Look, I won't tell you twice

Okay, no beating about the bush on this one.
If you want to reach amusement park enthusiasts, domestic and international travellers, and people residing in hotels, then Martin Worldwide can provide a list of people for you to contact. What they call travel leads are one of their many specialities.
Martin Worldwide have specialised in collecting lists of people who are happy to be contacted with advertising since I don’t know when – a long time, anyway. And they can reformat these lists so that you, as the advertiser, only contact people who are interested in the thing you’re advertising.
There! That’s told you. Now get on and contact them!

Getting the right list

When I ran the bookshop, one of our biggest difficulties was building up the email newsletter list to a reasonable level, and maintaining it. People were always dropping in, shopping for a while, then getting bored with us and dropping out. Well, at least that’s what you had to assume, as some just stopped responding and vanished. On the other hand we made some good friends amongst these customers, even though we never met most of them.
Because we were a niche market, there was little point in buying a ready-made list of email customers, and in a way, chasing new customers had something of the hunt about it. However, businesses with different markets would no doubt benefit from buying or renting a list, and there are some phenomenally wide-ranging lists around. Martin Worldwide, for instance, possesses a database of over 290 million consumers and 14 million U.S. businesses. That makes our little list at the shop look rather paltry. Still, we made sales through it, and that was the aim!
Martin Worldwide act as a telemarketing lists broker, amongst other things, and offer turnkey marketing solutions. Okay, turnkey marketing isn’t a phrase I’m particularly familiar with, and I had to do a bit of hunting around to find out that it means – I think! – marketing that’s up and running and ready to go for the person wanting the job done. I guess it comes from the idea that you turn the key in your (new) home and voila! everything is ready waiting for you.

Online Shopping

I’ve just been watching an online video for the company, Magnet Commerce, and it was very tempting to sign up for their 15 day free trial! The only trouble is I’d probably want to go further than the trial, and at the moment I really don’t have the justification for opening an online shop.

Magnet Commerce offers the software to get a shop online for someone who wants to sell online but doesn’t have the means or expertise to get the thing off the ground. You don’t have to download anything – which is always a plus. Everything is provided online, even graphics if you don’t want to upload those yourself. It’s like having a database, catalogue, invoicing system, and admin all on tap.

There were several times when I debated doing this kind of thing with OC Books when I was there, but we never quite got to a decision on the subject. (When I say ‘we’ I mean I never persuaded myself that this was the way to go…at that point.) If I’d come across Magnetcommerce ecommerce software, I might have gone for it. It’s not hugely expensive (the price depends on where you’re working from) especially when you compare all the costs of setting up such a thing yourself.

At OC Books, the suppliers who had online databases were the ones you tended to go back to more readily than those that would reply when they got round to it. With online databases you could tell at the drop of a hat whether the company had something on hand, or how long it would take to get it. That’s my kind of system.

Magnet Commerce also supports multiple languages and multiple currencies on the same store. That’s pretty effective: I could start a shop that sold to people in countries as widespread as India and Indonesia, Ireland and Iran. You don’t have to have a separate ‘shop’ for each location: you just manage them all from the one application. Ah, you say, but would they support all sorts of languages? Well, according to their site: "Any language you want to enable can be supported. Simply contact us and let us know which languages you want to use!" You can deal in multiple currencies too.

Another advantage, they tell me, is that their system is built on the latest ASP.NET 2.0 technology also using Microsoft SQL database. Unfortunately I don’t exactly know what that means, but it sounds impressive. I recognise SQL, because my son and I have talked about it a few times – it means Structured Query Language, if that’s any help. It’s a way of getting information from a database, and updating the database in return. (That’s putting it somewhat simply!)

Being of a curious nature, I checked out Microsoft ASP.NET on Google. It’s a free technology that allows programmers to create dynamic web applications, and can be used to create anything from small, personal websites through to large, enterprise-class web applications. You can see I’m pretty enthusiastic about Magnet Commerce. Good!
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Searching less far and wide

I just spent a quarter of an hour unpacking a piece of gobbledegook advertising language that appeared in a job advertisement. "Including reporting (standard and non standard) and provider/public liaison, and audit and compliance activities" was just one of the job requirements. Put simply, does it mean: telling the boss what you’re doing if he inquires, being able to speak to the customers in real English, making sure the petty cash hasn’t been filched, and coming to work on time? I think it might.
I won’t be going for this job, somehow; if I can’t make sense of how they talk in the advertisement, how will I understand them in reality? Would I have to translate everything everybody said, or would they talk in plain English?
I came across a phrase today: Vertically Searching for Meaning. This is a whole new concept to me, and again it’s taken me a bit of translating to get my head around it.
Basically, a Vertical Search is a more specific search than something like a general search, such as Google does. Google searches far and wide from its index of recorded webpages, and though it’s superb at what it does, it can also give a lot of irrelevant information. This is neither the fault of Google nor the searcher.
Vertical search engines, however, search a database that contains information related to a specific topic. It’s like the Encyclopaedia Britannica as opposed to a map index to your local city and its environs – though of course the comparison isn’t exact. Vertical searches, therefore, are of much more use to people wanting a particular focus. Thus there are search engines for doctors, job seekers, real estate – and others: I guess some of the ones I’ve talked about in the last few weeks would come into this category. Roughly.
Of course advertisers are interested in these vertical search databases, because it allows them to focus their advertising in a much more specific way. While Google’s adsense ads for the most part align themselves to the topic in hand – for the most part – ads on these databases know exactly what’s of interest and that makes all the difference.
Well, there, now that I’ve explained it to myself, I’m much happier!
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