David the cleaning dude

These are the little things. But, it just hit me last week that I have no idea what is the name of the janitor who came in every day in the evening to clean up the office. Since I am usually still in the office then, I have been smiling at him all this time. But, who is he or at least what is his name. So, I asked. His name is David. So, now, when I see him, I greet him by saying "Hi, David." I am not sure what all these means, but sometimes, there is no point in asking too many questions.

(Maybe I am going soft...)

The webinar thing started with a bang. It was made official last Thursday. I set up all the Google stuff and make sure all the links works. Then, when I come into office on Friday, there were five requests for webinar. Then, through out the rest of the day, additional requests came in. It is pretty cool! The first webinar took place yesterday and of the nine people who ultimately requested it, four of them showed up. So, that is a decent ratio that nearly 50% of the people came. In my prior experiences, I would be happy with a 25% attendance rate. Then, I blasted our existing leads to remind people that we also have a Thursday webinar session. Right now, between those new requests and people who missed the first session but asked to attend the next one, we are looking at a list of about ten people.

What I find interesting is that none of the requests came from Google. Because we pass a text string when somebody clicks on our Google ad, I can tell that these requests came from our website directly due to the absence of the text string. I think partly it is a function of the first batch who signed up were people who worked at different divisions of the same parent firm. So, I can only guess there is a bit of network effect at work here. We did move the webinar to the most visually prominent location - upper left. So, that probably helped a bit too. But, it is curious to me on how people would rather come to the site and sign up than just sign up directly via Google ad's. I need to think about this.

One side thing that I have noticed with the new landing pages is that the number of junk leads seems to be lower than before. This, I, too, have no obvious answers. Partly this could be cause more fields are mandatory so that it is more "painful" to leave junk request. (And, by junk request I am referring to requests that came from a Yahoo.com address with no name, no company info, nothing.) A second thing could be that we now have a more professional looking interface from both the text description, color/design template, and that we now have two attractive female images on the landing pages.

Oh, another thing about Google that I thought was fascinating. I have separated out each campaign between Search and Content network so that I can control the cost in each. Theoretically, these are two distinct networks. However, they do intersect when you search on the Google site where it would serve the ad with higher CPC. How I found out was that I keep seeing a Content network ad when I do a Google search where I was expecting to see a Search network ad. After going back and forth with Google help, they figured out that because my CPC is higher in the Content network for the same key words, it crowded out my Search network ad. Talk about logical yet technical answers. So, the first thing I did after learning it was to scrub through the Google campaigns to make sure that all my Search network key words have higher CPC than the Content network counterparts.

This is a busy week. We came out with a press release on company momentum on Monday. Followed Tuesday by another press release announcing our relationship with a major Silicon Valley technology vendor. Finally, we also have a white paper published by an analyst on our product. I am not a big fan of momentum release since I always find it suspect - after all I have never seen anyone issue a release about losing momentum. On the other hand, this is probably the easiest way to generate some buzz or, at least, have something on the wire. The momentum got picked up at the usual suspects - Yahoo, Google, Excite, etc. Financial Times also picked it up. That was kind of cool since I am a fan of FT. The second press release was shorter but has a marquee name that also has been in the news lately. It got picked up at more outlets and I can only assume it is because of the name. I guess I should be nicer to customers so they would let me use their names in publicity. :-)! As for the white-paper. It was sent out to the analyst's database as a new white-paper. I do not know how many pick up we will get out of it. So, I need to think of some other ways to promote the white paper - I am paying good money for it after all.

This must be the "find an analyst" season. After talking with an analyst who write for Network World, I was alerted to another one by a colleague. So we went through the courting ritual of saying hi and we love to know more about your products. This guy is a bit more work. He wants to sign us up for a $20K annual contract and he becomes a retained analyst. This is the typical Analyst/Gartner model. There is merit to the model for large ticket enterprise solutions. But, in our case, it has not been a good fit after trying several variations of the same idea. Of course, I did not say it out loud. Instead, I asked that he writes an article about us since how we found him was through an article he wrote that purport to address the specific vertical that we are in. I do not know if he would bite, but I did send him all the official propaganda. Fingers crossed.

Oh, a side note about the prior analyst. For some reason, she decided to do an article on us sooner rather than later. So, we quickly did a demo for her, gave her all the key talking points. The article is supposed to come out sometime next week. And, from the draft copy that she sent me, it looks like she drank the Cool-Aid! Gotta love it!

Okay, the last rumbling of the day. We got into this rather heated debate last week on some marketing terms. What it boils down to is should we do a blanket statement that is clean and intuitive but somebody can argue is not completely accurate from certain technical angles or should we put in the relevant qualifiers so that the information is technically factual from the very start. Being the marketing guy whose mission is to never confuse good marketing with reality, I am firmly on the side of using a clean and intuitive copy and just tell the sales people to blame it on those clueless marketing folk who come up with these lines. On the other end of the argument is Mr Proper who is the head of Sales. Unlike a lot of sales people I know, he insists on full disclosure up front. This may have something to do with the fact that his prior incarnation was in the legal world. Well, Mr Proper has done a great job as a salesperson so I certainly would value his input. On the other hand, I have done a good job marketing the company, if I may say so, so I must value my own judgement too.

I think this is partly a philosophical debate. I do not believing in lying. But, at the same time, I do not think it is wise to water down the effects of first impression with all the details to either bore and scare away a prospect. This is a ginger balance. My current position, after taking into consideration of Mr Proper's views, is to keep the marketing message simple and clean. However, in our technical documents like data-sheet, there will be an asterisk to explain some of the "practical" limitations as a result of the browser features.

(Maybe I am not going soft after all...)

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