I dont know who wrote this ......

“GOOD morning, ladies and gentlemen. We are delighted to welcome you aboard Veritas Airways, the airline that tells it like it is. Please ensure that your seat belt is fastened, your seat back is upright and your tray-table is stowed. At Veritas Airways, your safety is our first priority. Actually, that is not quite true: if it were, our seats would be rear-facing, like those in military aircraft, since they are safer in the event of an emergency landing. But then hardly anybody would buy our tickets and we would go bust.

………………………………………...

Your life-jacket can be found under your seat, but please do not remove it now. In fact, do not bother to look for it at all. In the event of a landing on water, an unprecedented miracle will have occurred, because in the history of aviation the number of wide-bodied aircraft that have made successful landings on water is zero. This aircraft is equipped with inflatable slides that detach to form life rafts, not that it makes any difference. Please remove high-heeled shoes before using the slides. We might as well add that space helmets and anti-gravity belts should also be removed, since even to mention the use of the slides as rafts is to enter the realm of science fiction.

Please switch off all mobile phones, since they can interfere with the aircraft’s navigation systems. At least, that’s what you’ve always been told. The real reason to switch them off is because they interfere with mobile networks on the ground, but somehow that doesn’t sound quite so good. On most flights a few mobile phones are left on by mistake, so if they were really dangerous we would not allow them on board at all, if you think about it..."

The list is endless (plastic forks, etc.) but the lesson is subtle: every business does this. From the standardized layout of a doctor's waiting room to the forms you fill out at the bank, we subject our clients and prospects to a little show that is not directly related to what we're doing for them. We're all doing theatre. We want our waiter to be better dressed than us, and the stockbroker's office to be as far away from an off track betting facility (or a laundromat) as possible.

Of course, the show is related to what we're selling. It's related for the same reason that the price of a cup of coffee varies by a factor of 120 depending on who made it and where you consume it. You don't have to like the fact that a show is going on, but you're part of it. The most successful organizations understand this and work hard to put on a show that works. One that doesn't get in the way of what we set out to purchase in the first place.

We won't be undersold

If you have a won't be undersold motto, the very best thing that you can do is find customers who find a better price somewhere else... and then give them the discount. Why? Because it proves you're not lying, and it spreads the word. Those customers are heroes.

Compare that approach to this one from Jason found at cou+rant.com. It appears as though Best Buy had a secret Intranet site that looked just like their regular site... except with higher prices on it. So, if you came in claiming that the store was being undersold by the website, it's alleged that employees would show you a site that sure looked like their site...exept you were 'wrong.'

Yikes.

I dont know who wrote this ......

The more you think about business as being a community service, the more successful you become. What I've told newspapers -- when they've asked -- is that newspapers used to be in the community service business. Now they've been positioned as cash cows."

I dont know who wrote this ......

Dynamic content creation is a necessary part of your overall web strategy. Blogs and RSS feeds are being used by small businesses everywhere. Unfortunately, this has caused a bit of stagnation on the static portions of the site, namely the home page. If your home page never changes, the search engines will grow tired of visiting your site.

From a search engine standpoint, not to mention most users, the home page is still the first look. You can't simply blog and call content creation done. If your home page has been indexed by the search engines, you can dramatically improve the search results for your home page and thus your entire site, by adding or changing that content every two weeks or so.

You don't need to mess with the page design, titles, headlines or meta tags, just change out some portion of the body text content with new relevant, keyword rich content. This little practice tells the search engines that this page had something new, this page changes often, - this alone will improve your search results.

Duct Tape Marketing.com

In this digital age we live in it's entirely possible to run a business, get through a day, or complete many a project without actually interacting with human beings. While the efficiencies of this are incredible, I'm not so sure it's always so good for the perspective.

I think it is a good practice, no matter what your business, to make it a habit to force yourself out on a real sales call, have lunch with a client, or drop in on a vendor - just to stay in touch with what your business really does.

Take it a step farther and pick out a networking type event, local lunch workshop or seminar each month and get yourself out of the office.

Finally, once or twice a year, go to a really big industry conference and meet face to face with as many industry thought leaders as you can, get fired up about what's happening in your industry, learn a new skill and even stretch yourself a bit by attending a panel or two that covers something unrelated to your core business.

I find that these types of relationship and mind building practices can immediately add to the bottom line by opening doors to new valuable partnerships and connections, can bring you renewed perspective about your business and industry, and can aid in forming your fully developed vision for your organization.

Sometimes, you've got to look up from the work you do day to day and see what's really going on in the world to better understand your place and your client's place in it.

