MarketingFree

As if being President wasn't enough...

... Advertising Age named Barack Obama "Marketer of the Year" (in truth, they did that before the election, but still!  I'll bet you're angling for person-of-the-year from Time, too.  Leave some scraps for the rest of us, Prez!).  My friends at ReachForce did a nice blog post about it, highlighting the key online marketing tactics.

But digging a little deeper, the folks at Wider Funnel did a nice post about multivariate testing that barackobama.com was using, taking advantage of Google Website Optimizer.  This type of granular, rapid-feedback testing is truly one of the differentiators of online marketing, with one caveat:  it requires statistical significance.  If you don't have enough users to rapidly get answers, you risk making bad decisions.  barackobama.com didn't have the problem.

An easy way to test is by just doing some ad-words campaigns with varied messaging, and then look at click-through rates... but make sure you are seeing enough traffic before you make any judgements.  Even better is to keep tests going long-term, and (assuming you have closed-loop marketing of some kind) look at conversion rates of those leads.  At a minimum, figure out where people are going after the initial click, so that you can make some assumptions about the quality of the visitors.

Joe the community organizer

In the "it was only a matter of time" category, Joe the plumber is now a community organizer - and has launched a new website at www.secureourdream.com.  The "Freedom Membership" is a steal at $14.95, because it secures your signed copy of Joe's upcoming book, Fighting for the American Dream.  For average Joe's, there is a free "We are Joe" membership level.

Can I get a WooT! for Palin-Wurzelbacher in 2012?  Let's just hope that Joe can afford "Joe the web designer" with the proceeds from his new book.

Now that I've offended half the populace, please check-out my much less offensive new project called civicsgraph.org.  If you are interested at all in the role of things like social networks, open source, privacy, or identity in our democratic government, I invite you to participate in the discussion.

Introducing civicsgraph.org: my first open source project

I've been marketing, selling and business developing open source software for years now (thus, the title of this blog), but I've never really participated in an open source project... until now.

Well, it's not really an open source project as much as it is an open discussion, about what I think is going to be a very important set of issues in the coming years.  I actually coined the phrase "civics graph" quite accidentally (as one of those things that just flowed out of a blog post about the election), and it's really just an extension of the "social graph" concept that Facebook has popularized.

But, as opposed to trying to explain it all here, why don't you just check it out for yourself and see what you think.  I hope you will participate - because I don't want my first open source project to be a failed open source project.  ;-).