Janet Johnson | The Art of Marketing

As James Dellow over at ChiefTech says:

Put this in your diary: Enterprise RSS Day of Action is coming up on April 24!

The purpose of the Enterprise RSS Day of Action is to help raise awareness for the potential for Enterprise RSS; which I applaud because it’s critical to productivity and intelligence, especially in larger organizations.

James’ brainchild, he’s set up a wiki already, and is tracking blog posts about Enterprise RSS there.

There’s been a call for a logo, and Stu Downes has come up with a cool one already, turning this into a truly global competition.

I’m expecting some collaboration from our friends here in Portland - with Scott over at Attensa, a leader in enterprise RSS systems, and perhaps John over at FreeRange Communications will chime in…

I know we’ve got fans of enterprise RSS here - let’s have an online party for Enterprise RSS. I’ll be there…

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Last November I switched from PC to Mac - because of my iPhone. At the time, my PC was acting up, and I had been futzing with trying to connect my Blackberry to my Outlook (without IT help) calendar for months. I love my Mac, and the seamless integration with my iPhone. But now that iPhone has a hope to connect to the Blackberry enterprise server, I have to say I’d advocate for the iPhone as the tool I’d choose to call essential.

Tool #4: The smartest PDA - iPhone

Before I got one, I wondered what all the fuss was about. But once I started using it, I immediately got it. Elegant usability.

Seriously, the UI was so beautifully developed, every single tool was intuitive, and once I tried the controls - setting times for appointments, for example - I wondered why everyone’s phone didn’t work that way?

How is it a great marketing tool? I have the intelligence of the web, the immediacy of text, the connectedness of email, the logistic satisfaction of context-sensitive maps and the joy of a camera built right into my phone.

I will never be lost again, I can Google answers to any questions, respond to email, and snap photos to share with others (and send them right to recipients from the camera application).

It was worth the money AND worth the $200 cancellation fee I had to pay. (That’s another story altogether…)

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I love SmartBriefs. Extremely smart newsletters on various industries - from consumer electronics to construction and real estate, from telecommunications to travel and hospitality - there’s likely a newsletter for your industry.

I subscribe to, and read (almost every day), IAB’s SmartBrief (see example here) on the interactive industry.

Dosage: delivered daily.

Cost: Free

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In an effort to show, rather than tell, I’m putting forth my personal Top 10 Marketing Tools in a series. I asked the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network’s marketing committee to send me a list of their top 10 tools, and will be posting about them over on the OEN Blog.

(It’s spring break, so I haven’t seen any of them yet… So here’s my second in the series, to inspire action when they return:)

Tool #2: A Smart Search Engine

I have to admit, I’ve used Google for traditional searces for years. But when I went out on my own, I discovered that a roving worklife meant I was never sure I would be at the same computer all day. I’ve long been a fan of SaaS technology (software as a service - where you go online and login to manage information) and iGoogle, the personal Google service, has saved my bacon many times.

They’ll tell you - when you type in “what is igoogle” to your google tool bar in your browser - which is fantastic in and of itself - that:

Google offers the ability to create a personalized iGoogle page that gives you at-a-glance access to key information from Google and across the web.

• Your latest Gmail messages
• Headlines from Google News and other top news sources
• Weather forecasts, stock quotes, and movie showtimes
• Bookmarks for quick access to your favorite sites from any computer
• Your own section with content you find from across the web

I don’t use it as a personal “portal” to all things online. I use it because:

• It gives me access to Google Docs and Spreadsheets, where I can set up living documents to capture and share notes, track action items and collaborate in meetings with clients. No matter where we are, we’re quite literally all on the same page.
• I used to be on a Dell with Outlook and a Blackberry, and could never get my calendar to synch with my PDA. (A great lead-in to Chapter 3) I kept my calendar online in Google’s calendar application, and while I wasn’t able to view my calendar (again, I’m not technical or patient enough to set it up correctly) from my blackberry, I could get to it from any computer connected to the internet. (A great selling point for SaaS) And, it would send alerts to my blackberry, which helped me get to meetings on time.

Beyond iGoogle (back to just plain Google for a bit), I use Google as a spelling tool and a dictionary. It goes like this:

You can’t get a fast read on whether you’re spelling a word correctly or not than to type it into your Google toolbar - take one of most commonly misspelled words - accomodate. If you’re unsure, in a flash you’ll know,

“Did you mean: accommodate?”

(While you’re at it, check out the results around the spelling correction in Google - you might see some smart search engine marketers trying to capture common misspellings for their clients.)

I use Google to quickly find sources for quotations - who knew John Heywood wrote: “Many hands make light work…” You can also find complete song lyrics in the same way.

But there are cooler things :

• like putting your UPS tracking number into Google to find out where your package is
• putting your flight number into Google to find out where the plane is…
• figuring out who called you by knowing where the 541 area code comes from… instantly
• …and don’t even get me started on Google maps - it’s the greatest thing for those of us who used to have to rely on CitySearch to find restaurant phone numbers… thank goodness for Google.

…those are the quick timesavers that make Google one of the Top 10 Marketing Tools I use.

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This week I’m going to “do as I say,” “walk the talk,” and (in doing so) get back into blogosphere basics…

It seems I’ve been spending more time on Twitter than blogging lately, which I’ve heard from several people recently. I have come to feel more interest and creativity in creating 140 character blurbs and following others recently, and blogging has seemed more like serious writing as a result.

But it’s time to get serious again, for many reasons.

Last week I challenged the members of our Oregon Entrepreneurs Network (OEN) marketing committee to help enliven the OEN blog and spread the wealth of knowledge by sending me the Top 10 Marketing Tools they use - and why.

We figured that entrepreneurs (and our colleagues) would probably appreciate a glimpse into the minds and habits of a bunch of smart marketers - learning about the tools they use. The ensuing conversation and collaboration inside the room was so enlightening that I can hardly wait to share what I learn!

I’m going to start my Top 10 Marketing Tools list with some of what I believe are “blocking and tackling” basic tools. Now, I’ve got a decidedly “online” bent so you’ll want to round out your tools by reading others’ lists - for sure.

Tool #1 - A Smart RSS Reader

Any marketer interested in making their lives easier in collecting information about their own reputations, their products’ reputations, their brand reputations and their competitors’ reputations must have a smart RSS reader in their toolbox.

Why do something manually when you can have a FREE product do it for you?

I define “Smart” as a reader that will do more than deliver persistent search results into your mailbox - although if you have to start somewhere, start with Google Alerts, which will do just that.

I use Attensa’s RSS products. They’re clients, many of the employees there are colleagues, and I’ve always appreciated the work they do in terms of their consistent interface design across platforms, smart enhancements and well-programmed applications.

To me, as Smart RSS Reader will:

1. Search multiple engines in addition to the major search engines and deliver content so you can have another view of where your conversations are happening. It’s nice to have a view (beyond what your SEM tools tell you) of engagement levels on del.icio.us tags vs. Technorati tags, for example.
2. Allow you to ‘train’ the reader as to where you’re spending your attention - so it will filter high-attention results right to the top of your feeds, and the low-attention results will appear down your results lists. That way, your most reader will help prioritize your feed results for you.
3. Let you get your work done beyond simply reading feeds within the application. For example (I’ve blogged about this before), I can comment on blog posts from within Attensa - while my attention is focused on the subject at hand. I can tag articles within Attensa, and it’ll post my tags to my del.icio.us account for me as well - maximizing my work efforts.

Any time you can find a tool that will work for you, learn from you, and enhance your productivity (AND it’s free to boot…), what’s there not to love?

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