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Created with Haiku Deck, the free presentation app for iPad What kind of hero story does your website tell? Sharing Hero Stories Stories are the key to engagement and conversion online. Marketing is, has and will always been about stories. The stories we tell ourselves, believe and tell others form the core of human aspiration and marketing is nothing if not aspirational. In Hero With A Thousand Face American mythologist Joseph Campbell explains that every culture is built on stories, stories with more in common than many realize. The "hero's journey" is at the core of many myths, legends and popular movies. Websites tell "hero stories" too. Here are 7 types of hero stories websites tell:   7 Kinds of Hero Stories Told Online Enlightened. Vicarious. Altruistic. Rescue. Stranger. Like Us. Heroes Together. Examples (with links) of each hero story: Hero Story Examples  . Submit Your Hero Story Examples: Hero Story Search (will eventually put a contest on this link

IDC's CMO Advisory has conducted an annual IT Buyer Experience survey for the past six years. We have tracked many changes and interesting trends, but one thing stands out as a consistent inefficiency in the market: every year IT Buyers report the purchase processes can be approximately 40% shorter.  Over the course of a 10-month average process that means the potential is to accelerate revenue by an entire quarter. This is a huge opportunity for both buyers and sellers with tremendous financial incentives for both and yet no improvement in six years. Why not and what to do about it? Buyers put about 2/3 of the blame for this inefficiency on themselves. There are scheduling issues, conflicting agendas, changing budgets, changes in personnel, immature purchase processes, etc. The challenge for vendors therefore is two-fold: Reduce the inefficiencies that are inherent in their own marketing and sales processes, and Better facilitate the buyer's process(es) Gap between actual and

The roof is gone. The second floor is gone. The stucco's been ripped off and the interior walls, floors and doors have been demoed. Very little of the original bungalow will be left standing, but under the stucco and hidden behind the living room wall we did find 2 stained glass windows. They aren't to code anymore, so we can't use them in place of regular windows, but we are considering incorporating them in the house--perhaps as an attic window. Front of the house Living room, facing the street Art glass on the right Basement After visiting the site, Josh and I drove up to Abt and ordered all of our appliances. We're getting an LG refrigerator and range, a Bosch dishwasher, a Broan range hood and a KitchenAid microwave, which will be installed in the peninsula. We also bought an LG washer and dryer, which I'm kind of giddy about. While certainly not top-of-the-line, all our household appliances are major upgrades from the mid-level Kenmore appliances we purchased

We want to share an exciting update to the earlier post about the new Analytics access controls.  As we mentioned in that earlier post, we have built a more powerful access-control system to help you better manage who on your team can access what entities in your Analytics accounts. These access controls are now enabled on all Analytics accounts. The feedback from our early users highlighted a clear need to let report viewers collaborate with teammates, and in response we created the new Collaborate permission that lets users not only create but also edit shared assets like dashboards and annotations. Open the Admin page for your Analytics account, and click User Management. You can see the new Collaborate permission listed along with the others. Learn more about our new access-control system, and gain more precise control over your Analytics accounts. Posted By Tim Thelin and Matt Matyas, Google Analytics Team

Is all this talk of "Customer Experience" within B2B Tech fluff? This is the question I asked Hubspot's two cofounders Darmesh Shah and Brian Halligan after their keynote speech at Hubspot's annual Inbound Conference . Their answers added to the momentum I have been observing and hearing. Yes, they felt Customer Experience, or whatever your organization names it, is massively important and is here to stay. At Hubspot their shift to a Customer Experience Company, or an Inbound Company as they call it (for a great detailed overview on this read @thesaleslions recent blog post ), is just another signal that providing and mapping a full Customer Experience will be an important part of the future of B2B companies. I believe marketing has an opportunity set the path to success. Below are some areas I see patterns around "Customer Experience" as it continues grow in B2B Tech: Marketing > Sales > Services: This is a trio that the HubSpot executives spoke ab

Listen To Martin's  & Drew's  Courage Cocktail Interview with Lee Anne McClymont Who has better "radio voice"? Martin's Ride & Cancer-preneurs Great and fun interview today with my brother Drew and host of Courage Cocktail Lee Anne McClymont. First part of the interview is embarrassing stories from Martin's Ride To Cure Cancer (summer of 2010). Can't ride a bicycle across America and not have plenty of embarrassing stories. Martin's Ride Highlights & Time Cods 1:43 My Cancer Journey Begins 2:35 Dr. van Deventer at UNC Lineberger agrees to treat me for Martin's Ride , bicycle ride across America. 3:35 Recovering the Martin's Ride dream after being diagnosed with leukemia. 3:50 Director of Ecommerce - love of all things Internet marketing and the web. 4:41 Making millions in e-commerce. 5:35 Cancer-preneur. 6:38 Finding power over your life again. 7:00 You are NOT your diagnosis. 8:35 Crowdfunding cancer research via CureCancerStar

