Content Management – Not So Easy After All

October 23, 2007 at 3:16 pm · Filed under Crappy Marketing, Marketing Advice

One of the most popular MarketHum products is our business blogging solution, the Thought Leadership Communities. So I was of course interested when I saw an ad from Vignette pop up in my Gmail as follows:

Blogs on the next level - The simplicity of blogs. The power of global collaboration.

Vignette is a content management system. I wanted to see what they were up to, so I clicked through to a page that advertised a whitepaper demonstrating the ROI of their “next-generation web solution” effective at “business blogging” and “social websites”.

They described the whitepaper as follows:

“Nucleus Research, the ROI experts, analyzed the business benefits of Catholic Health Initiative’s ambitious investments in Web-based collaboration and communication. Grab your own copy of this 3rd-party ROI case study to see the hard dollar benefits of online community.”

So I gave them a bunch of my personal information and they sent me the whitepaper - the wrong whitepaper, about a different Nucleus ROI study of their standard CMS implementation at Ball State University.

Bait and switch, or just poor content management? Either way, it looks bad for Vignette.

I have followed other companies’ Google ads before, to broken links and DNS errors. Perhaps it’s time for a little quality assurance initiative in your marketing department?

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“Career Horoscopes”?

September 15, 2007 at 2:00 am · Filed under Crappy Marketing

I just noticed an ad at the bottom of a Facebook page announcing that Monster, the job listing site, has a new feature: Career Horoscopes.

Have we sunk to a new low here? If this were a joke, perhaps Horror-Scopes for Halloween, I might find it creative and funny. But have they correctly judged their user base? Because if so, I don’t know that I’ll be advertising my next job opening there. Unless I’m looking for an astrologist.

Come to think of it, if Monster.com is that desperate for users and for giving them something to do on their site that they have to attract them through horoscopes, I pity them for that reason too. This is just bad all around.

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