Don’t drink and drive farm machinery

NPR: Drunk German Demonstrates How Not To Get Home

Posted via email from Jame is posturing

Easy ways to make your office more green

Everyone is trying to go green.  Here a few easy ways your business more green.
1.  Minimize the number of individual printers on employees desks.  It is amazing how much less people print when they need to walk further.  ;)
2.  Convert to digital paystubs, if you haven’t already.  I imagine many employees review, scan, shred.  This cuts out lots of steps for your employees and you HR team.  And Adobe Acrobat or similar PDF creation tool is cheaper than the time you spend on postage/stuffing envelopes.
3.  Get you employees mugs and water bottles.  You probably have company swag.  And these 2 are popular ones.  Give on to each employee and lead by example: use it for you water cooler, tea and coffee.  Sure you have to wash a few more dishes, but you’ll have less trash.
4.  Ditch the bottled water for a cooler of better yet filtered tap.  Either way you’ll use less plastic and decrease transport costs.

I thinks these are a few easy and low cost ways.  Chime in if you have ideas.

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#Palmpre: Crackberry for the rest of us?

Raise your hand if you know a blackberry user.  Keep them raised if the use it for personal stuff.  

Keep them raised if the personal > work.

I’m sure if we were in a room of 100 people the number of hands left in the air would be less than 20.

Blackberries are the consumate work phone.  To get your mail your company needs a special server.  Cell phone carriers tack on the $30/month Blackberry surcharge, which frankly, even for the biggest Facebook addicts, isn’t worth it unless someone else foots the bill,

In contrast the iphone is the consumate “play” phone.  Games, music, and movies are a breeze.  Work? Steadily improving.

If you recall, when Palm launched the Centro, it was called the “life” phone for work and home.  But it lacked the work streed cred of the Blackberry and the cool factor of the iphone.  It sold a lot, but didn’t convert many existing smartphone users.

The Pre aims to change this by getting some work friendly features, and some play friendly ones.  Let’s call it the crackberry for people looking for balance.

With that goal, Palm could be on to something.  And the idea behind Synergy and WebOS support this notion.

Here’s to balance for work and play.

(BTW I wrote this on my Pre)

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Blogging with #palmpre

One of the things I’d like to do with my phone is fire off quick blog posts when I’m out or I have a brainstorm.  The Pre looks like it can help with this.

This wasn’t really possible from my Centro and was way too much work with a virtual ipod touch keyboard.  Ok well maybe it was on the Centro, but I’d didn’t spend much time on apps other than transit schedules, text to twitter, light web browsing and light email.

Anyway I have been using posterous [www.posterous.com] a little over the past few months as a psuedo personal blog.  I like the email to post everywhere: twitter, facebook, friendfeed, blog.  Great for pic updates to twitter from basically any phone.

So now I am giving posterous my endorsement for blogging from you Pre.  Your Pre is an email machine.  In fact I just found this.  And posterous is the blog for emailers.

So start blogging and post everything everywhere you are online.  

If you are looking for me:
http://jameane.wordpress.com
http://jameane.posterous.com

P.S second posterous from my Pre, first press from the Pre.

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Even though I didn’t win the contest…

So I have been pretty excited about the Palm Pre since CES.
1. It has a keyboard
2. It is on Sprint, my carrier
3. Synergy sounded awesome
4. Multitasking or Synergy. A toss up.

So after sitting on the wait list for 2 weeks, I finally got one. Look for tweets and posts as I get adjusted. Changing from a Palm Centro and an iPod touch too a Pre.

So far: notifications are awesome. Quite possibly my favorite feature. Email, twitter and web are great! Multitasking and card are also pretty killer.
Not so great: the USB slot cover, the difficult to use cursor for preciseness. Here is where a stylus would come in handy.
Haven’t tried: cut and paste.

Transitioning. Hence the absence.

Transitions.

Lots of new stuff going on.

Some of you know…I started a new job.  In a completely new role.  You know I am interested in marketing automation (hence the page) and marketing 2.0/sales 2.0.I have moved from my role as a marketing person to a consultant helping implement marketing tools and CRM. So you just might see a few more techie posts and some more info on best practices and how to choose wisely. Stay tuned.  As things get a bit more settled, I’ll be posting on more on software, vendors and more.

The new company:  Echo Lane, SaaS consultants.

Organization design: functional or phase based departments?

So I was pondering the other day about how organizations are sectioned off.  Most organizations are  grouped by department: sales, marketing, finance, engineering, and operations.  This is convenient for the organizations, less so for the customer.   As social media emerges as a primary vehicle for communications: for marketing, sales and customer service, organizations are struggling to build a communications group, for all stages of the customer lifecycle.

