Erich Stauffer

Blog

  • How to Join a Fuze Meeting

    This video explains how to join a Fuze Meeting from the invite to the download to the installation.

  • What is Digital Marketing?

    Digital marketing is the promotion of products or brands via one or more forms of electronic media. A digital marketer is someone who focuses on customer acquisition and who has a passion for increasing conversions. Digital marketers drive new customer growth through the creation and hands-on execution of strategies across multiple channels like the website, social media, and paid advertising.

    The best digital marketers are the ones who focus on the customer. Why not focus on the company? Because the more the digital marketer knows about the customer, the more successful the conversions will be. The best digital marketers become an expert on their customers.

    Digital marketers work with a variety of marketing channels, which means they not only have to manage multiple platforms, but also relationships with internal staff and external agencies.

    The best digital marketer is a results-oriented person who has the analytical skills to break down complex problems, creativity to identify and develop new, scalable programs, and the skills to lead rigorous testing, measurement and iteration to improve results continuously. So what skills are needed?

    Digital Marketing Skills

    • Self-management – be able to manage your day-to-day tasks in order to achieve long-term and short-term goals.
    • Communication – sounds cliche, but here it’s important. Things need documented and communicated constantly.
    • Business analysis – the ability to distill information and present it in a way that other people understand it.
    • Domain knowledge – analytics, email marketing, paid advertising, retargeting, SEO, direct mail, video, and podcasting.
    • Curiosity – seek out and test innovative opportunities to expand visibility and customer acquisition through new channels.
    • Leadership – be able to lead a small team to help meet acquisition objectives by hiring, training, inspiring, and coaching.
    • Vendor management – be able to manage relationships with external agencies who specialize in various marketing domains.
    • Agile/Lean – a person of continuous optimization who develops and implements a strong framework for iterative testing.
    • Planning – be able to develop and manage long-term plans to meet long and short-term business objectives.
    • Technology – digital marketing and technology are inescapably intertwined. Be able to support the marketing technology.
    • Excel – you must have the ability to turn empirical data into insightful, strategic decisions for decision makers.
    • Strategy – the ability to think strategically and plan the overall direction of the company’s marketing strategy.
    • Google Analytics – you must understand how to read and interpret web analytics and testing/optimization techniques.

    Using the skills above you will be able to develop and execute the marketing strategy to meet the goals established for your company regardless of the budgeting constraints. You will perform weekly, monthly, and quarterly analysis reports across all marketing channels, which will report on your progress towards the stated goals. Are you up for the challenge? I am.

    My name is Erich Stauffer and I’m a digital marketer who is passionate about customers, conversions, and collaboration. One of my favorite things to do is to “check my stats”, which means logging into the e-commerce dashboard and Google Analytics to review conversions. I’ve managed Google Adwords, Twitter and Facebook ads, and helped run and train teams of other marketing specialists.

    I love to document what I do, which means I’m either updating a spreadsheet, an Evernote note, or a Dropbox folder. When new staff are brought on board, I’m the guy who trains them how to use the marketing systems and when there is new marketing technology, I’m the one trying it out. I love marketing, technology, and how it all works together. That is what I’m passionate about and that’s how I can help.

    How can I help you with your digital marketing needs?

  • Why I’m Going to Mixwest 2014

    Mixwest is an Indianapolis marketing, design, and technology convention with speakers and multi-track sessions spread out over two days: July 31-August 1, 2014. I’m going to meet new people and see old friends.

    Mixwest 2014

    I first went to Mixwest in 2011 when it was called “Blog Indiana“. Half of all of the people I follow on Twitter I met at that conference and I continue to keep in touch with them today. It’s any not different than many other conferences you might find in New York, Vegas, Austin, or San Francisco, it’s just that it’s in the Midwest, which makes it closer to me. I’m from around here, but it’s close enough that if you really wanted to come you could drive it in a day from Ohio, Illinois, Michigan, or Kentucky.

    The #Mixwest14 conference has a keynote speaker that opens each day, then there is breakout sessions, lunch, and an evening big speaker again. The first year they had Jay Baer, who I didn’t know of at the time, but have since realized is a pretty big deal in the social world. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, which is an hour south of Indianapolis.

    You can learn more about the conference on Twitter @mixwest and can follow all of the speakers on the unofficial Mixwest 2014 Speaker Twitter list. If you’re looking to socialize with the tech entrepreneurs, social media pros, and freelance writers around Indianapolis, this is the place to do it.

  • The Digital Arrow of Time

    In the library scene from H.G. Well’s The Time Machine where the time traveling man from the past finds books that have fallen apart amid a new ‘CD’-looking object that plays after he spins it on a big open plate thing. He asks about their books, only to learn they have been left to decay and turn to dust. He’s then taken to an ancient museum, where “talking rings” tell of their history.

    HG Wells Time Machine Talking Rings

    In H.G. Well’s future, books have been converted to talking rings, which are like CDs or DVDs that are more like metal rings that play when spun on a special table-top surface. But it’s not just books that need converted to new platforms, The White Album Problem also applies to digital cities.

