June BAAMC Meeting
After running to the bank to take out money for bridge toll, heading west towards the big scary city, and rifling through my car & wallet for change for the meter while praying that the meter maids were taking a day off, I finally made it into the June Bay Area Affiliate Managers Coalition meeting, this time hosted graciously by Real Networks. As an aside, I like their building… older, brick, kinda funky and unique but still professional.
Last time I did a video because it was my first venture over there and I had a lot to say. I was happy to receive some kudos on it from BAAMC organizer Michael Brucker. We had some special guests at this meeting… Lisa Picarille from Revenue Magazine came over and Brook Schaaf from Schaaf Consulting flew up from LA just for this. Aren’t we special? 🙂
I was going to write a good long post about it, but it seems Lisa in her diligence as a journalist has beat me to it! So here’s her take at RevenueToday.com. She mentions a few other special guests that attended the meeting, but I didn’t see them (and yes… I’d recognize them!) so maybe they were on the phone listening in… I did arrive a touch late.
So, some notes not mentioned from my take. It was nice to finally meet Lisa in person, especially after subbing for her that once on Affiliate Thing. Very gracious…although I have to tell you, it’s totally surreal sitting in a room looking at a person speak that you listen to every week without an image in your head. Strange lol. She was surprised that I’d had time to come to the meeting given how busy I usually am, which prompted me to mentally review how busy I must sound on Twitter and this here blog without actually intending it!
Also said hi to Karen Garcia of GTO Management who came to the meeting directly from SFO – what a trooper! And had a nice conversation with a fellow affiliate manager who’s used PsPrint a lot in his former life of being an event promoter and loves us! Always great to hear!
Brook talked about the up-and-coming Performance Marketing Association (PMA), which got a lot of people in the room revved up. We also talked at length about the NY affiliate tax and how we wish the networks would get more involved. What’s definitely clear is that there’s a lot of confusion on how we’re effected as managers and the programs we represent. A vague law will only vaguely be enforced, NY!
Incidentally as a side note, the PMA launched their blog this week and today Rebecca Madigan posted their plan of attack.
We also talked a bit about some miscellaneous things like video widgets and the like. Since most of us in the room have our programs through Commission Junction, we collectively wish they’d buck up on offering some more interesting and innovative creative options, like widgets. One opinion was that video is pretty good for buzz, but general consumers never think to click on the video so it doesn’t convert as a sales tool. I think the jury is still out on video as a traceable seller like a banner ad.
That’s the meat & potatoes of it, really. Our next meeting should be sometime in August. And I’m sure you’ll be happy to know that I managed to escape parking-ticket free!
Read MoreHOW Conference Post-Game Show
Well I’m back in the Pacific Standard Time Zone after 4 days in Boston. To date, it’s safe for me to say that the HOW Design Conference has been the best for PsPrint to attend so far! About 80% of people stopping by our booth had never heard of us before, which isn’t necessarily bad. This has been a relatively untapped resource for us, and we excitedly passed out samples of our printing, paper stocks, and information on the Reseller Program.
A neat feature of this show was that the expo hall wasn’t open the entire day – we only had to staff the booth from 8-9 am, 12-2 pm, and then 5-6:30p on Monday only. I believe the “Resource Center” hours (their moniker) were set this way to avoid stepping on the toes of too many special sessions. The real star of this conference is, of course, the educational sessions for designers. The expo hall is just a bonus for vendors to be able to toss some marketing voodoo at a prime audience.
I think we’ll definitely go back next year to the HOW Conference, being held in Austin, TX. Of all the trade shows I’ve been to as a representative of PsPrint, this was by far the most successful. Everything arrived on time, our booth looked great, and the audience was truly interested in what we have to offer. Overall, a great feeling!
Of course, I had to visit Faneuil Hall & Cheers, and did take some pictures that I’ll share tomorrow once I pull them off my camera. My hotel (pictured above) was pretty decent for a Best Western, and I have some tips & such to share about Boston for those of us going back for Affiliate Summit East in August. But that, my friends, I’ll leave for another day.
Read MoreAffiliate Thing Post-Show
On Tuesday I had the pleasure of co-hosting the Affiliate Thing podcast with Shawn Collins of Affiliate Summit. Let me start by saying that I was unaware that it’s a live show since I always listen to it on iTunes or GeekCast.fm. I listened to the recording last night that’s up over at GeekCast.fm and I have some criticism for myself.
First though, the experience. Monday night I spent nearly an hour fussing with Skype. The test call was choppy and I couldn’t understand all of what it was saying. But all my settings seemed fine. I determined at last that it had to be my internet connection, which has a tendency to be not so good in the evenings sometimes. I must have called the test call in the neighborhood of 30 times. I also called my husband’s cell phone to see if it was any better – nope. He could hear me pretty well but I could barely hear him. I finally give up and hope that it works in the morning or that there’s another option for me to call in or something if all else fails.