Some companies assign a team to a customer.  So they’ll interface with one account manager, one service person and so on throughout their relationship with the organization.  This is a great customer friendly model, but for smaller organizations, it is pretty impossible to implement while you have limited resources.

For most organizations, the primary goal is to find customers, engage them and keep them as long as possible.  Why aren’t our organizations structured around these phases of the customer relationship?  What if instead we organized our business around stages in the customer lifecycle.  Some roles would have more representation in one stage or another, but the metrics for the organization would be based on performance in the stage?

Here’s a basic lifecycle:

lifecycle

Identification:  finding new prospects, potential customers. Nurturing them until they are ready to progress the relationship with a purchasing cycle.  In this “department” staff would be weighted around communicators.  In a tech company this would include conventional marketing and communications people.  Perhaps pre-sales technical resources.  A market researcher. And a lead qualification team.  The market researcher would pass feedback to the product development team on what prospective customers are looking for.  This team would be graded on the number of prospects they find, and perhaps brand awareness.  This team would be focused on though leadership and making the brand feel “warm and fuzzy.” A key metric would be related to conversion rates between this stage to Acquisition. They’d also focus on understanding the market and the target customer.

What’s PR 2.0 anyway?

So I’ve spent a bit of time over the past couple of months thinking about PR and social media.  It is interesting because suddenly a lot of people are controlling or impacting your message (as a business).  Intentionally or not.  And this time around everyone contributes.  Positively and negatively.  My thoughts?  PR agencies, in the traditional sense should serve as facilitators, participators and filters for the new flood of info.

We discussed this very issue in my marketing training with @jessica_misspr and @shonalnarayan after recapping some of the commentary on the PR 2.0 chat,  so I thought it was a good time to get some feedback on a presentation I’ve been experimenting with.  90% of the experimenting was around being more visual, but I had a brainstorm and outlined this idea.  Comment away, it’s on slideshare (check the notes too).

Are you really getting spammed, or is it something else

One of the things I notice about email list management is that people leave mixed messages.  I don’t know if this has happened to you, but you find a few people visit the unsubscribe page, and never complete the action.  Is the page confusing, or did they get sidetracked.  Another common one is to get a heated message from someone looking to unsubscribe.  The problem is when you check the database for the email address there is no such record.  So there is no easy way to remedy the problem.  Typically we try to approach them by asking for old email addresses.  Raise your hand if you have an old address that forwards to your current one?

That usually solved the problem, if they remember, because at some point their domain name or address format changed, and of course the email senders have an old version, and are unable to locate the record with the reply-to address.

So the message here?  Don’t think that the senders of your email newsletter (white paper promotion, etc) are actually trying to continue mailing you when you are no longer interested in the content.  It might be as simple as a period or a hyphen in your email address.

What have you noticed about email subscriber management?  Interested in more on email, check out a few other posts on email communications.

Try it: Twitter’s not just for trendy techies (and celebs)

So I wanted to call this post “to tweet ot not to tweet,” but that is clearly played out.

After being a pretty avid user for the past 6 months or so, I thought it was time to save some observations and tips.  I first joined Twitter to update my Facebook status without using a data plan from my cell phone.  (Yup, I’m cheap.)

Here are some upfront notes:  my tips are aimed at people who are using twitter for b2b marketing, market research, networking or personal branding the tips might not apply to you if you have different goals and objectives.

Let’s get started.  Here are my tips on using twitter effectively:

Choose your name wisely. With your online identity you have a couple of choices.  Use your real name, use your nickname, use your hacker name, or be random.  If you are trying to brand yourself, I’d stick to something that is a lot closer to your name and a lot further from Britneys1stfan.  But don’t forget that in Twitter characters count.  So if you have a 20 letter last name, please don’t follow the first_last format.  Considering that every reply or direct message much include your username, you don’t want to eat up 40 characters on the name alone.  Try to stick with something in the neighborhood of 20 characters or less.

Follow your interests, not the crowd.  There are zillions of “best people to follow on Twitter lists.”  They usually include celebrities:  tech, pop culture or business.  These lists are irrelevant if those people don’t discuss stuff you care about.  Seek out people that discuss the topics you are interested in.  Use Twitter search to look for conversations using keywords you are interested in.  Look at your favorite blogs, magazines, newspapers, organizations, and people to see if they are on Twitter.  That’s who you should follow — not the 100K+ follower-club members because they are on the list.