MarketingSherpa Blog

Attention: If you know a grad student looking for a thesis topic, cross-cultural blogging differences might be a good one.

As part of my ongoing move to my new home in Serbia, I�ve volunteered as a guest blogger for a major media site, giving the American perspective on Serbian life in my spare time. (Don�t look for it; I use a pen name because I don�t want anyone expecting marketing advice or anything.)

I�ve been blogging in the US for Sherpa since 2001, so I thought I knew a thing or two about it. I was wrong. Turns out, as with any other social interaction, blogging in other countries can be a completely different experience. In the case of Serbia, you get way, way more comments. In the US, a highly engaging blog might get one comment per hundred readers. Maybe. On a good day.

In Serbia, 100 typical readers may post 70 or more comments!

Plus, the Serbs have definitely let me know they think it�s very impolite for the blogger not to be actively engaged, in nearly real-time, in the ensuing conversation among the commenting audience. When I did respond, very tentatively at first, to comments posted on my blog posts, the reaction was unanimous: �Wow, you�re not like the other Americans! Why do other Americans never respond? They are so rude.�

I can absolutely bet that not one of the other Americans who have on occasion posted to this media site�s blog realized they were being rude. They were simply blogging the American way. You say what you have to say and then you stand back and let the commenters have at it.

If there�s a major question or confusion, you might dive in, but usually not.

What implications does this have for US marketers? If your company or brand is global, be aware that blogging, online community tactics and even email outreach need to be adjusted by culture. You can�t just post a translated version of the CEO�s blog and expect it to work.

Ask your local staff and take a look at local blogs (even if you can�t read them) so you see the nature of the interaction. Don�t be an Ugly American by mistake like I almost was.

If you have had experience on this front in other countries, please comment here to let the rest of us know of other international blog rules or differences we should know about. I know I�ve only touched the tip of the iceberg.

Abby Stephenson, who manages Delta.com’s Web usability team, gave a great speech at an optimization conference I attended in San Francisco last week. Their tests over the past year have resulted in nearly an additional $20 million in estimated online-driven revenue.

Important note: Delta’s site didn’t suck before. In fact, ceaseless testing and optimization only improved key page conversions by an average of 4%-5%. But, as Abby notes, when you’re a multibillion-dollar site, 4%-5% is a LOT of revenue. (BTW: In my experience, if your site is an average-to-bad one, a thorough round of testing and optimization generally helps lift conversions 30%-40%.)

Delta.com’s top recent lessons learned:

o Cut instructions

Obviously, don’t cut instructions that people really need to figure things out. But, if you have a page with really self-evident instructions to the order of “Lather, rinse, repeat,” test taking them off the page.

o Turn statement headlines into action headlines

Instead of telling people what page they are on, (i.e., Order Form) try telling them what action they should take on the page (i.e., Order Here.) I’ve seen lots of headline tests from other marketers who confirm this.

o Strip off “Welcome”

Even though “Welcome to our site” headers look so very, very 1998, many of us still use them. Why? Abby thinks it’s because you feel like you should put something there to be polite. However, when her team tested removing an innocuous Welcome line from the tops of landing page templates used by Delta.com affiliates, conversions increased.

o Test copy next to “Submit” buttons

Just as submit button tests can move the needle, testing copy in the vicinity of the submit button can also make a difference. For example, next to its “Continue” button Delta.com tested “Almost done” versus “Go to Last Step.” The latter handily won.

o Graphics test results mixed

Abby noted that only 25% of the tests Delta.com now runs result in significant results worthy of making site changes. (Again, this is mainly because the site is already very optimized. Most sites would see a higher rate.) She uses tests for two factors — either to test a Best Practice her team has heard worked for other sites, or to test something internal people are heavily debating.

(Nothing ends an energy-and-time draining debate more quickly and non-acrimoniously than “Let’s test it.”)

As in other organizations, many of Delta’s debates are about graphics, colors and images online. And, as with other organizations, very seldom do graphics, images and color tests really move the conversion needle. (Copy, offer, submit button and number of form fields requested nearly always move the needle.)

However, Abby noted a few exceptions to the graphics-don’t-matter-as-much rule:

o “Lightening” a page overall by removing extraneous colors and graphics (including shaded rows in charts) and making dark colors lighter can significantly improve results.

o Removing extraneous directional graphics, such as navigation bars normally on your site template, can improve conversions.

o Adding credit card logo images to a page can *depress* results, sometimes significantly, maybe because they’re seen as eye clutter.

Finally, Abby’s biggest advice for all site test teams, “Only test what you can implement. Many great ideas are impossible to implement.” This means that you absolutely have to invite a Web techie to your testing team meetings, with the request to “Please shoot down all our great, but impossible to roll out, suggestions.”

By the way, if you would like a copy of Abby’s slides, the folks at Optimost who ran the conference said they might make them available on request. Contact info at http://www.optimost.com

We have a bunch of new reporters and researchers joining Sherpa this fall, so I spent a day last week writing up a formal mini-handbook on how to conduct marketer interviews for them.

Rules include:

#1. Always ask the marketer for his or her job title, even if their PR contact gave it to you. PR *always* gets the marketer’s job title wrong.

#2. If a marketer gives you data that’s a nice round figure — such as, “We got a 50% response rate,” assume it’s not an altogether accurate number and dig deeper. In real life, data rarely comes in rounded numbers.

#3. Ask for the names of all agencies and vendors who helped with the campaign. Assume the marketer will not remember correctly, so you’ll have to double-check with the actual agency.

I’m pretty darn sure that Rule #3 above will come as a shock to agencies.

The horrible truth is, most of your clients don’t know your company name. Sometimes they just don’t know at all; somebody else in the organization set up the relationship. Sometimes they knew, but they forgot. And, most often, they remember a bit of it (“It’s Neo or Novo something, and they’re in Chicago …”) but not all.

MarketingSherpa reporters don’t bother asking clients for agency or vendor URLs because 99% of the time the answer is wrong or “don’t know.” And all too often, if you stick a “dot-com” on the end of an agency name, it leads you to the wrong agency’s Web site because so many names are similar.

These two facts are more evidence of the agency-client disconnect that was beautifully revealed in August’s study by Rainmaker Consulting (who, by the way, are not RainMakerConsulting.com; that’s a different agency, of course.)

That’s why if you work for an agency or marketing-related vendor, I urge you to reconsider the holiday gift plans you’re probably making right now for clients and key prospects. Instead of something ephemeral, such as a card or ecard, or an edible crowd-pleaser, such as chocolate, consider giving a promotional product with your logo, brand name and URL boldly embossed on it.

Something like an oversized coffee mug, that sits on your client’s desk, is best. I know that sounds all too boring for your exciting, cutting edge, ultra-creative brand. Get over it.

Your current clients are your most valuable marketing channel. Referrals are critical to your successful growth. Knowing, as I do, how few clients can properly name the agencies that work for them, I’m stunned there are any referrals at all in this business.

Anyway, here are some related links:

Past Sherpa article: Research on the $16.9 Billion Promo Products Industry: Why T-Shirts & Pens Can Outdo TV & Internet:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=24177

Rainmaker Consulting:
http://www.rainmakerlive.com

OK, color me obsessed with Facebook.

LinkedIn is fine, especially for headhunting, but a bit stiff for daily networking. It feels like Facebook with a starched suit on.

MySpace is great if you are a kid, but just way too cluttered for my taste. My dog, Betty Boop, has a MySpace account; I don’t.

But there’s just something about Facebook. It’s more fun, more friendly, more reach-out-and-touch (or rather “poke”) and way more useful on a daily basis. Even though I work in Serbia, thousands of miles away from most Sherpa readers and staff, I still feel connected to my colleagues and friends.

So, inspired by brands such as Microsoft, I decided to launch a MarketingSherpa Facebook Group today. To join, just go to Facebook and type in the word “MarketingSherpa” (no space in the middle).

Anyone who is a reader, researcher or staff member can join. If you don’t already have a Facebook account, you’ll need one first. It’s complimentary as long as you have a valid email address.

Then, over the next few months, we’ll explore what it means to be in a Facebook group together. How does communicating via Facebook differ from interacting via other channels? How can we stretch the boundaries of Group-dom and create useful new apps together?

My hope is, together, MarketingSherpa readers and researchers can become even more of an integrated team than ever before. After all, we all share a common purpose: to discover what works in marketing and what doesn’t.

Also, while you’re on Facebook signing up, take a moment to consider what your brand as well as the VIP names of your company should or could be doing via Facebook. For example, Martha Stewart and Bill Gates both have personal Facebook accounts. (Martha has more than 1,500 friends while Bill has only 125 pals, so all celebrity is not equal.)