From seth godin

More Reading from All Marketers Are Liars

Seth Godin ends All Marketers Are Liars with a list of other books worth reading:

Crossing the Chasm by Geoffery Moore
Positioning by Trout and Ries
In Pursuit of Wow! and The Tom Peters Seminar by Tom Peters
Blink by Malcolm Galdwell
Selling the Dream by Guy Kawasaki
The Republic of Tea by Bill Rosenzweig and Mel Ziegler (out of print)
Don't Think Of An Elephant!/How Democrats And Progressives Can Win by George Lakoff
Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar
Why We Buy by Paco Underhill
Creating Customer Evangelists by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba
Emotional Design by Donald Norman
The Moral Economy of the Peasant by James Scott
Creative Company: How St. Luke's Became "the Ad Agency to End All Ad Agencies" by Andy Law

Ramki' dreamt big and won from rediff.com

Ramki' dreamt big and won

Shamni Pande

Irrespective of whether you think marketing is a science or an art, data is critical to the debate. Think about it, data is necessary to build case for either situation. But using it is easier said than done; pick up any market research report and see what you make of those figures laid out with vision-blurring, precision.

Sensibly, companies have now started outsourcing this data-crunching exercise to specialists. This is where 34-year-old S Ramakrishnan - 'Ramki, as he likes to be called - CEO Marketics Technologies, comes in. His venture is to get sense out of data, and it's an interesting story, read on:

The late Nineties is a good start, just around when the Internet and dotcom buzz started. Ramakrishnan - by then well entrenched at P&G India's brand management team, did something that was not so unusual for many raring young individuals at that time - turned a 'Net' entrepreneur.

Catalyst for the atypical decision is S.P. Jain Institute of Management & Research, Mumbai, from where Ramakrishnan claims the bug got him: "It was a rather unorthodox MBA training that encouraged entrepreneurial abilities."

Part of the new-technology wave, where people across categories harboured sweeping visions of what the Net could do, Ramakrishnan egged on by his friends, also co-founders - Vinay Misra and Shankar Marwada - launched Intercept Technologies in 1999.

Prophetically christened, to say the least, we see Intercept Technologies being cut in its stride by the dotcom bust. All we hear from Ramakrishnan of the crash, is the furious effort to reboot.

The trio knocked around with some ideas, unwilling to call it quits: "After all, it were our clients - the dotcoms - that went bust, we still had a concept going," Ramakrishnan says - asserting all the reasons why things should have worked.

To cut it short, Marketics Technologies is what we now know of, of the trio's act of defiance - which is gearing up to be a Rs 100-crore (Rs 1 billion) entity. There appears a huge thrust on role definition, for instance, the company

March 10, 2007 works on latent marketing skill, initially concentrates all efforts on the US market and works on its belief in the Net and uses it as a core platform for interface. End product is well-analysed, marketing intelligence given to clients to draw decisions from. Significantly, Marketics has eschewed from tapping the market for funds, "we started on a shoe-string budget, which involved some of us not taking our salary for sometime," says Ramakrishnan. He's game to various options in future, including short-time collaborations. But most critical of all these decision has been the collective choice to stay focussed on the US market - initially: "It's easy to be lured and go tapping every 'expression of interest,' that comes along. But not all turn out to be solid business propositions. We decided to conserve our talent to make an impact in one area, before we could address other geographies," says Ramakrishnan. Today, Marketics Technologies has made a foray in UK and is seeking to spread into Europe and is even looking at prising open the home turf here in India. On board are some of the top-Fortune 100 companies in different industry segments. Non-disclosure agreement prevents Ramakrishnan from actually bandying client names, save a few such as Universal Studio and RCI (part of Windham Worldwide). Finally, it's interesting to note that Marketics has managed to capture the US market with just 10 people servicing (including Ramakrishnan), and two back offices in India. Interestingly, Coimbatore is chosen for its 'surprising' cost-effectiveness in comparison to other Metros, "we found excellent technical talent there," says Ramakrishnan. There is also a big office at Bangalore and all together the team is 250-strong, winning against all the odds.

From Duct tape Marketing.com

I f you're not using Firefox browser yet you're not going to understand why I'm giddy about something called extensions. Since Firefox is an open source software anyone smart enough to write a way to extend it's functionality can make my browsing experience better. Now, like a lot of things that can be done, you have to wade through what should be done and used to make your browsing experience better.

Here are my top 5 browser extensions in no particular order

del.icio.us bookmark - lets me copy some text on any page and post it to my delicious account

SEO for Firefox - Aaron Wall's treasure chest of info on search results

Fleck - This one allows you to make notes and lists on web pages and then send the annotated page

Search Status - simply tool that sits in my dock on the browser and gives me page rank, alexa ranking, backward links and indexed pages for any site on visit on the fly

Roboform - fills in forms and keeps track of passwords and the like

And a bonus one that's kind of funny - BugMeNot - allows you to skip putting your info in to get an article on sites like the New York Times