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With Halloween here, I’m reminded of an incident that took place about this time last year at the previous company I worked for. One of our suppliers was located in Mexico and Karen, one of our sales reps, called the Naucalpán office asking the Spanish-speaking phone operator to speak to Carlos, our contact there. “Sorry, Carlos no is here. They dead.” “What?!...

Postal officials have said that, without help, the USPS will default on several payments to the federal government and will be $10 billion in the red as of September 2011. They have already stopped contributing to the Federal Employee Retirement System account and are now targeting 120,000 jobs for layoffs by 2015. The Postal Service also wants to increase postage rates, reduce delivery days, increase...

• Where is my TC with those LMs?
• My phone’s ringing…answer it or ignore? Ummm…voicemail for sure.
• What color pen should I use today?  Green, Blue, Pink, ORANGE!
• Did I update my schedule for status?  It’s in 5 minutes…
• Print status
• Oh, something shiny…
• Print status!
• Is that a shiny...

Evangelical; adjective. Also, e•van•gel•ic. 1. pertaining to or in keeping with the gospel and its teachings. 2. Marked by ardent or zealous enthusiasm for a cause.

I am evangelical about Netflix. I am a loyal and enthusiastic member. And they have been a great client to Hacker Group.  One of the things that is core to any strategic discussion...

I had a great time talking with the people who attended my session at the DMA!

I always find I learn more by preparing to speak and then discussing the topic than I ever would by attending even the best possible sessions. So I’m very grateful I had the opportunity to present.

Since I was talking about multi-channel marketing, it’s not surprising that I got a couple of questions...

The “convergence marketing” session at DMA 2011 by Richard Rosen reminded me of a tweet I read yesterday that said “it looks like direct marketers are more concerned about brand than general agencies are.”

Rosen is talking about taking the best of brand and direct and converging these two disciplines.

The Rosen Velocity Scale that shows the convergence is a...

Who doesn’t love “what works” articles, books and conference sessions? The yes or no. Do this. Don’t do that. It appeals to our need to draw a line somewhere.

That was the DMA 2011 session with Jay Schwedelson on email. I took a ton of notes.

Here are some highlights:

Pre-headers: Do they matter? Emails that utilize the first line of a preheader for...

Let me confess from the beginning . . . I’m not a power Twitter user. So Biz Stone’s presentation at DMA 2011 was pretty interesting to me.

Here are a few ideas I got:

Twitter will become more prevalent for evaluating products and services. I never would have thought of it that way. I think of it as more of a broadcast medium. But, it’s absolutely...

I previously wrote a blog post in which I was skeptical of Facebook’s ability to acquire new customers.  Rather, I thought Facebook was a pure retention and loyalty play.

Based on last night’s DMA 2011 Keynote, Facebook is fine tuning its pitch to demonstrate...

Jennifer Schulties, Senior Marketing Manager at Martha Stewart Living and Keith Bergendorff of Publishers Clearing House Analytical Services talked about predictive modeling solutions in a single model in a DMA 2011 session I attended today.

They call it lifecycle modeling across channels for acquisition and retention.

My take? They are in a difficult place.

Schulties laid out...

The highlight for me so far at the DMA 2011 conference was the interactive breakout panel after the keynote address this morning.

Gary Vaynerchuk from Vayner Media said, “Managing acquisition has been fine-tuned to a science.  Brands are struggling with retention."

I don’t want to sound too self-serving here, but this statement reminded me of where Hacker Group was...

Lawrence Kimmel, CEO DMA, began his DMA 2011 keynote with an engaging visual illustrating the convergence of limited time and technology. The time is always now. (Of course the theme of the conference is real-time marketing. So no surprise there!) He is setting up the conference for capturing those transformational moments with ideas shared, meetings that changes the course of your business. We...

I’m spending my day traveling to the DMA 2011 Convention – but the road has been much longer than a simple flight from Seattle to Boston.

Many months ago, I made a speaking submission to the DMA. I thought of a snappy title. (At least it seemed snappy at the time.) I put together a few bullet points. Sent it in. Waited.

Just as soon as I had completely forgotten about it,...