Graeme Thickins on Tech

Reflections & analysis about innovation, technology, startups, investing, healthcare, and more .... with a focus on Minnesota, Land of 10,000 Lakes. Blogging continuously since 2005.

Tag: GT&A Strategic Marketing (Page 1 of 2)

Upcoming Event to Focus on the ROI of Digital Marketing

April 12, 2009 / / 0 Comments

A Twin Cities event for senior executives and marketing professionals has been announced by long-standing Minneapolis web marketing firm Ciceron.  Entitled Radical ROI: Seizing the Potential of the Digital Marketplace, the half-day panel will be held Monday, May 11, 2009, from 8:00 to 11:00 am at the Midland Hills Country Club in St. Paul.

RadicalROIForum-051109


The event offers attendees a chance to hear how a panel of local business leaders have transformed their organizations to thrive in the digital marketplace — and I am privileged to be one of those panelists:

• Paul Douglas: CEO, Weather Nation (and former chief meteorologist, WCCO TV)

• Jan McDaniel: CEO, JTM Vision (and former CEO, American Red Cross Twin Cities)

• Phil Hotchkiss: Founder, BigCharts.com

• Joel Kramer: Founder, MinnPost.com (and former Publisher, Minneapolis Star-Tribune)

• Graeme Thickins: Founder, GT&A Strategic Marketing

• Andrew Eklund: CEO, Ciceron Digital Marketing

A special reduced rate of $195 per person is available till May 3 at this registration page, with a group rate of only $395 for up to five people from the same organization.

Ciceron is a web marketing and consulting agency based in
Minneapolis. It offers full-service solutions from
professional search engine optimization and email marketing programs to
in-depth metrics and performance tracking.  Its clients have included such major brands as Home Depot, Nascar, USBank, Andersen Windows, Best Buy, Target, and Pepsi.  For more about Cicero, check out their about page, their full client list, and here are their management bios.

I hope to see you at "Radical ROI: Seizing the Potential of the Digital Marketplace" on May 11. Again, use this registration page before May 3 to get those preferential rates.

Subscribe to My ‘Blidget’

February 18, 2007 / / 2 Comments

Actually, I’d rather you subscribe to my RSS feed. But, what the heck, subscribe to this, too! Just click on the blue bar near the top of my sidebar to the right. It lets you add a widget of my blog headlines to your own blog or web site, courtesy of Widgetbox. Blidgetgraphic I saw this company debut at DEMO last year. They thought widgets were gonna be big….and they were right! The company’s been going great guns since then, becoming an amazing source of every kind of widget imaginable. They partnered with Typepad to introduce this “blidget” (blog+widget) concept. Mine looks like this:


Get

For some reason, my photo was showing up in it fine at first, but then it wasn’t. Are you seeing it on my blidget? The one I chose, naturally, is the infamous hat & lei photo of me above in my header, shot while partyin’ on Maui about 10 years ago…

Blogs as ‘New Media’: The Evolution Continues

February 16, 2007 / / 0 Comments

Wow, some real interesting things are happening out there in Blogland lately! Specifically, new developments that keep raising questions about disclosure and the independence of bloggers. Marshall Kirkpatrick did a TechCrunch post yesterday about Microsoft hiring two respected industry guys (one an analyst, the other a tech journalist), to start blogging for the company. And it drew a hailstorm of comments — accusations of selling out to The Man, etc. But the question about ethics and disclosure isn’t just about big-company bloggers these days. Robert Scoble, who started the whole employee-evangelist blogging phenomenon at Microsoft, has been under attack at the small startup company he now blogs and “vlogs” for, PodTech. A post on his Scobleizer blog a while back drew a very heavy, sometimes downright nasty discussion about disclosure, specifically relating to Robert’s coverage of clients of PodTech’s. [Some of PodTech’s clients it calls “sponsors” and are identified as such on its web site. Robert also has one sponsor for his personal blog, which he says is Seagate.] His post on this topic was in response to Valleywag calling him out on being a shill. Scoble straightens out Valleywag on the details, but admits he doesn’t always give enough disclosure. He resolves to be more careful in the future. Dan Farber at ZDnet also weighed in on the flap.

But the arguments about what consitutes sufficient disclosure will surely continue. Who decides? The evolution to new media is not without its bumps. Traditional journalism has a code of ethics that takes up a whole book at some media outlets such as the NY Times (which hasn’t prevented some notable lapses by certain reporters and editors there in recent times). But bloggers now, more and more, seem to be getting held to higher standards — especially those of the so-called independents that are widely read. Those who have accepted high-profile positions at big-name companies don’t have disclosure issues, however. We all know who’s paying them, and simply apply that filter.

One great blog to read that covers this issue like no other — blogs versus mainstream media — is Mark Glaser’s MediaShift, which is hosted by PBS.org. I’ve written about it previosuly. You’ll find his coverage of the recent “WeMedia” conference interesting as well.

