If you’re like us, you subscribe to blogs with the full intention of reading every post but, as your email or RSS reader fills up, you never get around to reading all (if any) of them. If you’re looking to narrow down your reading list for 2010, these are the blogs we always make time to read - and recommend that you should, too.
Seth’s Blog
Marketing and business guru Seth Godin shares his thoughts on marketing, spreading ideas and standing out from the crowd.
MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog
A great blog for online marketing resources, marketing articles, online seminars, case studies, conferences and events.
Mequoda Daily
A blog that focuses on online publishing, information marketing and make money online.
Get Elastic The Ecommerce Blog
The #1 ecommerce blog in the world, covering SEO, usability, analytics, email, shopping cart abandonment, and social media.
VKI Studios
Internet marketing and website usability blog to help you get more traffic and higher conversation rates.
Posted by Crissy Campbell | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
Created by Backbone and KPMG, the PICK 20 is the only national ranking of its kind and some of the judges and winners are our friends.
Among the Judges
Super-smart social media and digital marketing expert, Kate Trgovac is president of LintBucket Media, a boutique marketing agency headquartered in Vancouver which focuses on social media, community building and digital content creation. We love Kate and her marketing and technology blog.
A winner last year, “NowPublic continues at the forefront of the reinvention of news media,” according to O’Connor Clarke. “They continue to impress with the rate of their growth, their constant innovation and their overall leadership in defining the future of citizen media.” Napier said the company’s “scan tool, which acts as a filtering system, appears to be positioned to help readers get the information that is most valuable and relevant to them,” but Trgovac, while impressed by the company, is “still not sure how they make money.”
11 ThoughtFarmer Friend Chris McGrath, and social media gurus Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo who introduced me to ThoughtFarmer http://www.thoughtfarmer.com
Intranet software which incorporates social networking features
A winner last year, ThoughtFarmer “is still great, although they’ve got some tough competition. Still, it has a solid team, smart products and really cool marketing,” according to O’Connor Clarke. Trgovac also sees “lots of competition in the marketplace” but also calls ThoughtFarmer “one of the best social intranet applications I’ve seen, with a great interface and features.”
#20 Pixton Friend and CEO/Creator Clive Goodinson and Creative Director Daina M. Goodinson http://www.pixton.com
A site where people create, publish, share and remix comics
Geist enjoyed seeing something “new and creative” and Shende said Pixton “outputs creativity, collaboration, crowdsourcing and community all in an innovative new spin on an old, previously non-democratic medium.” The judges hope Pixton can monetize the service. “If the company can continue to attract classrooms willing to try the solution, and highlight the value delivered to entice institutions to pay for the subscription, the company could turn a fun comic-strip tool into something that’s really adding value and providing a revenue stream,” Napier said.
Congratulations to all 20 winners!
Posted by Monique Sherrett | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
It was Super Bowl, which is one of the last mass media experiences that we share. Super Bowl is particularly important for the ad industry ($3 million for a 30-second spot) and we think that spending $3 million is not ballsy, but handing over the creative direction of your ad to your consumers is a really ballsy move.
Posted by Monique Sherrett | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
First let me tell you a story. It’s actually Seth Godin’s story from The Purple Cow, a book about what it takes to create and sell something remarkable.
Seth and family driving in France, enchanted by picturesque cows grazing in lovely pastures. Kilometres and kilometres of cows. New cows suddenly are just like old cow, now cows are common. Now cows are boring.
“Cows, after you’ve seen them for a while, are boring. They may be well-bred cows, Six Sigma cows, cows lit by a beautiful light, but they are still boring. A Purple Cow, though: Now, that would really stand out. The essence of the Purple Cow—the reason it would shine among a crowd of perfectly competent, even undeniably excellent cows—is that it would be remarkable. Something remarkable is worth talking about, worth paying attention to. Boring stuff quickly becomes invisible.”
