Simpering UK-92480

Okay, this is cheating a bit but I have been dying to use the word "simper" meaning to smile in a silly, self-conscious, often coy manner. Or, the shorter form for the expression "grinning like an idiot." Something that I do with some degree of frequency.

Oh the UK-92480 bit was the initial name for the pharmaceutical compound that eventually came to be Viagra. I thought you might enjoy this bit of lore that is becoming part of the popular culture. Viagra, that is.

But, back in the ranch, things are busy as always.

The latest website revision have been pushed to the live site. Of course, I immediately found some errors. Fortunately, with the help of Contribute, I was able to make the correction in minutes on the staging site. But, the problem is that I have no way of pushing the quick fix out. That is, not until earlier today when our head of engineering walked me through the process via an home-grown website management tool that I can control through a browser. As the saying goes, I am now armed and dangerous! With Contribute and the home-grown tool, I can pretty much do all kind of strange stuff to the website without having to wait for the webmaster. Not that I would do that, but the potentiality is there. Heh!

We are at the late stages of preparing for launch our webinar program. The website is ready. The email reminder text has been prepared. I am ready to add a new set of key words and ad's in Google to drive traffic. Pretty much the only thing that is holding me back is time. Because this is a weekly program, I want to wait until tomorrow for the promotion because I do not want people to sign up for this week's non-existent program. I am curious to know how the webinar will do as part of the lead-gen and sales process. Fingers crossed.

The website revamp is coming along. I had a good discussion with the designer and gave her some detail information on the components needed in the new site design. It is not meant to be something revolutionary so a lot of stuff will be from our existing site. On the other hand, it is good to have a professional build a foundation that we can work from.

One thing that I am thinking of doing is to add web click path tracking on the website. It helps to collect information such as where users go and the most popular page of a website. From that information, we can infer what page/information need to come forward so it is easier to find as well as what kind of information that are of particular interests to viewers. My original plan is to run it in conjunction with the new website. However, the head of engineering was pretty psyched for the idea and he wants to deploy some resources to get it done in the current site. Cool!

I have been staring at Google and not doing a heck of a lot for a while. It is partly a function of fatigue since I was monitoring it every day for about two months. And, of course, now that I am busy doing other stuff, it is just not the most pressing issue. Anyway, I finally got my acts together and cleaned up the Google AdWords account. Specifically, I added a new campaign because one of our prospects told us what key words they searched on and a few of them were completely off our radar. That was pretty cool. Customer input complements nice with the program of looking through the daily web log to see what search terms that lead people to us as well as running a Google tool to find out other related terms that people search for given a set of key words. Long story short, I run the Google tool and now have a few hundred new key words.

Of course, it is a good deal for Google because it means I am paying more by the sheer increase of key words which leads to wider coverage. But, if it brings qualified leads, I am all for paying a few extra bucks. The interesting thing about the new key words is that they are all variations of the major key words that we are already using. For example, adding a "Windows" in front of the key word. I guess people just search for different flavor of the same idea and it is good to cover all bases. As a result of the increase in key words, one of my campaign is getting blown out of water in terms of hitting the daily budged limit. It is a good problem to have because it also means that we are casting a wider net. We will see if the extra expenditure and efforts are warranted in a few months.

My latest project is to come up with a game. The idea is to let viewer play a simple game/quiz and get a score on their knowledge level. This would, in theory, pique their interests so there is a higher level of recall and, if the goddess of fortune smiles upon me, get the viewers to sign up for more information. Game is hard to make. Distilling a list of questions is tricky enough, then, there is question of how to score the answers. Originally, I was going to come up with a formula, but it turns out to be a rather difficult one. So, I have changed tact to brute force and created a spreadsheet with all possible variations of answer combinations. Then, I will assign a score for each combination. I know, it is not the most elegant method, but sometimes, elegance takes too much time.

Life on the PR front is going okay. I am asking a bunch of customers to okay a press release and some of them are saying we cannot mention their name. Not what a marketeer wants to hear. Then, there is the case study pending approval from the customer. I plan to call him later in the week to follow up. The case study re-write is going slowly. I am hoping to have a new first draft this week - but I am not holding my breath. But, whatever happens, I will have a PR piece hitting the wire and a white-paper posted next week. That, I should be thankful for.

Oh, I tracked down a regular contributor to Network World magazine because she wrote an article that touches on some of the issues that our solution addresses. We had a good chat and she indicated that she would be interested in writing an article about us! How cool is that! That will not happen for a few weeks due to other articles in the queue, but that is fair. I suggested that I would buy some reprints once it is published. Yeah, it is all very mercantile. It is alright though, if the rules are understood.

Arms akimbo, simpering, and dreaming of a world without UK-92480. (Yeah, akimbo was another word that I was dying to use. And, yes, I seriously need to get a life.)

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