Another example, David Letterman has 179 Facebook Groups dedicated to him. Some are passionate fan clubs; others are … not. (What are they saying about your brand in various groups?)

Plus, several ecommerce sites such as Amazon are benefitting from the vastly burgeoning world of Facebook applications, such as the Amazing Giftbox. (In fact, Facebook apps are so hot now that several financial backers have announced cash rewards for inventing good new ones.)

Lastly, Facebook’s Marketplace is rapidly becoming the Craig’s List for the 21st century …

How are you marketing via Facebook? Join MarketingSherpa’s group there and let me know!

Useful Links Related to This Article:

MarketingSherpa Readers, Speakers & Researchers Group
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7051207106&ref=nf

I was giving a speech at a PR association meeting in New Jersey in early 2001 about how the Internet was affecting PR tactics, when a group of older-looking grumpy attendees just sat there like lumps and left as soon as possible afterward. “What’s up with them? Was my speech that awful?” I asked the organizer.

“You were fine!” she reassured me. “These are the guys who are pretty close to retirement, and they hoped the Internet thing would not get so huge, so quickly that they would have to learn it. They just want to coast for a few more years until they can retire.”

I snorted, full of the superiority of a natural-born enthusiast. I felt sorry for them — they were missing out on what could be the most exciting time of their careers.

Living in Serbia and Croatia these past few weeks, I have been reminded of that moment time and time again. Not because these people are mired in the past — to the contrary, most are straining with every fiber toward a better, brighter future. Nope, that grumpy old person who does not really want to learn a whole new marketing tactic has turned out to be me.

I, who embraced the Internet so wholeheartedly, have grown old. Do I really, really have to do it all over with mobile phones?

Well, the answer is absolutely yes. I knew it for a few years now but buried my head in the sand until now living in this land. Depending on which source you research, the amount of Serbs who are online ranges from 16% to 27%, including students at school and white-collar workers. However, 90% of the population have cell phones.

If the Internet is going to take off here, and, boy, is it ever poised to take off in a big way, it is not going to be when everyone has a computer plus a high-speed connection because that is not going to happen in our lifetime. Instead, it will happen through mobile phones.

The new generation of Europeans, Asians and, increasingly, our own American kids, too, think of PC-based communications as old school. An Internet tied to a PC is such a 20th-century thing. Get with the program, Grandmother, mobile is everything!

The new generation worldwide update their Facebook accounts with their phones. They blog with their phones. They tell everyone where the coolest party is tonight with text messaging. They make YouTube movies with their phones. They trust their phones. They love their phones. They carry their phones everywhere. The “third screen” is the first screen of their hearts and everyday lives.

And it is our job in the marketing community to figure out what, for most of us, is an entirely new platform. Does your marketing department even “own” an official iPhone? Do you routinely play around with a mobile phone just to see what can be done with it now? If you do not watch TV, you cannot design great campaigns for it. Ditto for mobile.

So, I am inviting you to join me in my personal “homework” for the next year. I am going to buy a sample of each of the latest type of mobile phone, and I am going to use them! Please join me. First step, learn how to update my Facebook via mobile. OK, this may take a while …

Oh, blech. I promised my new bosses at Sherpa when they let me move from the US head office to work virtually from a home office in Serbia that there would be no problems.

“You won’t even know I’m gone. I’ll have a great Internet connection, and I’ll work away writing new Handbooks for Sherpa busy as a bee,” I swore. Which was completely true, except for the Internet connection. Turns out in our little town you can’t buy bandwidth faster than about 235 kilobits per second, a speed that testing site BandwdithPlace.com told me is “mediocre.”

This isn’t a problem when I’m writing a Handbook, which is what I spend 90% of my workday doing. However, when it came time to put an official MarketingSherpa Questionnaire online for you guys to take to give your own input on the topic of Landing Pages … I just couldn’t face doing it myself.

It would have taken 10 hours. So, I took the lazy woman’s way out. I emailed my draft questionnaire to the new guy (i.e., the only one with a little open time) in our New York research department and fell on his mercy. Thankfully, he helped out.

Then, he asked me to test the questionnaire before we launched it to find any problems, because the last thing you want to do when sending a questionnaire to 237,000 of your closest readers is to send something that’s broken. OK, now you can guess the depths of my underachievement during the testing process.

All I can say is the bandwidth drove me temporarily nuts.

