I am beginning to explore a new focus for this site.  Over the past several months (years) other projects have restricted me from posting to this blog as I would like.  Recently I embarked down the path of working on a patented process for my team’s consulting activity.  I am beginning to wander if placing this work into the public domain would be a better course.  After all, what is more powerful?  Telling clients about your process or empowering your partners to use and sell your process?  I am beginning to think the later is the way to go.

Therefore, upon some further research I may change this site into a portal for the development of those ideas.  I am not sure what that might mean yet, but it will certainly mean change.  That is of course I do nothing.  That could mean my long droughts between posts coud actually get longer.  I just feel pathetic for saying that.

OK, I am impressed. I just recently downloaded flock (flock.com) and quickly switched it to my default web browser. It is a lot of fun.

Flock is a web browser designed around social networking. It is built off the Gecko rendering engine (same as Firefox) so it seems to be rendering web pages the same way as beloved Firefox. Among the many features that I adore is what I am curently using to write this blog post. It allows me to connect straight from the browser to my blog and others. In fact, there are entire sections that allow me to search sites such as Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, del.icio.us and others.

I even worked inside of my ExactTarget account today with no issues. I am sold!

I highly recommend checking it out even if just for a day. Who knows? Maybe you will switch as well.

www.flock.com

Tomorrow I will be featured in the Wall Street Journal for a Knowledge Management initiative that has spanned the past 10 months in the form of a skunk works project. In fact, the project was started by an intern last summer named Ryan Tinker. Although the project evolved quite a bit and even gained some help from other initiatives it ultimately manifested itself into what is in the WSJ.

Join me in my 5 minutes of fame. Literally. I think that this will off the web site in the morning. The safe alternative is that it will be featured in the print edition in the morning as well. I have a feeling that I will end up feeling like Steve Martin in the movie The Jerk when he saw his name in the phone book for the first time. “My name is in print! I am somebody!”

So when you open your copy of the Wall Street Journal tomorrow think of me screaming, “The new phone Books are here! The new phone books are here!”

Click here to read the article.

I spoke today at the Omniture Summit in Salt Lake city about integrating ExactTarget and Omniture’s Genesis Platform.  Afterward, I stuck around for Mikel Chertudi’s presentation on Lead Nurturing with email.  One part of his presentation that jumped out at me was his comment (and research to back it) on using fax as a complementary channel in email driven lead nurturing programs.  It was fascinating.

Mikel argues that Omniture has experience 5x conversion rates (compared to email and others) using this forgotten marketing channel.  He argues because it is more obsolete there is less noise to compete with.

Funny thing.  I spend so much time consulting about online marketing strategies and how they work with multi-channel efforts.  I have never once recommended this as an approach.  It sounds so simple it is genious.  This is especially true if timely in deployment and to a B2B audience segment.

Here I am again.  Sitting in the back of an airplane in a holding pattern above Philadelphia (of all places) while passengers continue to bombard the ever ripening bathroom.  I am on the first leg of a 24hr marathon speaking tour.  I speak at 4:00 in Boston at a Print-on-Demand conference then immediately hop another 2 leg flight to Salt Lake City where I will be presenting at the Omniture Summit.

Only now am I starting to doubt my decision to pull back-to-back presentations tied together by a red eye.  Sometimes hindsight is 20/20, but I am starting to understand the strange looks I got when explaining to my team what I was doing this week.

I recently consulted an agency who wants to integrate email marketing into their CRM driven print campaigns. “It will be a value ad” my contact says in jubilation. Hmmm… I ask myself. Forgive me if I don’t share the same enthusiasm.

As a former agency guy I am all for creating additional value. But is there really value in value ad? I say not so much.

I encourage firms like this and others to ask themselves if they are reacting to a competitive threat or attempting competitive differentiation. Frankly, if done poorly neither pose an attractive option. Furthermore, there are striking differences that should be considered.

Reactions to competitive threats typically use value add to stop the bleeding or beef up a product sheet. It is like saying “we do that too.” It also says “we know they are better, but we are cheap.” Note the operative word being cheap. If I were a scholar I might use the word commodity. I liken it more to bottom feeding.

Move on to the case of competitive differentiation. Half ass efforts to create something new are typically countered with better ideas. These tend to be better funded and superiorly marketed to half baked plans such as my friends value added program.

Either way they leave themselves completely vulnerable to something that is going to cost money to create, market and support over the long haul. When I think of this agency rolling out email software to their clients I can’t help but think of a quote I picked up recently.

It goes like this, “Software is like sex. One mistake and you support it for life.”

I hope they catch on to this notion. Because this agency’s value ad has the potential of not only providing little value, but damaging their business in the process.