing World

Conversations with a dead squirrel about premium pricing

My headline is a little misleading but if Inc, Econsultancy, Fast Company and HBR can get away with it so can I. If you can’t be bothered to read Neil’s post; the principle is to sell the solution or the idea rather than the product or components. E.g. sell an online customer acquisition system that will increase sales by 1,000% rather than selling a web developers time for 6 weeks.

What A Dead Squirrel Taught Me About Premium Pricing

Really good digital marketing practices from Dr Dave Chaffey

The post claims that they’re best practices. Best implies that they’re as good as they’ll ever be so I prefer to call them really good practices instead. Either way it’s not worth splitting hairs over as this slide deck by Dr Dave is worth reviewing.

Digital marketing “really good” practices

IBM Marketing Center: I’ve no idea what it is, but it could be really good!

IBM have released a new tool that sounds awesome. Like a sophisticated multichannel Hubspot or Pardot for the enterprise. However the details are somewhat sketchy right now and the feature list is followed by a disclaimer stating that IBM may not release everything promised on the page. However if IBM have managed to integrate Coremetrics and Unica neatly, this could be a major game changer for multichannel campaign management solutions. Of course it could all be vaporware in which case you never heard about it from me.

IBM Marketing Center

Facebook’s $1,000,000,000 for Instagram – Other things they could have spent it on…

by David Sealey on April 11, 2012 in David's Blog Round Up, Digital Marketing with No comments

DBRU: Omnichannel, Kaggle and the Disney Institute

by David Sealey on February 20, 2012 in David's Blog Round Up with No comments
Mysterious Roving Rocks of Racetrack Playa

Social, mobile and local – Omnichannel experiences for retail

Creating unified retail experiences across digital, physical, mobile and social is the new challenge. In this post on the Capgemini Customer Experience blog I discuss the need for retail innovation.

Social, Mobile and Local for Omnichannel Customer Experiences

Kaggle – A mash-up of the olympics and analytics

Think you can predict how many people will be admitted to hospital next year based on historic data? If you could then it could equal $3,000,000! Kaggle creates competitions from data for analysts to compete on. It’s a great site with an intro video worth watching.

Kaggle

Disney Institute comes to Yorkshire

If money and time allowed I’d love to go to this event. The renowned Disney Institute is coming to Yorkshire to share advice on Leadership, HR and Quality. Well worth attending.

Disney Institute in Yorkshire

What have I missed? Can you make any recommendations of articles that should be in the round-up in the comments?

DBRU: Digital marketing predictions for 2012

by David Sealey on January 9, 2012 in David's Blog Round Up, Digital Marketing with 2 Comments
2012 by Creativity103

Three interesting posts from Dave Chaffey, Chip Street and Neil Perkin about what trends they expect to see in 2012:

1. Getting digital marketing fundamentals right

Dave Chaffey’s trends for 2012 post highlights the importance of continuing to optimise, comply and innovate this year. Over the last two years marketers have had to play catch up with the introduction of new social channels and the rise of content marketing. 2012 is the year when maturity and sophistication will replace the hype as measuring the return of these activities becomes realistic.

Digital Marketing Trends 2012

2. Digital marketing’s godfathers predict 2012

Eisenberg. Kaushik. Geddes. If you don’t recognise these names then you need to review your digital marketing library. Chip Street has collated their thoughts on what 2012 holds for various digital marketing disciplines.

Some of the key predictions include:

  • Increased use of social signals for SEO validation
  • Mobile and Paid Search will mature
  • CEOs will take greater responsibility for conversion and customer experience
  • Growth in post scheduling tools
  • Downfall of dashboards (I wish)
  • Reshaping of the PR industry around digital
  • Marketing will become marketing

In terms of actions that can be drawn from this post I’d suggest:

  1. Have a strategy for mobile and local
  2. Get back to true marketing principles (further posts on applying traditional marketing techniques to digital marketing)
  3. Optimise for content sharing

2012 digital marketing predictions

3. Becoming T-Shaped in 2012

Neil Perkins identifies the need for more t-shaped digital marketers in 2012. For the uninitiating to be T-shaped means to have a broad range of skills with real depth in one specific area.

It’s something I strive to practice as a digital marketer and was the core reason for starting an MBA rather than a marketing specific course last year.

Therefore I’d recommend that marketers begin to understand where their business knowledge and skills gaps are and fill that knowledge through courses and reading. Perhaps it may be as simple as breaking away from your desk and spending thirty minutes in the warehouse or with the accountants understanding that side of the business.

Will 2012 be ‘T-Shaped’?

Let me know in the comments if you think I’ve missed any great digital marketing in 2012 posts.

