PubCon South Commences

by Elmer Boutin Marketing

PubCon South starts today in Austin.

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Check Those Shipping Addresses

by Elmer Boutin General Marketing

Something I’ve noticed quite a bit lately is companies trying to ship stuff to me via UPS when I’ve given them my post office box as the ship-to address. As most of you know, this doesn’t really work very well. I first noticed this last year. I would go to pick up one of my boys at their mom’s house to take them to dinner and they would present me with a package; generally something I didn’t expect. It’s not that the package wasn’t welcome, just that it was something I didn’t order. When I checked the address label, it showed the items had been shipped via UPS to my P.O. box and ended up at the home of my ex-wife.

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Spam, Spam Everywhere And Not A Can to Eat

by Elmer Boutin Marketing

Josh Bernoff has been on a sort of rant against spam lately over on the Empowered blog. I guess “rant” isn’t quite the right word, though. While he’s certainly complaining about it, he’s also done a bit of analysis showing just how much crap he gets and breaks it down by type and even calls some companies out about their poor email habits.

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Give It Away, It’ll Come Back

by Elmer Boutin General Marketing

There are many marketing experts out there recommending you give stuff away in order to attract paying customers. Whether it’s knowledge, product, “stuff,” or whatever, the idea behind it is not only to offer samples but to build up your brand’s good karma. The idea is, if you give good things, good things will return to you. You shouldn’t “give to get” because greed and selfishness doesn’t work in this. It needs to be more of a culture of just being helpful. Here’s an example of what I mean …

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Help Me Find My Mechanic! – Part 2

by Elmer Boutin Marketing

Quite a while ago, I told a story of my frustrating attempt to find the phone number for my mechanic’s shop online. A few weeks ago I happened to mention to him that I was involved with web marketing and would be happy to answer any questions he might have about web marketing. As it turns out, he was well aware of lack of online visibility and had a lot of questions.

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Leading Beyond Limitations

by Elmer Boutin Leadership

I was assigned to a unit in Germany leading a team of 6. I was enjoyed my work and things were going along rather nicely. Then I got “the call.” It was almost 7:00 PM and the Company Commander was on the line. The conversation went something like this …

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Let’s Have Some Realistic Twitter Expectations

by Elmer Boutin Marketing

A friend in the public relations business forwarded a link to an article on CNN Money. It’s a Fortune piece entitled “Can I Help You? On Twitter the answer is no” by Anne VanderMey. In the article, VanderMey describes how her and her colleagues set up customer service problems with 8 different companies and tried to solve them via Twitter, the companies’ web sites and their phone customer service.

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PR Done Canadian Style

by Elmer Boutin General Marketing

Living in Germany during the late ’80s was great. I found myself in Augsburg, a beautiful city rich with history dating back to the Roman Empire. For the most part, we and the locals got along quite nicely. But there were always the exceptions.

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Calling All Marketing Technologists

by Elmer Boutin In-House

Last week I did a quick poll in preparation for my presentation at PubCon South next month. I asked IT folks what they wished their marketing colleagues better understood so they (the IT people) could better help them.

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Authors & Publishers: Make It Easy On Us

by Elmer Boutin Marketing

Reviews are a staple of the book industry. Just like in any marketing, good reviews from trusted sources will influence purchase decisions. Book reviews are not the staple of my work here. I feel it’s important to share knowledge, so if I read a good book I want to let you know about it. I have done enough of them to know what I want from authors and publishers. In short: make it easy for me to help you promote your book.

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