The Marketing Technology Blog

• Pressitt – Social media news release (SMNR) creation, publishing and online news distribution service
  A free user-friendly Social Media News Release (SMNR) service that allows you to quickly create, publish and share your news to an online, socially-connected audience.
  (tags: smpr news web2.0 socialsoftware socialmedia marketing smnr service pr social)
• Are The Words “Social Media” Missing From Your Business Vocabulary? | Owengreaves.com
  The real issue isn’t what the words mean, it’s how a consultant or media firm explains them, provides a case study that reflects that a business can derive an ROI from Social Media.
  (tags: socialmedia roi marketing strategy)
• New Salesforce Strategy: 'Amplify And Extend' | BNET Technology Blog | BNET
  As the momentum for SaaS has grown, traditional enterprise software vendors, including SAP, Oracle, Microsoft and Cisco, have shifted their marketing messages away from disparaging the cloud computing model to trying to scaring customers about the cost of a so-called rip-and-replace strategy.
  (tags: saas crm salesforce sap oracle microsoft cisco)
• Whom did you wake up with this morning?
  Christoph C. Cemper has been building links since 2003 and is a well respected guru in the SEO industry, especially when it comes to getting real juicy links on trusted domains.
  (tags: links linkbuilding sem)

Had a wonderful time this morning speaking shop with Lorraine Ball. Lorraine’s company specializes in strategic content initiatives for small to medium size businesses in Indianapolis – including blogging, newsletters and press releases. Lorraine has been a big supporter and her husband Andrew is a great guy and incredible artist.

Lorraine and I have had the opportunity to work for very large corporations, but we love the agility and excitement of small business. Lorraine encourages all of her interns to work for a large business for a number of years… I would recommend it as well. The lessons learned in leadership in a large company can be critical when running a small business.

In a very large business, to maintain productivity, you must assign responsibilities to leaders. Supervisors execute the vision of leaders and monitor employees. Managers balance priorities and remove obstacles. Directors help maintain the long-term vision and ensure that the department is staying on the path. Vice Presidents create the long-term vision and the strategy of the organizations. The folks at the top guide, promote, cheerlead, and oversee the business.

[Photo cropped from a background found on Gnome]

Lorraine came up with a beautiful metaphor. Being a leader in a company is very much like controlling a river. If your goal is to stop the river, you’re going to run into problems! Companies have momentum… you’re going to make a huge mess if you simply keep trying to throw up dams or redirect the water where it doesn’t want to go. Micromanaging the river won’t result in anything but a mess.

The objective of the leader should be to utilize the momentum of the water to keep the direction of the water moving in the direction the vision requires. Each leader in the organization and their subsequent teams and employees are tools to shift the momentum. It requires a leader to adapt, empower, and delegate the necessary functions… and continue to keep an eye on the horizon and where the company is heading.

This isn’t unlike Social Media and Online Marketing. Hastily constructed campaigns and ever-changing strategies may result in minor results here and there. Long-term strategies that leverage each medium for its strengths, with properly allotted resources, can direct the river of revenue for your company. The river is going to continue to move with incredible force… the question is whether or not you’re going to harness that force or fight it!

Since updating my blog and putting WordPress on Amazon S3, I’ve been able to remove caching plugins. The caching plugins performed poorly in comparison to pushing all my images to S3. (My first month’s bill: $0.50).

I realize that caching could squeeze some additional performance out of my site… but it would stop me from updating the site with customizations for the iPhone, Blackberry, and other mobile devices. The issue is that one visitor could visit the page on a handheld device, it gets cached, and the next person is presented with the same handheld version in their full browser. Caching and dynamic themes don’t mix well.

The first plugin I found for beautifully optimizing the themes for both iPhone, Blackberry, and other handheld devices is the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin.

This plugin was developed by Crowd Favorite. I tested the plugin on an iPod Touch and my Blackberry and both views are stunning. Kudos to the developers of this plugin for optimizing the view and navigation for both Safari on the iPhone or iPod Touch as well as the Blackberry and other devices.

One note on installing this plugin, it requires a different install than most plugins. You must first upload the theme to the themes directory, then upload and activate the plugin. Thankfully, the authors even let you know when you install it incorrectly.

iPhone WordPress Administration

The other intriguing iPhone plugin I found was WPhone. WPhone actually allows you to manage WordPress fully within an administration panel optimized for Safari on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Very cool indeed!

I’ve not installed this plugin since I usually do some advanced ‘tinkering’ with each of my posts, but for you folks looking for some iPhone WordPress goodness, this appears to be a great plugin!

As content management systems continue to evolve, I hope that the developers incorporate mobile browser and mobile device integration as part of their strategy. Carl Weinschenk has a great article describing the upcoming mobile browser wars.

With Opera Mobile downloaded over 40 million times and the iPhone now accounting for 0.19 percent of browsing worldwide… mobile optimization will become much more of a competitive advantage soon!

• iPhone Overtaking Nokia Worldwide | BNET Technology Blog | BNET
  Nokia has lost its overall market share leadership in the worldwide smartphone segment to Apple, based on browser calls for mobile ads.
  (tags: mobile iphone advertising)

After months and months of deliberation, I finally did the deed and purchased a Blackberry Curve 8330 tonight at the Verizon store.

I’ve been using a Samsung touch screen for the last year and have missed countless calls, can’t synchronize calendars, and can’t stand having to look at it to answer a call.

I’m a big fan of Apple, but I’ve been messing with my iPod Touch the last month to see if I could get used to the touch screen. I can’t. For those of you that say it gets easier, it hasn’t… I don’t want a phone that I must be looking at in order to operate it.

IMHO, it seems to me that touch screens have taken us back a step, not into the future.

As well, too many of my friends moved to the Blackberry. Chris Baggott, CEO of Compendium even got rid of his iPhone to return to a Blackberry. Adam Small, CEO of Connective Mobile, has been trying to talk me into a Blackberry for a while. And new friend Vanessa Lammers told me how much she enjoyed her Blackberry.

Heck, if President Obama can’t do without his Crackberry, I can only imagine how great the service and the product is. Tonight I’m just figuring out how to make and receive phone calls. As recommended by Adam, I downloaded Twitterberry so that I at least can tweet from it!

So… all you Crackberry-addicts, let me know your favorite Apps!