inluminent

I missed this article when it was published earlier this year, but in today’s economy, I think any marketing ideas that come in at a low budget are useful to all of us.
Go read Creative Marketing on a Shoestring, by Isabella Trebond over at Entrepreneur.com, if you’re interested in inexpensive marketing tactics including those that [...]

This article was published on December 9th, but I didn’t catch it then for some reason…
“Our goal is to create a library of industry specific best practices,” [Dave Chase, managing director of marketing and industry relations, MSN] said.
The efforts of the initiative’s work is available at MSN’s Advantage Marketing website. Sadly, they seem to [...]

In Dial-Up Revelations, Meg talks about her latest experience in Paris where the internet isn’t free (or cheap, for that matter) and isn’t fast:
Lately I’ve grown lazy around the issue of page size and images. When designing something for a client or posting a picture to my own web site, I’d often think to myself, [...]

This is a feature I’d like to see adopted by email lists and newsletters that I subscribe to:
Attention all Newsletter Publishers:
Add permanent links to your email newsletters
Should be fairly self explanatory.
(ps. that goes for email lists too, set up your email list software to add a quick ‘to read this post or any posts on [...]

Jeremy’s rant about insufficient shipping details on check out pages at online retailers reminds me that even though I worked at a travel agency recently, I still bought all of my tickets direct from AA.com or Southwest.com (living in Dallas meant I didn’t need any other airlines to get anywhere) because I hated the customer [...]

Over the holidays I had the opportunity to sit down with a cousin-in-law of mine that’s in his Junior year at college. This kid is smart and has a real opportunity to get a good job in a year and a half or so.
While we were watching a football game, he asked me about [...]

I don’t think Mark got ‘pissed’ about having to go into work early for a meeting that really shouldn’t have taken place, but this is something that just shouldn’t happen to employees:
“I had to be at work early this morning for an all employee meeting . The bosses were supposed to announce a realignment / [...]

I’ve read two pages of Prey by Michael Crichton tonight.
I’m hooked.
This particular quote from the intro is what has hooked me:
“We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more sigificant characteristic of our kind.”
Looks like a good book… [...]

If you want to publish your email address on a website, you’re gonna get spam, but there are a few things you can do to cut down on the amount of spam you get.
The easiest is to not publish your email address on a website. You’ll still get some spam, but your ISP should [...]

You know, it’s really nice to just get away from it all for a while every now and then.
I haven’t had the luxury of getting away from my daily routine since I was in the Army… In the military, you usually get told to take a two week vacation sometime during the year, and [...]

This holiday, the wife and I took a quick 24 hour trip up to visit her family in the ‘great’ state of Oklahoma, more specifically, the beautiful snow covered city of Tulsa.
It was a great trip, and the highlight of the trip was our finally getting to meet the newest member of the family, [...]

I’m busier than hell at work planning a strategy for our online advertising sales teams. It’s tough work, honestly, mainly because I’m one of those guys that has to figure out where he’s coming from to know where he’s going. I like to look at the history of things, so that I know [...]

Tonight, I was working on some backend development for MarketingFix.com, our internet marketing weblog, and I found this list of MovableType plugins on love-productions.
I had not realized that Kristine had put together such a great resource, but am grateful that she has.
In the near (relatively) future, I plan on looking into these plugins for use [...]

I have to applaud Apple for releasing another update/upgrade to Mac OS X “Jaguar” … but …
The god damned thing is 51 MB in size.
51 MB.
Now I know what it really feels like to be without broadband.
I’m sitting here on my plunky dunky 56K modem thinking… WTF?
56K + 51 MB = like fucking forever to [...]

A recommendation from Peter Shankman on an email list I read daily:
Raving Fans: A Revolutionary Approach to Customer Service
Peter recommends this book after quite a sad experience at a local Starbucks… during which he received fairly poor customer service. Peter’s words:
… its basic premise is that we expect shitty customer service as a nation [...]

This is just too much fun not to share with folks:
Toboggan Run
Enjoy your sledding.

Jeremy should read The Summons by John Grisham only because the main character ‘gets away from it all’ during his flying lessons. (Bought it at the airport waiting for a plane on Tuesday. It’s a good Grisham book too, read it in under two days).

Ok, so Kasia didn’t say anything about monopolies, but her story about AT&T raising her internet fees because she doesn’t subscribe to Cable TV is a good example of what can go wrong if a company ‘owns’ a particular market and there isn’t any real competition for that market…
Now, I also think the broadband market [...]

Anthony Joh has posted some ads that were on Apple.com recently, but have since disappeared… if I were on something slightly faster than dialup I’d check them up, but 56K (if this connection is really that fast) is slower than shit for anything truly interactive…
After Jan 1, I’m ordering broadband… can’t take it any [...]

On the plane today, I finally got around to reading The Persuaders from the November 2002 issue of Business 2.0.
It’s a great read that quickly profiles 5 great sales persons in easy to read and easy to share storylets (not a real story, but more like a few paragraphs with lots of depth).
When I get [...]

For years, I’ve used a MS Intellimouse Exlporer on a Macintosh, including OS 9 and OS X. The intellimouse has 5 buttons and the default buttons for the 4th and 5th button (the two on the side) are ‘forward’ and ‘backward’ actions that are pretty useless on a Macintosh (they work, just not nicely) [...]

I arrived this morning in Atlanta after a quick flight from Austin on Delta. I enjoyed the quick walk through the Atlanta airport on my way to a cab. The cab driver was very friendly and got me to my destination right on time.
I spent the majority of the day meeting people, discussing [...]