Now I have two favors to ask you:

Favor #1. Please come and take the questionnaire now if you didn’t get a chance before. The problems are all fixed, thanks to our New York research team. Yes, we’ll send you all a copy of the Executive Summary with new charts in a few weeks:
http://s-r3cij-14367.sgizmo.com
(Closes Thursday, September 13th, because that’s such a lucky date.)

Favor #2. Please *forgive* me for my pre-testing delinquency if you tried to take the questionnaire last week. I will not ever, ever make that same mistake again. Yes, we do have your answers on file if you submitted, even if you got a weird loop instead of a nice “Thank you” page.

Oh, and one last thing:

Please, please take a look at your own site’s load speed with the comp analyzer you can get at WebSiteOptimization.com. Turns out that although 93.99% of US workers have high bandwidth, only 53% of US consumers do. The rest are feeling the exact same pain I do whenever I visit your site. Actually, it turns out that nearly one out of five Americans online feel a lot more pain because they’re still on 56k dial-up. Ouch!

Thank you.

If you’re in the middle of a homepage design review (just as we are), here’s a handy checklist of eight improvements worth testing based on MarketingSherpa research and Case Studies:

#1. Refocus 80% of the page on a single primary audience

Although your home has to serve everyone — prospects, press, investors, customers, HR recruiting, partners/distributors, etc. — dividing the real estate into even sections for each one will create a mishmash so no one can find anything.

Instead, pick the audience you most need to impress with your homepage (I’m assuming it’s prospects you hope to sell something to) and dedicate the vast majority of the page to their needs. Note: I’m NOT saying “dedicate it to marketing to them” but rather “to their needs,” which is something else entirely — see below.

You can serve your secondary audiences by means of simple tab navigation across the top of the page or hotlinks in unobtrusive places, such as your footer or the top right corner of the page. Examples of this approach range from NetFlix.com to the Virginia Beach Visitor’s Center at VBFun.com.

#2. Move your most useful links into the “small window-fold”

Horrible truth — many visitors don’t open windows all the way to see your whole homepage. This is especially true if they’re surfing from search engines or email. Your analytics stats can’t tell you this, but usability clinics will in short order. (Alternatively, just walk around your office looking at your co-workers’ computers. How often do they have several windows open, none using the entire computer screen?)

This means the classic page fold, which all Web designers work so hard to get critical content above, has moved higher than you think. Unless you are in ecommerce or media, however, it’s my experience that the hotlinks your primary audience needs are rarely above that fold.

Instead, many sites use that critical top-and-center real estate for vanity content created by the marketing or branding department. You know it on sight: a big graphic with, perhaps, a tagline. Useful links are often under that — under the fold. It’s now time to move this vanity content elsewhere (for a lab-tested solution, see my hotlink to a new Sherpa research study below).

#3. Use your internal search reports to rewrite navigation links

Cut through your internal political battles about what should be on the nav bar, how to word it and in what order it should appear in one simple step: review your site’s internal site-search stats. Key, first have all searches from company-owned IP addresses (i.e., your own employee searches) removed. They probably don’t use the same wording that your customers and prospects do.

Then just look. What are visitors typing into search? Can you use those exact same words in your navigation bars and other hotlinks on the homepage? If it’s an incredibly popular term, can you use it twice as both a button and a hotlink in the text? For example, look at the Cars.com home page to see how they repeat the hotlinked keyword term “Sell” in multiple places and formats.

#4. Dump extra columns

Got more than three columns, including your nav bar? Dump one. Trust me, test it. Easiest way: combine two short columns to create one longer one.

#5. Dump external ads and banner-style ads

Unless your business model is driven more by external banner advertising (or AdSense revenue) than it is by whatever else you hope visitors will do on your site, dump the ads.

Don’t let the Webmaster sling up Google AdSense “just to make a little more revenue on the side.” You can do that on your blog or on other pages that are not supposed to be dedicated to your company. Your homepage is to help visitors navigate based on their needs in relation to YOU.

Also, don’t let the marketing department create (or re-use) promotional banners to post to your Web site. People are coming expecting to find useful links for what they need and to learn about what your company offers. Usability studies show that banners that look like external marketing banners (using colors, typeface, images, etc. that would not normally flow with your site design) are subject to “banner blindness” and, frankly, can be annoying.

