Ryan Wofford

Looking back through the posts I’ve shared on here, it seems that change, loss and regeneration have been underlying topics floating through a lot of the messages on my blog. Whether its a new app or piece of technology, or a life event… I am finding that Change is often the factor that leads me back to this forum to share with you.

Colby's "money" smile

About a year and a half ago, I lost my mom to a 17+ year battle with cancer. My big recent change involves another saddening loss… the loss of my dog, and long-time companion, Colby.

Folks who know me, probably knew Colby as well. There was a time (in college) when she rarely left my side. We traveled on road trips between Auburn and Athens, GA frequently to visit our friends up there. She was pushing 18 years old and was a great and loyal companion over the years. She will be missed dearly. Here’s a Facebook album of pics of her over the years, and the video below is a clip of her resting place. I decided to take her back “home” to Chewacla State Park in Auburn, AL. It’s a beautiful place I look forward to returning to more often to visit her.

In other news, things are going great with Adria & I. We are setting in nicely to the new home, and loving it. I’ve got an ever-expanding “honey-do” list of things to do around the house. To keep this loosely tech related, I’ve been using the “Task This” app to keep track of everything. Another handy little app is the iHandy Level to keep things straight (literally).

Our wedding plans are coming along. We’ve announced our date (save the dates going out soon) and have some registry info over on our wedding site.

Life at Deposco is going well. The company is in a growth period, with new customer acquisitions, as well as expansion in staff. My role continues to challenge me and present new opportunities. I will be traveling a bit in the coming weeks as I head out to strengthen our customer relationships, and meet some of the users and buyers of our services. I’ll be documenting all of this with videos and more over on our blog.

Stay tuned, and remember to embrace change… it’s what helps us grow!

Well, here it is & almost another two months went by before I got another post in. What can I say? We moved into our new house, work has been super busy and stressful, the World Cup has landed in full force…  and, while I’ve got plenty to say–this is just a quick post to apologize for the temporary site outage (if anyone noticed). I tried to upgrade both the core site to WordPress 3.0 and a bunch of Plugins at the same time, and that turned out to be a really bad idea. Of course, I know that’s a bad idea to try to push all of those things thru at once, but normally WordPress upgrades go pretty smoothly. This time, not so much.

After running, the page refreshed to the White Screen of Death. I was no longer able to pull up any pages, including admin pages. Not cool. After a few hours of Googling & debugging, I finally found the issue to be an incompatible plugin (Podcasting by TSG). I removed the plugin, and the site works again.

Just thought I’d let folks know in case any other WordPress users out there experience the same issue and are freaking out. If so, and it’s NOT an issue with the plugin I listed, here’s another post I found with an apparent solution I tried as well.

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Sometimes you just want to pull your hair out

Well, here it is… Almost a full two months exactly since my last post and I guess that is just an indication of how busy things have been in my life since my last post!

There are certainly a lot of things to update you on, both personal and professional. I’m writing this from the WordPress iPhone app, 25k feet up on my way back from the Material Handling and Logistics North American 2010 Trade Show in Cleveland. This was Deposco’s first foray into the trade show world and I was charged with putting together everything from the marketing strategy for the show to the marketing materials, to assembling the actual booth itself. It was quite an undertaking. I’ve attended smaller trade shows in the past, but this was the first I’ve managed from every angle.

The show was a four day show in Cleveland, featuring all kinds of exhibitors with products spanning the space within the four walls of the warehouse and beyond. Our strategic partners, UPS, indicated it would be a good fit, as it is the largest of it’s kind this year in North America.

The show from a technical perspective went off without a hitch. Sure, I had to overcome some challenges, such as building our entire marketing strategy around doing live product demos of our on-demand, SaaS warehouse management systems in our booth, then losing all of our demo guys to various other obligations… But we overcame and had a great show (and still were able to provide overview demos of our product). Knowing what our small booth and efforts cost, it was amazing to me the expenditure some of the exhibitors put forth. Let’s just hope some of the connections and prospects turn into real qualified leads for us!

What else has been going on? In a month’s time, with the help of my good friends at Schecter Technologies, LLC, we were able to completely redesign, develop, and launch the brand new website at Deposco.com. Stop by & have a look. This should give us a huge strategic advantage with SEO over the previously flash-heavy site, which was poorly indexed to say the least.

In other personal news, the Fiance and I have made great strides with finding and closing on our first home (just in time for the tax credit), as well as further wedding plans, so head on over to our wedding site for more news on that soon.

All-in-all, a really busy few months… I promise to try to keep this better updated, but as my friend Brandon Sutton recently posted over on his blog… “I’m No Superman” either!