In the land of email distribution services there are some big players and companies with lots of features. How do you choose who to spend money with?
I looked at everyone’s websites. I tested the tools.
I like that CampaignMonitor.com has a self-explanatory website. The home page tells me about the immediate benefits I will see using the service: control, design testing, reporting, and the blowing-away of clients. Wow, they know what I need.
Free sign-up. Yay!
Easy set-up. Double yay! (Although it did take me a bit to realize all the moving parts for creating the on-site subscriber links and thank you pages. As a methodical beginner this was all fine, and now that I’ve done it once, I’m like a rocket ship.)
Simple reporting of complex info. Love the opens, activity reports, subscriber reports—fantastic!
Plus, they have a rockin’ newsletter with lots of tips. It’s important that the company selling me email distribution actually understands how this works and writes a good newsletter.
And, they continue to provide value to the community by creating tools for designers, like this CSS Support Chart that details what CSS elements are supported in various email clients. Hello Superstar!
Campaign Monitor is my Purple Cow. They make email marketing “refreshingly simple”, which is also part of the tagline for Freshview, the company responsible for Campaign Monitor.
And “refreshingly simple” makes them my favourite. It makes them remarkable. So remarkable that I’m willing to recommend them to friends and colleagues, which is what I did recently on Lab with Leo.
Now how did I get that wine?
In June, Mathew from Campaign Monitor spotted me on Lab with Leo and sent me an email thanking me for mentioning Campaign Monitor. He also said, “We’d love to send you a Campaign Monitor shirt to say thanks.” Sweet!
Since James is the t-shirt wearer in our family, I picked a size for him. On a related note, James gets a lot of t-shirts from Threadless, who also use Campaign Monitor.
Somewhere along the line, I also ended up with 2 bottles of fantastic Australian wine from my Sydney-based friends at Freshview.
Remarkable service means I remark on the service.
Thank You for the Thank You.
Posted by Monique Sherrett | Email to a Friend | Of course, you should follow me on twitter here
My bookkeeper pointed out the other day that the backup on her computer hasn’t been working for the past couple of months. Eek gads! What that means is that all the information she is entering for my bookkeeping purposes could disappear. By “her” computer, she means my computer, which I’ve set up for her to use.
Documents, photos, music, videos ... there’s all sort of valuable stuff on that computer because it used to be my home computer.
So here is my data loss disaster story in a series of photos.
It starts like this:
Oh, that was weird!
Oh, that was really bad.
Oh, I don’t know how to fix this.
Oh, I really don’t know how to fix this.
====
Oh, James?
Oh, geez.
Oh. Ooooooooh.
Oh. No.
Have your own story? A single photo will do.
One of my clients is PutPlace. And they are all about preventing data loss disasters like this one.
* PutPlace offers real-time backup.
* PutPlace protects and organizes your photos, documents, emails, music and home movies.
* PutPlace enables you to publish a file on multiple sites and find it later.
PutPlace is more than file backup. It’s a lifesaver and they are running a photo contest.
All you have to do is submit a photo of your shock or horror with a caption about your data loss fears. The prize is an annual subscription to PutPlace for 100 GB of data + $200 USD Amazon gift certificate.
If you are a user of Flickr (the world’s best photo sharing site), and have regularly uploaded photos for the multiple years you’ve been on the site, then you may have a huge archive of thousands of photos at this point. How often to you get the chance to revisit photos from a year ago, or even farther back? Possibly never. Well Photojojo has come up with something called “Time Capsule” and it may just be the thing for you.
“Every couple weeks, Time Capsule digs up your photos on Flickr from a year ago, choosing the ones that are most interesting (most views, comments, and faves), then sends them to you in a quick email.”
I signed up for it a few weeks ago, and have received two newsletters so far. The selection of photos show up with the captions I’d written to accompany them on Flickr, and are a very generous size. I like this tiny slice of life from a year ago showing up in my inbox, and revisiting shots posted the previous year.
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