There is no story

I was originally planning to talk about my grand theory of Inter-temporal Black Box Optimization. But, you know what, at this hour, I do not believe that I have enough energy to explain what it is. Maybe I will work it out over the Christmas timeframe. It basically treats the Google engine as a black box and seeks to optimize the output for a given input across time.

At least the title sounds impressive.

**
So, I am still very much knee deep in the website revamp purgatory. On one hand, it is gratifying to be able to mold the output so closely. On the other hand, it is a huge emotional and energy drain. I am now working from each branch of the website structure. About half way through but I have started from the easy ones.

The other thing is that I still need to add the SEO (search engine optimization) and other ancillary services designed and hooked up to the new website. Man! This is going to take a while.

Sent out a blast to an industry vertical where we are seeing some traction. The mechanics of sending out blast is not that big of a deal as I have done it a number of times. The trouble is how to massage the information into the CRM. There is also the issue of marketing vs sales view of the world. Marketing (me) wants to hit enough of the audience to make the effort worthwhile since it is the same costs. Sales (Mr Proper) only wants to hit the very narrow subset of people that he has in mind. To the extent that my targets are a super-set of his targets, you would have thought this is a pretty straight forward discussion. But, no sirree bob. I think I've spent more time negotiating the structure of the targets than the time I've spent on doing the blast.

Me bitter? Never.

Oh, we also made a bunch of Happy New Year card. It is a good idea and it is a nice gesture. the trouble is that we do not have most of the people's mailing address! In this day and age, the key information to capture is email and phone number and until now, we have done a rather poor job of capturing the mailing address. So, we will work on these. My plan is to have the initial fill-in-the-blank done by early next week so I can scrub the final list and get everything out either Friday or the following Monday.

So my fiasco of the week is the conversation with an IT trade reporter.

The background is that we bagged a major medical school as a customer and I have been pushing the PR firm to shop the story around. The first reporter flaked on us and the PR firm found a replacement reporter.

The reporter talked with the customer first and, before talking with the reporter, I was warned that there could be some tough questions on what has changed, product-wise, since the last time this publication covered us. Fair question and I quickly assembled a list of new features and accomplishments since that last coverage. Ever the boy scout.

So, this is the gist of the exchange with the reporter (C = Chief Chicken Headless, R = Reporter)
==
C: Since the last coverage we have come up with a new configuration which is used by this customer
R: What is the difference between the customer from the last coverage to the new customer this time?
C: The new customer uses a new configuration whereas the prior customer uses a different one.
R: But, it basically does the same thing despite the differences in configuration.
C: That is a fair point in that it fulfills the same business needs, but we are pretty excited about the new configuration and the school loves it. And, this is a new release.
R: When was the release?
C: About two months ago.
R: This is not news
C: We think that the new customer represents a new way of looking at this critical user issue. Their users have all the IT infrastructures but they cannot address these needs effectively. Our product provides the ability to "level the playing field" and effectively solve these concerns.
R: Surely the old customer does the same thing
Y: This is the first customer who came to us and told us explicitly this is the reason they needed our solution. The solution also provides a slew of backend management tools that has helped the IT administration of this key user needs.
R: Yeah, that is a new customer not a new story
C: We think this is a brand new way of looking at this user issue and the customer has clearly articulated the underlying issue that are often difficult to articulate by most of the IT people
R: ... Not enough of a news
C: Would you be interested in getting information on the school's case study
R: That's okay, I've already talked with the school
==
and then it loops back to the top - "this is a new configuration"

I do not fault the reporter for asking tough questions but it was a bit frustrating to have to keep repeating the same thing knowing full well that he will retort with the same too. Obviously, we did not go into an infinite loop but the various overtures and explicit questioning of what will be enough of a story from me did not yield anything.

If I did not know any better, I would have fired the PR firm for not prepping the reporter ahead of time. And, of course, I am sure that it will be a funny story in ten years.

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