I'm getting ready for The Big and Influential Trade Show.
As an exhibitor, my company received a list of the registered media planning to attend. Last year I just sent everybody some press releases. This year I'm being more selective, so I looked up each company. And, you know, some of them may have blogs, but I wouldn't call them "media," any more than I would call myself a medium. In fact, a couple of them were PR firms, maybe looking for free admission to the show.
If there were an emoticon for an eye roll, I would use it here.
Saturday, January 30, 2010
Monday, November 30, 2009
OMG! Britannica.com!
An article I wrote has been indexed by Britannica.com!
http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/38313406/Data-Security-for-Libraries-Prevent-Problems-Dont-Detect-Them
Wow! Gosh!
http://www.britannica.com/bps/additionalcontent/18/38313406/Data-Security-for-Libraries-Prevent-Problems-Dont-Detect-Them
Wow! Gosh!
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Visit Finland Thanks to Rotary
If only I had had a blog when I visited Nepal and West Bengal in 2004 on a Group Study Exchange trip sponsored by the Rotary Foundation.
I hope that Rotary District 7470 sends bloggers to Finland in 2010. What an opportunity would go to waste otherwise, now that Finland has declared universal broadband access a right.
To be eligible you must be between 25 and 40 years old, a full-time professional, either living or working in one of the following New Jersey counties:
The team going to Finland will go from March 21 to April 21, 2010. You need to get your application in by November 30, so email fgeraghty@verizon.net now.
I hope that Rotary District 7470 sends bloggers to Finland in 2010. What an opportunity would go to waste otherwise, now that Finland has declared universal broadband access a right.
To be eligible you must be between 25 and 40 years old, a full-time professional, either living or working in one of the following New Jersey counties:
- Morris
- Essex
- Warren
- Sussex
The team going to Finland will go from March 21 to April 21, 2010. You need to get your application in by November 30, so email fgeraghty@verizon.net now.
Social Networking
"Katharine?" You sounded very nervous. "As you know, I have just finished my training here at (famous insurance firm marketing financial instruments). I wonder if I could..."
Of course you can come over to my house and give me your spiel. It's a tough economy for everybody, and you are changing careers. I'm sure that they just put your whole class in front of a bank of phones and told you to call everybody you know. How frightening!
I've known you for 20 years. I very much want you to succeed. I probably am not going to invest anything with you, but at least now you can turn around and give a thumbs-up to your supervisor. "I made an appointment!"
Who knows? Maybe I'll think of somebody who can use your services. Or maybe I'll help you think of a way to market yourself and set yourself apart from the competition.
Good job--keep tapping that social network! But, if I may, two words of advice.
1) I have made other people irate when I did not end up buying their product even after (or especially after) their drawn-out sales pitches. I trust that if I do not buy. we will still be friends. After all, I am not really interested in your product. I'm meeting with you because you're my friend and it's good karma.
2) Your call displayed on my caller ID as "UNAVAILABLE." That's the same as screaming "SALES PITCH"--you might not get as many pickups that way. I did pick up, we did make the appointment. And after we hung up I remembered that I had a conflict. I wanted to call you back, but you had not left me your number. You might want to try leaving your number next time, just in case. :)
See you this afternoon. And, good luck!
Of course you can come over to my house and give me your spiel. It's a tough economy for everybody, and you are changing careers. I'm sure that they just put your whole class in front of a bank of phones and told you to call everybody you know. How frightening!
I've known you for 20 years. I very much want you to succeed. I probably am not going to invest anything with you, but at least now you can turn around and give a thumbs-up to your supervisor. "I made an appointment!"
Who knows? Maybe I'll think of somebody who can use your services. Or maybe I'll help you think of a way to market yourself and set yourself apart from the competition.
Good job--keep tapping that social network! But, if I may, two words of advice.
1) I have made other people irate when I did not end up buying their product even after (or especially after) their drawn-out sales pitches. I trust that if I do not buy. we will still be friends. After all, I am not really interested in your product. I'm meeting with you because you're my friend and it's good karma.
2) Your call displayed on my caller ID as "UNAVAILABLE." That's the same as screaming "SALES PITCH"--you might not get as many pickups that way. I did pick up, we did make the appointment. And after we hung up I remembered that I had a conflict. I wanted to call you back, but you had not left me your number. You might want to try leaving your number next time, just in case. :)
See you this afternoon. And, good luck!
Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt
Just finished reading Junk Science Judo: Self-defense against Health Scares and Scams by Stephen J. Milloy. Milloy seems to assume that poor science makes headlines because scientists, peer reviewers and editors do not understand the scientific method, and that if he just explained it, the scientific community and the media would see the error of their ways. They would refuse to report on inconclusive but alarming results.
