Ideas, projects and reading notes.
Are you looking for a brand name? Is it difficult?
Many methods are available, mindmaps, thinkpack, travelling, no brain mode…still looking for other cool and fancy ways of stimulating your dying braincells? Here are my favorite tools:
Good luck!
As i’ve been reading the excellent book called “Story telling - branding in practice” i just wanted to share some reading notes:
Testing how value propositions, USP and other webdesign elements can impact the botton line of your business is compulsory for e-commerce and other online ventures.
A preliminary step must be accomplished firt, competitive analysis.
The best resource that i found so far has been published by MarketingExperiments.
This framework is really not a high level grid of analysis but you can use it as a mezzo lens to analyses comepetitors.
More than 600 marketing messages per hour/day/week how do you succeed in transmitting your value proposition to potential customers?
According to the marketing experiments compendium using the transparent marketing principles will help you to achive outstanding results:
Who else wants to be the next facebook idol?
Become the most famous people on facebook, be a candidate and ask your friends to vote for you!
With Steven Bao and Julien Jalouzet we created this application we really do hope that you will enjoy it.
Install it now
This evening we will present The 24 hours facebook challenge to a talentfull audience of facebook enthusiasts and developpers in Boston. You can have a preview watching the video below. This will be amazing!
Recently i moved in Boston in order to work for a very promising start-up company which aims to create the biggest wine community in the world. Yesterday i took some time to walk accross Charles River and i took a picture and played a little bit with it using photoshop.
It seems to be really promising as it’s mixing together online games and social networks.
So if you want to join my team…
I’ve been away from my blog since a few months. Actually in the process of moving out from Annecy/Geneva i’m going to spend the next academic year focused on my MBA at Grenoble Graduate School of Business.
I’m going to post some new articles, next month in July.
As i’m shifting toward Search Engine Optimization and Interactive Marketing, new articles on this blog will be related to these topics, i hope you’ll enjoy it!
Women’s segment :
A can of Wine with the mini Sofia sparkling Blanc de Blancs ?
http://www.sofiamini.com
Segementation by product:
A wine dedicated to be associated with pizzas!
http://www.pizzavino.com
Hybridation of segments, alcopops, beer, wine and diet drinks:
“it’s not quite wine, but a wine ‘refresher’ made from wine (51%), dealcoholized wine (31%), and grape must (18%).”
The vlog buzz is getting louder and louder everywehere, i’ve found a great tutorial on how to vlogyou’ll be able to learn how to compress, screen capture, archiving and posting your videos (for free of course!).
If you want to have fun and learn how to make money online thanks to a bunch of brilliant iinternet marketers (sic) with a great financial education don’t miss the top 10 internet marketing videos. You won’t need an MBA because you will earn your first million in less than seven days 
Have fun!
No it’s not another set of buzzwords! Dashboards are everywhere, from small and medium business to multinational companies these tools are a must have for executives and managers.
Here is a definition of dashboards from the dashboard spy “it is basically a way for business users to get an at-a-glance understanding of metrics of importance to them. In addition to acting as a summarization device, the dashboard also serves to highlight specific data and allows the user to drill down and inspect specific items. […] dashboard also represents a user interface design pattern that designers should study and understand. From the perspective of information technology staff, the dashboard often represents a consolidation of data from disparate data sources. The effort is usually considerable when it comes to the necessary extraction, transformation and presentation of the data.”
I’ve found a really amazing website where you can see a lot of screenshots of many different business and industries.
If you want to know more about dashboards you should really go and have a look at the dashboard spy.
There’s some interesting videos of Adobe Photoshop cs3.
Here is the list of the best videos reviewing the latest version of photoshop CS3. I hope that it will help you to get a great review.
I hope that these elements helped you to make your own review of photoshop CS3!
· Revenue recognition
· Expense recognition
· Cost allocation
· Profit definition
· Historical costs
· Conservatism
· Equity as residual value
· Contingency recognition
· Legal data requirements
· Income/expense timing
· Tax management issues
· Statement adjustments
· Adjustment process
· Trend analysis
· Project projection
· Cash flow projection
· Industry analysis
· Competitor analysis
· Economic conditions
· Adjustment areas
· Share price patterns
· Market trends
· Value drivers
· Market models
· Task analysis
· Economic allocation
· Contribution Analysis
· Trade-off determination
· Investment base
· Capital Investment
· Human resources
· Cash flow patterns
· Cost of capital
· Investor expectation
· Ongoing business value
A new version of Photoshop CS3 (Announced On December 14, 2006 and to be released during spring 2007) is already available to download.)
Two market segmets are targeted by this new release, both digital photographers and graphc designers.