Ada, at elementary school for the first time, is in a multi-age combination first and second grade class called "the Big MAC." (It's Big and a Multi-Age Classroom.) While one of the two teachers is new to the class (but not the school), it seems like a wonderful and very unique combination class that has the first and second graders doing a lot together. Ada's report from her first day of school was dominated by her explanation of the classroom's behavior chart (green smiles through red frowns), but she also said she got her pick her seat (next to her Montessori buddy Ami), her teacher was "mostly nice but a little bit mean," her class "earned two big Wows," and she almost cried on the playground because she didn't know where to put her lunch box during recess. "But I kept my tears in my eyes." My self-proclaimed tomboy, Zoe entered fourth grade. She has a well-respected, seasoned teacher and many friends in her classroom. She rep

What do you do on the last day of summer vacation when one kid wants to build sandcastle on the beach, one kid wants to hit the pool in a neighboring town (the one you don't have passes to), you'd love to take a bike ride along the lakefront and your mother, visiting from Virginia, says she "doesn't care...as long as we don't go to an amusement park like Kings Dominion"? If you're me, you head over to the Garfield Park Conservatory . Inside, the kids played hide and seek in the fern room while the grandparents wandered around identifying some of their own houseplants. But outside was actually the highlight. We usually head to the Conservatory in the middle of winter to get a bit of a green fix, so I'd forgotten how spectacular the grounds can be. Workmen were setting up for a free Shakespeare in the Parks performance to be held later that afternoon and the goats were off duty, but the city demonstration garden was brimming with fresh herbs and vegetabl

Not using AdSense yet? In the last ten years , AdSense has helped over 2 million partners grow their businesses. Be sure to tune in on Wednesday September 11, at 11:00AM, when we’ll be hosting a special 10th Anniversary Hangout on Air  for prospective publishers. If you haven’t yet signed up for Google AdSense or would like to learn more, you should join us. We’ll demonstrate how AdSense helps you earn money from your website, allowing you focus on creating great content. Learn how AdSense:  Earns you extra revenue  Shows your users relevant and useful ads Lets you control which ads show up on your site Helps you understand what’s working and what’s not with robust reporting tools Several publishers will also be joining us to share their AdSense experiences. Hear why they chose AdSense and how it’s helped them grow.  Join this event page to live stream the Hangout on Air on September 11 from 11:00am - 12:00pm PDT. Posted by Bola Akinsanya - AdSense Strategic Partnerships Team

Diversified Content Marketing No one cared when I preached, "Content marketing" in 2003. Now everyone is creating "inbound marketing". Some good things happen when everyone does something online. Overall quality of whatever the group marketing is doing tends to go up. One very big bad thing happens too. Chances for your content to shine are reduced by the noise of success. This post is about how to fortify your content marketing with the four horsemen: Four Horsemen of Content Marketing * Content creation. * Content curation. * User Generated Content (UGC) engine. * Ecommerce. Content Marketing Horseman #1: Create Daily When you don't know what you don't know create a lot of content every day, but always have "narrowing the funnel" as your goal. Narrowing the funnel is when you can safely reduce your traffic net because you know what content brings converting traffic. The key is connecting the top of your content marketing funnel (traffic generatio

Faced with a cacophony of payment models from fee-for-service to value and risked based, with everything else in between, the evolving healthcare consumer, millions of people in the coming months gaining access to healthcare via the HIX insurance purchase, healthcare marketing becomes an even greater challenge than before. One size does not fit all. And growth is good. Sustainability...Presence...Perception...Experience... These are the four dynamics that direct-care healthcare providers need to understand and incorporate for success in their marketing operations and campaign efforts in a consumer-driven market. No longer nice to have, these four basic marketing concepts are now business requirements. Sustainability- The resources to effectively and continuously communicate brand and differentiate you’re offering across multiple channels. Presence - By maintaining a continuous presence across multiple channels as in so many other consumer-directed industries you build brand preference.

