.:RIMproInsider:.

Read a great quote in Fast Company written by Wenda Millard, Chief Sales Officer, Yahoo.

“People aren’t going to listen to you unless you’re part of their world.”

One of the things I see so much in the marketing we do in the RIM world is that we are very much stuck in our world of shelves and box counts, and cubic feet.

Honestly, I have yet to meet a client who prefers to be billed in cubic feet. It’s confusing to them. Granted once they learn they shrug their shoulders and accept it. But clients think from the perspective of a box.

If you want people to hear your marketing, start by getting out of your world and into theirs. Into their problems and ways to solve it. Ways to provide measurable, realistic solutions to the problems they have with their inactive or semi-inactive files, their media storage and backup rotations, their need to access files more quickly than a day through digital access and their security issues as it relates to the paperwork they create everyday that needs to be destroyed.

Local advertising continues to change. In a recent article by Greg Sterling, a expert in local search advertising, he reveals some interesting statistics based on two surveys. The first one was September 2003 and the second was just recently completed.

Among many other questions, we asked consumers, “In the past year, which of the following sources of information have you used or referred to when shopping for products or services in your local area?”

That study found that traditional yellow pages, white pages and newspapers were the dominant sources of local information. The Internet was then in fourth position. A follow-up survey with 500 consumers earlier this year found that, remarkably, the Internet had moved into a tie for first position.

This indeed has some significant implications for us in the RIM vendor industry. As a very “local” oriented business you need to be aware of these changes.

Sterling goes on to

Traditional yellow pages and newspapers remain powerful local shopping resources but have lost some of their reach. The Internet has emerged as a potent source for local business information. However, “the Internet” is itself a universe of numerous types of Web sites, including Internet yellow pages, online newspapers and search engines.

Search engines in particular — driven by broadband adoption — have shown significant growth. Yet consumers do not regard search engines as reliable sources for local information in all cases.

One should resist the temptation to see Internet adoption as a zero-sum game vis-à-vis print media. Use of the Internet does not mean that consumers have abandoned traditional media. But it does mean that their local influence has diminished somewhat.

Keep your head in the game. The words my coach reminded me of years ago on the football field are applicable to you today. You can get so busy with the day to day that you forget to be aware of these sigificant changes that have occurred within just two years.

One of my internet marketing heroes died yesterday. Corey Rudl was killed during a race, doing someting he loved to do.

Corey was one of the legends of Internet marketing and was considered among the most influential webmasters of all time. His success is often cited as a reason many online marketers entered the field. Corey was the passenger in a 2005 Porsche Carrera GT which veered off the track at the California Speedway and crashed into a safety barrier at over 100 mph. The driver, Miles Keaton was airlifted to Loma Linda University Hospital where he died about an hour after being admitted. Corey died at the scene of the accident.

Despite never meeting him, he was a mentor to me. I have read his newsletter for years. I have listened to him in teleconferences. He is someone I respected greatly. He taught me much.

You will be missed. Thanks for the wisdom, inspiration and ideas you shared.