Good idea:

The new AsiaTown logo made its first public appearance today, Friday the 13th of July. Cory (pictured on left) and Katharyne from St. Clair Superior Development Corporation (SCSDC) stenciled the AsiaTown logo 3 places in the community. This is the logo’s first appearance, but far from its last. We will begin to use this logo - a bonsai tree design with all 12 animals from the Chinese Zodiac – all through the neighborhood…

St. Clair Superior Neighborhood: Launch of Marketing Effort for AsiaTown Cleveland

Wonderful. Jay Conrad Levinson wrote Guerrilla Marking in 19fuckin’84. I think we need to do something more then rehashing ideas that are a couple decades old. We should have done those… a couple of decades ago. It’s time to move on:

Virginia Carlson has joined the city’s Economic Development Department as deputy director for research, outreach and marketing… She mentioned the Cleveland Clinic, a proposed Design District and the city’s downtown sports stadiums as potential catalysts for attracting and keeping people in the city.

Carlson said another of her key roles will be to formulate a “guerrilla marketing” campaign to create buzz about the city. Part of that, she said, will include beefing up the city’s Web site and presenting a better image to national and international media.

Here’s an idea. Why don’t you develop your own campaign, instead of glomming onto other people’s?

Development chief likes city’s assets - Plain Dealer Early Edition

Hmmmm. I could have some fun on a platform like this:

Concentri attempts to unify customer management systems for e-mail, Web, mobile phones and interactive TV. Structurally, it maintains a shared customer database with levels for profiles, activity history and responses to forms such as surveys. This falls between the simple profile table of interaction managers and the complex marketing database of the campaign managers. Data matching, transformations and consolidation must be done outside the system before the tables are loaded.

Concentri supports both batch selections for outbound campaigns and real-time responses for interaction management. These are managed through a single campaign interface, which lets users define selection rules that can be attached to e-mail campaigns, SMS mobile text messages, Web pages and WAP mobile Web content. The system delivers the e-mail, mobile messages and Web pages directly…

Knotice’s Concentri unifies touchpoints

From Ron McDaniel:

Mark my words, some day the United States will get education right and then there will be a big backlash. Instead of blaming illegal immigrants and cheap foreign labor for our problems, we will blame our own kids.

How can I honestly compete with a kid that has all of their expenses covered and even gets an allowance? The web has opened up entrepreneurship and kids are catching on.

OK, Elizabeth Grace is not a Kid. Sixteen is a young adult. But still, how many people that young have the drive to build it and the stamina to promote it? Here is the email she sent me…

Buzzoodle Buzz Marketing Blog » » 16 Year Old Entrepreneur

I found the following about “Brandjacking” in today’s MarketingVOX rather timely:

The “Brandjacking Index,” a four-week survey by MarkMonitor, found that cybersquatting, in which illegal sites pirate popular trademarks via phishing, clickfraud and similar tactics, runs rampant online.

Brands abusers serve as dangers not merely for consumers, but also for the brands themselves. They are often better web marketers (emphasis added by me…see addendum below), with media and Internet companies the most attractive targets, accounting for 31 percent of the abuse.

I bet the powers that be never thought they’d be “Brandjacked.” And come to think of it I wonder why the Cleveland+ and Cleveland+ Business websites each don’t have a blog, podcast and/or social network incorporated into them?

Report: ‘Brandjacking’ Intensifies - MarketingVOX

Addendum: I decided to enter a handful of keywords in Google to see if the Cleveland+ Marketing Alliance was doing any keyword advertising. Unfortunately it doesn’t appear as if they are as nothing came up linking back to their websites. But when I Googled “GCP” the following came up as the third paid search listing:

Wasting $8.5 MM
fCleveland+
A response to Cleveland+
www.fclevelandplus.com