Gardasil: DTC advertising via your college bookstore (OnThePharm (Hanser)) by RJS

Merck is advertising Gardasil directly to college students that utilize Barnes and Noble's bkstore.com. For those unfamiliar, bkstore.com has a plugin structure where students log on to their college's bookstore, choose their class number (e.g. PHRM 328), and their books are loaded up, and you can either pick them up or have them shipped to you. No going to stand in lines or trying to figure out what books you need. One click shopping at it's most convenient.

So these are college bookstores inadvertently advertising prescription drugs to the entire college population. Well, more accurately, to the population that chooses to have their books shipped to their home, anyway. I don't know if the bundles that can be picked up have similar advertising info.

Merck's going about it in a strange way, though. They're sticking the prescribing information into these boxes. No fancy brochures, just the PI packet, which I find rather bizarre.

I can't say it doesn't make sense, or that it's a terrible idea — I think it's better than advertising Ambien on television — but it does make me wonder what's next… Cephalon advertising Provigil to high school and college kids? Med students? Pharmacy students?

Hey, why not?

(No discounts for having advertising in your box of books, either. )

Posted in: advertising , drugs , gardasil , marketing , money

Clint [design, marketing] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

Posted in: design , marketing

Resumes... what are they good for? [life, marketing] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

Seth Godin has a remarkable post up today. Remarkable because he manages to express an extremely salient point in a space so small I wouldn’t have thought it possible.

The crux of his post is this:

Here’s why: A resume is an excuse to reject you. Once you send me your resume, I can say, “oh, they’re missing this or they’re missing that,” and boom, you’re out.

Having a resume begs for you to go into that big machine that looks for relevant keywords, and begs for you to get a job as a cog in a giant machine. Just more fodder for the corporate behemoth. That might be fine for average folks looking for an average job, but is that what you deserve?

If you don’t have a resume, what do you have?

If you’ve been to university (or perhaps they do this in high schools these days): do you remember that class you took in your senior year where they try to prepare you for your upcoming/ongoing job hunt? You know that class. The one where they beat into your head how not to make a horrible résumé?

They spend so much time focusing on how not to make yourself look like a blathering idiot on a piece of paper that they neglect to tell you what Seth explains so succinctly in his short post. Read that post and think about if your résumé is doing you any favors.

At this point in my life, I feel I could toss the thing and not be any worse. I get and turn down a lot of job offers these days at some really cool places! I’m almost certainly it isn’t because of what I’ve catalogued about my past activities; more likely it’s how I’ve demonstrated my ability to work with others, to express myself in the written word, and to build some cool shit!

Posted in: life , marketing

Intel launched a Mobility marketing blog, and I wrote the kickoff post (Tiny Screenfuls (JoshB)) by Josh Bancroft

The folks in Intel web marketing have launched a new blog, all about Mobility:

http://blogs.intel.com/mobility/

It’s going to be all about upcoming cool stuff that’s being released later this year - Silverthorne (which is getting its own super-secret new brand name, launching next week!), Diamondville, WiMAX, and other cool mobile stuff.

I’m helping them out, giving them a “blogger’s-eye perspective”, and generally trying to help them do it “right” - make the blog interesting and useful, as opposed to just rehashing marketing copy. They asked me to write up the first post for the site (which, you’ll notice, has actually been built on top of an older blog about CES), which I was happy to do. It’s called “Living The Mobile Lifestyle“. It ended up being a little longer than I had planned, but I’ve been a mobile technology geek for a long time - over a decade - and it turned out that I had a lot to say.
Anyway, check it out, subscribe to the feed if you’re interested, and stay tuned for interesting news and hands-on experiences with cool mobile toys (like MIDs, WiMAX, etc.). I’ll be doing most of the writing here on TinyScreenfuls.com, but I’ll be crossposting any interesting bits there on the new Mobility blog, and on the Intel Software Network blog, too, so feel free to jump in with any comments or questions, here or there. Enjoy!

Posted in: blog , diamondville , launch , marketing , mobility , silverthorne , wimax

South by Southwest Interactive [internet, marketing, programming, social networking, technology] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

Yes, Jacqui and I are heading south this March. To Austin, Texas for South by Southwest, or SXSW as the kids say. A lot of really cool people from all over the country who also happen to be friends are going too. I am also excited to be attending my first conference in a long time where I am not media.

That means I can have fun, enjoy things, learn stuff, goof around with friends, stay up as late as I want, and get a pony for Christmas too!

For those who may not know exactly what South by Southwest Interactive is, just watch this video by ZeFrank.

So what should we definitely do when we’re in Austin? Furthermore, what good panels should I definitely not miss?

