Archive for November, 2005
November 17, 2005
You Know You’ve Hit Your Mid-Thirties When …
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1) You listen to XM online to hear some background tunes and immediately select a channel that plays music from a decade that isn’t this one. Or the last one.
2) You see kids suddenly putting their shirt collars up and think it looks kind of stupid and then remember that you used to do the same thing and probably looked stupid, too.
3) In meetings you catch yourself saying, “Remember when we tried …” where you used to say “What if we tried … ”
4) Someone points out that they can see a slight indentation on your left earlobe where you used to have an earring and you look puzzled because you briefly forget that you did, in fact, used to wear one.
5) Things that you worried about 10 or 15 years ago seem silly now … and how you wish you could go back in time so you could not care about them then.
Or maybe it’s just me.
November 15, 2005
TypePad is Done
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Sue Pelletier thinks TypePad’s attempts to make amends by letting people choose their compensation — select 15 free days of their service if you were only a little inconvenienced, 45 free days if you were very inconvenienced — is cool. Theoretically, she’s right, it’s an interesting approach.
But practically speaking? You could offer me 365 free days of their service and it wouldn’t mean a damn thing, because who wants 365 free days of service from a system that doesn’t work?
And that, my friends, is what people need to come to grips with. As of 2:15pm today, I can’t access a single one of the blogs hosted on TypePad from my blogroll. More importantly, I can’t log into TypePad to work on my organization’s blog. The system is down, because the system doesn’t work.
No more apologies, no more bizarre attempts to make amends. Let’s just face facts: TypePad doesn’t work.
November 15, 2005
Screwing Up a Launch
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I was very excited to hear about the new launch of Google Analytics yesterday (basically a rebranding and formatting of the Urchin stats service). Until I tried to sign up and couldn’t. Until I finally could, and got the code, and put it on my site, only to be told that it takes at least 12 hours for reports to show up.
That was over 24 hours ago, and still zip.
This was a pretty sucky product launch. (Interestingly, at this morning’s forum at the US Chamber, there was actually a good back-and-forth at the end between the audience and Bill Gannon from Yahoo about product development and knowing when to launch a product.)
And slapping “beta” on it doesn’t work anymore, because Google has basically been to that well too often and, whether it meant to or not, changed the meaning of the word Beta to mean “1.0″. But I can’t say it any better than Jeremy Wright did.
UPDATE: Data finally being generated. I’ll have to give it a week or so to see how it goes compared to other site stat tools I have, but on first glance, a pretty impressive product now that it seems to be working.
UPDATE: Morning of 11/17, it’s down in a novel way — when I enter my password and press submit at google.com/analytics, their system just dumps me back at the main Google page. Is “you get what you pay for” finally becoming as true for the web as it is for the rest of life? Gasp!
November 12, 2005
Peter Drucker, 1909-2005
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When I got my first job in the non-profit sector I bought a little book called “Managing the Non-Profit Organization” because I knew I was going to need some guidance. I must have been pretty young and callow because at the time, the name of the author didn’t mean anything to me — it was just the only book I could find on the subject that seemed easy to read.
Funny, this morning was the first time I’ve thought about that book and its author, Peter Drucker, in many years. Drucker passed away yesterday, having long ago become one of the earliest and best-known (though perhaps least-listened-to) management gurus.
November 11, 2005
Great Ideas Blog
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This week a blog was launched for the upcoming Great Ideas conferences, sponsored by ASAE and the Center for Association Leadership. Thanks to the staff at ASAE and the Center for asking me to participate (and to Jeff De Cagna, godfather of the Association Blogoclump, for putting everything together).
Other folks blogging include Amy Smith, David Gammel, Kathi Edwards, and Micki Rops.
The Great Ideas meetings are being held in Orlando (December 4-6) and San Diego (February 26-28). I went to the first Great Ideas conference in Florida last year (in fact, this blog was originally started as an event blog about the workshop I presented there) and it was a worthwhile time. This year’s schedule looks even better — it’s always a plus when you find that you’re interested in more workshops than you’ll be able to attend.
They were foolish enough to invite me back to present this year (thanks, guys!) so maybe I’ll meet some of you there. Check it out — it’s worth the trip — and keep an eye on the Great Ideas blog, because if it works out like the one we did for the ASAE annual meeting last summer, there should be lots of interesting conversations cropping up.
November 11, 2005
Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together
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I’ve insisted before that associations should have e-newsletter programs that are available for non-members. Alas, I’m not sure if anybody’s listening, because I still see a lot of associations that only provide e-newsletters for their members. So many missed opportunities …
Beyond the conversions you’ll get from establishing opt-in conversations with non-members (this assumes your e-newsletter actually has interesting content so they’ll want to opt-in), here’s another way email can drive membership sales: combine it with phone calls.
As Brian Carroll wrote in an article in RainToday:
“The killer application of email marketing and phone calling is the ability to prioritize phone calls based on the actions of the email recipient. With tracking capabilities you can now know what link your prospect clicked on and where they went to next. Plus, you can track many other elements as well.”
Imagine two non-members receive an email newsletter about widget manufacturing.
One clicks on a link to an article about how widget manufacturers are improving distributor relationships. For the other, there’s no data.
Wow, you just learned a lot about that first one with just one link. So much, in fact, that treating both of these non-members the same afterwards (sending them the same broadstroke direct mail membership package, for example) is a recipe for mediocre results.
Better, naturally, to contact the first one directly with targeted sales information about an issue you already know he’s interested in.