April 29, 2005

Priceless

NCW Cover.jpg

  • PR Agency Fee = $200+/hour
  • Professional photograher = $5K
  • Having your #1 competitor use your company name as the cover story headline instead of yours = priceless

This is absolutely terrific. eHarmony gets lovely placement of it's founder on the cover of this publication (about what a great online marketer it is) and the title ends up being the name of it's hottest competitor, PerfectMatch. You couldn't pay for better.

Keep up the good work ;-)

Posted by johnza at 03:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 02, 2004

Vioxx

Don't know what folks think of how Merck handled this whole thing, and don't feel like commenting myself about it right now without knowing more of the facts, but did want to share a bit of info that might be useful.

Yesterday on the plane I sat next to a clinical endocrinologist and head of the pharmacology committee of a big hospital and he made the following suggestions for anyone currently using Vioxx:

First, if you are a heart patient and taking aspirin, do not replace Vioxx with any other Cox-2 inhibitor drug. It could have much the same effect.

Second, try any of these other drugs for inflamation and pain control but watch for their effect on your stomach: Motrin (still good), Naprosyn, Relafen, or Daypro. There are others but he said most are pretty tough on your stomach.

Finally, of course really ask your doctor about all of this and insist on specifics and detailed information.

I am not a doctor or an authority on any of this at all but he seemed like a great, caring concerned guy.

Posted by johnza at 10:42 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

October 01, 2004

Great points by Kirsten

re:invention blog - for women entrepreneurs. Kind words from K.O. on how to pitch stories.

Good advice for everyone. The amazing thing about the web is that when you do something wrong, it gets indexed in google and a zillion folks learn about it right away.

As John said, we are sorry and we shouldn't have sent a big PDF, its easy to get carried away and so easy to ask permission first.

In any case, we do read the lots of blogs although it is amazingly hard to keep up. Its not just the marketing ones like yours, but it is VC ones, the technology ones, and the general punditry as well.

Love the targeting and focus as well. You should BTW check out VC Mom, its the newest one from the Geeks at Ignition. Michelle is going put up some insights about being a woman in venture capital that might be helpful to all.

BTW does anyone else think that the UI to set up a manual trackback in MT is terrible. Just the string Enter URL to Ping makes little sense, should be more like enter Trackback address IMHO

Posted by rich at 09:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Even guys who write a marketing book can forget the basics

Recently, in our enthusiam for our own product - our book, we sent out a mail to 20 bloggers whom we really respect with a preview attached. Peter Davidson rightly points out that this could be viewed as spam.

Heck, we feel stupid. Here we wrote a book about the marketing basics and we forgot a key one. We should have known better. We should have sent out a quick note to folks first asking if they were interested. Whoops. We are sorry. That was a mistake and we will not do it again (believe me). We really love the blogsphere too much to be this sloppy about it.

Again, sorry. We are going to the library right now to re-read our whole book and write on the board "I will not Spam" twenty times.

Posted by johnza at 06:23 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack