As most of you know, I don’t do alot of promotion on my blog, but thought it might be prudent given the fact that this is a really neat event that we have coming up. As most of you know, I work for Quest Software and on February 6th, we are having a Notes to Exchange Migration Virtual Conference. Its completely online and geared to those folks who are interested in moving from Lotus Notes to Exchange and Sharepoint.
I think virtual conferences or trade shows are great since you can do it from the comfort of your desk and really have no “sales” interaction which on some level is a good thing. Anyway if you or someone you know is interested in attending, I would encourage you to register and attend this great event. As always, let me know if you have any questions.
Several times this year I have updated my readers on the current state/video views on my organizations corporate account on YouTube. Well, since its the last day of the year, I thought I would give you the latest numbers which are simple amazing.
In my October post, I was hopeful and excited that we would go over 100,000 by the end of the year. Well, its December 31st and we just went over 130,500 views!! This means that in 3 months we went up by 45,000 views…which in my opinion is awesome. We continue to provide fresh content and I am truly proud of our accomplishment.
If you are involved in SQL Server in anyway, my current organization is asking for 2 minutes of your time to fill out a survey to shape the future of our SQL Server offerings.
Alas….if you fill out the survey you will be entered into a drawing for a BenQ 20 inch monitor. Please take the time if you are working with SQL Server to fill out the survey as I know that it will be valuable to our development teams.
Wanted to share with all of you a piece of marketing goodness that my company produced. Our theme is that if you want to be a SQL Server Rock Star, use our tools which I think is pretty compelling as well as kinda uber-geek cool.
About 14 months ago we tried our first giveaway at my organization.It was met with some trepidation and some folks flat out were against it citing as to why we should give someone incentive to download an asset.It was a huge success and has since been duplicated many different ways across the company.We have given away Zunes, Xbox’s, monitors, soundocks, iPods, T-shirts and even gift certificates to people just to either try our stuff or read a darn white paper.
I say no more.Stop. I have since see some people in our company that treat this sort of incentive as cocaine and are wanting to give away some trinket or toy just for the sake of getting more leads with a complete disregard for the quality of the lead.
I agree that every once in a while we should give something fun away to give incentive to people and to let the marketplace know that we are a fun and vibrant company, but enough is enough.I have this strange feeling that the marketplace is either getting sick of our gimmick giveaways and in some strange ways almost expecting it.I have a feeling the some marketing people are the crack addicts want to give away this sweet thing just to boost lead count. I think its time that we stop being the dealers and start to be innovators again.
What is wrong with giving away something that the client is not only going to gain value from but also give them something that shows our commitment to that particular space?Sure, a book or a subscription is not as sexy as an Xbox, but we need to start giving out all of our candy all of time and give the marketplace a time to WANT to see something from us as opposed to the fat kid hanging outside your house everyday, cause they know you throw out a pound of chocolate every day.
It sure is fun to work on a program where we are giving away something for fun, but it might be even more rewarding to go back to the basics of marketing again and make something that is traditionally not appealing sexy again.
I have found that most companies don’t have a concrete email marketing strategy. Some are run from the gun, where they use it like cocaine to promote everything and anything. Some use it strategically but don’t find it useful because they either don’t know how to measure it. And then there are the companies that don’t leverage it at all, simply because they have no idea where to start.
Since starting email marketing at my company almost 6 years to the day, I have seen it go through a bunch of transitions. We had the early adopters, the skeptics, the jokers (everything we send is spam..and I was labeled the spam king) to the abusers. As email marketing is ever evolving in the marketing landscape new things pop up every day, but one of the things on my agenda for 2008 is the ability for my organization to adapt better to reading panes, auto previews, mobile devices and offer our users flexible templates from which to work from.
My strategy right now is to get better. In fact my strategy is to be the best, since I truly feel we have a good thing rolling now. To be the best one must constantly innovate and not rest on ones success.
The first priority is to get people in my organization to think of email as a strategic weapon and not as “free” or “lets just send an email” type of activity.
I posted about 2 months ago our status on viral vids and the use of YouTube in our efforts to promote our brand. I was able to log onto our account this morning and noticed that we just tipped over the 85,000 view mark, which means we have gone up 22,000 in less than 2 months. I have asked my team to ensure we post fresh content every couple of weeks so our audience and subscribers can gain value from our brand.
I am anxious to see if we go over 100,000 this year.
Mike has in my book an “its about time” post on LinkedIn. It looks as if I will be able to add my big bald mug shot on LinkedIn come Friday. I hope I don’t scare too many people away from my profile.
Chris over at Raw Stylus asked that I update him on our viral video status with YouTube.
I believe the last post I had on this was on April 6th, where I mentioned that we had 21,000 views on YouTube of Quest Software Videos. As of today, we have over 63,000 views on the 51 vids we have posted on YouTube. Some of the most popular videos that I have seen have been the instructional ones where we had an expert presenting. For some reason however, I don’t consider any of these videos viral. I consider this as a part of doing business in the new Enterprise 2.0 model. If one should happen to go viral great, but its nothing that I am counting on.
One of the things that we have learned in doing this process is to keep them simple and educational. Most of the videos that we have on YouTube are recorded webcasts that we have done in the past and all provide a high level of technical knowledge and training. We never set out to have this account to pound our chests and let everyone know how great we are. We simply want to educate folks in our recognized areas of database management, application management and windows management.
I have tasked my team to ensure we have fresh content posted consistently as we do have quite a few people subscribing to our channel. I believe fresh and engaging content keeps our numbers respectable and hopefully people want more.
I am excited to see how our account will progress in the next 6 - 10 months, but I can honestly say I am very optimistic and proud of our current accomplishments.
I am reading the book Wikinomics and on page 90 it has a great quote that I would like to share. “Can proprietary software vendors see the writing on the wall?. We sure hope so. Proprietary software spells rapid obsolescence if these companies don’t find a way to coexist with the peer producers”
The authors were talking about folks who utilize open source to gain business advantage. While I won’t go into too much detail as I think you should run out and read this book, I will mention a few things as to how it relates to a product we have at Quest.
Its called Funnel Web and its a web analytics tool that’s perfect for the open source market. Its a great little tool for small to medium size business who want to analyze their web traffic. I heard a comment on the funnel web discussion community the other day about how they wished Quest would release this into the open sources market and I could not agree more.
While I don’t know the specifics as to why Quest can or cannot do this I will say that if you are a user of Funnel Web or someone that would like to see this go open source, please comment on this blog and I will be sure to share your thoughts with some folks.
At Quest, we created a character known as SQL Stan. SQL Stan is a fictional character but he is “is the embodiment of the collective SQL Server expertise at Quest Software.” We have a bunch of SQL Server experts at our company and we put this out there to see how the SQL Server community reacted to him.
So far the response has been pretty significant and I would like to see what you have to say about SQL Stan. So if you are a SQL Server dude or dudette and have a question about SQL Server, check him out and let me know what you think.
