Taking on Chindia

I had lunch with a buddy to catch up. He told me about this new buzz word "Chindia" - a contrasted form of China and India like "Wintel" for Windows and Intel. Have not heard "Chindia" before but got the notion immediately. It would be interesting to see if this term lives. I know people sometimes use Wintel, but I do not believe it ever caught on.

Did you know the English word "entrepreneur" came from the Old French "entreprendre" meaning "to undertake"...

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A strange week indeed.

The biggest news, by all measures, is that Mr Whup-Ass is taking on the acting CEO role of another company. He is on the board of this company and there have been quite a bit of internal turmoil there. So, the board decided to fire the existing CEO and asked Mr Whup-Ass to step in for the interim while they figure out how to take care of the situation.

Of course, this is proving a bit problematic from my (marketing) perspective. Mr W is staying on as our CEO and we want him to do that. However, the original announcement of his acting CEO appointment put his association with us in doubt. This put a bit of pressure on us because we needed to explain to everyone who monitors our activities that he is still with us without sounding like a bunch of headless chickens.

It took a few days of going back and forth to confirm that Mr W will indeed stay on as CEO as originally thought. Then, it becomes a matter of putting out those small fires and doubts. Unfortunately, the other company's website still have not been updated. I will need to keep bugging them to change the website...

The other thread on the on-going PR saga is that I have gotten internal buy-in to change the PR agency. I have talked with the new agency and they have put forth a proposal that is within what I was expecting. The tricky part now is to figure out the best transition period. Strategically, I do not want to advise the out-going firm too early because there is the risk that they will start to coast for however many days that are left nor does it make sense to have the out-going firm work on relationships and project knowing that they will not be supporting them. On the other hand, at the emotional level, I have not decided on how "cold blooded" I want to be. I have enjoyed working with the people from the out-going firm and I certainly do not hold ill feeling beyond the fact that I think I have a better team with the new agency. I will talk with a few people and decide the best way to handle this.

On the Google front, I have started the A/B test with ad's. Actually, it is a test with two components. One is to test which copy works better. This is achieved by serving these ad's in an even rotating manner. So, the comparison is apple to apple. This is distinct from the Google AdWord default choice of automatic optimization. On the back-end, I am also testing which landing page works better as a conversion tool. This is achieved by having two identical ad designs one that goes to an information request page with the other going to the webinar request page. This test has run for one week so far and I would like to run it for a few more weeks to see the results.

On the lead front, it seems we are getting more quality leads this week. I do not have any idea on what is the difference this week. The probable candidate is the nice article that we got from Network World. On the other hand, I do need to guard against the psychological trap known as the "immediacy/proximity effects" where I correlate what happened right before an event as being the cause. But, hey, if that is what it takes to take some credit, it is an easy sell. :-)!

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Oh, did somebody mention Spain? My Spanish vacation is coming in a bit more than three weeks. I have been listening to Spanish tapes for a while now and I must say that if I ever want to retain a cleaning lady for my apartment, I am ready. Now, if you want me to order food from a restaurant, that is a completely different story. The tapes I use focus on preparing a person to live in a Spanish speaking country whereas I need tourist Spanish. Not saying the exercise is for naught though. It is still good to prep my ears and generally trying to recoup my limited vocabulary.

The other thing I have been doing is to watch as many movies from Spain as possible. The idea being that I need to prep my ears for Castilian Spanish. It is interesting that through these films, I am learning the Spanish on how to kill a neighbor (La Communidad, a great film - illogical, dark, and funny) or how to say the F word in Spanish (El Secreto de la Corazon - it is a cute film about growing up). Now, I am working on a film that talks about drug, transvestite, and the church (La mala educacion - interesting so far.)

So the truth is that I will probably still get lost in Spain. But, that is a separate issue.

!Vamos!

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Oh, my latest brilliant idea on the landing page is to cross-promote the webinar events. In other words, once somebody requests information on our products, in the thank you page, I also give them an option to request a webinar. It is worth a try. My two technical challenges are 1.) I would like to spare the person who signs up for the webinar the trouble of typing the same info again 2.) I would like a way to track the flow from info request to webinar request.

I also attended a marketing webinar. The bad news is that I am already doing most of what the speaker was talking about - namely be quantitative and double down on the venues that work instead of a shotgun approach to cover everything. The good news is that I got a few ideas out of the webinar anyway. Specifically, I think offering a report on the "Top 10 Mistakes" for IT folks to download could be quite powerful. I always enjoy reading this kind of list because I (feel that I) can judge how well I am doing with third party benchmark. I think this ties into my ideas of doing assessment and quiz on the website. IT people like that stuff. The other idea is to do a customer referral program. The speaker did not go into the details and I need to find out more. But, I am convinced that it is faster/easier to sell through customer referral than anything else in the world. Maybe I will announce a customer referral program in my upcoming company newsletter blast?

I think I mentioned that we are working with an analyst to write a series of whitepaper. So far, I have not seen any interesting traffic (that I can discern of) from these whitepaper. The plan now is to include an additional press release on the wire touting these whitepapers. I do not suppose that he would oppose the idea. And, in any case, I am lifting words from his whitepaper and peppering these words liberally in a number of upcoming customer press releases. I guess the danger is that I wear the relationship thin with both this analyst and the press by keep talking about the same analyst.

If you want control over the web content, Macromedia Contribute is a great product. For the longest time, every change I need would go through a mark-up from me to the webmaster for implementation. It takes quite a bit of time going back and forth. Now, with Contribute, I can update text, add new objects, etc. to the staging website. And, when I am happy with the result, I can push out the changes to the live site.

Of course, a new capability also comes with a new ability to make mistakes. For example, I was building a few new pages on a product that we have not featured for a while. These pages were work in progress. And, in came a request to change text on the webinar request page. Not remembering the work in progress, I made the simple text changes on the webinar page and pushed out to the live server - along with the work in progress pages. Yikes! Good thing that I remembered within one hour or so and took out links to the work in progress pages. It could have been embarrassing.

New website design is coming along. I got the first full color drafts for review. All I can say is that I am glad to have retained a professional for the work. Of course, this does not preclude me from making a fuss about the lines, disjointed components, and menu items, etc. I was nice about it though. :-)!

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For our parting thought, my buddy Mr Chindia told me a conversation he had with a "patriotic" American who was unhappy with the French. This patriot quipped that "Look at how France economy is a mess. Heck, they probably don't even have a word for 'entrepreneur'!"

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