In the latest edition of Rolling Stone magazine, Lorne Michaels talks about how ideas are presented and often rejected for Saturday Night Live.

The writers for the show will come up with creative thoughts, and then develop and write many different skits. They’ll present the skits to the boss (Lorne) and the other writers. Then, they are often told that a skit is not good enough to be put on the actual show.

At that point, a writer can throw the skit away and work on new ideas. Or, they can file that skit away and try to present it again at another time.

One of the most famous SNL skits in recent memory is “More Cowbell”. In the Rolling Stone article, we learn that skit was rejected and re-presented 7 times before it actually saw the light of day. With that much “failure” surrounding it, that skit could easily have ended up in the trash. However, it went on to become one of the show’s greatest moments.

There are many ideas that we may think of when it comes to marketing our company, product, or services. We have many “flashes of creativity” that excite us for a while. But for one reason or another, they are not converted into actual marketing campaigns. Reasons may include budget, timing, or just a lack of resources.

Many of those ideas may end up in the trash for a good reason. They can’t all be great. However, we may find that keeping ideas filed away may provide benefits to us months or even years down the road. Technology makes it very easy for us to store ideas. It could be in the “Notes” app on our smart phone. Or perhaps we keep an easily retrievable document somewhere that we can edit at any time.

There will be times when flashes of creativity escape us. If we take the time to review our list of “ideas from the past that never quite became reality”, we may find the inspiration that we need to create and develop a successful marketing effort.

Photo Credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mo_Cowbell_MardiGras2009.JPG

Check out a little of what you can expect to see at the Lunch & Learn.

Check out interlinkONE at booth # 969. Hope to see you at the show!

When people visit a site to place an order, they certainly may know which product they’d like to order. But oftentimes, people simply like to browse. Thus, they may utilize the Product Group and Product Type categories.

In the ilinkONE Version 8 software, users have the option to present the Groups and Types via thumbnails. Thumbnails for each group or type can be displayed directly on the Search page.    Users also have options as to how big the thumbnails may be (by default, the thumbnails are 100 x 100 pixels and the large option is 250 x 250 pixels). If you only have a few items, then you certainly may take a look at using the large thumbnail option.

But no matter what you choose, you certainly will want to ensure that the sizes of your thumbnails are consistent.

If you’d like to do this in your own instance of our software, it’s real easy. The main two things you need to do are:

• Modify your Client Rules to display thumbnails for Product Groups and Types (other options include text links and dropdowns)
• Create your thumbnails, and then upload them via the Database Admin pages for Groups and Types

I hope that you find this feature helpful!

Below is the screenshot of one way that thumbnails could spice up the front page of your online ordering portal:

Yes, traditional mail and fulfillment has been their focus for a long time. However, they are not shying away from using online tools to help them accomplish their objective.

I received a direct mail piece from MFSA this week. It contained an invitation to their New England Chapter meeting in September. The mailer listed costs, registration options, an overview of the agenda, and I also believe a choice of chicken or prime rib (Okay, I made that last one up).

However, one of my favorite pieces of content on the mailer was a line that said “Join the New England Chapter Group on LinkedIn“. The familiar LinkedIn logo was placed next to this line of text.

I am quite familiar with MFSA — I’ve attended conferences, I receive most of their email newsletters, I’ve been to chapter meetings, and I visit their website. However, I was not yet aware that there was a LinkedIn group for the New England Chapter. It is certainly possible that I have completely overlooked advertisements about it on those other channels.

However, for some reason, seeing the note about it on the direct mail piece caught my attention. I joined the group that day.

People see, hear, touch, and smell more marketing messages than ever before. We are all competing to find ways to get our message noticed.

In a multi-channel world, I think MFSA just did a great job of that.

The Direct Mail piece

The Promotion of the LinkedIn Group

New anti-spam Error Message

In an effort to protect end users, we now validate the URL you try to shorten against lists of websites known to be unsafe. If you try to enter an unsafe URL, you’ll see that error message above.

We do this by integrating in real-time with trusted spam, phishing and malware lists, and will continue to keep our anti-spam protection as robust as possible by integrating with new services as they become available.

Enhancements like these should help ensure that users can rely on our ilink.me service to execute and measure social media marketing campaigns without interruption!

A few months ago, I expressed a bit of joy over the convenience of the Pandora app on my iPhone and their “strike while the iron is hot” marketing activity.