The battle for influence goes on. In the minds of most web users today, that influence now exists collectively in blogs, or at least in certain blogs that are respected and deemed to have influence over others. No question that blogs as a medium are gaining fast on traditional media. And don’t doubt for a second that corporate communicators and their bosses aren’t getting this, bigtime.

What makes a blog influential? How does one measure that? How much of it is quantitative vs. qualitative?

Yahoo! Kisses Krugle

February 14, 2007 / / 1 Comment

This just in…news on Valentine’s Day about a company I follow named Krugle, of code-search fame. Seems they’ve chosen this hallowed day to announce they’ve been tapped to supply search functionality for the Yahoo! Developer Network. This is a centralized resource that offers open APIs and Web Services to make it easy for developers to extend and build on Yahoo!’s products and services.

Redlipsanim

The Yahoo! Developer Network hosts the publicly-available code and documentation for Yahoo!-owned properties, and provides tutorials, code samples, and other resources for developers. With this partnership, developers can now take advantage of Krugle’s code search engine and interface when they’re working with Yahoo! APIs and data — specifically, to find, save, and share code written in six languages: ActionScript, JavaScript, .NET, PHP, Python, and Ruby.

A kewl thing about Krugle is it also provides users with contextual information as they browse the code, such as associated documentation and dependencies, bug reports, commentary, and user-tagged code and search results, which they can then easily share with their colleagues.

“One of the reasons for Yahoo!’s success has been the company’s strong belief in opening up its products for third-party developers,” according to my old buddy Steve Larsen, who’s the CEO of Krugle, based in Menlo Park, CA. Stevelarsen_1 “By publishing open APIs and helpful documentation, they create an active and engaged community and encourage developers to create applications which utilize Yahoo!’s technology in new and innovative ways. With this partnership, Krugle will make it easier than ever to leverage the true potential of Yahoo!’s open APIs and Web Services.”

Krugleallyoucaneat

To check out Krugle code search on the Yahoo! Developer Network, just go to http://developer.yahoo.com.

One other thing I like about Krugle: not only the management, but the investors and advisors behind this outfit are pretty darn awesome, too.

Minne-GOOG?

February 14, 2007 / / 1 Comment

Google has Minnesota in its future — or certainly should. So says my neighbor Ed Kohler, who blogs at TechnologyEvangelist.com. (He’s literally just a couple miles from my place in Bloomington, MN.) He just put up a spectacular pitch for why Google should buy the soon-to-close Ford plant property in St. Paul for a data center site. Ed, you are the man! Talk about a compelling case. Wow, would this ever put Minnesota back on the map as a major computing center. [It really was once. Seriously.]

Minnegoog_1

The University of Minnesota even brought the “Gopher” search and retrieval protocol to the Internet in 1991. How many of you remember that? I’ll bet Larry, Sergey, and Eric do…

Other states are, of course, all over Google to locate facilities inside their borders. But we can surely make a better case than North Carolina, with all the recent flap going on there regarding the outrageous tax incentives secretly offered to Google. We wouldn’t need to bribe them — we actually have something they could really, really want.

Last year, Larry Page threw a bone to Ann Arbor, Michigan — where he went to undergraduate school — by opening an ad sales office there. I learned about that when I discovered the Ann Arbor SPARK blog suddenly started running me as a “guest blog” one day last year. [Thanks, guys. Never even been there, but happy to help!] Landing that Google office was a coup — well, a morale booster, anyway — for a state that’s in dire need to create jobs to get their economy back on track. But it’s small potatoes compared to what a data center on this jewel of a property on the Mississippi could mean in economic terms, for both Google and Minnesota.

This piece of land is literally a one of a kind. Ford’s been there 83 years! Henry himself purportedly chose the place. I mean, Google — your own hydroelectric dam??? The possibilities for this property, to so many varied interests, are mind boggling. One of those eventual outcomes, of course, would be more high-rise condos. But who the hell wants those? The neighboring residents of Highland Park surely don’t! The battles between forces opposing potential developers for that property are just starting to heat up. And, unfortunately, that could drag on for years. How nice it would be for a big monster player like Google to come in and shorten that process considerably… 🙂

Why, as Ed so eloquently argues, shouldn’t Google take a serious look at the state that brought us such Internet legends as Gopher and the Allaire brothers? [In fact, I’m gonna ping my friends Jeremy and JJ right now and send them this link, so they can weigh in on this, too!]

So, the gauntlet has been tossed. Are you listening, Governor Pawlenty? …and whoever else is actually taking leadership in this state for real economic development. Ed’s laid out the case for the “Minne-GOOG” data center. Now let’s see if our guys have the cajones to pick up the ball and take a run at selling it to Larry, Sergey, and Eric….

Go, Gopher(s)!

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