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Well, as of now I’m a few weeks into the new job as Directory of Marketing for Deposco, Inc., a small start-up SaaS company in the supply chain management (SCM) industry. More specifically, we work in the supply chain execution space, offering companies great ROI on our warehouse and inventory management systems.

All indications so far are that I made a fantastic and timely move. I’m enjoying being a part of a highly skilled and accomplished team and the company has some great momentum coming off a strong fourth quarter and this year is shaping up to be a banner year already as well. We’re seeing strong adoption of OnDemand, SaaS solutions in both small-to-midsized companies as well as enterprise level corporations.

Ryan with Kitty

Marketing plans are starting to come together and initiatives are underway. I’ll try to keep you posted as new things develop (non-confidential, of course ). In the meantime, if happen to be in the industry and you would like to follow Deposco on Twitter, you can find us at http://www.twitter.com/Deposco.

I will also leave you with this picture of shame… part of my hazing with my new company was to have to sport this hot pink Hello Kitty backpack around for a week. That’s okay, though… They will pay. They always pay.

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Image by sarniebill1 via Flickr

I’m not really one of those people who is big on New Year’s resolutions, or who came into the first few weeks of January talking about how this was going to be a great year, or a decade of change. As a matter of fact, I probably downplayed it, if anything. I’ve had a lot of change in my life over the past year… my mother passed away, I was forced to move houses, I got engaged. And, I was aware of some change coming my way in the new year… the company I’ve worked for over the past 9+ years is going through a merger and while I wasn’t happy about it, I was interviewing for a new job, we’re hoping to buy our first house this year, and more. My point is–change happens. Like many, often I find myself resistant to it at first. Then, it happens. Something changes. And the only thing you can do is adapt.

Sure enough, after months of discussions and a turn of events, I was offered a Director of Marketing position with a local SaaS company, which by all accounts appears to be a wonderful opportunity for career growth and to practice what I have a passion for, which is developing marketing strategies to attract and connect with customers on an intimate level. This opportunity is really what sparked me into launching this blog and getting better about documenting and sharing knowledge with my peers (and friends or enemies or frienemies or whatever you call our twisted relationship), and make more of a conscious effort to write more. I’ve even dusted off the ol’ screenplay, as well (but we’ll leave that for another discussion)!

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

So, here we go into a new year. A new era. A new decca (as Flavor Flav would say), and I look around and I have to say… the winds of change are ‘a blowin’. I’m leaving behind almost 10 YEARS with my current company (that’s almost unheard of these days!). I’m officially starting my new job on Feb. 1st. I’m crossing into a completely new vertical industry. I have a LOT to learn. And, I’m scared.

I actually recalled another time in my life when I was exposed to change and someone lent me a copy of Who Moved My Cheese? by Spencer Johnson, M.D.. I had given the book back, but wanted to read it again and needed instant gratification so I purchased it on iTunes so I could listen to it while I cooked dinner that night. I realized again that it was okay to fear change, whether you understood it or not. Life begins when you react to that decision. I think I made pork chops with apples and kale that night. I made the decision the next day to take the offer.

So, here I go… about to embark on a new phase in my life and I can only hope it proves to be as enriching and self-defining as I believe it has potential to be.

Stay tuned to this blog as I hope to keep you posted with how things are going, new developments in my personal and professional journey, and of course my experiences with developing and executing marketing strategies using today’s (and tomorrow’s) new technology!

How will you foster and embrace change this year?

Here’s a quick gripe / calling out of a few certain companies that apparently don’t properly sync their databases prior to sending an email campaign.

Having been the Director of a firm that manages email marketing for clients for many years, I understand the importance of these things and probably pay closer attention than most, but here’s how things went down…

I was forced to spend several hours yesterday updating all of my online accounts to change from my work email address to my personal address. Seems easy enough, but we’re talking almost 10 years worth of subscriptions to places, so it was a bit daunting.

Today, as I sit at my desk, I notice some emails coming in from various companies and I start to panic a little thinking “I swear I updated that email address yesterday”. So, I actually double-checked. What I found confirmed that I did in fact update my account. So, what gives?

Image via Wikipedia

It seems to me there are some companies out there not following best practices when it comes to email database marketing. We’re not talking about small mom and pop shops, either… we’re talking BIG companies (I’m pointing the finger at you Delta, Marriott)! One would think two of the biggest rewards programs in the world would be on top of this with nightly syncs and back-ups at minimum, but apparently not.

Get with it folks!

iconic Maker's Mark bottle

For any of you who follow me on Twitter (@djinc), for better or worse you probably know by now that I drink a good bit of booze. Along with wine and scotch, another thing I drink a good bit of these days is Maker’s Mark whisky. (Yes, I noticed my spellchecker just prompt me for the missing “e” in whisky, but that’s how the American government actually declared it spelled in 1968).

