Posted by BI Monkey on July 19, 2009 · 1 Comment
I use LinkedIn quite alot for keeping track of business contacts and colleagues, and also for keeping up to date with thought within the industry using the Discussions. However the Discussions are fraught with spam and lousy social marketing. Here I will highlight two of the most ineffective practices, because they are really getting on my nerves and people keep making the same mistakes over and over again.
How to guarantee nobody reads your content
Simple – ask people for an email address before they can read or download it. Since you’re interested in putting people off, why not ask some marketing questions people don’t want to answer as well?
Imagine I was in the street and demanded name and address details before giving you a pamphlet. How many pamphlets do you think I would manage to hand out? Just like in real life, you have to give something to get something in return. If your article is any good – and relevant to the reader – a simple link to a sign-up page for further articles will garner more genuine, targeted responses. People who are interested in what you have to say will sign up – not those few people who may be interested but turn out not to be once they access your content.
If you want people to read your articles – give them away. Ask for involvement later, not upfront.
Got any spare change, mate?
So the next issue is how to effectively ensure nobody pays attention to your product or service. It’s very easy – just cut and paste your standard marketing blurb into a new post, or maybe as a response to a discussion without putting it into context.
For example: Have you heard of [Super New BI Product]? It will [Insert lies about product] and save your business [made up number] dollars. Just click here [link no-one will click on] to find out more or email [sales manager you will never email] to find out more about our amazing product and services. If you are even reading the end of this paragraph i’d be surprised – your brain has already tagged it as [spam].
Again, this is the equivalent of jumping in front of someone in the street and demanding they listen to your pitch. You will get as much attention as a homeless bum asking for spare change. It’s called social marketing for a reason. You need to engage with people, explain how what you offer potentially could assist them and you are willing to help.
Then they might talk to you, and you might get the business you are dismally failing to acquire using your current approach.
</rant>
Posted by BI Monkey on May 21, 2008 · Leave a Comment
Please, please, please don’t.
It’s ugly. It’s unwieldy. It’s hard to debug. It’s inefficient. It’s entirely geared towards delivering simple warehouses using Cognos tools. It’s got settings hidden everywhere.
I’m sure it was pretty good at some point in the past. But i’d rather use DTS, which has all the above flaws, but nowhere near as bad.
Update – following answering a query on a forum to ask why SSIS vs Cognos data Manager, I added a few reasons for this:
1) It’s old product – so it lacks functionality that SSIS has, in terms of connectivity and capability – most work has to be devolved back to the database layer via SQL, e.g. aggregation
2) If you think debugging SSIS is hard, Data Managers only audit function is the logs, which are massive text files you have to trawl though after execution
3) It’s slow, and very “Black box” – unlike SSIS you have very few options for performance tuning by changing settings
4) It cannot be extended – so no custom components, and very poor scripting support.
5) Settings can be deeply hidden and often the only way to find things is by trawling through components until you find them.
6) There’s a very good chance DM will be deprecated as IBM has too many ETL tools and this ain’t one of the good ones!