The hard sale can always be an interesting way to try and close new business, but it’s always a tactic that should be used sparingly, in my opinion. This post at IntricatePlot is an example of barely treading the fine line between smart and dumb ass in the sales business. I actually think it’s a [...]

Recently I ordered an adapter from Apple for my iBook. I wanted to be able to watch DVDs on my TV instead of on our iBook. So, I took a trip over to the Apple Store (online) and ordered an Apple A/V Cable. I saw the description:
The Apple AV cable [...]

I just read this post over at expositionkink:
Well, the semester’s drawn to a close, and the “dead days” before finals begin have already upset my equilibrium. I keep on forgetting I still have a project and 2 exams to get through, so I’ve stayed up eating pie and working on this site the past couple [...]

I just got around to reading Steve Outing’s latest article on convergence, finally.
It’s a well writen article that details 3 writers that are taking their own journalism to new audiences, across multiple delivery vehicles… but that’s not what I think about when I think ‘convergence’.
We’ve been hearing about “media convergence” for a long while, but [...]

FYI, the 2003 SXSW Interactive Web Awards entry deadline has passed for this year, but it’s totally fun to visit random entries if you have some time on your hands… And if you come to the conference in March, drop me a line so we can maybe catch lunch or something… I’m pretty sure I’ll [...]

Tonight, the wife and I decided to just stay in for the night. We ate lunch around 3:00 at Freebirds, the best damned place to eat a burrito in the world, and it almost held us over for the night, but alas, we finally got hungry around 10:30 or so, hald way through the [...]

The news that U.T. May End Photojournalism Program due to the internet’s developments, is quite interesting to me, especially when you put it in perspective with the idea that many schools across the country have added some sort of “e-” (and I don’t mean ‘executive’) programs to their undergraduate and graduate programs over the past [...]

Froogle has been launched.
This is huge. Google is beta testing Froogle, a new shopping search engine tool. This has a huge potential… freakin’ huge potential.
The big question to me is whether or not this will really impact the way marketing is done online… Search Engine Optimization will become a big piece [...]

Yesterday, I moved the our cell phone plans from the Fort Worth locale to the Austin locale. It was fairly painless. AT&T Wireless has been my cellular provider of choice for about 5 years now. I’ve been happy with their service from day one and have never looked back (though some of [...]

So, us MarketingFix folks have decided that we needed a private weblog so that we could post things that others might need to see in a written + image form, in addition to our little email list that we’ve set up (thanks to EZMLM)… it’ll also help my colleagues learn more about MovableType I’m thinking [...]

I’ve been super busy trying to get my life in order after our move… regular postings will resume sometime soon (I hope)… dialup sucks and those open wireless nodes I mentioned a while back only work in the kitchen or so it seems (must be the rain).

Apple really makes it easy to buy accessories for their hardware now-a-days. I remember back when there was generally only one way to get a third part accessory for your Apple made computer, and that was by turning to a catalog. I also remember back when Byte magazine was an Apple computer enthusiast [...]

Apartment living sucks. Bottom line.
There’s a reason I bought a house when we moved to Fort Worth, and I can’t wait to buy another when we sell our first house. We live in an apartment complex of roughly 1000+ units in a downtown location. The view is great, but having neighbors [...]

I’m a firm believer in Outlook as a group scheduling and contact management tool. It also happens to be a decent email client. But, I can tell you this… if there is no Exchange Server in the equation, then it’s really just an email client.
I work at a company where there [...]

Starting a new job is always a challenge. Moving to a new city to start a new job is also a huge challenge. I’ve done both of these things in the past week and with that comes stress.
Stress is good, but only in moderation, sort of like Coffee. I’ve got a lot [...]

How to get Plucker, a decent AvantGo replacement, working on Mac OS X.
Jeremy Zawodny will be playing with MySQL and Terrabytes of data…
.

Wow. According to OfficeParkDad, Radio Shack is ending their long practice of gathering customer information like name, address and zip code, at the point of purchase. Kudos to Radio Shack, and I can say that that’s probably the reason I don’t shop their more often, even if its not a conscious decision.

While this is a bit old for some of you I’m sure, it’s a great read, but my post is a bit long, just because I want to archive the info here:
E&P Online: An Exit Interview With WSJ.com’s Neil Budde
Walt Mossberg, personal technology columnist for the Journal, called Budde’s departure “a sad event for Dow [...]

Scott makes this comment in a post on the FuzzyBlog!:
“Marketers don’t seem to get that being in our faces isn’t helping them at all — in fact it’s just ruining it for them”
But, I’d like to ask to Scott to take a slight moment to reflect on what marketing is mainly about: reaching a critical [...]

Haven’t had time to really check this out, but it looks interesting.
The Cosmos of MarketingFix.
Like I said, interesting, but I don’t know how useful it is yet…

Scott’s pissed that online travel agencies (Expedia is the one in this example) are now charging for providing a service. I just left the travel business, so I know a little more from the inside that Scott does. What Scott doesn’t admit is that most online travel agency websites were built to make [...]

Two fantastic branding and Apple articles on Wired:
Apple: It’s All About the Brand
For Mac Users, It Takes a Village
[via [stop]design]
And one other about loyatly in customers:
Mac Loyalists: Don’t Tread on Us
[via winterspeak]

Today was my first day at my new job.
I can already tell I’m going to love it. More on that over time though.
Last night, the wife and I made the trip to Austin from Fort Worth after sleeping for around 5 hours, then waking up to pack up the remainder or our [...]

We’re home. Not a big winner, but not a loser either. Vegas was fun.