Posted by: marcidevries | August 19, 2010

The Value of Objectivity

I’ve been in too many meetings with this theme, lately, so I simply have to write about it. Something has been happening to my fellow marketers in the past few years that turned them into commodities salesmen. “Do you want a collateral pack with a newsletter template now?… how about now…   NOW?”

Since I stopped selling stuff, I’ve made many more people happy and successful in their business (and earned a better living myself) by providing an objective opinion than I have selling “stuff and things.”

Those of you who have asked for objectivity sometimes don’t like what I had to say, but at least it’s coming from a place of honesty and a real desire to do the right thing for your company. And I like it that I don’t have to sugar-coat the reality of what I see when I’m there to tell the truth.

The truth does, indeed, set you free.

Posted by: marcidevries | August 13, 2010

The Marketing Line Item

In the past few months I’ve been doing a lot of consulting work, which is surprising to me because I didn’t think people paid for good advice anymore.

Usually clients contact me because they have a line item in their marketing spreadsheet that they want fulfilled. When I ask them “why” all of a sudden we’re into consulting. Here’s the thing:  Somehow Excel has wormed its way into the marketing department, and marketers now have spreadsheets that say “SEO Line Item 67 — Cost $7500/year. Expected return $75,000″

The idea of drawing such a straight line from tactic to ROI has been the big promise of the Internet, and probably also its biggest lie. The individual tactics CAN be traced to revenue. However, the revenue correlation has more to do with the context of the tactic rather than the tactic itself.

We’re back to story telling. The better and more consistent a company’s story is, the better return they have from their tactical line items.

See?

Posted by: marcidevries | May 28, 2010

Gettin’ all “Presidential”

So next Thursday (June 3) is the Marketing Excellence Awards dinner for the AMA Baltimore, and the official passing of the baton from Luba Abrams to me as president of the Baltimore Chapter. It’s interesting and exciting in equal parts. I’d love to see you all there, if you’d like to come (you don’t need to be a member) please click here and if you want to see pictures of me doing the voice over for the intro movie, click here.

Wish me luck!

Posted by: marcidevries | May 7, 2010

Getting Real with Social Media

There’s Nothing Witty Left to Say; Social Media, Year 3 – A Time for Perspective

An AMA Baltimore event
DATE:
May 26, 2010

FEATURED SPEAKER:
Marci De Vries, President, MDV Interactive

AM SPEAKER SERIES:
Some companies take to Social Media like fish to water. Others struggle with it and don’t feel like it’s the right direction for their company. Marci will take a top line view of whether they are helping or hurting themselves by participating in something that feels so unnatural, and discuss whether they need to approach Facebook, Twitter, and other venues at all. Read More…

Posted by: marcidevries | April 30, 2010

Social Media for Award Programs

Here’s a link to an article about how the Baltimore Chapter of the American Marketing Association is promoting their annual Marketing Excellence Awards through Social Media. I’m quoted, of course. http://bit.ly/a6AuiD

Posted by: marcidevries | April 9, 2010

De-Virtualization

I admit, I’m dissappointed. My most recent experiment with virtal business/all cloud computing went bust. The final straw was at dinner with my husband and brother where they mocked me openly about how virtual apps weren’t really working for me.

Here’s what I tried:
1) Abandon desktop email software and use only Gmail with domain name mapping
2) Abandon Word/PPT/XLS and use only Googe Docs
3) Abandon paid Web hosting and go with free WordPress deployments hosted on their server

Here’s why it didn’t work:
1) Gmail falls apart when you try to use multiple email addresses. I currently use 6 mapped domains, which means six totally different email addresses. With Gmail, I needed to login/logout of each address account in order to keep my email “to” field clean.

When I tried forwarding all 6 addresses to a general Gmail account, much of my inbound and outbound mail was captured by spam filters so my clients couldn’t communicate with me.

The mail that DID get through was marked “marcidevries@gmail.com on behalf of Marci@mdvinteractive.com” which is a stinky way to brand a tech company, right?

2) Using Google Docs was a hassle because I couldn’t really get regular .doc .xls .ppt files to open correctly in Google Docs. Therefore any document sent by a client wasn’t really readable. I also couldn’t edit and then send them a Google Doc back because Word et.al. doesn’t really open Google Docs correctly.

Which, considering that they didn’t receive my emails anyway (see problem #1) maybe this didn’t really matter. LOL

3) The free hosting by WordPress is really pretty awesome. However, there aren’t enough widgets available to allow the site to do what I want it to do. So frustrating. I am still hosting in the free version, but will probably switch to paid hosting with WordPress as my free CMS in a couple of months.

So there’s my update on Virtualization. The Web is SO CLOSE to being able to actually do this. So close, but yet so far…

Posted by: marcidevries | April 6, 2010

Conundrumming

Not sure how to think about online advertising? You may want to check out this article by Chris O’Hara at Traffiq. It’s an interesting perspective, and (of course) I’m quoted in it. http://bit.ly/cIscrK

Does this ring true for you as you’re looking online marketing for this year and beyond?

Posted by: marcidevries | March 29, 2010

Moving Fast – RSS Revisited

A few years ago, many of you heard me going on and on about RSS feeds and how the Internet was starting to talk to itself to make content move faster. Now there’s a relatively new innovation called PubSubHubub (or PuSH) that’s changing the game again. It’s a different way of doing RSS feeds — like there’s an assistant technology. Anyway, watch the video — it’s easy to understand and fun.

Posted by: marcidevries | March 24, 2010

Stay Safe, My Friends

Just this morning I gave a presentation on Online Reputation Management for the Marketing Director’s Support Group (MDSG). Thanks again to Andrew Rose for his gracious invitation to present here.

The talk was about Online Reputation Management, and I was pretty surprised to see the interest. Here’s the presentation, where I broke it down and made it manageable for marketers at companies large and small, with free tools (and a couple of paid ones too). Check it out and let me know what you think…

Reputation Management as told by Marci: http://tinyurl.com/yd74udn

Posted by: marcidevries | March 23, 2010

Keeping it Real

There’s authenticity, immediacy, and the holy matrimony of the two.
Here’s an interesting finding from my work on the Baltimore AMA board. We revamped the site into a WordPress/bloggy sort of entity, and opened it up for board members to write on, and all of our members to contribute to.

This simple act of Opening the system to everyone has reinvigorated the site, and brought activity that I didn’t think I’d ever see on an association site. The contributions are genuine and interesting, and the response from members as well as non-members has been immediate and awesome. Check out this entry where an AMA member writes about a company she admires, and then that company responds within MINUTES from the Web. Awesome.

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