How touching. Milloy does not know that there is an entire marketing technique abbreviated as FUD. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt--deliberate dissemination of disinformation about a product or service in order to confuse consumers and dissuade them from supporting the competition.
Blogs make FUD easier than ever. If I wanted to, I could say disturbing things about my competition here on this blog, and encourage my friends to leave similar comments to boost the PageRank. I could moderate any ripostes from the maligned competition. And if I were truly devious, I could have other websites pick up my posting--websites that do not allow comments. No peer review, just my slanderous word out there in the blogosphere forever.
It's hard to get other people's blog posts taken down, even if they are blatantly inaccurate. Another blogspot blogger took some of my press releases last winter and ran them through a blender, but left my name and telephone number intact. They looked like real press releases, albeit written on hallucinogens. The purpose of those postings was to create links back to an Internet pharmacy site. See the "report abuse" choice at the top of this page? I complained to Google, which owns blogspot. I filled out their online form (the only way they allow complaints) but I when they requested it I did not send a scan of my driver's license because they did not offer me an encrypted transmission. Because I did not send it, Google has not acted. Stalemate.
Fortunately, the bogus press releases do not spread FUD, except on the question of whether I might be blogging while intoxicated. But I give this example to show how easy it is to post misinformation, and how hard it is to remove bad information. Who needs the New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the American Medical Association if they can start a free and anonymous blog and say whatever they want?
Do I believe everything Milloy writes about the inappropriate reporting of scientific studies? I don't know. And I find his web site, JunkScience.com, more strident and abrasive than the book. But I do think that as long as people are out there perpetrating FUD, we all need to be aware of it lest we wind up, as Milloy quotes Carl Sagan's foreboding
On a similar subject but from an entirely different section of the library, I also just finished reading How to Rig an Election by Allen Raymond and Ian Spiegelman. Raymond is the former top GOP operative who served time in federal prison for jamming the Democratic call center phone lines during the 2002 New Hampshire Elections.
Raymond did not go to the pokey for his political FUD. Having actors portraying urban men calling conservative, potentially racist, households to urge them to vote for the Democratic candidate, in order to scare them into voting Republican is just business as usual, I guess. Ugh. Between shenanigans like that and Operation Bid Rig is it any wonder The Star-Ledger, the largest paper in New Jersey, endorsed independent candidate for governor Chris Daggett?
Adrenaline gets our attention. But we have to keep questioning the source of the information that makes our hearts race, lest we be frightened into acting against our own best interests by cynical purveyors of fear, uncertainty and doubt.
How touching. Milloy does not know that there is an entire marketing technique abbreviated as FUD. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt--deliberate dissemination of disinformation about a product or service in order to confuse consumers and dissuade them from supporting the competition.
Blogs make FUD easier than ever. If I wanted to, I could say disturbing things about my competition here on this blog, and encourage my friends to leave similar comments to boost the PageRank. I could moderate any ripostes from the maligned competition. And if I were truly devious, I could have other websites pick up my posting--websites that do not allow comments. No peer review, just my slanderous word out there in the blogosphere forever.
It's hard to get other people's blog posts taken down, even if they are blatantly inaccurate. Another blogspot blogger took some of my press releases last winter and ran them through a blender, but left my name and telephone number intact. They looked like real press releases, albeit written on hallucinogens. The purpose of those postings was to create links back to an Internet pharmacy site. See the "report abuse" choice at the top of this page? I complained to Google, which owns blogspot. I filled out their online form (the only way they allow complaints) but I when they requested it I did not send a scan of my driver's license because they did not offer me an encrypted transmission. Because I did not send it, Google has not acted. Stalemate.
Fortunately, the bogus press releases do not spread FUD, except on the question of whether I might be blogging while intoxicated. But I give this example to show how easy it is to post misinformation, and how hard it is to remove bad information. Who needs the New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the American Medical Association if they can start a free and anonymous blog and say whatever they want?
Do I believe everything Milloy writes about the inappropriate reporting of scientific studies? I don't know. And I find his web site, JunkScience.com, more strident and abrasive than the book. But I do think that as long as people are out there perpetrating FUD, we all need to be aware of it lest we wind up, as Milloy quotes Carl Sagan's foreboding
of an America in my children's generation or my grandchildren's generation...when clutching our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what's true and what feels good, we slide almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness.
On a similar subject but from an entirely different section of the library, I also just finished reading How to Rig an Election by Allen Raymond and Ian Spiegelman. Raymond is the former top GOP operative who served time in federal prison for jamming the Democratic call center phone lines during the 2002 New Hampshire Elections.
