preaching to the converted

The always enlightening Mike Speiser on why it pays to target your messaging at the most dedicated 20% of your customers/audience, rather than trying to speak broadly to everyone. An excerpt:

Another big learning was that, for most companies, the average cost of moving a customer from the second most loyal to the most loyal category was extremely small while the cost of going from a new customer to the most loyal customer was often a money losing proposition. That is, the costs of acquisition exceed lifetime value, on average. Most companies focus on customer acquisition way too much! Even very early stage businesses are best served by having evangelists amongst their early adopters.

If you're in the digital media industry, and aren't reading his blog "Laserlike" regularly, you are a damned fool. I know you're busy, but just this once, close your door, skip the Team Spirit Meeting and read up; it's not often ideas this good come free.

namespace collision

Ugh. So I've known for years that there's another Tony Zito out there, a semi-savory real estate agent from Baton Rouge -- he even beat me to the domain name. But this takes the cake -- this Tony Zito, CEO of Mediaforge, is in my own industry, and is clearly being interviewed far more oftenthan I. I wonder if the era of Google will inspire more people to name their children with unique identifiers, or opt for digital camouflage.

gonna start up the old blogging machine...

I would say "again" but I think it would be a bit disingenuous. I've been having a lot of thoughts lately, some of which would require at least 150 or 160 characters to fully explore, so I figured it was as good a time as any. I'm considering a switch away from blogger.com, though...we'll see.