So what’s new ?
If you want to have a try these configuration are proposed:
Today i’ve decided to play around with google docs, and more specificaly google spreadsheets.
The aim of the exercice was to make a tool to calculate compound interests, and here is the result:
Unfortunately you can’t edit the numbers directly on the webpage (it would be a nice feature) as it’s a display only (we could use it to make the first web 2.0 executive dashboards).
So you need to click on the following link if you want to download the excel sheet which will allow you to calculate compund interests.
Jay Abraham reading notes:
List of the ten worst mistakes a business does
1. No testing. (it could be implemented for a niche website, like for example you do two different versions of the website or two different versions of the opt-in that you can change each week. At the end of each week note the stats and make a report.
2. Running institutional advertising instead of direct response advertising. (it only highlights stability and oldness, there’s no focus on the benefits, there’s no direction toward a decision or an action. Instead direct marketing tries to generate an immediate response. Direct advertising provides a story and presents reasons why your company is better than others and it’s supported by facts. The prospect is only concerned by the benefits you render to him. You need to tell the customer what he has to do next (how and who to call), remind him the risk free purchasing deal and the most important, what can he expect from owning your product or services.
3. Not ascertaining and developing your USP and articulating it clearly as a part of all your marketing. You should have a USP (best products, lowest prices, providing services or education, no out-of-stocks, 24/7 customers services).
4. Not having a backend (you may loose money up-front but you need to evaluate what’s the real value of a customer over time. Thanks to the value of the backend of each customer you’re able to calculate the real ROI of an advertisement. You need to innovate in order to harvest the “residual value” of the customer.
5. Failing to determine and address prospects and customers needs. Identifying needs is a key to success even thought it’s not possible to be all things to all peoples, in this situation the image is diluted.
6. To forget or never consider the fact that you have to sell and educate your way out of a business problem. If you want that your customer enjoys the special price that you offer him you need to educate him to appreciate it, indicating him the real reasons why you make such an offer (inventory overstock for example). Integrity is a key to success, for example if you can’t keep fulfill your obligations it’s good to inform them and to give them a small gift (much cheaper than a refund).
7. Doing business with your company is not easy, appealing, desirable and not fun.
8. Failing to tell customers the “reasons why”. Whenever you make an offer, run an ad or whatever you need to explain to your customer why you’re doing such a thing (you’re cheaper because you buy high volumes, lower overhead etc.)
9. Not sticking with marketing campaigns that are still working. Therefore you loose the cumulative concept, don’t allow the dynamic of testing, you dilute your company’s image. You need to test! Instead of taking arbitrary decisions. Don’t never ever abandon the best performer until you find something better.
10. When preparing ads forgetting to focus on the intended customer and no one else. You need to attract the attention of the target audience in the headline (and qualify it if the context is too broad). State your proposition or offer, in the rest of the ad you need you need to present support and develop and the reasons why the prospect should choose this opportunity. Finally tell the prospect how to act. (no abstract headlines, target your customers.)
Today i’ve received two brand new nabaztag/tag!
This is a picture from flickr of a nabaztag/tag from arnaud4O4:
When i saw the ad on the website of the company which products them, nabaztag.com a few days ago i couldn’t wait to receive them, they showed the new features like vocal recognition, rfid tag reader, rss reader etc.
Well today i must say that the dream turned into a nightmare.
The platform to register the nabaztag/tag is not available, their website is down. Two hours later the webste is back again but there’s A LOT of broken links (error 404).
Finally after 3 hours i’ve been able to register my nabaztag/tag. As i were working on a PC i was using firefox 2 and well heuuh.. their interface is completely unusable with firefox there’s a ton of javascript bugs; i tried to figure out for another 20 minutes what was wrong, i switched to IE and everything worked.
I’ve been able to try the services available at the moment, like sending a text message and it worked after five attempts.
I also tried to upload a personal MP3 and it’s really disapointing as you are limited to 45 seconds only…
After a moment i really wanted to know what was going on with these dams rabbits. I went to the french forum and i was horrified, so many people were so unhappy with their nabaztag/tag and from the support of the company, there’s even a group of customers who decided to write a complaint to an association of consumers.
If you want to have a clear idea of the features available at the moment a message has been posted here, and this is a translation from french:
And here is a list of the features which don’t work:
I’m very surprised that they don’t even mention the included tag reader of the nabaztag. There’s not even any tags available when you receive your nabaztag/tag.
As a conclusion i would say that nabaztag/tag seems to be very promising but you certainly shouldn’t buy it now as they are in an early stage of development, like a prototype and it’s really a shame that violet is selling this buggy product.