Raymond did not go to the pokey for his political FUD. Having actors portraying urban men calling conservative, potentially racist, households to urge them to vote for the Democratic candidate, in order to scare them into voting Republican is just business as usual, I guess. Ugh. Between shenanigans like that and Operation Bid Rig is it any wonder The Star-Ledger, the largest paper in New Jersey, endorsed independent candidate for governor Chris Daggett?
Adrenaline gets our attention. But we have to keep questioning the source of the information that makes our hearts race, lest we be frightened into acting against our own best interests by cynical purveyors of fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Branding Ads
One thing I like about creating ads for my church is being sure that when I call to book the space, no salesperson says to me, "What's the purpose of the ad? Is it just general branding or do you want the customer to do something?"
Now, duh.
I confess, there have been times that I've run ads just because my boss said, "Take out an ad in the New York/New Jersey Issue of the Widget Journal." I suppose you could call those branding exercises.
But usually, if I have fought for the money and the management approval for an ad, I want results. I want the phones to ring. I want extra bodies in the pews. At the end of the day I want to be able to prove that the time and money I put into the project had measurable results.
Ad salespeople who ask if I just want to brand must imagine me rolling around in stacks of loose greenbacks like autumn leaves, uncertain what else to do with them.
Thanks for letting me share.
Now, duh.
I confess, there have been times that I've run ads just because my boss said, "Take out an ad in the New York/New Jersey Issue of the Widget Journal." I suppose you could call those branding exercises.
But usually, if I have fought for the money and the management approval for an ad, I want results. I want the phones to ring. I want extra bodies in the pews. At the end of the day I want to be able to prove that the time and money I put into the project had measurable results.
Ad salespeople who ask if I just want to brand must imagine me rolling around in stacks of loose greenbacks like autumn leaves, uncertain what else to do with them.
Thanks for letting me share.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Your Call Is (not that) Important to Us
I rarely 'fess up to the years I spent performing and managing customer service. It seems quotidian compared to my current glamorous marketing duties.
And yet, marketing and customer service are mirror twins. Marketing targets and attracts the customers, then it hands them off to customer service. Customer service has the longer-term job of keeping marketing's promises--and of keeping the customer satisfied.
I read with great interest Your Call Is (not that) Important to Us: Customer Service and What It Reveals about Our World and Our Lives by Emily Yellin. Most of us "get" customer service. We understand how voicemail works, and how companies use customer relationship management (CRM) phone trees to try to keep us away from an actual expensive live operator.
What we don't all know is how those CRM systems work, what the best ones are accomplishing and the unintended consequences of the systems that make it deliberately hard to communicate.
I never thought about the relationship between the corporate toll-free number and longer wait times, but of course it's true that if the company is paying for a WATS line it feels free to keep me on hold--if I were paying for that air time I would revolt or hang up.
As much as companies may wish that I would serve myself by locating the right person through their phone tree or by referring to their website, telephone service is still a valuable outreach to customers who either don't have Internet access, don't read the language, or have a difficulty spanning departments that they can't shove into just one box.
I bookmarked page 84 in the chapter To Send Us Your Firstborn, Please Press or Say "One," glad to learn that I have allies among the experts.
And yet, marketing and customer service are mirror twins. Marketing targets and attracts the customers, then it hands them off to customer service. Customer service has the longer-term job of keeping marketing's promises--and of keeping the customer satisfied.
I read with great interest Your Call Is (not that) Important to Us: Customer Service and What It Reveals about Our World and Our Lives by Emily Yellin. Most of us "get" customer service. We understand how voicemail works, and how companies use customer relationship management (CRM) phone trees to try to keep us away from an actual expensive live operator.
What we don't all know is how those CRM systems work, what the best ones are accomplishing and the unintended consequences of the systems that make it deliberately hard to communicate.
I never thought about the relationship between the corporate toll-free number and longer wait times, but of course it's true that if the company is paying for a WATS line it feels free to keep me on hold--if I were paying for that air time I would revolt or hang up.
As much as companies may wish that I would serve myself by locating the right person through their phone tree or by referring to their website, telephone service is still a valuable outreach to customers who either don't have Internet access, don't read the language, or have a difficulty spanning departments that they can't shove into just one box.
I bookmarked page 84 in the chapter To Send Us Your Firstborn, Please Press or Say "One," glad to learn that I have allies among the experts.
a big pet peeve among top speech technology designers like Springer is the phrase, "Please listen carefully, as soon of our menu options have changed"....He thinks it should be banished from all speech systems, calling it "extremely controlling." And he asks, "Why take up eight seconds to say something so condescending?"
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