Website Managers

Archive for February, 2007

Sometimes looking back out how we got to where we are today can show us our successes, mistakes, what we could do better and what we should avoid. If you are young enough you might not remember a time before there was the Internet. For you this is the only life you know.

For others, the Internet was something strange that happened along the way; something that complicated our lives even more than they already were. I remember times before the Internet when monitors were green text on a black screen. If we were adventurous, we discovered how to change those colors, create our own text-based menus and enjoyed ASCII art: pictures made using only the characters on your keyboard.

Am I starting to sound old? Think about what you were doing in 1979. I remember that being the year I heard about computers, took an interest in them and enrolled in a computer technology course in Minnesota to learn not only how to operate them, but also how to repair them. What we were taught instead was how to find that bad circuit board, replace it and send the bad one back to the factory for repair.

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Reprinted with permission from Eric Albertson’s SucceedingInBusiness.com Newsletter. (Copyright, 1998-2007, Eric Albertson, SucceedingInBusiness.com.)

Have you ever heard of something hardcore marketers call a persona?

(Check out persona for more info.)

Neither had I, until about 15 years ago, when I was trying to win a $100 million dollar sale at Boeing, as a lone sales rep against teams from IBM and HP.

I didn’t know anyone at Boeing, a company that, at that time, had more than 200,000 employees. I had to figure a way to become known fast, or give up.

I got lucky. It turns out an old work associate had hired on at Boeing. The real luck was that I discovered the concept of the persona, also known as the ideal customer.