Japan’s The Ministry of Foreign Affairs English-language Web Japan is a bottomless trove of in-flight magazine-quality stories like ANTIBACTERIAL EPIDEMIC and J-culture-hyping love-fests like Honoring The World’s Manga Artists.
If American propaganda efforts are this bad, why do foreign governments even bother blocking them?

Posted November 23, 2007 by Casey
Categories: Dispatches, Politics & Controversy, Travel. Tags: foreign affairs, japan, Manga, marketing, propaganda. 3 Comments.

VA Linux founder Larry Augustin on OSS
In Augustin’s view open source development became a necessity in the 1990s when the cost of marketing a program came to exceed the cost of creating it. “My favorite is Salesforce.com. In 1995 they spent under $10 million in R&D and over $100 million in sales and marketing. That [...]

Posted March 15, 2007 by Casey
Categories: Technology. Tags: distribution, F/OSS, free software, GPL, Larry Augustin, marketing, open source, oss. One Comment.

Competitive Intelligence: “a large fuzzy animal may be a bear.”

Marketing: “SAP can help you understand your fuzzy animals. With over 30 years in the fuzzy animal industry, we know if you are looking at a bear, a guy in a coat, or a large dog.”

Communications: “In today’s world of increasing challenges, It’s obvious fuzzy animals are what our customers care about.”

Sales: “Who cares what it is. Let’s kill it and eat it.”

Posted March 24, 2006 by Casey
Categories: Questionable...funny. Pointless., Technology. Tags: animal, communications, competitive intelligence, fuzzy, joke, large, large fuzzy animal, large fuzzy animals, marketing, perspective, sales. 2 Comments.

I have mixed feelings about the value of advertising — it’s worth pointing out that according to John Battelle, Google never ran an ad anywhere prior to going public — but I still enjoy seeing things like this Wyoming Libraries campaign. Jill Stover quotes Wyoming Libraries’ Tina Lackey with the news that “Wyoming’s libraries are as expansive as the state, and as close as down the street.”

I’m just hoping that A, the horse is real; and B, they auction it off. See, I have these silly ideas about doing a cross-country road trip with it.

Posted March 20, 2006 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Questionable...funny. Pointless.. Tags: advertising, buzz, libraries, library, marketing, prairie, promotion, trojan horse, wyoming, wyoming libraries. 2 Comments.

Ken forwarded me this podcast of Robert Cialdini speaking on his Six Weapons of Influence, which he lists as

Reciprocation
Commitment and consistency
Social proof
Authority
Liking
Scarcity

Cialdini’s book is in its fourth edition, and has apparently been adopted as a text for more than a few classes and the concepts have worked their way into everybody’s marketing seminars. Motivation speaker [...]

Posted November 10, 2005 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information. Tags: apparently, authority, commitment and consistency, directed difference, friendly thief, give and take, hobgoblins of the mind, liking, marketing, motivation speaker, patricia fripp, podcast, reciprocation, robert cialdini, rule of the few, scarcity, six weapons of influence, social proof, thief, truths are us, uncomfortable, yakyak. 21 Comments.

Lynne Puckett on the Web4Lib list pointed me to Web Pages That Suck and highlighted this quote from the site:
Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is getting their problems solved. Most people visit a web site to solve one or more of the following three problems.

They want/need information
They want/need [...]

Posted October 26, 2005 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information. Tags: advertising, branding, client needs, customer needs, language, marketing, new marketing, patron needs, web site. 3 Comments.

Matt and I have been talking about online role playing games lately. He’s more than interested in the new challenges they pose to our legal system, the new media opportunities they offer, the ways they’re altering culture. We got into a conversation about how companies are taking advantage of them in marketing campaigns, so I [...]

Posted September 25, 2005 by Casey
Categories: Politics & Controversy, Technology. Tags: campaign, campaigning, election year, embrace, game, gamers, games, gaming, in game, in game campaign, in game compaigning, in game marketing, marketing, mmo, mmorpg, online role playing, online role playing games, political gaming, politics, presidential election, role playing game, role playing games, rpg. 4 Comments.

The Telecrapper 2000 is an improvised, homemade system that identifies telemarketing calls and leads the marketer through an artificial conversation that wastes the company’s time and money. The idea is to drive down productivity, and like so many other productivity sapping things, it can be quite funny. Check this Flash-animated recording: My Hip Hurts (mirror)
Rather [...]

Posted September 16, 2005 by Casey
Categories: Questionable...funny. Pointless., Technology. Tags: anti-productivity, deviantart, flash animated, funny, idea, marketer, marketing, phone, phone call, tc2k, telecrapper 2000, telemarketer, telemarketing calls. Be the first one.

I don’t want to admit to being interested in marketing, but I am. Here’s a few links…
Blogs:

Church of the Customer 
Seth Godin 
Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.com 
Threadwatch.org 

Randomness:

Writing, Briefly 
Google’s search result quality evaluation guidelines 
definition of the Google Economy at Wikipedia 
The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR 

tags: building buzz, internet marketing, marketing, search engine optimization, seo, web marketing, [...]

Posted September 8, 2005 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: building buzz, google economy, googleeconomy, internet marketing, marketing, search engine optimization, seo, web marketing. 2 Comments.

The Speakeasy Speed Test is an okay way to waste some time, but the most amusing thing is how easy they make it to promote them. The Speakeasy badge here looks like any web ad, but they’re not paying for it. All they did was post a link saying Add Speakeasy Speed Test to Your [...]

Posted August 13, 2005 by Casey
Categories: Libraries & Networked Information, Technology. Tags: amusing, google economy, internet marketing, marketing, marketing tip, speakeasy, speakeasy speed test. One Comment.

The news came out last week that the biggest music consumers — the ones throwing down cash for music — are also the biggest music sharers. Alan Wexblat at Copyfight says simply: “those who share, care” (BBC link via TeleRead).
Rather than taking legal action against downloaders, the music industry needs to entice them to use [...]

Posted August 5, 2005 by Casey
Categories: Copyrights & Intellectual Property. Tags: consumers, content, content consumers, content owners, content producers, copyfight, copyright, downloaders, drm, evangelists, fair use, fairuse, lawsuits, legal alternatives, marketing, music, music consumers, music industry, music marketing, music sharing, owners, producers, share, sharing. 7 Comments.