Vol. 3 , No. 32     August 12, 2003

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Gerry McGovern
Measuring the Cost and Value of Your Content

Content should be the channel through which knowledge is formalized and communicated. Increasingly, content is becoming the problem.

A century ago, scarcity was a key issue. But increasingly, our society must deal with glut. We are becoming physically and intellectually overweight. We are eating too much and writing too much.

What to do? Let’s take our heads out of the sand, for starters.

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Kirsten Osolind
Small Business Lessons for Big Business

Small businesses have perfected the art of island-hopping: packing light, living low and swiftly changing direction based on needs, news and impending threats.

Big businesses can get mired in hierarchy and politics long before they can muster switching gears. In today’s unpredictable world, big businesses can no longer afford to shelter the steadfast and specialists. Big businesses and their employees must learn to island-hop to remain competitive.

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Jim Sterne
Let the Computer Decide

Jim advocates the “Try It, Measure It, Tweak It” method of Web site design. While it may never catch on as an acronym (TIMITI?), the idea is simple and can have a profound impact on the success of your site.

The premise may be simple, but the implementation is challenging. Still, there’s some new technology making the whole thing a lot more intriguing.

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A Note to Readers

Of Elevator Pitches & Book Summaries

My 11-year-old son is working his way through his summer reading list with great ambition – at least for a boy on vacation.

But what comes less easily to him is the summary he needs to write that distills the book into its digestible essence. How can he reduce the richness and intrigue of the 870-page Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, for example, into a few sparse paragraphs?

It’s not unlike the task marketers and other executives at times have before them, to distill the essence of their company in a one-line message or “elevator pitch.” Can you reduce your company’s fundamental va lue to a few sparse lines?< /font>

My good friend Hank Stroll sent me something this week that reinforced my son’s perspective of how difficult a task it is. Hank, a frequent MProfs contributor and co-author of our newly minted ebook, A Marketer’s Guide to e-Newsletter Publishing,
shared the results of a survey in which 9,500 high-level executives were asked to match the elevator pitches of unidentified CEOs with their respective well-known companies (Dell, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and the like).

Some were easy: “To help practically anyone buy and sell practically anything.” (eBay) Or: “To be the leading direct computer-systems company, bar none.” (Dell)

Others were downright puzzling: “To be the 'preeminent building-block supplier' to the worldwide Internet economy.” (Would you believe Intel?) How about: “Deliver extremely high performance on inexpensive computers.” (Did you guess Oracle?) (Read the full survey results here.)

Good business focus starts with the basics. As Hank wrote, “The pitch is about communicating value. How can trust be earned if you can't say what you offer?”

Or, as I told my overwhelmed son, hone in on that one thing that made the book special: What was the core value or lesson you took from it? What made it unique?

Until next week,

Ann Handley
ann@marketingprofs.com
MarketingProfs.com

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Sean D’Souza
A Tale of Two Sales Pages: Which One Ends Up With the Paying Customers?

Here you are surfing the Internet. And this Web site is giving you an $86 discount compared with another site—a whole 30% difference. Yet you end up buying the product from the site with the higher price.

Now why on earth would you do something as irrational as that?

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Kristine Kirby Webster
Brandmouthing

What if brands could figure out how to proactively harness the power of word-of-mouth marketing? What if—instead of badmouthing by consumers—we could harness the power of the consumer’s word in brandmouthing?

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Mike Schultz and John Doerr
Five Effects of a Site on a Service Business Brand

It is now almost unheard of to find a consulting, technology or professional service business that does not have a Web presence.

But if you build it, will people come? And will they hand over their money?

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Al Fox and Mike Cuccia
The Need to Build Relationships in Today’s Market

Today’s business environment is difficult at best. As sales cycles become longer and the competition gets stiffer, businesses are looking for the proverbial “silver bullet.” Everyone wants a way to find qualified prospects… and close them better, faster and cheaper.

How? One relationship at a time.

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Contact

Publisher:Allen Weiss
amw@MarketingProfs.com

Content: Ann Handley
ann@MarketingProfs.com

Partnerships:
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