    In this Atlantic piece on “What happens when digital cities are abandoned?“, Laura Hall writes, “Ownership…must be continually renewed, the way a garden must be continually tended, lest nature overtake its carefully-arranged borders.”

    The way she talks about revisiting her Multi-User Dungeon (MUD) reminded me of what it’s like to go back into the empty Minecraft server. There it sits, a world past occupied, ready to run for as long as it’s maintained. But what happens when it’s turned off the way collegeclub.com was turned off?

    Laura mentions Geocities, where I too had an address in Athens at “8802”. I still remember it because it was the first time a virtual place was categorized like a physical place and so it seemed like it wasn’t just online, but was a real destination. A destination that got shut down by Yahoo! in 2009.

    “The great paradox about these digital communities is that they’re easily kept around forever, and they are even more easily deleted utterly,” said Jason Scott, an Internet advocate and archivist who launched a digital preservation team in 2009. “These communities had lasting historical and societal value.”

    Laura pines, “It’s up to our future selves, or those who live beyond us, to make sense of what’s being saved today: to curate the data and form the stories around it that will give it meaning.” In H.G. Wells story that was with talking rings.

    Scott said, “This is not a new self-awareness. You’re just keeping it on a hard drive instead of the old family bible. Your diary is now on a server, instead of underneath your room, where your parents throw it out.” I couldn’t agree more.

  • Gross Songs Kids Love

    The first book I ever wrote was a collection of lewd songs children sing in grade school called Gross Songs Kids Love. However, due to file mismanagement and The White Album Problem, I no longer have the book.

    It was originally written in PFS Write on a Zenith personal computer with a 5 MB hard drive. It was written between the years of 1988 and 1994.

    It’s not like I didn’t have a version in Windows. My father helped me convert the files from PFS Write to a file that could be read in Windows by “printing to file”. I had to have a computer that could read the 5 and 1/4 inch floppies, which my Windows 95 computer did.

    I copied the files from the Zenith PC to the Gateway 2000 PC running Windows 95, which was used as the family PC. There the files sat as I got on with high school, swimming, and Shog.

    By the time I had my own Windows 98 computer I failed to copy the book to the new PC and therefore lost the digital copies. But what about the physical copies? After all, I printed it out on the attached dot-matrix printer. What came of those?

    In my physical file cabinet in my office I have not one, but four “Things I’ve Written” folders and not one of them contains a copy of the book. It may be somewhere else in the file cabinet, but it just goes to show that even paper copies can be lost (or is that more obvious – I can’t tell anymore).

    My children are now of the age when I started writing this book, but when I look at what they are creating, it pales in comparison. Even though I’ve bought them Snagit to record Minecraft videos on Youtube and it’s easier than ever to create content, they have little to show for the available resources before them.

    I blame myself for not pushing my children to create more works despite my own professional advice to business owners to create content to market their businesses online. How does that saying go, “the cobbler’s son has no shoes?” Don’t be that guy, Erich.

  • Who is Roger?

    Roger got up to go to work, just like he does every morning. The sky was still dark, but there was a hint of gray as the sun was rising far away from his east window.

    His wife made him breakfast as he put on his shoes. He always kept them by the front door and took them off just as the kids would greet him on his returning home.

    The kids were still asleep and so Roger went over the upcoming bills with his wife and what the calendar had down for him tonight and this weekend. Nothing much.

    After finishing his breakfast and brushing his teeth, Roger grabbed the cup of coffee and lunch from his wife, kissed her and left for the day, same as always.

    On his way to work he passed the same courthouse, the same school, the same hospital, and the same corn fields. In every way this was a typical, normal day.

    GNNgnzhh! A loud, static, industrial grinding sound blared from an unknown location. Black pixels appeared above the roofs of the houses. The world began to flicker.

    Darkness.

    Applause.

    In front of him sat a studio audience. He couldn’t move his head. “Where am I?”, he thought. “How did I get here?” Suddenly a game-show-like host came near.

    “Who do you think you are?”, asked the show’s host.

    Unsure if he could speak, he said, slowly, “I’m Roger.”

    “Who do you think Roger is, Roger?”

    “That’s me. I’m Roger.” The audience laughed.

    “Where do you think you are right now, Roger?”

    “I, I don’t know. I was driving and…”

    “Ladies and gentleman, allow me to introduce to you the first fully functional artificial intelligent computer of it’s kind, R.O.G.E.R.”

    Roger attempted to cry, but there were no ducts, only a LCD monitor, and a fading, gut-wrenching realization that everything in his life was a lie.

  • Kite – How I Got Fired from My First Writing Job

    Ryan Zimmerman owned more computers than anyone I knew at the time. He was 14 and ran his own bulletin board server from his bedroom via an ISDN line in a time when most people only had dial-up. Our high school had just got it’s first T1 line the year before, a connection that’s slower than most people’s cell phone today.

    That was roughly the story that got me fired from my first writing job. It was my first semester working for Kite, the yearbook at our high school. My assignment was to write a feature story that would be included in the yearbook that year. I knew Ryan and that his story was unique, but I didn’t know how to make it interesting.

