Baldy riffs with THE bald guy
I had the immense pleasure of spending the day with Seth Godin in New York today. You guess from reading his books that Seth will be energetic, approachable and genuinely nice, and you wouldn’t be guessing wrong. Seth donated the proceeds from today’s seminar to Acumen, so at $2000 a head, I reckon Seth donated $100,000, which gives you some measure of the man. And at $2000 a head you’d expect the seminar attendees to be quite exceptional, and they were. Individuals ranged from significant online web app providers to a Brazilian TV magnate. Discussion was varied, but there were definite Seth themes. At the heart of Seth’s doctrine is the new industrial revolution. We’ve moved from the 1950s TV marketing - factory production model (average ad, sells average product to Mr Average). And now we’re in a ‘remarkable permission complex‘. The best brands have permission to talk to their consumers (think Apple - iPod - iPhone). 
Seth sliced and diced his way through every business represented on the day, and for Webreality this meant more focus on verticals (using our core techology to deliver very targeted solutions) and leveraging our Adword technology. Webreality’s position at the heart of ecommerce and emarketing in Jersey, does give us opportunity to deliver more traction for our customers - more thoughts to follow! For now, back to the sights and sounds of New York; a city which has just the right amount of energy!
Baldy hits New York and flies SilverJet, a real Purple Cow
This week I’ve got the pleasure of Seth Godin’s
Baldy goes carbon free (for an afternoon at least)
The Jersey Electricity Company invited me to test-drive a new all-electric Smart Car today. As an unashamed petrol head, the experience came as something of a revelation.The Electric Smart Car is identical to an ordinary Smart Car. The give away is the curly yellow cable leading from a 13amp plug to the place where you should stick petrol in. Inside, there’s a gear-stick that shifts between drive, neutral and reverse. That’s about it. You turn the key, press the accelerator, and then you silently waft away on a gentle hum. The near silent operation is the biggest revelation, and I think one of the biggest benefits to a defined road network like Jersey. Imagine all road noise and pollution gone over night … Driving the SmartCar was surprisingly good. It’s nimble, torquey, responsive, goes up hill without looking like a milk float. With a range of 70 miles, it would be more than enough for 90% of the journeys carried out in Jersey. At £20k it’s not a cheap option, but if the States get into gear with cheap parking and free charging for electric cars, it would look very viable. At £20k however, I’d expect the user interface of the car to look better. 
SmartCar really needs Apple to do it’s UI. Then I might have a go, but for now it’s back to burning petrol.
Adwords Manager - tax free?
We’re just in the process of launching our new Adwords Manager. It’s currently in beta mode, and we’re looking for skilled Adwords users who’d like to give it a spin. We’ll give you free sign-up in return, and we’ll credit any burnt adword spend, so you’ve got nothing to lose.Jersey is outside of the EU, so we’re able to book Adwords tax-free, which is particularly helpful if you’re in the EU, and a consumer or a small business under the VAT threshold. Google Europe is headquartered in Dublin, so wherever you are you’ll pay 21%, unless you use us. But our Purple Cow is that Tax Free Adwords will do more than save you tax. We’ve written a bulk uploader that works a bit like mail merge. We can merge your data into your own Adword templates, so you can produce really targeted Ads for each product in your catalog. For example ….Hewlett Packard 57, £17.99 becomesHP 57 Printer CartridgeOnly £17.99 for Genuine HP Ink+ 5% Off Orders of 2 or More!www.day2dayshop.comTax Free Adwords will then add appropriate keywords, and link your ad directly back to the product page. Quite cool really. There’s loads more, but in the meantime if you’d like to beta-test and let me know what you think I’d be very grateful.
10 minute website testing
So you’ve got a stellar web idea, you know it will work, but will the market take it? In the old economy, in fact, even last year, you would have built your site, built your brand, built your logo, ordered your stock, labels. You’ve handed over hard-earned cash to your accountant, incorporating companies, set-up bank accounts. You’ve got your fulfilment agent ready to fulfill thousands of items per day, and now you’re best part of £30k down. Now, you can do it in a hair’s-breadth. You can test market the concept with a free site from Google, Squidoo (I like this one), or if you’ve got a bit of knowledge, you could buy a template from Template Monster, throw it in with os commerce and give it a whirl. I built a test platform for HealthSpark, a new vitamins and supplements uk healthstore, using the latter route. The build time was 30 minutes, and the site will be ready to receive test transactions next week. Once you’ve got your test site live, you can run a pilot Adword campaign, and get immediate data on likely cost-per-click, and if you’re ready to fulfill, you can get customer conversion costs. Nice work.
Write like a blogger
Just reading Seth Godin’s blog (Purple Cow guy), and I thought you’d like this:You can improve your writing (your business writing, your ad writing, your thank you notes and your essays) if you start thinking like a blogger:
- Use headlines. I use them all the time now. Not just boring ones that announce your purpose (like the one on this post) but interesting or puzzling or engaging headlines. Headlines are perfect for engaging busy readers.
- Realize that people have choices. With 80 million other blogs to choose from, I know you could leave at any moment (see, there goes someone now). So that makes blog writing shorter and faster and more exciting.
- Drip, drip, drip. Bloggers don’t have to say everything at once. We can add a new idea every day, piling on a thesis over time.
- It’s okay if you leave. Bloggers aren’t afraid to include links or distractions in their writing, because we know you’ll come back if what we had to say was interesting.
- Interactivity is a great shortcut. Your readers care about someone’s opinion even more than yours… their own. So reading your email or your comments or your trackbacks (your choice) makes it easy to stay relevant.
- Gimmicks aren’t as useful as insight. If you’re going to blog successfully for months or years, sooner or later you need to actually say something. Same goes for your writing.
- Don’t be afraid of lists. People like lists.
- Show up. Not writing is not a useful way of expressing your ideas. Waiting for perfect is a lousy strategy.
- Say it. Don’t hide, don’t embellish.
What would happen if every single high school student had to have a blog? Or every employee in your company? Or every one of your customers?P.S. Just reading Seth’s Small is the new big, you’ve got to get it, its fresh thinking is like utterly addictive.