So far I am pretty sure I want to attend the following, but scheduling may work against me and I will most likely not likely get to see them all:

• Saturday
  • AJAX and Flash Mistakes (Jonathan Boutelle)
  • 10 Things We’ve Learned at 37signals (Jason Fried)
  • Go For IT! Attracting Girls to Technology (Clare Richardson)
  • Quit Your Day Job and Vlog (Tim Shey)
  • The Suxorz: The Worst Ten Social Media Ad Campaigns of 2007 (Henry Copeland)
  • The Weird Turn Pro: Crowdsourcing For Creatives (Derek Powazek)
  • Worst Website Ever: That’s So Crazy, It Just Might Work (Andy Baio)
• Sunday
  • A/B Testing: Design Friend or Foe? (Corey Chandler)
  • 10 Tips for Managing a Creative Environment (Bryan Mason)
  • Tools for Enchantment: 20 Ways to Woo Users (Kathy Sierra)
  • Wireframing in a Web 2.0 World (Richard Rutter)
  • Magic and Mental Models: Using Illusion to Simplify Designs (Jared M. Spool)
• Monday
  • A Critical Look At OpenID (Jason Levitt)
  • Building Developer-Friendly Web Service APIs (Ben Vinegar)
  • Self Replicating Awesomeness: The Marketing of No Marketing (Brian Oberkirch)
  • The Web Agency: There Will be Blood (Chris Bernard)
  • What User Generated Video Means to Word of Mouth Advertising (Daphne Kwon)
• Tuesday
  • Considerations for Scalabale Web Ventures (Chris Lea)
  • Creative Collaboration: Building Web Apps Together (Paul Hammond)
  • Secrets of JavaScript Libraries (John Resig)
  • Using Entertainment to Create Effective Mobile Advertising (Adam Zbar)

I have bolded the items that I think will really help me out at my day job at Stone Ward. While I am the lead web developer there, I am increasingly being called on for my expertise in the ways of social networks, approaching bloggers and blogging, et cetera. It would be nice to have some time listening to the ideas and thoughts of some people who are smarter and who have more experience than I do.

If you’re going, what panels are you most interested in?

Posted in: internet , marketing , programming , social networking , technology

Futzing and Resistance to Change [blogging, health & lifestyle, marketing, social networking] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

Riding the train this morning to O’Hare, I read two great articles posted by Tara Hunt on her blog. Tara co-founded and works for Citizen Agency in San Francisco and is an Online Marketing Professional. That stuff is all in her about page, but as I’ve been subscribed to her blog over the past few days (and creepily following her on Twitter for a while… just kidding), I’ve come to really enjoy her posts.

The two recent posts I’m referencing are Futzing as the Future of Word and The Human Body Teaches Us to Embrace the Chaos. The first is about how knowledge brokers or individuals who are able to bridge the gaps between two disparate groups of people (e.g. think marketing and teenagers, or technology and the baby boomer generation) have become extremely important and are paid handsomely for their skills.

The second is a comparison about how your body adapts to the travails of exercise and diet as you enter your thirties, and how that relates to marketing:

Just like I can no longer take for granted that my body will respond to the same routines it responded to in 1999, businesses have to adjust to the way the market responds. Many businesses fall into the trap of having something work in the beginning, then formulating it so that it’s done the same way for subsequent years, then wonder why it doesn’t work anymore.

Both body and corporate resistance are issues I have to deal with on a fairly regularly basis and really hit home with me. One of the most challenging parts of my job are those concerning companies that their old methods aren’t going to work and they need to embrace change, and sometimes even chaos.

Posted in: blogging , health & lifestyle , marketing , social networking

Bits and bobbles before Macworld [apple, ars technica, blogging, django, internet, marketing] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

Things have been moving extremely quickly in our run up to the week of Macworld over the past few days. Because I have so little time, I am proceeding to engage in a massive brain dump. In no specific order, here we go:

• I’ve secured a G4 Powerbook to use next week from our good friend Adam

• Received the Eye-Fi and discovered that it is extremely close to being able to perform the tasks I wished, but falls oh so short. I’ll talk about those in an upcoming article on the device on Infinite Loop.
• Besides not being able to help me out with live blogging, the Eye-Fi is a fantastic piece of technology, packaging, and exercise in user friendliness. It’s few and far between that you run across a product that makes you feel like magic is happening and is a joy to use from start to end.
• We’ve secured a few copies of Office 2008 for Mac to give away at our party this Monday. Office:Mac 2008 doesn’t officially go on sale until Tuesday so this is pretty special!

