Internet Entrepreneurs Blog

In version 1.0 of my blog, I spent some time planning out blog topics and even wrote a number of entries ahead of time, assembly line style.  This let me knock out 4 or 5 posts in a single 1-2 hour sitting so I could just release each post every couple days to keep an even output.  In the end, though, this just wasn’t sustainable.

I still feel like planning blog topics is important, especially since I often get ideas for topics precisely at the times when I’m farthest away from my computer (at church, on the trails, driving, etc.).  However, I noticed that I was forgetting to write about interesting things that were happening in real time.  For example, it would have been helpful if I had written about my research and thoughts about the Chipotle IPO in the weeks leading up to my investment rather than trying to recreate the whole story two weeks after the fact as I did yesterday.  I’m also kicking myself for not writing summaries of my MBA courses as I completed each class for my own records as well as for this blog.

My advice to new bloggers is to find a nice balance between pre-planning entries and posting news as it happens.  Planning gives you the benefit of coherent, relevant posts while keeping topics current ensures interesting, accurate content.  How do “professional” bloggers do it?

I just switched my blog over to Word Press from BBlog and I feel like a new blogger. My posts had dropped off under BBlog to around 1 a month and I thought this was just the way things were after blogging for a few months. Then Paul got Word Press and it looked pretty sweet so I tried it. Man, it’s amazing.

Word Press is easily the best and most useful (free) software ever to be written in the PHP language. Not only does the coding seem to be solid but the web design is impeccable. Lots of PHP software I’ve tried has too many features that seem to be crammed in to satisfy as many users as possible making the software a pain in the ass to use. Not only that but all those features often make the software less flexible and constantly buggy. Word Press is none of these.

I certainly don’t want to poo poo BBlog because it is great software and I know the writers worked hard to create it. But with Word Press available for free, it really doesn’t make sense to even bother with any other blogging tool.

Yesterday I attended the first annual Duke MBA Marketing Conference at the Fuqua School of Business and I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of the event. All the sessions were entirely relevant to what I’m working on now with Messenger, TripleBlaze, and Safarium. Here are my notes (I planned on typing them up anyway, why not post them on the blog as well?).

Lenovo
- Using blogs to gauge brand impressions on certain brand attributes (positive/negative/neutral)
- Media spend is divided among these steps to loyalty:

• Ad awareness
• Consideration
• Preference
• Lead generation
• Conversion
• Loyalty

- Leveraging partnerships with global brands; partnership with Google helps Lenovo to be seen as innovative, cool, etc.
- Go after your fan base and they can talk for your brand (influencers)
— Bloggers are influencers

Ford Fusion
Mockumentary on Hurra Torpedo
Lots of interesting web and TV advertising.

Long Term Brand Equity
- Price elasticity on sales is approximately 15X advertising elasticity
— This means discounts have a much larger effect on sales than ads
- Advertising is a form of promotion
- Brand managers are increasingly short term focused at the expense of the brand
— Data is increasingly thinly sliced (up-to-the-minute sales numbers, etc.) leading to a short term focus
- People have become more price sensitive over time (decades)
- Average long term effects offset short term effects by about 40%
- Advertising and discounting have largest effect on long term (baseline) sales
- Price premium: distribution and product have greatest role
- Wide availability helps price premium: form of advertising, signals value
— “With such wide distribution, it must be good”
- Discounting can be good for new products to induce trial

ING Direct
- Memory = saliency (relevance) X frequency
- ING has no physical locations (beyond cafes)
- Bringing groups together makes online biz more personal
— Free outdoor film screenings
— Free commute, events, etc. [reinforces “save your money” message]
— Show up to a movie, it’s paid for by ING! People tell friends, surprise
- Credit card companies push credit irresponsibly, ING promotes savings
- Good service is good for repeat business but is not usually enough for exponential word of mouth growth
- Don’t advertise the surprise

Tremor (P&G subsidiary)
- Focus on “connector” consumers rather than innovators
— Connectors have social networks 5 to 6 X larger than normal folks
— Connectors actively seek new news, love to talk, highly influential
— Inqusitiveness, connectedness, persuasiveness
— Prime prosepect is female HS sophomore or junior
— Trend spreaders, not trend setters
— Motivated by sharing
— Typical teen has 25 people on his/her buddy list; connector has 150!
- Slightly less than 1% of connectors can affect change on national scale

• There is a message the consumer wants to HEAR
• There is a message the consumer wants to SHARE
• These two messages are ALWAYS different

- Advocacy plus amplification
- Buzz (viral) marketing - not the same as word of mouth (WOM) advocacy (amplification without advocacy; ex: subsurviant chicken)
- Connector brand enthusiasts are best salespeople
- Advocacy does not occur online but in 1 to 1 conversations; exceptions: consumer electronics, travel
- Connectors are 70% female
- Marketers must remember they are not the average consumer
- Dawn connector marketing: making chores around the house easier by having kids help
— Make it easy for the consumer to talk about the brand
- Identify who your target customer listens to
- Create a database of your enthusiasts
- What is uniquely talkable about your brand?
- What is the consumer insight that is driving your brand?
- What triggers are you providing to allow talk about your brand to occur naturally?
- Product design can lead to talkable moments: iPod “wheel”
- Qualitative feedback yields insight
- WOM window is 1-2 weeks before launch then periodically

Since most people using hosting services don’t have access to their web server configuration files there isn’t an obvious solution to making urls like info.php?id=14 more search engine friendly. I even recently read on the google sitemap info page that not only does Google dislike dynamic urls like the one above but that google SPECIFICALLY doesn’t like pages that have an id argument with a number. It appears google would prefer a URL like info.php?state=14 to the URL above.

This really annoys me, especially since this is the most logical way to handle large information based websites since most of the data is stored in a database. I’ve already mentioned my trick of converting numbers to letters and I have had success with this method. Here’s my latest trick and you can use this one in combination with the previous trick if you like.

Using PHP’s GLOBAL variables you can keep track of any text tacked onto the end of a url. This allows you to change your info.php?id=14 URL into info.php/14 by using the following code:

You can place as many modifiers on the end of the URL, just separate each one with a slash then use the split function to get each of your variables. I think the Wikimedia Wiki also uses this method so it appears to be legit. Good luck!