I can’t sleep (of course) because I’m nervous about the show. I finally get to sleep and surprisingly have no trouble waking up early the next day for the show. I’m on the West Coast and I usually work 10 am to 7 pm at PsPrint, so I had to get up around 8:30 am to wake up enough to tape the show at 9 am. I fire up my home computer and get Skype up and running, calling the test call about 10 more times with only slightly better results than the night before.
I let Shawn know over the messenger portion of Skype that I’m having issues and he suggests we start anyway and if it’s too bad I can drop off. Luckily when WebmasterRadio.fm called, it was much clearer. Which begs the question – shouldn’t the test caller be the best quality possible? I digress…
The call itself went great in the moment… there weren’t any points where I was sitting there silently banging my head. I fumbled the intro to myself, which is ironic because that’s what was keeping me up the night before – how to whip in PsPrint AND this blog. I figured that was the only part I could rehearse, and coming from a theatrical background I’m a fan of rehearsal.
Now, for my “notes to self”.
- Be more conscious of how close my mic is to my keyboard and how loud I’m typing.
- Do more research about what’s going on so I can suggest more topics instead of being a ‘yes’ woman.
- Don’t laugh – it doesn’t come across well over the phone/skype.
- Attempt to fix the skype thing because in the recording I do hear myself cut out sometimes.
I think, all in all, this was a good exercise for me in giving up control of my image and gives me some things to work on. Please, go listen, and add on to my notes so I can work on my presence, public relations and such! In advance, I truly appreciate it.
Read MoreFree Toolsday for April 15th
Happy tax day! Here’s a great free tool to save yourself some green. Honestly, I’m not sure why it’s taken me SO long to tell you about this tool. Anyone who’s ever had to hire a graphic designer for a really simple postcard or business card knows how frustrating it can be to put so much back & forth into a project that takes the designer 10 minutes to flesh out. Not to mention how much money it costs. This is why PsPrint launched the fabulous Design It! tool last year.
Design It! uses state of the art online graphic technologies that allow you to design a business card or postcard in mere minutes. It’s super easy to do the design work and ordering online. With the tool you can either upload your own background or photograph or pick from hundreds of stock designs that PsPrint’s internal graphic design team have developed since the launch of this tool.
You may be weary to use it since it it’s provided by a printing company, but there’s no obligation to buy. At no time do you put in your name or email address or anything unless you decide to order. So you don’t have to worry about receiving junk mail or anything after just giving it a try.
All text boxes are very intuitive to use when adding your custom text, and you can change fonts, colors, and customize the photos or logos you use on the cards. When designing postcards you can even add your own indicia to mail the cards professionally. At last count there are over 300 different templates for the business cards and over 150 templates for the postcards. PsPrint even has an open invitation to users to submit their feedback about what templates they’d like to see and what would improve the system.
Give it a try today. You have nothing to lose!
Read MoreFeedBurner FAIL
Something wonky happened a few days ago and I didn’t notice… sorry feed readers!
Here’s the posts you may have missed…
- Effective Email Case Study – TubeMogul
- Link Glossary – Alt Text
- Comfortable Branding by Name (Video)
- Hard Sell Tactics DON’T WORK
- Developing Professional Business Cards with Sharp Company Logos
- Link Glossary – Backlinks
- Cribbed Content for April 11th
- Twittermethis v. Twattermethat (Podcast)
Hard Sell Tactics DON’T WORK
I think most people can agree that hard sales tactics are intimidating and uncomfortable, so I never encourage anyone to go for that sell from the onset. Any good sales person probably already knows this. Equally, once you’ve entered into a project or partnership with someone, I think it’s still important not to be pushy and to give equal respect to your vendors or clients.
Recently we contracted a vendor to help with a project and let them know that our resources are a bit limited so we wanted to get things going but we didn’t know what pace we’d be able to work at. I thought that was pretty clear when we started the project. We started to get emails about the project and asking us repeatedly for time lines and action to be taken, so I responded that our resources are very limited and we’re working on it. That seemed to do the trick.
Apparently not. I received a pretty pushy email today explaining that they need dates and they have other projects too so they can’t just leave this one hanging and they have internal deadlines and such that we need to cooperate with. I didn’t initiate this project, so I’m leaving it to the person who did initiate it to respond.
So, here’s my gripe…we already said we couldn’t jump right to it, so why are you? Why don’t you just give more attention to your other projects and set this one on a back burner like we have? We’ve already entered the contract with you, and we don’t have any intention of bailing on it. We just need a bit of space and some time to get the other departments here as excited as we are about this.
What to do? I thought I was clear before, but I guess not so… how do you handle this kind of pushy vendor?
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