Finally, I thought I’d toss out a few of my most recently “starred” items from my Google Reader. These are links and articles I found especially interesting:

• Ben Gold has started an Interviews Tumblelog. His first victim is Marco Arment of Tumblr. Marco is Chief Scientist at Tumblr and does all the back end work: “I write the majority of Tumblr’s back-end code, design the architecture, and administer the servers. I generally don’t touch the design or front-end, since David is much better at that.”
• Jonathan Buchanan has released a new version of django-tagging. This is an excellent Django application that you can use in your projects to add bolt-on tagging support for just about anything. I use it here on my blog and in several work projects. Jonathan has added multi-word tags, a tag_cloud_for_model template tag and more.
• The Acid 3 test is entering it’s beta stages. The Acid tests are meant to coerce web browser developers like Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and others the support new and important standards. This helps web site developers build even more interesting and capable web applications. The tests stress edge cases and through the browser vendors fixing those cases, the hope is to shore up general support for new technology. Whereas the Acid 2 test stressed Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS), the third test emphasizes ECMAscript (javascript) and DOM support.
• After the Robert Scoble thing, everyone and their Mom joined the Data Portability working group. That includes Google, Facebook, LinkedIN, SixApart, Flickr, and Twitter. The whole Web 2.0 Illuminati! :) This could theoretically be a good thing, as long as they can work together and find common ground.
• VNGRD is selling this awesome shirt in their new collection, I would’ve bought it by now if their online store was working.

• Shelf is an interesting tool written by Tom Insam for OS X. It examines the content of your active application and attempts to extract metadata such as URL, hCard, vCard, email addresses, contact you’re chatting with, et cetera and present a useful set of context around an individual associated with that content. For a useful example, say that a work colleage opens up an AIM chat with me. This Shelf application will see that I’m chatting with that person, access their Address Book record and present to me any additional context on the shelf. Phone number, email address, and photo (if available). There are a million ways this could be tied into additional data sources and much more information to be pulled out of existing applications as well. It’s still a bit rough, but looks to be coming along nicely.

• The best of the wooden look is a compendium of really good looking websites that have used a “wooden” look to good results.

Finally, I’d like to point everyone to the blogs of some of my coworkers. Two of these are new and one has been around for well over a year and I’ve never had a chance to link it up here.

• Blake’s Thinktank is a blog by our Director of Public Affairs, Blake Rutherford. Blake is steeped in politics and covers the subject extensively on this site. I’ve advised him in the past on the subject of blogging. He’s needed little tutelage to hit the ground running and build a dedicated readership. His personal style and thoroughness have really begun to shine as this important political season has picked up pace over the past six months.

• Monkey Bulb is the blog of Chris Kindrick. He’s been called an Art Director, independent film actor, and a national commercial star. He can now add blogger to that list. Don’t miss out on Chris as he’s hilarious and sharp as a tack. I think he’ll do great on his new site.

• Last, but not least is the blog of Emily Reeves, Ms. Adverthinker. Emily is tacking the world of marketing on her brand new site and is still awaiting a new header image. Hopefully we can get that up over the next week ;) I wish her all the luck in the world, but I don’t think she’ll need it.

And with all of that out of my brain, I am shutting down until I reach San Fransisco. Keep your news readers and web browsers trained at Ars Technica, Infinite Loop, this blog, and our Ars Technica Macworld Twitter account for all the news from the conference next week.

Posted in: apple , ars technica , blogging , django , internet , marketing

Analytics junkies [marketing, social networking, technology] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

My friend, super-blogger, and fellow Arsian, Josh Bancroft has a really keen post about how he tracks the various metrics of his personal blog (which gets quite a good bit of traffic!). I will admit it too, I am an analytics junkie too and I use a lot of the same metrics and tools as Josh does to see what content is doing good and where I can make improvements on my site.

This is another post that grew from an interesting conversation at work. We were discussing what site statistics/metrics are REALLY important to a blogger. That is, swimming in a sea of numbers and graphs and data, which are the ones that are the most meaningful to you as a blogger? That got me thinking about the ones that are most important to me, so off I went taking screenshots in Google Analytics, and this post was born. I had a lot of input from my friends on Twitter, where I conducted an impromptu Twitter InstaPoll(TM) to get their ideas, so thanks to them for their input. I’m also going to do a separate post on stats that are just plain fun to look at, but don’t really tell you anything useful.

As many of you might already know, my day job is working as the senior web developer for an advertising agency. As a core member of the interactive department, I’m called on more and more regularly to chime in on analytics, audience building, and other things of that nature for clients. I am of the opinion that one of the most important parts of deploying and maintaining a client’s online presence, whether it be full-blown corporate website, microsite, or intranet is tracking how people are interacting with that site, and the trending of several key metrics.

Bounce rates and how they change over time show, at least on a superficial level, how engaging people find your content. Traffic funnels and “goal conversions” can illustrate bottlenecks in your navigation structure and problems with your forms. Top performing content shows you what types of posts resonate with the online populous at large and with search engines in general.