Ever wanted to learn more about Google Analytics APIs? Maybe even have someone talking to you about how to use them? Well, if you haven’t gotten a chance to tune in, we’re excited to present Google Analytics on Google Developers Live. Our Developer Relations team has been hard at work putting these together; we’ve done a few already , and also have some coming up that we’re excited about! We'll be doing these a few times a month, on Thursdays at 10AM PDT (full schedule here ). Each show is about a half hour. The show will either take you “Behind the Code” or “Off the Charts.” Off the Charts is a series about getting into the deep features of Google Analytics, understanding how it works, things you can do with it and how to use the feature itself. “Behind the Code” will not only showcase new GA features and technology, but also take us behind the scenes and give you a chance to hear directly from some of the engineers, product managers, and others who work behind the scenes to desig

I'm lucky to have REALLY smart friends. Here are five ideas a recent survey of some of the smartest turned up in anser to the question, "What cool stuff are you doing this holidays?" Names and identities are being withheld until 1.1.2014 as promised :). M Idea 1: Mobile Games As a recent Forbes article noted mobile games are ROCKING. Digital games are expected to hit $1.1B growing 54%. Not suggested your ecommerce or B2B website goes into the digital game business, but finding a way to be FUN and MOBILE this holiday is a "genius idea". Tips to keep in mind as you make a digital game out of shopping or forming a relationship with your website: Mobile Game Tips Keep mobile games simple.  Develop games that play OVER TIME.  Don't forget the leaderboard.  Curate "winners" so everyone learns.  Align your game with core brand values (see Stengel's Brand Ideals ). Idea 2: Disrupt Convention This holiday season don't do the usual thing in the expe

Google Analytics users can use the Core Reporting API to save time by building dashboards and automating complex reporting tasks. This API exposes over 250 data points (dimensions and metrics), and new data is added every few months. For many developers, it can be difficult to keep their applications up to date with all the latest data. To make things easier, today we are launching the new Google Analytics Metadata API to simplify data discovery. The Metadata API contains all the queryable dimensions and metrics included in the Core Reporting API. We’ve also added attributes for each dimension and metric, such as the web or app name, full text description, grouping, metric calculations, deprecation status, and whether the data is queryable in segments. You can check out at a live Metadata API response here . You now have programmatic access to generate the same list of dimensions and metrics we use to generate our public documentation . You can now create this list using the Metada

We've long known that the power of digital marketing is in its measurability. But measurability is only half the battle.  The other half is attribution — understanding how to allocate credit to your various marketing programs and appropriately recognize their impact on the customer journey. Over the past two years, we’ve built a strong foundation in attribution with Multi-Channel Funnels and the Attribution Model Comparison Tool in Google Analytics (as well as additional tools for AdWords and Google Display Network ). Today, we’re expanding our attribution capabilities with Data-Driven Attribution in Google Analytics Premium, with algorithmic models and a new set of reports designed to take the guesswork out of attribution. It’s available globally to all Google Analytics Premium customers. Data-Driven Attribution analyzes the customer journey, whether that journey ends in a purchase (or conversion) or not. Our modeling methodology, grounded in statistics and economic principles

Vestique Women's Apparel Store & New SEO Had lunch on Friday with Heather King . Heather is a talented online ecommerce merchant helping the equally talented founders of Vestique , a successful women's apparel retailer in Raleigh, Charlotte and Greenville North Carolina, move from bricks to clicks. Vestique, like many catalog or brick and mortar retailers, faces unique challenges after Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm updates including: Pages not supported by social shares don't get much New SEO traction.  Social Shares hard to get because inventory moves so fast and unpredictably.  Inventory uncertainty hampers inbound link building. Uniting inventory, website and Point of Sale (POS) systems is a challenge.  Time crunch for founders and shoppers.  Here is Vestique's Internet marketing data: Bricks, Clicks and New SEO This post is about sharing ideas to help Vestique and other online merchants harness the power of our "new SEO". This "new SEO&

Mobile Apps pose a unique set of challenges for marketers and developers. On the web, you can iterate on content and features in near-real-time and deploy conversion tracking, Remarketing , analytics and other tags to measure the effects on your users. Apps, on the other hand, are effectively frozen at the point of user install. Making even the slightest change means waiting until your next update makes its way through the various app stores and even then, you can’t be sure that all of your users will update quickly, if at all. The surprisingly static nature of Mobile Apps creates significant problems. Forget to add an event to a key button press? Tough! Need to add conversion tracking for a last minute campaign? Too bad! Realize you need to change an important configuration setting? Sorry, not possible... that is, until now! Previewed at Google I/O earlier this year, today we're launching Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps. With Google Tag Manager for Mobile Apps , you instrument

As healthcare evolves into a consumer-centric, semi-retail market with you existing in a multitude of reimbursement schemes each nuanced for a different market segment, have you   identified from a marketing perspective immediate actions to   improve your market position and revenue generation?   This isn't about massive advertising campaigns, gimmicks, wellness programs, etc. It’s more about getting the basics right, understanding who pays for what and how, the needs of your healthcare consumers, as well as driving demand, managing demand and moving demand to the right locations. In some circumstances it may even mean de-marketing certain services. This is a difficult question to answer given the focus and preoccupation with hospitals and health systems, with EMR, readmissions, cost reduction, quality improvement, etc., but at the very least, it does not mean that marketing leadership cannot make a difference in their organizations, lead change and make a meaningful, measureable