Polymer Studios::Web Consulting

Get a clue…again

3. November 2008

I read the Cluetrain Manifesto when it first came out around 2000. It was eye-opening and inspiring at the time, and there was plenty of buzz around the main concept that markets are conversations and businesses need to get involved. I haven’t read it since and recently just ran across the Web site (via Jeremiah [...]

SM 4 B2B

30. October 2008

7 Comments

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

1 Comment

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 [...]

ROI of blogging

10. October 2008

0 Comments

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 [...]

An amazingly right technology for the times

5. October 2008

1 Comment

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, [...]

Unreflections on UnSummit08

2. October 2008

3 Comments

Before my memory begins to fail, I wanted to offer some observations about yesterday’s UnSummit08 conference. For those of you who were out of the loop, UnSummit was an impromptu conference that a few of us put together when we heard that the Summit conference, put on by the Minnesota Interactive Marketing Association (MIMA), was [...]

Marketing heresies

30. September 2008

3 Comments

In preparation for a discussion called “Marketing Heresies,” which I’m instigating at tomorrow’s UnSummit “unconference,” I’ve tried to jot down a few statements that I hope will spark some discussion. I’m sure I’ll be shouted down on some of these and taken to task on others for lack of evidence, but hey, heresies are beliefs [...]

A massive, subprime bailout of links

24. September 2008

0 Comments

Oh my, has it been a week since we last talked? If we follow each other on Twitter, then it’s probably been more like a few minutes, as that’s where I’ve been spending/wasting my time. Which brings us to the first in this cavalcade of content: Graeme Thickins, of DoApp and Tech~Surf~Blog fame, ponders whether using [...]

Announcing UnSummit08

17. September 2008

9 Comments

Whatcha doing on Oct. 1? Did you clear the day for the MIMA Summit but didn’t get your tix in time? Or are you looking for a different kind of Summit? Announcing UnSummit08, a conference for the rest of us. The disenfranchised. The disgruntled. And those of us who simply failed to register on time What’s the [...]