Just got done listening to a webinar by the good guys at HUBSPOT.

I love what these guys do and what they have to say. This most recent webinar was called “Viral Marketing: How to Create a World Wide Rave”.  It was really awesome.

My favorite part of the webinar was one of the introductory stories.  It’s the story of when 7 equals 350 million.

The story was told of the lady who was tasked with the job of marketing the brand new Universal Orlando Theme – The Wizardly Word of Harry Potter.  She had an almost unlimited budget for marketing.  She could do anything she wanted.  So she thought about her options:

• Direct Mail Marketing
• TV Commercials
• Super Bowl Commercial
• E-mail Marketing
• and, I’m sure a ton of others

So, what did she come up with?  The slickest super bowl commercial ever?  A million dollar give away?  

Nope, she set up a special – by invitation only – webinar.  The webinar was scheduled at midnight (you know – the whole Harry Potter wizard thing).  Invitations went out to a whopping SEVEN people!  That’s right – only seven.

How were the seven people picked?  Again, did she pick major news people, journalists?  Theme park revieweres (assuming they exist)?

Again, nope.  She simply picked the seven most popular Harry Potter bloggers and invited them to this special invitation event.

All seven agreed.

Her bosses, of course, were beside themselves.  I can only imagine the questions – why aren’t you buying magazine ads?  Why aren’t you buying tv commercials?  Why aren’t you hiring a super exspensive Ad Agency?

She didn’t have an answer UNTIL 24 hours AFTER the event.  

So, what happened?  Of course, we know the story.  All seven bloggers immediately wrote posts about the event.  They posted pictures about it.  They put information on facebook, they tweeted about it.  And, within 24 hours, over 350,000,000 (that’s right – million) had heard about the new park.  

And, it isn’t just a random collection of 350,00,000 people.  It was 350,000,000 people who had some sort of interest about Harry Potter – exactly the kind of people you want to know about your brand new Harry Potter theme park.

All I can say is “WOW”!  The simple truth is that you can’t buy that kind of publicity.  Literally – no matter how much money you have, you can’t buy that.

So, the question is what does a story like that mean for you and me?  Leave a comment and let me know your thoughts.

Here’s a couple of my very short and very brief thoughts:

• NEVER underestimate the power of social media
• Be real – form a TRIBE – get the book TRIBES from Seth Godin to see what I mean
• Giving up control can have AMAZING results – to do something like this – you have to be willing to give up some control.

Other thoughts?  Let me know.

Just started reading through an excerpt from a talk given by Jason Fried  (founder and partner at 37Signals).  In case you don’t know, 37signals is the web software company that has made some incredible web applications like: basecamp, highrise, ta-da list, writeboard – really like a ton of great stuff.

They’ve talked about how they did it and how they did it different than most other companies.

Here’s a link to the article:

http://www.krisjordan.com/2008/09/17/jason-fried-10-things-weve-learned-at-37signals/

Just watched this video on FastCompany.tv:

fastcompany.tv/

Made me think a whole lot more about how I use – or better yet – fail to use a simple free Analytics systems – Google Analytics.  This simple and free program gives me the ability to know a ton about who is visiting, what pages they are visiting, how long they stay, what links they click on, etc.

It’s really a great tool.  I simply don’t pay enough attention to it.

As some of you may know, Adobe just recently announced that Google and Yahoo will now finally be able to index flash files (read press release).  So, I was thinking about this and reading about this just recently.

Ran across this quote:

“As anyone who has had the pleasure of doing web design and development through marketing agencies knows, Flash tends to be wildly popular among clients and wildly unpopular among, well, pretty much everyone else.”  (from ars technica)

I loved the quote and I think it is basically true.  Flash is really loved by designers in hip marketing agencies (I know of a couple in my area – Fort Wayne).  But, just about everyone else hates it.  Why?  

1. It’s slow – I HATE that – please wait – loading – bar that shows up on Flash sites – I usually leave
2. It’s violates “normal” navigation and usability standards.  It’s flexibility is one of it’s weaknesses.  It allows designers to put navigation anywhere – breaking all normal conventions.  Making us wonder – just what does this do?  I wonder where the navigation is on this page – I usually just leave
3. It has to be updated by a designer.  Need to change text in a flash site?  Great – hire the designer.  There really aren’t any good Content Management Systems for flash – no way to have authors, editors, etc.
4. It’s not searchable – If you want a cool looking site, great – go with Flash.  But if you want visitors, go with something else.

I really love working with WordPress. I’ve been using it for quite a while now for clients. I think it gives one of the easiest, cleanest interfaces for Content Management.

But, I’ve always thought that the admin interface was kind of boring.

Now, I’ve found a list of admin interfaces that jazz up the boring old interface quite a bit.

Here’s the link (with 9 different admin plug-ins):

http://weblogtoolscollection.com/archives/2007/12/28/9-wordpress-admin-themes/

My personal favorite is the NiceAdmin (http://www.douglaskarr.com/projects/niceadmin/).

This new admin coupled with the Admin Drop Down (http://planetozh.com/blog/2008/04/admin-drop-down-menu-202/), make a great interface.

I think the admin drop down is almost a must have – it creates exactly what it says – admin drop down menus. So you have to do half as much clicking.

I just signed up for a new service that I find really, really interesting. It’s at iwantsandy.com.

Basically, it’s a personal e-mail assistant. I can e-mail things that I need to keep track of, reminders, to-do’s, etc. and Sandy will remind me of them.

It’s great for things that don’t really fit into the calendar time slots or the normal to do sort of things. For things that you want to remember, but you don’t want to fill up your calendar or to do with, I Want Sandy is the perfect solution.

I’ve just started using it – sort of testing it out.

All I do is send an e-mail to a special address set up for me. The e-mail may say something like this: “Print Flight Confirmation tomorrow”. Then Sandy will send me an e-mail reminder tomorrow – at 5:00 AM (the time I picked to send me information that does not have a time tagged to it). Or, I can e-mail “Print Flight Confirmation Tomorrow at 5:00 PM”. Sandy the will send me an e-mail reminder at 4:45 PM to remind me to print out the confirmation.

It can also do reminders via text message if that is more to your liking.

Finally, in another awesome integration – it has two more features I haven’t explored yet.

1. It can integrate with Jott.com – another service I use. This means I can use my cell phone to call in reminders, then Sandy will grab the info and e-mail it at the appropriate time. Very cool!

2. It can also provide an iCalendar feed that you can subscribe to via Apple’s iCal or Outlook.

http://iwantsandy.com

I think this is probably everybody’s dream. I think it might even be why some people become comptuer – work – at – home kind of people. Just think about it. I can really work from the beach????

Danny Outlaw posted a interesting article about how he plans to really do this – to work form the beaches in Costa Rica.

Check it out here:
http://outlawdesignblog.com/2008/online-tools-for-working-abroad/

Ok, I know, there’s still some holes to plug. But, we decided to take the new site live and continue patching holes as we move forward.

Everything is still controlled inside of WordPress. So, as web deisgners, we’re pretty excited about using WordPress. And, although we’ve found it to be pretty simple and useful as a Content Management System, we still had to fall back to writing code by hand.

While that’s not a problem for us, we assume it would be for the average user. More thoughts as we move forward…