However, no matter how much I love music, I have fallen into the bucket of someone who has not used Pandora recently. In fact, it’s been a few months since I last used it online or via my phone.

Sure, I’ve heard my friends discuss how much they love Pandora from time to time on their Facebook posts. I see other employees using it as I walk around the interlinkONE office. But for me, I just didn’t seem to find the time to launch and listen.

Well, while I may have “forgotten” about Pandora, they did not forget about me.

Two days ago, I received an email from Pandora. It wasn’t pushy… They didn’t ask “where I’ve been”. But rather, they provided enough of a gentle incentive to make me want to launch and listen one more time. The email simply let me know that they had added songs that I might like to one of the playlists I had created in the past.

This type of content did a couple of things: one, it reminded me about why I loved Pandora — they help people discover new music! Two, it put the service in the front of my mind, which caused me to help move it up in my “things to do” priority list.

When it comes to your marketing efforts, you may also have a list of people who you view as “inactive subscribers”. Perhaps they haven’t opened one of your eNewsletters in months. Maybe they have ignored your invitations to listen to a webinar. But no matter what, the good thing is that they are still on your list. They have not yet opted out. We must not view these types of contacts as lost causes. Rather, we should creatively find ways to re-engage them.

Thanks to Hulu, I’ve been watching a lot of Chef Ramsay’s shows recently.

I’ve been on a steady diet of Kitchen Nightmares, Hell’s Kitchen, and most recently, Master Chef. (If you held my hand to the fire, I’d say that “Kitchen Nightmares” is my favorite.)

As you may have noticed by my absurd use of puns in that last paragraph, those shows are having a heavy influence on me. The effects of watching that many cooking-related shows can also be seen in other areas:

• Vocabulary: I am now using many of Chef Ramsay’s sayings when describing food. While these aren’t necessarily new words, I now love using the word “fresh” to describe good food and I wear a disturbing cringe on my face when i refer to “frozen” food. I have also been fighting the urge to yell “Get out of my kitchen!!”.
• Awareness: I have been introduced to a variety of mouth-watering-inducing meals that I have never tasted, but have become completely obsessed with. Beef Wellington, you are in my target!
• Actions: Yes, my wife can attest to this: I have greatly increased the amount of time that I spend in the kitchen. In fact, I actually attempted to cook up a honey-mustard glaze yesterday to accompany grilled chicken. (Unfortunately, the finished product earned the name “Chicken Swimming in a Honey Mustard Soup”)

Now, I am not trying to say that simply watching hours of cooking-related shows has made me an expert, or even an average cook. But my new “association” has absolutely affected my life.

Finding Help in the Kitchen of Marketers

To grow business in today’s economy, many service providers that traditionally offered print, mail, or fulfillment are now seeking to offer additional marketing services to their clients. To do this, they certainly may need to make investments in software and hardware. However, it goes beyond that.

Discussing and selling a multi-channel marketing campaign means that we will be talking a new language… it means that we must be aware of things that are happening in the “marketing” world, as opposed to just circles that discuss print. It also means that we need to walk-the-walk.

To do this successfully, we must make changes when it comes to our associates. Here are few ways that we can do this:

• We must read magazines that specifically discuss marketing topics and website design.
• We must subscribe to newsletters share insight on the world of mobile marketing and best practices for email campaigns.
• We should read posts from bloggers that are engrossed in all-things-marketing, and that freely share tips, tricks, and best practices.
• We should look at attending trade shows and joining associations that are focused on the marketing.

Yes, the people and things that we associate with do have an effect on us. This applies to all fields, activities, age groups, etc.

A change in association may not make us an instant-expert, but it absolutely can put us on the path to becoming a legend one day.

Photo Credit: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gordon_Ramsay.jpg

In this video, Jason Pinto of interlinkONE uses a recent piece of mail that he received as marketing inspiration. And since it’s August, and kids are headed back to school soon, he gives you a little assignment as well!

Can you handle it?

Along with frequent posts on m-bossed.com, he is quite active in sharing helpful information on his Twitter account.

Recently, Ryan used our QReate & Track software application. That tools allows companies to generate QR Codes and then measure their effectiveness.

Ryan was kind enough to post an article on his blog where he discusses his experience with using our software.

Please feel free to check out the article here >>