I’m off to Chicago for my client’s big annual conference.
SCIP’s 20th Annual International Conference & Exhibit is the premier event for professionals engaged in competitive intelligence.
If you’re in Chicago and have nothing better to do, stop on by.
groI’m half way through the first day of the Sales Intelligence Summit and I have to tell you that it’s one of the best business events I’ve been to in a while. You know it’s a good show when the guys taking a bio-break sing its praises over the urinal divider.
The keynoter was Jim Dickie of CSO Insights. If you are at all interested in sales, the sales process or what differentiates great companies from the rest in terms of sales then you need to check this guy out. It really was one of the most informative keynotes I’ve heard in years. While his core audience is people running big Fortune 1000 sales machines, his lessons are of great value to even the smallest company. He’s also a very good speaker.
Also heard from Dennis Chapman of the The Chapman Group and Dave Roberts of Siebel Systems Users Services. While both focused on the importance of sales intelligence and the sales process, Dennis spent alot of time on how you can take the subjectivity out of the sales process (make it more measurable) and Dave focused on how you can use sales force automation tools to help your average sales people improve so that they perform more like your star sales people.
Favorite line of the day came from Dave: "A fool with tools is still a fool." Of course Dave’s British.
More later.
I’m in Park City, Utah for a couple of days attending the Sales Intelligence Summit. They were overbooked in the Park City Marriott so they sent me and a couple of other people over to their premier property, Summit Watch, in the heart of town. And the hotel picked up the tab!
So please hear me when I say this isn’t a complaint. I mean how can I complain as I sit here in front of a fireplace, in the nicest hotel business center I’ve ever seen, and a view of the mountains to boot?
So say this is an observation that I would gladly share with Mr. Marriott if I were to ever meet him. I think it’s silly that you’re charging your patrons $20/week for Wi-Fi. It is so cheap and easy to do that I’m not sure what is gained by it. There may very well be a good reason, but I have to think that some of the guests feel a little nickle-and-dimed.
Still, what a view!
Dana Blankenhorn wrote an interesting post about the dearth of entrepreneurs making hay out of all the new and developing online creations. He points out that no one is really making money on blogging yet, but they are already moving on to podcasting, open source software, etc.
My favorite piece from his article is this:
The challenge is to find ways to bring in enough advertising,
sponsorship, event, and subscriber revenue to turn hobbies into
careers. Without fertilizer, plants die, and money is fertilizer.
Volunteers will burn out without it, some quickly, some more slowly,
but all surely. Or, as entrepreneur Max Bialystock says in The Producers, "Money is Honey."
Anyone who has ever tried to build a business based on bartering services, or paying their labor with beer knows that he’s right. You truly get what you pay for.
BTW, what keeps me up at night is figuring out a way to build the next media empire with all this new stuff. I’ll keep you posted. And if you’re interested in building it along with me I’ve got a fridge full of beer in the basement…
Just read this item in MarketingVox about a study done by MediaPost on the blogging phenomenon:
A Universal McCann study on consumer-generated media finds that very
few people – about two percent – are bloggers, according to MediaPost,
and that those who do commit their opinions to webpages regularly tend
to be quite young. Adults 18-24 are three times more likely to blog
than the average adult. The glass-half-full crowd may interpret that to
mean that blogging will increase as this generation displaces the older
adults. The half-empties may interpret that as meaning that blogging is
for less serious and more self-involved individuals.
I initially read this piece because I read most things I find that relate to blogging, but I couldn’t get past the first sentence. Specifically, "very few people – about two percent – are bloggers" bothered me. Two percent of what? The world’s population, America’s population or the online population?
Even if it’s just the latter, two percent is a huge number. Look at it this way: say there are 50 million people online (I’m sure it’s more than that, but I like round numbers). Two percent is one million people.
That’s a lot of content, and yes most of it’s crap, but when in the history of mankind have you had access to the opinions, comments and thoughts of one million people without leaving your home?
