Chris Anderson brings a fantastic point of view on how video is raising the bar on knowledge daily. He presents something in opposition to the theories linking short video clips to attention deficit disorder and similar side effects.
The video is 18:53 and completely worth the watch. Makes you happy to be in the media, datacenter and computing industry.
I’ve been communing much lately with fellow entrepreneurs and it seems that we have similar challenges in the marketplace.
Here are some of the things we realized:
- We run focused firms, customer focused and highly ethical.
- We’re established yet have small marketing budgets.
- We lack the man power to fully pull off SEO or any technical aspects of SEO and Ad-word management.
- We are slammed like other entrepreneurs with sales, operations, finance and legal issues.
So as a way to vet my feelings, I decided I would share how our marketing operations run here at ColoAdvisor. This is certainly not “by the book” or even efficient but we run a (small) tight ship here. This article is very specific to our marketing efforts and not our technical expertise or other operational aspects.
Blogs – Done by anyone at the firm, the majority of the blogs are directly related to our industry but we post non-datacenter blogs which we file under musings. (Like this post!) Anything added to the blog automatically generates a tweet, linkedin and facebook entry courtesy of Hootsuite. Some use the WordPress web panel to publish work but I personally love Marsedit as I can work off line and see what the article looks like before I publish.
Twitter – Anyone in the firm can more or less tweet, but generally this is maintained by one person setup with a second monitor running Hootsuite to track our tweets and our network (especially for direct replies or mentions). Additionally, we utilize the Hootlet from Hootsuite to tweet about interesting things we run across. We track many industry blogs but also use Alltop to find good articles to repost.
Facebook – Also done by our “marketing guy” our Hootsuite pushes our comments to the Facebook page, Twitter and Linkedin. We haven’t developed the potential of Facebook yet but I’m of the opinion that for the consumer markets they are a force. We sell mainly to businesses so we haven’t fully developed our FB strategy.
Email marketing – This function is really handled by our sales team and not marketing. We utilize a 3rd party that attaches to our CRM implementation of Highrise. For small personal emailings our sales team uses a great piece of software called Directmail for Mac. Actually, unless web-based everyone here is on a Mac.
SEO – General Work. Currently outsourced to a firm that handles 12 keywords that we want to be highly ranked on. Our marketing person handles an additional 40 phrases that we do in house utilizing a variety of practices:
SEO – Message clarity – We check all meta data and descriptions on our website to ensure our message is very clear and understandable in 1 sentence. W
SEO – Website – We are never quite happy with the website and tweak the language and the look constantly. We are currently working on a large revision that it makes it easy for client to use our service and get the process started automatically. Language, flow and keyword use are things we consider daily. As an FYI we had the site completely built in WordPress which limits our design freedom a bit but we feel it’s one of the best decisions we’ve ever made.
SEO – Backlinking – We are always looking to have our site listed in directories, forums and resources for folks looking for colocation, hosting and cloud computing.
SEO – Press releases – We’ll push the occasional press release at about $80 a pop. This helps our SEO quite a bit and gets us some recognition but has never yielded us any direct sales. Not a real big fan of press releases unless looking at it from an SEO perspective.
SEO – Media – This is the term we use for any multi-media stuff. For instance we have a video that outlines how we work. Youtube, Vimeo, Slideshare are some of the platforms we use in this regard.
SEO – PR – This is where we reach out to industry insiders, luminaries, trade magazines and try to offer value through writing articles, providing interviews or giving our opinion on the cloud, colocation or hosting community. We love to present to large audiences and be interviewed by publications when applicable.
SEO – other social networking – we are always exploring new avenues to get the word out. We haven’t gotten deep outside of Twitter, Facebook, our Blog and Youtube but we’d like to. Buzz, FourSquare and other avenues we just haven’t been able to tap yet.
Pay Per Click Advertising – We are still wading through this, we have a minimal budget that we commit every month. Ideally, we’ll get this developed soon and see how things pan out.
We’ve answered some LinkedIn questions for folks about business operations, colocation, hosting and all things cloud computing.
Recently, we wanted to find an easy to use online database that we can use for our growing index. We sent out a LinkedIn question and got great answers. Even those who had an interest in our business presented their product plainly without any “pitch”. Well done LinkedIn, must be your use of Mac computers in the office that results in such creativity. 
I was just thinking and no offense to anyone out there that maybe doing this BUT; if your email signature lacks a fax number- I won’t cry.
I had a garage sale about 2 years ago where I sold my old Canon fax machine that would normally cram all 5 sheets of my fax together no matter how well I fed the stack into the machine.
I’ve been a long time user of Textexpander from SmileOnMyMac. Heard about it initially on the Mac Geek Gab and purchased it. I was quite happy with version 2.0 until I saw a brief video by Merlin Mann on his use of Textexpander 3.0. Of course couldn’t help myself. Running it demo mode right now, knowing full well that I’ll push the Paypal button any moment to purchase.