Now, I don’t profess to be all-knowing about the stuff, I’ve just loved the taste of it since my grandfather used to ask him to run into the kitchen as a 7 year old child and pour “this much” Canadian Club in a glass with “this much” Sprite.

For those who don’t know a lot about whisky (or whiskey) or “bourbon”, it’s kind of like the Champagne of the South. I don’t just mean that in a point-at-the-rednecks-and-laugh kinda way.

I mean that supposedly, if it doesn’t come from Bourbon County, Kentucky, it ain’t really “bourbon“. Though, unlike the AOC laws in France, it doesn’t technically have to come from that county to be labeled “bourbon”, just fit the government-mandated criteria, and be from anywhere in the US.

And, that really brings me to Maker’s Mark. Although it’s seeped in Kentucky tradition, it’s just kind of a brand that goes against the grain (or rye *cringes coyly at bad pun*). It’s not made in Bourbon County. Unlike a lot of other popular American whiskies of the era, there’s no rye in it. They are one of the few American bourbons to take the US government declared, albeit Scottish-influenced spelling of “whisky”. And, they don’t just seek consumers, they turn them into brand Ambassadors.

So, through the work I do I had the fortune to meet Barry Younkie, Global Marketing Director at Maker’s Mark, some years back. Barry, one of the brains behind Maker’s Ambassador program, was helping us on a project that was geared around creating a brand community of our own for a client. Barry helped me understand the often immeasurable ROI value of converting your customers into your biggest fans, and your biggest fans into your biggest brand ambassadors. These consumers will go beyond the average use case and actually carry the torch for your brand. They become evangelists. They spread the word.

What Maker’s Mark does with their Ambassador community shows a commitment by continually investing to provide the members of that community tools to help spread the brand message. Along with monthly email updates containing info like recipes (both drink and culinary), updates on the status of your personalized barrel of Maker’s Mark–you get your name on a barrel when joining and the opportunity to visit it or purchase a bottle from that batch, and more; the brand also follows up with direct mail pieces like pictured below.

Each year around the holidays, they send out some special promotion to help you spread the word and share with your friends and family.

2008 Direct Mail Package: Your own personal Maker’s Mark stamp like they make the iconic bottle top with.

personal Maker's Mark seal

2009 Direct Mail Package: Gift wrapping materials

Maker's Mark gift bags

This sounds to me like a brand with a sense of Community to me.

With just a day left in the year, don’t downplay the opportunity to donate to your favorite charity or social cause this year. It’s a great tax write off and the non-profits can more than use the support in these times, so do your part!

If you are in Georgia and looking for a great local organization, try checking your local hospice agencies. Abbey Hospice in Social Circle, Ga is an amazing resource for families dealing with terminal cancer patients in their lives. Visit their website for more info www.abbeyhospice.com

Old School Media Image via Wikipedia

This article brings to light the necessity, even in the role of a web 2.0 demand generation strategist, for an offline strategy.

As I was meeting with a client the other day, who was in charge of his company’s online marketing destiny, I posed the question, “Where do your clients live?” He quickly began to reply “well, we’re an SaaS company… we hope they live on the web” and I had to interrupt, “what if they don’t?”

As he backpedaled, he then began to tell me to think of their customers, in fact, as the “Rust Belt“. “This is no good,” I thought. We need an offline strategy. I need to show these folks that we can win this battle old school style… We can rock this lo-fi, no-tech scene too.

Then, I had an idea… we can get our promo message out on CD or DVD, like I used to trying to get gigs.

I decided we would try something that looked like this:

Vertical Market Demo

By following this course, we could not only spread our brand message, but then convert offline users into online users by driving them to a conversion point on the web. Sure, the chart and the message needs a little refinement, but the idea is there, and it is a great idea to have a supplemental offline strategy to go with your web presence.

How do you supplement your online strategies when you have to take them offline?

Image via Wikipedia

Hi I am posting this blog via the new dragon dictation iPhone application. This app allows you to speak words into your microphone and have them translated to text. You can then select all, and copy and paste into another application such as SMS or e-mail.

Here I’m going to try to post this to my WordPress blog…

edit: So, the above was posted via the Dragon Dictation app successfully. I did have to try a few times to get it to work, primarily because I believe I was probably speaking more words than it could process at a time (it did not specify any sort of limit). What I found I could do to work around it was speak a sentence, hit “done” and let it process, then continue recording and repeat that process until I finished what I wanted to say. Maybe not the ideal way to write a blog post, but certainly cool for shooting off a quick email or SMS message.