Kicking Over My Traces

Welcome to the July 9th, 2006, edition of the Carnival of Marketing, started by Noah Kagan to highlight the seven best recent posts on marketing.

With a drum roll and a trumpet flourish, here are this week’s entries, in no particular order:

• Jeff Brooks at Donor Power Blog describes a right way and a wrong way to use BVMs to increase donations in “Quality matters more than you might realize”. I like learning new terms. “BVM” is new to me; it stands for “Broadcast Voice Mail” and refers to automated recorded voice messages aimed for a person’s voice mail box rather than the live person. I also loathe spam in all its variations. Read and heed!
• Starling Hunter at The Business of America is Business excerpts from a recent BBC World interview concerning the retirement of British soccer star David Beckham in “Victoria’s Secret? Brand it Like Beckham.” David Beckham was already well-known; Mr. Hunter thinks that Beckham’s wife is steering an effort to exploit his celebrity to build a brand and manage it.
• Jim Logan at Direct Response Works analyzes the use of snail mail to drive traffic to a website in “Direct Mail for the B2B Landing Page.” This sort of complementary marketing is what I expect to see more and more — not the Web eating everybody else’s lunch but rather smart marketers combining different channels in support of an overall goal.
• Jack Yoest at Jack Yoest takes us along as he follows the sad trajectory of a Sales Guy who always swings for the fences in “The New Sales Cycle: Forecast Failure in 8 Easy Steps.” Homerun-hitters in sales as in baseball may be dramatic and attract attention, but the salesmen who can reliably deliver singles, doubles and even sacrifice flies are better for your company. Love those sports metaphors!
• James D. Brausch at The Ramblings of James D. Brausch analyzes the business model of online traffic-sellers (think AdSense or Commission Junction) in “Avoiding Traffic Selling Mistakes.” He wants to sidestep the errors made by companies in the past and ongoing errors of current companies in order to build a better business model for his own soon-to-be-launched online traffic-selling business — but also to help online businesses to reach a deeper understanding of how to manage this aspect of driving traffic to websites. He listed one of the reservations I have with Commission Junction — a click-through threshold that, if not met, results in termination. (Note: I am affiliated with CJ through eMusic, and also with Google Adsense but not AdWords.)
• Dave Lorenzo at Career Intensity lets us in on five key secrets the gurus keep to themselves in “The Reality of Building Buzz.” One of his secrets — using buzz as a complementary technique — dovetails nicely with the post about snail mail driving traffic to a homepage. Wow! A coordinated marketing campaign!
• Seth Godin at Seth Godin’s Blog rounds out our seven posts with “Beggars and Choosers, ” a quick yet insightful peek at complacency using current music-industry conditions as an exemplar. Don’t smirk at the music industry before you do a bit of self-examination to see if your own company or business might be a hair complacent.

The Carnival of Marketing will remain here at “Kicking Over My Traces” next week. The following week will find the carnival hosted by jslogan at Direct Response Works.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 9th, 2006 at 10:15 am +0000 GMT and is filed under Business, Carnival of Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.