As Josh so aptly demonstrates in post, all of these techniques can carry over very well to managing your personal sites and blogs as well. I have a set of three web pages I visit on a daily basis to see how my site has done. Those are Google Analytics, FeedBurner, and Google AdSense.

Old blog (phaedo.cx)

When it comes to Google Analytics, which tracks the majority of the data I review, I inspect a very small set of data on a daily basis. Number of unique visitors, page views, how many of my visitors are arriving via search engines like Google or Yahoo! and how many of those visitors comes from referrals (other blogs, news posts, forums, et cetera).

As I’m experiencing right now, you will see a much different pattern on a brand new site. This particular blog and domain has only existed for a few weeks, and I am currently in a phase of building a new audience. Getting a crowd to follow you to a new site is a challenge and I am finding it really interesting to see how my promotion efforts in regards to search engines and otherwise are slowly building an (even bigger) audience here.

New blog (blog.clintecker.com)

In addition to Google Analytics, and like Josh, I also use FeedBurner to track people following my RSS feeds. Furthermore, FeedBurner has some cool features that show you which posts people are clicking on the most. This can give you valuable insights into the types of titles, descriptions, and content that are striking a chord with your readership.

Finally, I track AdSense to see how my vast network of sites displaying Google Ads are doing. I currently have these running here, http://phaedo.cx (my old blog), http://arslounge.com (a community aggregator), http://www.htmini.com (an old blog I used to run), and some other places. Good content on all of these sites has allowed me to make what I consider really good “iTunes money.” Six months ago I was making $30 a month, in November I made $40, and in December I made $50. I’m hoping for this to grow as I get better with my blogging and networking skills!

I hope this has been enlightening to anyone looking to grow their new or existing blog/site into something bigger and perhaps something huge! I would also recommend reading through Josh’s post to get an idea of some good pages on Google Analytics to check if you’re a blogger.

Posted in: marketing , social networking , technology

Apple dominates CES [apple, marketing, technology] (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

Last year, Macworld and CES were booked over the same week in January. Quite unfortunate. Does anyone even remember what happened at CES last year? The iPhone, Apple TV, and a slew of other Apple products hit the ground and blew away anything that was being discussed in Las Vegas.

Well this year, Apple barely had to try. Macworld is next week, and as you know, Apple announced minor, incremental updates to their pro-line.

Result?

News of CES is swept away on the blogs (that is, if you count TechMeme as an accurate portrayal of what’s being talked about).

Heck, if you take a look at the front page of Technorati, you wouldn’t even be able to tell CES is going on right now.

And all of this is unfortunate. The larger consumer electronics market is extremely poor at PR and on days like today, it becomes more than evident that they really have no idea how to market or get the word out about some of the really cool stuff being demoed at CES.

What’s not fair, however, is to blame Apple for their products getting more press today. Jeremy Toeman blasts them on his blog, and it’s totally unwarranted. Jeremy should be blaming the poor PR departments of CES and the exhibiting companies, not Apple’s fantastic PR department. And lets not get too congratulatory here. What has Apple’s PR department done today except perhaps leak a little news about the bumps and then post a press release on their website?

Posted in: apple , marketing , technology

Cursor*10: Cool addicting flash game [fun, internet, marketing (Clint Ecker (clintology)) by Clint Ecker

What you see above is the title screen for a flash game called Cursor*10. Made by Yoshio Ishii, you click on the stairs to take you to the next level. In the first few levels you can easily find the set of stairs, but in successive levels it gets hard and takes more time to reveal the icon.

Here’s where the cool part comes in. You have ten “cursors” or lives and you can cooperate with yourself to go higher. Whatsa?? When you play your second, third, et cetera cursors, you see all of the previous attempts ghosted against your current progress. In the instance where you must click a box 99 times to reveal the stairs you if you were clicking the box on your previous attempt, you can team up and click on this attempt and your efforts are doubled! In some instances a previous attempt can hold down a button to show the stairs and your current attempt can move on.

Pretty cool! I made it to the 14th level before I ran out of attempts. Check it out for yourself.

By the way, this is what’s considered a viral game. Much like many of Ferry Halim’s works of genius (and art!), this game is simple, addictive, novel, and it is amazingly easy to lose and start playing again. These are the types of games that attract hundreds of thousands of players, keep people coming back every day, and encourage sharing amongst friends.

To take this in another, marketing direction. These are the types of casual games that marketing & interactive agencies should be pushing and selling to their clients as branded properties. Clients have a tendency to want to make things over-complex and stuff branding, up-selling, and depth at the expense of a successful project, and it’s our job to convince them to go the other way. Simplicity sells. Really.

Posted in: fun , internet , marketing