Friday Blog Log

Welcome to another edition of our Friday Blog Log! Here are our Links of the Week for your enjoyment!

1) Charles Green's Trust Matters: In this Trusted Advisors post, Charles discusses how "issues of the commons show up first in government, later in business, because government by default gets the un-economic propositions. But the issues are increasingly not unique to government." He goes on to state just how trust issues impact business. And if you read our post yesterday, you know that this is an area that we are so very passionate, that every now and again, it causes us to rant. This is a great post, and the comments are very thought-provoking as well.

2) Bob Sullivan's InfoGrow: In Bob's post, he reviews The Association of National Advertisers Conference, where attendees were polled on topics around sales and marketing effectiveness. Another area in which we are passionate is using analytical intelligence in your direct marketing strategy. In this study, attendees polled think that utilizing an analytical approach, along with an effective creative strategy, will be the most important difference makers in 2008. Take a look at the other interesting nuggets that came out of this poll.

3) Paul Paetz AKA The Anti-Marketer: In Paul's most recent post, he discusses "a classic example of what Christensen labels "cramming" in his discussion of disruption theory." He goes on to define this concept: "Basically, incumbents often ignore disruptions until it is too late to do anything about it, and then make valiant attempts to "cram" the disruptive innovations into their existing offering to try to forestall or block the disruption." Paul gives some past examples of cramming that definitely resonated with me. The topic is very intriguing -- and it will be interesting to see if the "cram" that he refers to (the Wall Street Journal recently added a Digg widget to the end of their online articles) proves to be successful. Very interesting reading!

4) Jim Berkowitz's CRM Mastery E-Journal: Here Jim discusses the first of 7 Deadly Claims: Superior Customer Service. Yep, another area of our passion. His comments are dead on. He talks about how making this claim without backing it up by actually having superior customer service can, yes, in fact, be quite deadly. He also discusses how you create excellent customer service by actually wowing your customers, as opposed to stating it all over the place. OK -- I promise not to get started on another rant. We think you'll really enjoy this post, too. It is filled with insightful ideas on the topic, and he's got six more deadly claims to go (actually, 2 and 3 are already waiting for us)!

5) Jaren Angerbauer's post on the Digital Marketing Blog: In this post, Jaren discusses how to effectively manage old or inactive e-mail accounts. With the increasing importance of e-mail marketing in our multi-channel marketing strategy, this post provides some great insight for our consideration.

We hope you enjoy all of these posts as much as we did! And, TGIF, by the way -- don't drink too much eggnog on this Holiday weekend!

Happy Holidays!