Using Marketing Applications to Generate Leads & Sales
Can I tell you a secret? One of the best marketing tools you’re not using is the marketing application. I’ve implemented a few over the course of my career and experience tells me that when used well, they give marketers an great ability to understand customer behavior while generating leads and/or sales. I worked on one for a large insurance company (with an ad agency partner) that ended up as a

Barnes & Noble Doesn’t Get Customer Service … Or Survival
Yesterday I pointed out great service I got from a couple of companies on Twitter. Today, I share a story of lackluster online customer service. I’m a huge fan of Barnes & Noble retail stores. As explained in the letter below, my mother used to frequently take me to the store on Fifth Avenue in NYC and, even as a child, I used to love walking the aisles – especially the textbook section in the back. These days, I still go to Barnes & Noble frequen

Three Tips for Brands Using Twitter
A few weeks ago I bought some dip from Sabra, the people who make Sabra hummus. I got it home, ripped it open and was offended by the taste. The dip had spoiled in spite of an expiration date a few days into the future. I found Sabra’s Twitter account and tweeted my experience to them. They “followed” me and expressed regret for my experience. They followed up by asking for my email address. Haven’t heard from them since but just expressing regret was pretty class to me. An even better

The Web Sucks. Will Old Media Seize the Day to Make It Better?
The Internet sucks. It just hasn’t really evolved all that much since Netscape’s IPO in 1995. Aren’t you tired of having to visit 20 different sites (or more) to get content on your varied interests? And hard as you try, you still can’t make RSS feeds fun, right? There are other options out there but they’re just stop-gaps in the evolutionary process rather than true evolution. The closest thing to the next iteration of th

Solving NBC’s 10PM Problem
NBC 1943 Logo I like Jay Leno. On a trip to California last year, I made sure I got tickets for The Tonight Show. Even now, if there’s nothing else on at 10pm, it’s likely I’ll watch Jay. With that out of the way, I have to say Jay doesn’t work for 10pm – and the problem isn’t Jay, it’s the content. NBC recently canceled Southland because it’s content was too dark for 9pm. With Jay in at 10pm every night, there was no times