I guess I’ll have to read the MediaPost piece to get the details, but I wish MarketingVox had been a little tighter in their writing.
And for the record I fall into the glass half full crowd. I don’t really care how old someone is, as long as they have something intelligent to say and say it well.
Per my earlier post you know that today started off as a classic crappy
Monday, literally. This post is to tell you that it ended with one of
those sublime evenings you hope to remember forever.
It began with dinner. Nothing special; ham, peas, pineapple and some Kool-Aid to drink. Then we started talking.
Erin, my daughter, is 11 and she was on a roll. She is renowned for mixing
metaphors and for being a step late on getting the joke, but then
out-laughing everyone. She cracks herself up in the middle of jokes
and can’t finish them. She’s brutally honest and oblivious to that
fact. She is our catalyst.
I can’t even remember what we were talking about, but she mixed
something up and it got Justin, our 8 year old, laughing so hard I
thought he was going to puke. These laughs are generally reserved just
for us. I’m not sure how many of his aunts, uncles, cousins or even
grandparents have seen this laugh. It’s a thing of beauty, something I
wish I could do.
Then Michael, our 12 year old resident comedian jumped into the mix and
it was a full-on riot. Michael’s a goof, and Erin’s antithesis. He
gets the jokes before they’re finished and holds his tongue when he sees
"the look" in his parents’ eyes.
Celeste sat back with that bemused look she gets when they are this way
and watched her fourth kid, me, jump into the fun. We wandered into
gross joke territory, talked about kids from our respective schools who
can pull spaghetti out of their noses and kids who have milk shoot out
their noses when they laugh. Then it was mean teachers and who knows
what else. Celeste explained a joke or two to Erin and we kept laughing.
It was a half-hour of paradise.
Then the truly remarkable happened. We asked Erin and Justin to clean
the kitchen and Michael to finish his homework while we went to work
out. Upon returning we found a spotless kitchen, a new table cloth on
the table and homework completed.
Celeste and I talked about dinner tonight and when I said these are the
moments I hope I never forget she said, "I hope these are the moments
the kids never forget." As always she is so right.
What that this would be our legacy.
P.S. Don’t tell him I said so but I think Michael is a budding author.
His assignment was a (very) short story and if you go for military bugs
slaughtering each other I think you’d like it. Of course if you have
a soft spot for caterpillars you’ll probably lose your lunch. He’s asleep now, but if he wakes up and gives me permission I’ll upload a scan and link to it.
"
Bored with sending passengers’ bags to the wrong
airport, Midwest Airlines upgrades to locking baggage handler in cargo
hold and flying him to Philadelphia"
— Another fine example of our friend Fark taking your average weird story and making it really speak to you.
Just found a site that has created a very simple way to share images, video or other graphics files. It’s called Grafedia and basically it works like this: You go to their site, upload an image, assign a word to it and then tell anyone you want to see the image that they can get the image by sending an email to "TheWordYouCreated@grafedia.net".
I tested it out by uploading a picture of the junk I dug out of my yard last weekend. I labeled it "lowderjunk" so you can see it by sending an email to lowderjunk@grafedia.net. ***Important*** You have to make sure you put something in the body of the message for it to work. It can be anything…letter, number, favorite cuss word, etc.
You can also use the service with a video/picture phone. Simply send the picture/video to the address you want and it is automatically posted. So if I had taken the picture of my junk with a phone I would have sent it to lowderjunk@grafedia.net and it would have been loaded in the system automatically.
I read about this site in Cool News, which is a great business/marketing email newsletter.
If this is any indication of how my week is going to go, I might want to stay in bed for the duration.
Back on March 13 I posted this piece stating that the ACC wouldn’t be represented in the Final Four. To cut myself some slack I did make this prediction before the brackets came out, and yet I was only a one-point win by UNC away from getting it right.
I also said that if I was smart I’d say that only one team would get in, not none. I hate it when I’m right about being wrong…or whatever.