    My teacher had me re-write the story 3 times, but ultimately she failed me on the assignment and kicked me out of the class. Now I write stories like that almost everyday. I write them on Facebook, Twitter, and on this blog. I write them in emails to coworkers and to friends. I write them in reports and in documentation that gets stored on servers.

    It’s all boring.

    No one wants to read about someone who has everything. They want to read about the boy who struggled and overcame. Okay, so he had a fast connection and a lot of computers. No one cares. If I would have wrote about how he got cigarettes from his parents and stole computer parts from Best Buy, maybe I’d have an article in the Kite, but I didn’t.

    I hated school. I still do. In Spanish class I wrote lyrics. In Math class I wrote short stories. In church I’d write to the person sitting next to me. At college I’d chat with girls on AOL Instant Messenger. I learn by writing. I like telling stories, but I’m not very good at it because I don’t like conflict and without conflict, there is no story.

    What’s your story?

  • 2014 Trends in Technology

    We’re just about 50% through the year and a few people have been releasing new reports on trends so I thought I’d highlight some things here:

    • Mobile – while the ability to make money from apps may be harder now, the use of mobile devices is only going up (1,2). The future of mobile is a more integrated society with more access to information formatted in new, useful ways.
    • Biofeedback/Quantified Self – from Fitbit to the new iPhone, sensors are becoming smaller and more ubiquitous. Accelerometers are now embedded in the processors themselves and the new iWatch may include advanced biosensor features.
    • Open Data – data.gov is the biggest example, but there are other examples, which you can find at http://www.opendatanow.com/. New businesses are being formed around analyzing and using this newly accessible data.
    • API Access – not only do sites like data.gov have open data, but now sites like http://open.fda.gov/ have API access to that data; and sites like IFTTT and Zapier make it easy for non-programmers to move data around in complex ways.
    • 3D Printing – CDW and Staples now sell 3D printers. Kids are designing and printing their own objects. If you want to ride the next PC-like wave, this is it. It’s hard to see now because it’s so new, but this is a new industry.

    If this interests you, compare it to the trends I speculated about the 13 trends changing the world in 2013 to see how many of them stayed true:

    1. Crowdfunding – Kickstarter just raised funding for Reading Rainbow.
    2. Crowdsourcing – The Reddit hive mind is the best detective on the planet.
    3. Open Source – Firefox just took their codebase closed-source.
    4. Insourcing – Robotics is allowing manufacturing to be cheaper in America.
    5. Infilling – Inner cities are encouraging growth to raise tax income locally.
    6. Cloud Apps – Chromebooks have risen in popularity and use.
    7. Long Tail – HBO shows now available on Amazon Instant Video.
    8. 3D Printing – SEE above.
    9. Augmented Reality – Facebook just bought Oculus Rift.
    10. Electric Cars – California’s biggest car manufacturer is now Tesla*.
    11. Private Space Exploration – Virgin Galactic not yet having regular flights, but SpaceX* is.
    12. Mobile Computing – SEE above.
    13. Mobile Payment Processing – Square and Starbucks continue to innovate.

    Out of the 13 trends, I’d say at least 10 are still going strong, but at least one has stagnated, replaced by Open Data and API Integrations.

    *Both Elon Musk companies.

  • How I Almost Lost Everything

    Well, not everything, but my entire blog.

    I went to create a blog post yesterday and instead of a publish button, there was a “Submit for Review”. Not really thinking, I just clicked it anyway, the page refreshed, and the post was gone.
    After doing some research it appeared that the database was full. I was using 150.6 MB out of an allotted 100 MB.
    While modern databases now come in 1000MB chunks, this database was started back when the standard was 100 MB and they had graciously let me go over by 50% until cutting me off (without notice).
    What else happened because of this?
    Backups had stopped running. Since there was no way for the plugin to add more data to the database, a new backup could not be created.
    One option was to clean up the database with a plugin, but I couldn’t add any new plugins because again, the database was so full, it couldn’t make an entry.
    How did I fix it?
    I created a new 1000 MB database, did an export, then attempted to import into the new database using WordPress’ import tool, but the file was too big (6 MB). The max size is 2 MB.
    So instead I went into the web host and used PHPMyAdmin to manually export and attempt to import the data. This also didn’t work because it exceeded the “max packet size”.
    Now I was starting to get a little panicked.
    I went back to the website and deleted all spam messages (~3000), which freed up enough space to install a plugin called WP-Optimize. I ran that, which deleted all revisions, freeing up almost half of the database, but the export file was still just as big.
    Another thing I noticed was that the theme I recently installed (Jupiter) had created several new tables and may have been what put me over the top in space so I removed it.
    Finally I remembered that posts can be exported by category, author, or date range so I exported them individually by category, which kept each file under 2 MB.
    I imported them into the new WordPress database 1 by 1, semi-automatically restoring the data to the new database. This worked.
    All 619 posts and all 5 pages have been restored.
    This is just another example of The White Album Problem. As databases outgrow their restraints they will need moved to larger databases over time and knowing how to manage this data transfer process is critical to preventing data loss.
    In addition, this process highlighted the need to monitor database usage at least on an annual scale.
    It would be nice if the web host would provide a function to expand out an existing database, but maybe this is an option they or some enterprising young entrepreneur will do in the future.