Polymer Studios::Web Consulting

SM 4 B2B

30. October 2008

Hey folks, this is a query for ideas. I just had lunch with a friend who is a marketing exec at a major bank. Not on the retail side, which sells checking accounts and car loans, but on the institutional side, which sells things like investment management and multi-million-dollar financing packages to big corporations. They [...]

Ethics of corporate commenting

23. October 2008

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How not to handle complaints about your company… Over at myRagan.com, an online community for corporate communicators, lisam recently posted: Coworkers regularly make me aware of blogs and online media sites that either include negative commentary about our company’s products, or mention all of our competitors but not us. My coworkers ask me, “Can we have someone [...]

Killer interactive demos: less features, more context

19. October 2008

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Interactive demos are a great way to give your customers and prospects a good idea of what your product is and how it can benefit them. Demos are usually associated with demonstrating features of software or consumer products. And they’re just as effective for selling complex services or conceptual ideas. Demonstrate how your product solves the [...]

ROI of blogging

10. October 2008

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Better late than never! I just got wind of a old (Jan. 25, 2007) report by Forrester that takes on a real sticky wicket: calculating the ROI of running a corporate blog. I’ve ranted on more than one occasion that marketers should use social media, including blogs, as an R&D tool and not to expect a [...]

Recession-proof marketing – Part I

7. October 2008

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All this talk of economic downturn has gotten me thinking. Are we in for a repeat of the ugly years of ‘02 and ‘03? I don’t think so. If you recall, during the last downturn, companies froze in their tracks and virtually halted all marketing activities. Advertising plummeted. So did investments in marketing infrastructure. It was a [...]

Market recovery

6. October 2008

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At the exquisite Thai food blog of photographer Austin Bush, I found this video of the Samut Songkhram market, which is set up over the town’s railroad tracks! Watch how the vendors quickly get back to business after the train passes. Could this be a lesson on how to cope with disruptions in business? See the [...]

An amazingly right technology for the times

5. October 2008

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Yet more from the latest Minnov8 podcast… Graeme Thickens (start at 23:40) reacts to the suggestion that as companies tighten their belts and start questioning costs, social media will be put on the chopping block: “Social Media doesn’t cost a lot of money. It takes participation by an individual or more than one individual within a company, [...]

UnSummit reviewed on Minnov8 podcast

5. October 2008

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Woo hoo! This week at the Minnov8 podcast, Steve Borsch, Tim Elliott, Graeme Thickins and Phil Wilson review both the MIMA Summit and the UnSummit. As some of you know, Phil led the “Social Media Reality Check” session at UnSummit and later blogged about the experience. Graeme attended the MIMA Summit and blogged about it [...]

Touching the third rail of business

5. October 2008

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When I was a grade schooler, my dad was in sales. I don’t know if he was any good, but he had some immutable rules about business that he would share with me, the most important of which was “Don’t ever mix religion or politics with business.” This election season, however, I’m amazed how many professionals, [...]

Electoral College Prediction Tracker

2. October 2008

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This is a great little info viz widget. Width of columns corresponds to number of votes each state has. Rows correspond to the predictions of various media outlets. Even Fox News shows Obama ahead. Strange, NYT shows McCain ahead by quite a bit. (Sorry the width of the widget doesn’t fit on our blog). This is [...]