Don't send me this.

With the holidays coming up, don’t miss an opportunity to get in front of your customers and prospects by sending a holiday gift or card.

Here’s a tip: go out on a limb and do something memorable and/or fun.  Don’t send the same bland holiday card my insurance agent sends out (sorry, Shawn).  Send something like a picture of your employees or a bottle of sparkling pomegranate juice.   Just don’t blend into the background of holiday music.

Use your creativity and think of what you’d like to receive, and send that.

Finally, resist the temptation to digitize your signature or to use a signature stamp.  Sign each one personally — your customers can tell.

Just a thought!

Nick

The first one is a 30-second commercial for Volunteer-o-matic™, an Apple iPhone App created by Bjorn Austraat and selling for 99¢ on the App Store.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=TURF19zPdrc

Then, while I had the application (and my skills) warmed up, I put together a 2-minute mock interview in which I respond to two specific questions about marketing.  It’s pretty wacky, but it was fun to do.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLJgJjlbW0M

Update: Several people have asked about the songs in the videos, so here they are.

• The Volunteer-o-matic commercial features “You, Me, and the Bourgeoisie” (also known as the App Store song) by The Submarines.
• The mock interview features “Black Star” by Radiohead and “Standing In The Shower… Thinking” by Jane’s Addiction.

Enjoy!

While I was at TuVox, I created quite a few one-of a kind marketing programs.

One really cool idea was personalizing www.tuvox.com based on the domain name the web visitor is coming from.  That is, the website “morphs” depending on whether the visitor is a (1) prospect, (2) partner, or  (3) competitor.

NOTE: If you are seeing a little box to the upper right that says “Nick Ezzo welcomes visitors from XYZ”, then you are experiencing basic personalization.  If you see your company logo, you are experiencing targeted personalization.

At TuVox I took it even further, since I had a library of 350+ demo audio recordings created for our prospects.  In addition to the logo, these visitors get a little audio player that demonstrates what their system would sound like with TuVox.  That is what I refer to as extreme personalization.

All of this is done without the visitor giving up any information or filling out a form.

The reaction I get from most people is “how the heck did you do that?”

How it’s done

This level of personalization is accomplished using a database that resolves a visitor’s IP address to their domain name, which is typically their company name.  The database I use actually has the company name, like this:

192.168.10.10 –> xyzcompany.com –> XYZ Enterprises, Inc.

Then the company name is used to pull information out of a home-grown MySQL database.

The fields in the table control things like which type of page to show (prospect.html, partner.html, competitor.html) and whether a company logo or audio file should be used.

The results

When web personalization is done well, most people have a positive reaction.  It makes the website more memorable, and enables work to get done faster.  The responses I received were overwhelmingly positive.

To be fair, I was contacted by two companies that asked me to take their logo off my site.  I don’t think they grasped that only visitors from their domain would see that page.  Two out of 350 isn’t bad, right?

So let’s hear it for Big Brother.

By the way, if you are reading this article, I have already received an email telling me that you are on my site.

- Nick

Awhile back, I created a demand generation campaign to get the attention of 50 decision makers at 50 insurance companies.

Here is what I did  [view here]:

1. I called the 50 top property and casualty insurance companies in the US and recorded what the caller experience sounded like.  As you can imagine, many of these were pretty bad.
2. I posted all 50 recordings on a landing page, and sent the link to 50 VITOs at 50 companies.
3. I watched the fireworks as these CEOs and VPs clicked — first on their own recordings, then on their competitors recordings.
4. Once I knew who their top competitors were, the inside sales team sent  emails and made phone follow-ups:  “you want to sound better than X and Y, don’t you?”

The results:

Once we qualified out some of the smaller accounts, we booked more than a dozen meetings with insurance companies in North America.

Let’s hear it for VITO!

[view here]

Techniques That Cost Less Than $100 Total

Having spent exactly three weeks looking for my next opportunity, I’d like to share some tips & tricks on how to get your next job.   It’s not magic; you just have to understand how to take the Web 2.0 pieces and assemble them into a job hunting machine.

The secret is this: approach your job search like a marketing campaign.

Guess what you’re marketing: yourself.

By the way, since I am a marketing dweeb professional I can get away with antics like sending Nerf™ pistols to people.

Here’s what I did:

1. Purchased my domain name www.nickezzo.com from GoDaddy. (cost = $4.99 a month for hosting, plus $10 to register the name)
2. Created my résumé site using WordPress, with a basic theme that I customized. (cost = free)
3. Added VisiStat website tracking, so I get immediate feedback (email and SMS) when someone hits the site. (cost = $29.95 a month, cheaper if you pay quarterly or annually).
4. Sent emails to key people with a special AdCaM code to track who clicks. (cost = $14.95 a month for VisiStat AdCaM)
5. Mailed decision makers fun items like a Nerf™ pistol to show how I “target prospects”  (I know it’s lame, but it resulted in a callback and an interview).  I included a cover letter and a USB drive with my work, also using AdCaM links on the USB drive. (cost = $7.99 for the Nerf pistol, $5.00 for shipping)
6. I use Salesforce.com to track Contacts, Accounts, and Opportunities (cost = free for 30-day trial, all features turned on, including Salesforce.com mobile).
7. Using LinkedIn, I download bios of the people who will be interviewing me.  I also connect to them after the interview, in order to remain in contact.  (cost = free)

Total cost so far?  $72.92.  My point is — with an investment of less than $100, I have landed 3 phone interviews and 4 face-to-face interviews (including 3 with one company).  And get this: it’s all tax-deductible as job search costs.

The real test will be to see if anyone hires me.  Stay tuned…

Steve Pollock/Ashok Khosla/Nick Ezzo in Entrepreneur Magazine Dec 2008

Although there is a link at the top of the page that clearly says “Articles“, I might as well throw in a gratuitous plug for my articles.

From my work with TuVox and VisiStat, here are a few of the articles I have written, contributed to, or been quoted in.

The long-haired guy in the plaid shirt is me.

CLICK HERE for some of the recommendations that colleagues have written about my work.

Note: If you’ve worked with me in the past, you can write a recommendation by visiting my Linkedin profile.   Each positive recommendation can earn you one bottle of good wine.

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