There are no words. The "Ain'ts" are gone. New Orleans is back.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 08:01 AM | Permalink

In an earlier writeup on website hosting, I said we recommended Unix hosting but didn't say why.

The biggest reason is security. Unix servers are inherently more secure against hacking, than Windows servers. We've had exactly one instance of a website being hacked in the years we've been offering hosting services. It is also the only website that we hosted on a Windows server. No coincidence. We no longer offer Windows hosting.

The other reason is that some things are just easier to do on a Unix server, in the typical setup called "LAMP" for Linux - Apache - MySQL - PHP. Linux is a version of Unix. Apache is the widely used web server software. MySQL is the type of data base and PHP is a programming language. All of these are very widely used and there are lots of people who know how to do things with them. Furthermore, they are free and open-source (open to development and additions by anyone who wants to help).

So they aren't subject to the kinds of changes that Microsoft products are - where the pressure to develop new salable products leads to jumps from one version to another.

To give one example, when we are redesigning a website, and the client hosts on Windows, there are four different versions of the code possible for generating emails from the website (as when someone fills out a contact form). Usually there is no way to find out which will work on their server other than by trial and error.

In the case of Unix hosting, there is only one version, and it always works.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 08:20 AM | Permalink

If you opened a pizza parlor in Canada in 1950, you would have had an uphill battle.

Now? I bet there are Domino's on every corner....

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 09:41 AM | Permalink

When it comes to spending money, most people are scaredy-cats.

All marketing has to start with that understanding.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 09:40 AM | Permalink

It's no news that TRUST is a huge factor in all marketing and sales.

It's important to realize that trust is not just a matter of YOUR name and brand, since you may not have a reputation at all with most potential buyers. They've never heard of you.

So you start out with a level of trust based on association. What is the trust level of your industry? or of the medium in which you are advertising?

People assume a used car salesman, or a congressman, can't be trusted.

On the other hand, if you start a bank, you are going to start out with a considerable amount of trust. People assume their money is going to be safe there even if they've never heard of you.

But don't try and promote a bank by email.

Email marketing to people who never heard of you is probably going to be a failure, even if you can get a legitimate list. The trust level is terrible, people know it is almost certainly some kind of scam.

Worth thinking about.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 11:15 AM | Permalink

One of the critical questions that has to be answered before you can do intelligent marketing, is who are you trying to reach?

This is called "target markets" "market segments" or "publics" and can include factors (in consumer marketing) such as age, gender, income level, location, etc.

One important point is that who you are trying to reach may not be the person who makes the decisions or is actually going to make the purchase.

This applies to both consumer marketing and business-to-business.

In the consumer world, you market toys to the kids, who then go to Mom demanding or asking for their very own (fill in the blank).

In business-to-business marketing, it may be the CEO or Purchasing Agent making the decision, signing the purchase order or writing the check. In many cases the decision is influenced, the purchase is initiated by, or virtually or actually decided by someone else.

Computer systems decisions are almost always strongly influenced by the IT Department.

You can often get a lot farther by marketing to the decision influencer than the decision maker. Sometimes you have to market to both.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 09:41 AM | Permalink

Many businessmen, with no training or experience in marketing, are convinced they can handle their own marketing.

There are, I'm convinced, two big reasons for this:

1. Nearly everyone doing marketing as professionals, has no real training in marketing. Maybe they are artists, or programmers, or technically proficient in video editing or something. But they've never really studied marketing.

2. Most businessmen have been burned many times, purchasing what sounded good from people who claimed to be professionals and charged high prices.

Why then shouldn't people just decide to do it themselves?

And yet, marketing is a subject. There are things to know. There is no single text that has all the answers, and few that are 100% reliable, but there is a LOT of valuable info out there. Of course, sorting out what's true from what's not, and getting enough experience to gain a real command of the subject, can be rather expensive.

The only way you become a real expert is by actually doing things and seeing how it works out. And that's expensive both in time and money.

All I'm saying, it can be done.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 08:12 AM | Permalink

The Creator designed this galaxy for perfect viewing from Earth. Great proportions, boundless beauty, it oozes style, has a wonderful color scheme and a tasty minimalist backdrop. As good as it gets:

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 08:11 AM | Permalink

Since the Internet started to go commercial in a big way back around 1997, it has been a rapidly changing medium. In fact, from a marketing viewpoint, easily the fastest changing medium since advertising was in its infancy.

Is that still true?

Look at all that's happened in the last year alone - Twitter, the ascendancy of Facebook, real-time search, Bing, Caffeine (Google's latest major change, now in the works), the popularity of Joomla, etc. etc. etc.

Two years ago we wouldn't have thought of putting video on a website. Now we try to put video on every website we do.

All media eventually become mature. They don't stop changing, they just change more slowly.

The Internet hasn't reached that point.

Sure, there are a lot of things about the Internet that you can count on. What Google is generally looking for. What, fundamentally, makes a website effective or not. Many other things.

But it still takes, and will in the foreseeable future take, a considerable amount of time to stay on top of what's happening online.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 08:15 AM | Permalink

I wrote about branding last June. I have more to say.

"Brand" is what people think of your company, product or service. It isn't what YOU say it is. It's what your prospective customers say it is. To a great many people, Wal-Mart stands for low priced decent quality goods and items. Target's cachet is low-priced but better quality.

Branding is everything you do to establish or change that. It's also everything your competition or enemies do in the same vein. Unions for years have been attempting to re-brand Wal-Mart as "the giant company that's unfair to its workers and small businesses." To date they haven't succeeded, at least with most people.

"Brand identity" is everything that REMINDS people of your branding or of your brand.

There is to some degree, a continuous spectrum between branding and brand identity. A logo or color scheme is at one end. No one is going to get much of a concept of UPS, knowing that their color is brown. A logo does very little more than that. Sure, colors and logos should be CONSISTENT with your branding. But trying to lean on them to build a brand is a waste of time.

A slogan or tagline, on the other hand, can contribute to building a brand. Repeat it enough times and people will tend to think it is true. At the same time, it is weak compared to other methods of branding. SHOW people what you want them to think.

Barnum and Bailey Circus has been "The Greatest Show on Earth" for 150 years. But they also tell you the same thing throughout their shows. And the whole approach of their shows is a spectacular. They assume they are the greatest show on earth, as a starting point - not only in what they do but how they present it. And the shows do a great deal to live up to that slogan, which is really a claim and a promise.

Now let's take a contrary example. Verizon has evidently discovered (finally) that people think their customer service is hideously bad. Their answer? A marketing campaign to tell everyone how great their customer service is and how dedicated they are to providing great customer service.

Did they actually CHANGE something, to improve their service?

No.

So that's a campaign doomed to failure.

Ultimately, branding has to be based on truth.

The more truthiness, the better chance it has at success.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 10:11 AM | Permalink