On her blog, Cre­at­ing Pas­sion­ate Users, Kathy Sierra bril­liantly com­pares full color com­pany brochures with bor­ing, black & white user man­u­als to illus­trate the need for plac­ing greater mar­ket­ing focus on the exist­ing cus­tomer. For what­ever rea­son acqui­si­tion seems to trump reten­tion. Quan­tity trumps qual­ity. Imme­di­ate return trumps long term growth. Per­haps this is because …read more

Remem­ber that line from the Bea­t­les song “If you want it, here it is, come and get it.“  Well that pretty much sums up a won­der­ful web­site I recently dis­cov­ered called Freecycle.org.  I heard about the site last Fri­day while lis­ten­ing to All Things Con­sid­ered on WYSO.  Freecy­cle allows you to give unwanted items to …read more

Yes­ter­day my wife’s car sur­pris­ingly got a flat tire. It had been parked in the garage for a few days, seem­ingly fine, but must have been slowly leak­ing.  She called me after she dis­cov­ered it yes­ter­day after­noon, so I came home from work a lit­tle early to get it repaired. I jacked up the car, …read more

Want to learn about the future of prod­uct mar­ket­ing? Check out www.MyHeinz.com. Heinz is offer­ing per­son­al­ized labels for their ketchup bot­tles. While the price is a lit­tle steep, (6 bucks a bot­tle) it is a bril­liant idea.  Why would some­one want this? Why not? As some­one who has worked in a restau­rant, I can tell …read more

About a month ago I drove past this sign. It was in the front yard of a home that was for sale (It may still be, I don’t know). The home sits at a very busy inter­sec­tion — the cross­roads of two state routes adja­cent to the inter­state and across from a shop­ping cen­ter. A …read more

Look­ing for inspi­ra­tion?  Seek­ing new ideas?  Hate to spend money?  Check out ChangeThis.com  Once a month ChangeThis pub­lishes a hand­ful of insight­ful “man­i­festos” which can be down­loaded as PDF files for free.   Some man­i­festos are writ­ten by well estab­lished authors while oth­ers are penned by aspir­ing new­com­ers.  For exam­ple this month’s issue fea­tures a …read more

Now I am sure that every­one read­ing this post would never have a prob­lem with a web page they want to view at work being blocked.  I real­ize that you are all prob­a­bly far too busy fill­ing out reports, max­i­miz­ing rev­enue, and cre­at­ing value for the share­hold­ers, but on the off chance that you have …read more

Writely is awe­some. There are so many great things that are built right into it that can save you time, reduce your headaches, and increase your pro­duc­tiv­ity. Here are 6 things that imme­di­ately caught my atten­tion. 1. Hello GDdrive: A few weeks ago I wrote about the poten­tial release of Gdrive, an online stor­age ser­vice …read more

Check out this site for your invi­ta­tion to join Writely, Google’s free, web based word pro­cess­ing tool. Writely appears to have all the basic func­tion­al­ity of Word, and also allows you to upload doc­u­ments to the web, share them with oth­ers, and post them on the net — either pri­vately or pub­li­cally. I can’t wait …read more