The “New Math” of Marketing
November 21, 2006
“there’s a real need, almost a desperate need, for the 999,000 vibrant webpages that aren’t in the top 1,000 in traffic to find a way to get there.”
Unfortunately, that’s the problem that most marketers have. They’re trying to stuff 1,000,000 sites into the top 1000. This is what leads to a real distrust of brands and marketing out there – not every product in the world can be “the best”, “the cheapest”, “the coolest”, etc.
This is what branding and positioning is all about – it’s about realizing that not every blog needs to be in the Top 100 to be a massive success – perhaps it only needs to be in the “Top 100 Bonobo Chimpanzee Sociology” blogs. Or whatever your market is. The key is market segmentation.
For whatever other faults you may think the book had, this is the point that The Long Tail
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Interview at “Business Networking Advice”
November 21, 2006
One of my newest favorite sites is Business Networking Advice – over there, Josh interviews all kinds of really interesting people about their views on how to be a better networker. It’s a great window into the thoughts and minds of all of the great networkers out there in the world.
Today, Josh interviewed me. While networking isn’t something that I talk about a lot on here, it’s a vital skill (and one we’re going to talk about in depth at the teleseminar series.
Click here to check out the interview.
Teleseminar – Integrated Thinking for IT with Linda Ferguson
November 21, 2006
The first episode of the Episteme IT/InfoSec Career Portfolio Teleseminar & Podcast Series will feature my brilliant colleague and fellow blogger Linda Ferguson.
I have trained with Linda (and her business partner Chris Keeler) for almost 3 years – I first met Linda back in 2004 shortly after I had arrived in Canada to open the Toronto R&D office for nCircle. I had long looked for someone who really “got it” as far as training in NLP goes – there are a significant number of people out there who are simply training a lot of regurgitated material from the 1970s and 1980s. I was looking to work with trainers who were willing to go looking outside the traditional “NLP” literature and incorporate all of the newest information from science and business communication to create something completely new. And I found that in Linda and Chris.
In the time that I have worked with them, they have completely surpassed the “old” ways of NLP, advancing the research beyond the original skills to bring in elements of emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and new ways of understanding the way that we communicate, emote and think in order to create a course that is called “Integrated Thinking”.
And, having gone through the course, I realized that Integrated Thinking is a skillset that most IT people are lacking most of the time. While I know that you can probably remember a time when you looked at a problem and saw all of the facets… and the answer just clicked for you and you knew exactly how to get there, it probably doesn’t happen often enough. One of the things that Linda has been great at teaching is that you can realize that there are multiple perspectives, multiple views, and multiple ways of creating a more rich and elegant understanding of the tasks that you’re attempting to perform on a daily basis. And how to make that sense of knowing just seem a little more effortless.
So, I asked Linda to kick off the teleseminar series with me, because I know that she’s going to have some brilliant thoughts to share with us. For examples of her thoughts, check out her articles on “What’s Stopping You?” and “Making Tough Decisions”.
The teleseminar is going to take place at 1PM PST/4PM EST on Tuesday, November 28. Click here to sign Up For the Mailing List to get the call-in info.
If you have questions that you would like to see Linda and I talk about, please leave them in the comments below.