David Sealey

PS please share this! It will make me happy.

DBRU: What’s your PVP?

by David Sealey on November 21, 2011 in David's Blog Round Up with No comments
Photo by Jessierocks

Today’s daily blog round up includes:

  • Whilst I was starting my career in the web, Jeff Bezos was busy building Amazon
  • PVP!? What it is, why you need one and how to create it
  • Facebook is stalking everyone across the web – be afraid, be very afraid

Jeff Bezos on long-term vision, chasing opportunities and growing Amazon

A great Forbes article on how Jeff has shaped and executed Amazon’s long-term vision. It seems that from the beginning he knew where the internet was going. My quote of the article was:

We’re willing to plant seeds, let them grow—and we’re very stubborn. We say we’re stubborn on vision and flexible on details.

- Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon

Full interview and the 6 things Jeff Bezos knew

Building a Personal Value Proposition

What do you do? It may seem an innocuous question but its a key one.

Describing myself as “a consultant that helps large businesses unlock greater value from online marketing activities” is far more powerful than “I work with computers”. Understanding the value we deliver is a powerful way of focussing our work and conversations.

Full article at http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/11/a_value_proposition_for_your_c.html

 Facebook reveals how it tracks people across the web

Website owners are installing Facebook like, share and join widgets on their sites like there’s no tomorrow.

After all, Facebook provides access to 500 million web users. The scary part is that everytime we visit a site with these features Facebook can track us.

Combined with the details that we’ve willingly handed over about ourselves, Facebook could be the greatest consumer profile database ever!

http://mashable.com/2011/11/17/facebook-reveals-its-user-tracking-secrets/

 

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DBRU: Unreasonable customers, social sharing and the power of asking questions

by David Sealey on November 12, 2011 in David's Blog Round Up with No comments
Copyright to photography.andreas

Pack or progress your unreasonable customers

Occasionally a customer will be so much of a problem that you’re better off without them. Seth Godin gives 4 good reasons to keep your customers and 4 good reasons to get rid of them.

What do you think? Is there ever a good reason to sack a customer?

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2011/11/the-unreasonable-customer.html

Social Sharing Plugins for WordPress

I opted to pay $5 for SocialPop on this site. If you’re after something “free” then Web Designer Depot may have just the answer for you:

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2011/11/10-awesome-social-sharing-plugins-for-wordpress/

Power of organisation shaping questions

Polly LaBarre writes an excellent HBR Blog post on the subject of asking questions that have the potential to change an organisation. The question itself can be quite simple; its the answer that need to be disruptive. So what questions will you ask in your organisation that could lead to something new?

Personally I think it speaks volumes about a leader when they openly ask questions that may lead to difficult answers…

Read it for yourself at http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2011/11/whats_the_question_that_will_c.html

DBRU: Conversion rate optimisation to power base selling

by David Sealey on November 11, 2011 in David's Blog Round Up with No comments
Vida Bandida by KotiCms

CRO under-used; technology could make you redundant; billionaire business school; power base selling; sharing for success

Shocking report that very few companies are using conversion rate optimisation techniques

Dave Chaffey at Smart Insights shares how the latest eConsultancy report shows that few companies are using Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO) techniques. Key action point from the post is that you should be practicing conversion optimisation and that A/B testing, Multi-variate Testing and customer journey planning will have the biggest impact.

Full report: http://www.smartinsights.com/analytics-conversion-optimisation-alerts/conversion-rate-optimisation-adoption/

Technological unemployment

“New technologies are displacing workers faster than the economy can find new uses for them” is the warning message in this article. What this means for an employee is that we need to be masters of the new technology before it replaces us.

Full article: http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2011/11/technological-unemployment?fsrc=scn/tw/te/bl/raceagainstthemachine

Billionaire business school

When a billionaire wants to share business advice, what should you do? Listen well.

Having made his millions in the pet food industry Clay Mathile has now set up a business school to help bring on smaller businesses. In this fascinating interview he talks about what it takes to build a billion dollar company.

Full interview: http://www.forbes.com/sites/brettnelson/2011/11/09/the-billionaire-business-owners-playbook/

Power base selling

Jim Holden’s classic (1990s) techniques for winning big sales. Infiltrate the prospect, find the fox, and then undermine the competition. Following some blog research I’ve picked up the book from Amazon for only £2.64 with free P&P!

Power Base Selling: Secrets of an Ivy League Street Fighter

Share for success

Social sharing widget makers AddThis have put together an Infographic of how people are sharing web content. Wednesday at 9:30 is the best time to share content that you wish to have shared!

Full infographic: http://searchengineland.com/infographic-how-where-when-people-share-content-100539