The Innovative Marketer

Best new software I've seen in a long time

I give a lot of presentations -- webinars, trade shows, customer visits.   And lately I've been trying to find a way to make Microsoft PowerPoint (which I use) look and act more like Apple's Keynote (which I love).

This past week, I stumbled upon 280 slides, an free online presentation application that rivals Keynote in its easy user interface and powerful add ons, and you don't need a Mac to run it!

I liked that you could easily share your presentations with others, like you can do with Google apps (by the way, 280 slides blows away the Google app presentation software), and also present your presentation directly from the Internet. 

Want to present while you're offline?  280 slides has an export feature that lets you save your preso to your own computer.   They also let you publish your deck directly to SlideShare.

Want to add pictures?  There's a feature where you can upload your own, or search for, and embed pictures directly from the web.   Have a video you want to share?  It will link directly to  YouTube or Vimeo for videos.

The one thing you lose in this app (for now) is the ability to easily move charts and graphs from Microsoft Excel to the online site.    But they just launched this month -- I'm looking forward to seeing the changes and enhancements to the app over time.

The Top Mistakes Marketers Make

Reading through Roy Young of MarketingProfs' latest eBook, "The Top 10 Biggest Mistakes Marketers Make," I'm amazed at how many issues are pervasive in marketing departments large and small. 

Here are some of the perennial bugaboos that you might find in your company:

Mistake #2 - Using metrics that don't matter to top management

How many marketing meetings have you been in where people were slapping high-fives to one another over 80% email open rates, 25% click through rates, 10% response rates?   Impressive stats? Yes.  But share your enthusiasm with your sales colleagues and chances are you'll get a pasted one smile as they silently beg you to stop talking so they can ask you for my squishy ball giveaways for a client meeting.    

Making sure that what you are reporting is what the person you are reporting it to cares about -- that's pretty key.

Mistake #8 - Swallowing fads unthinkingly

Oh man, I've got to write a separate post on this one.   WAP, Wikis, Second Life, Facebook, Twitter, Podcasts, Vodcasts and of course, blogs.   So many marketers fall prey to what I call the "In Flight Magazine Syndrome," that is, someone at the company reads about some hot new trend in an airline magazine on a cross-country flight and suddenly your entire marketing department is barreling headlong into a project for which there is no real business need, no hope of executing successful, and no reasonable form of measurement (ask me to tell you my "grid computing" and "knowledgebase" stories some day over a beer).

Anyway, it's a good read.  You can read the other eight mistakes and Roy's great commentary when you download the document here.

Five business Podcasts* you must not miss

Do you listen to marketing podcasts?  If you have a lengthy commute or you're on planes a lot like I am, here are some useful free business Podcasts you should check out. 

1. HBR Ideacast
Harvard Business Review's audio companion to their monthly magazine.  Often you'll hear authors of articles in HBR discussing their current research.   Lots of content about innovation here.

2. Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (Stanford)
Don't have time to make it to Palo Alto for their weekly lecture series starring some of the leading thinkers in Silicon Valley?  Check out this Podcast.  One of my favorites was a talk by Tien Tzuo, formerly of salesforce.com, now CEO of Zuora.

3.  Knowledge @ Wharton Interviews
Articles are now available in MP3 format.  Some of them sound like written articles read out loud, which may make them hard to follow if you're doing something else while you're listening.  Still, the content is well worth paying special attention to.

4. Duct Tape Marketing
Small business marketing guru John Jantsch continues to score interviews with high profile marketers from all over the world.  You'll find useful ideas in every one of his frequently produced shows.

5.  Manager Tools
Do you manage people?  This weekly show is a good listen. 

and of course, you can always subscribe to the periodically published Podcast by yours truly, The Innovative Marketer. 


* A Podcast is a free, downloadable audio or video program available via RSS feed on the Internet.  It's different from a regular download online because you can subscribe to Podcasts in a series, much like you can subscribe to a blog feed or a magazine.

Top 10 Marketing Blogs

It's been raining quite hard in Northern California this week, so with the power out, we headed to the sports bar to take in the playoff games.  A bunch of us being marketers, we talked about what marketing blogs and thinkings we follow regularly on the web.   Here was my list:

1. Seth Godin - The most astute observer and clearest communicator of marketing trends out there
2. Malcolm Gladwell - not marketing-focused exactly, but he's such a good communicator of business ideas
3. Guy Kawasaki - a great marketer and a wonderful guy
4. Tom Peters - Tom's ideas persist for decades
5. Garr Reynolds - check out his new book - Presentation Zen.  It's great.
6. Harry Joiner - he's a marketing headhunter with a good head for marketing
7. The Brothers Heath - authors of my favorite book of 2007, Made to Stick
8. Brian Carroll - a smart and nice guy, who "gets" new media and old fashioned relationship marketing.  Check out his free eBook here.
9. Charlene Li - Forrester Research's uber-connected social technology guru
10. MarketingProfs Daily Fix - Super smart marketers opine frequently here

Who do you read regularly?

Shut up and listen

Following on to the advice on setting up a Google alert on your company, here's another tip for monitoring what people are saying about you, your company, and your industry.

But first, a brief reminder from The Blogging Authority:

While it's wonderful to hear from you via email regarding ideas and posts that appear on The Innovative Marketer, it's much more interesting to have your thoughts added as comments to the original posting.  That way, the conversation gets expanded beyond two participants, and can result in the creation of some interesting new ideas.

Thanks for your email.  In the future, I'll be asking if you can post them as comments to the original article.  I promise I'll continue the dialog in the comments.

And now, back to our regularly scheduled note.

Most companies are still focusing on what to say online, rather than what other people are saying about them.  It's time to close your yapper and just listen.  Hear what people are saying about you. Take it to heart and then make appropriate changes.  And where do you go to take the pulse of the web?

Technorati is another great, free resource that you can use to help track terms and keywords (try plugging in names of your publicly facing employees, products and industry), see who is linking to them, and most importantly, what they are saying.

Alert: Google

Have you used Google Alerts yet?

If you're too busy to go to Google to see the latest mentions of ... well, anything you search for, try setting up a Google Alert. They're email notifications of your search term popping up on the Internet somewhere.

For example, I've set one up with the term 'Eloqua' and whenever my company is mentioned, I receive an alert on my blackberry, pointing me to a news site or a blog or a newsgroup. It's a great time saver and you can use it to keep up to date on any term you like.

Calculate Your ROI

Here's a quick tool from Marketing Today that will let you play with your anticipated return on campaigns and calculate the potential return on your investment.  Be sure to bookmark and pop this up on your browser when  your CFO wanders by.

By the way...

If you don't know Marketingsherpa and the great research and case studies, they provide, you are missing out.  Subscribe to their newsletter and you'll get dozens of useful tips each month on real-world solutions to problems that marketing practitioners have every day.

Seven steps to innovation

BJ Fogg of the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University has lead some interesting new thinking on trustworthy computing and what makes things on the Web credible (or not).   BJ has worked with a lot of innovative people.  He posted a list of what he thinks are the critical steps to innovation.  Worth a look.

Google as Your Marketing Calendar

If you're not using a fancy schmancy CRM system or proprietary calendering program already, may I recommend the new Google Calendars.  With it, you can inport and export from Outlook, share your calendar with the entire group, and, of course, access the calendar from any web client.

One thing I haven't tested yet:  If you schedule a meeting at noon Eastern Time, and then check your calendar from California, does it show up at 12:00 or 09:00?