Pay particular attention to the time stamp and the form fill in functions. They help a lot when doing marketing operations.
TextExpander 3 Fills from Merlin Mann on Vimeo.
I’ve been around a ton of people in my life that will say things like, “oh yeah, I had the idea for (insert amazing site here), but just didn’t have the chance to follow up on it.” David Heinemeier Hansson speaks at FOWA about the importance of the execution of an idea and not just merely the idea itself.
If you’ve read Google’s story or similar startup stories you’ll find the resistance these entrepreneurs faced was fierce. Check out the talk, really good – not safe for work due to language. (The audio isn’t good for the 1st minute but gets much better after that)
David Heinemeier Hansson – FOWA Dublin 2009 from Carsonified on Vimeo.
When work becomes overwhelming the natural response for a geek is to examine the tools that he uses. Several years back when I was a Sales Engineer and overloaded with work, I took the advice of a good friend and picked up David Allen’s Getting Things Done book which really saved me. His methodology is practical and easy to follow.
The gist of the methodology is the following:
- Empty out all the mental baggage by cleaning up your office
- Kill off all “inboxes” except for one. (physical ones)
- Learning to properly process email with a distinct process for each type of email that you receive (delegate, file, delete, or add to project list) more on this here.
- Any “to do” that you have containing more than 1 step is really a project.
- Tasks have contexts, for instance, you cannot call folks at 11pm at night so no need to look at your “return calls” task list at that time
- It’s pointless to look at to-do items that cannot be done due to a dependency – an example right out of David’s book:
You want to clean the garage; You add “clean garage” to your to-do list. You go out to the garage Saturday morning to clean said garage but you have 3/4 of the garage filled with stuff that you wanted to have picked up for donation. So you go back inside without cleaning the garage because the true first step of this type of project wasn’t “clean the garage” but it was “call donation place and schedule pickup”.
I was able to really get my life back on track but as I started to get productive I’d read a blog post by someone who used a different tool to track their projects. I’d get curious, download the new software, move my to-do’s over and try it for a couple of hours. Meanwhile I started to fall behind in my work and second guess my setup which was working just fine. Doing the research, downloading and reading about other GTD project organizers is something that I heard referred to as Productivity pr0n by Merlin Mann. Both he and I will readily admit to being addicted to this powerful vice.
This addiction is quite amazing, you’ll keep reading about better ways to implement GTD. You’ll follow blogs all over the internet and participate in forum discussions about why a notebook with a leather cover is more conducive to productivity than synthetic notebook covers. Here are a few articles of paraphernalia related to GTD.
I eventually snapped out of it but would get sucked back in during job changes (going from Windows to Mac or vice versa) but really cured myself of this vice when I read an Article by Merlin Mann called Better. (Thanks Merlin) So if you decide to implement GTD I highly recommend it, just don’t turn into a productivity junky like I did for so long.
Epilogue:
In the end, I chose an application called OmniFocus which is quite amazing and syncs with my iPhone using a companion application. But the road to get there was fraught with download after download of various software, purchasing varying notebooks, buying notecards, and doing all sorts of crazy things that distracted me from my true goal of getting work done. I had initially planned to outline the various applications that I tried but realized what a herculean task that would be.
Really interesting talk by Nathan Myhrvold. It takes him a bit to get into the subject on how technology is being used to fight Malaria but worth the wait. Various pieces of technology are introduced including the preservation of the vaccines without refrigeration and the computer modeling of Malaria spreading across Madagascar using a 1000 core super computing cluster. Video time is 15:12.
Direct link is here.
Here at ColoAdvisor we all take on various tasks to keep things running. In the course of the day we login into many systems including: CRM, Mail Campaign Management, Analytics, YouTube, WebMaster Tools (Google, Bing, Yahoo and others), WordPress Control Panel, Linkedin, Our VOIP provider, Corporate Checking, Corporate Credit Card, Facebook, Twitter and I’m sure I’ve missed a few.
There are 2 approaches to password management that I see from friends:
1. Use the same password everywhere (Bad Idea!)
2. Use the same password but add the 1st 4 letters of the url that you are visiting. For example:
googMYPASSWORD
yahoMYPASSWORD
amazMYPASSWORD
linkMYPASSWORD
This method is much better provided the ‘mypassword’ is somewhat complex and not something that can be susceptible to a dictionary crack.
I really didn’t like any of these methods so I ended up purchasing a program called 1Password which basically manages all my passwords. The program is amazing can only be explained by a brief demonstration. I was going to record my own demonstration, but found many online that were well done. Check it out below…
Directlink: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh-wUknEPhY&feature=related
To learn more about our services give us the bare minimum details and we’ll get right back to you.
340 East Northfield Rd, Suite 2A, Livingston NJ 07039
Tel. 703-665-1000
E-mail: info@coloadvisor.com