It’s just unprofessional. If the marketing department has a special on — especially if that promotion is being blasted on other media channels (TV, postal mail, radio, etc.), definitely reference it, even using a graphic and headline that’s directly from the external campaign. However, put that promotional content into a format resembling your site’s format. It should look like it belongs there, not like your marketing department bought an ad on your site.

#6. Bigger typeface

I see this a lot on B-to-B homepages. They use 60% of the page for one massive rectangular graphic and a large headline. Then, they squish all of the remaining content, especially useful hotlinks, into teeny, tiny type. Come on, guys! Body copy that’s under 10 points (preferably 12 points) is hard to read and probably wasted.

Consider Web 2.0-style design that’s now sweeping the cooler corners of the Web. These sites, such as Mozilla.com, use bigger type both for readability and for personality. They effectively say: “This is a clear, easy-to-understand place. Welcome.”

#7. Fast load time (for at least half the screen above the smaller fold)

Not everyone is on a super-speedy line like you have in your office. Some are still on dial-up, and some (like me) are on “high speed” lines that aren’t so high speed when everyone in the house or neighborhood is using them to download movies.

I understand if your CEO wants to look super-cool by having Flash or video on your homepage. It’s probably not a good idea given usability concerns but, hey, it’s a political battle many marketing departments lose to the forces that be. So, fine, give in. Let them stick Flash on the homepage if they really, really want to.

However, relegate that Flash to one side of the page — preferably the right side, although you’ll want to test it. This way anyone who opens your homepage with a small window can read useful information and click on useful links immediately if they want, while the Flash takes its sweet time to load on the other side.

A site that does a fantastic job of this is ClearInk.com. Another useful tool for your internal design-vs.-load-time battles is the (free) Web Page Analyzer tool over at:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

#8. Are your basic info links getting too much traffic?

Ask your Web analysis team to divide your traffic into newbies versus repeat visitors. Then ask them what the most clicked links for newbies are. If “About Us,” “Products” or “Services” links on your homepage are getting more than 10% newbie traffic, then your homepage copy has a problem.

Your homepage should clarify for new visitors what your company does and what your major product lines or services are. It should also provide easy-to-find (above the smaller fold) links to the most popular of these. If newbies are looking at your homepage and not finding this basic information and then, in desperation, digging further into generic info pages to try to find something relevant to their needs, you have a copywriting problem.

Your homepage real estate is being wasted. Rewrite your copy based on what people need to find to take the next step and post it up. Then, as soon as you have another 500 newbie visitors, review the analytics again. Have you gotten more people directly to where they need to be from the homepage, or are they still wandering confused to generic information?

Yes, I know this is enormously easier to say than it is to actually do. I’m on that homepage revamp committee for Sherpa right now, remember? Now we have to put our own words into action. Gulp!

P.S. If you would like to see Sherpa’s latest research study into homepages — we had 60 business execs visit real-life homepages of companies such as Oracle, IBM and Sun, it’s available at:
http://www.sherpastore.com/b2bbenchmark08.html

Admittedly, our B-to-B Marketing Summit Brochure was brochure-from-hell from a proofing standpoint. The marketing department had to get 29 different speakers’ names spelled properly (this must be very easy in places, such as Sweden, where you have a limited pool of names to deal with, but in multicultural America you always have to double-check.) And we had to make sure the right headshot went with the right speaker, which can be easier to screw up than you think.

Plus, there were 500+ past attendee company names to spell correctly, including some with caps in the middle (Sherpa included, unfortunately) and some without, which also makes guessing impossible.

And, of course, all those session times … for some reason putting sessions into the proper slots is also always harder than expected. Like children, they wiggle about and bump into each other instead of lining up in a nice, quiet, orderly fashion.

So, when the marketing team proofed the blue lines the printer sent over for our big August campaign, they had a lot to review.

Which explains how everyone totally forgot to proofread the response URL. So, we ended up with tens of thousands of brochures that read, Go to “http://www.vanityurl.com,” which was typed in as a placekeeper copy early in the process and never updated.

When the team alerted me about this, I said, “No problem, just go buy VanityURL.com and redirect from it!” Which would have been lovely except for the fact that NutriSystem already owns it.

They must have a marketing department very much like ours.

This actually made us feel much better about having to trash the printed brochures and start again; we were not alone in the world in being imperfect at proofing. In fact, when I mentioned the snafu to a few friends in the Net marketing world, they laughed and told me their own horror stories. (The worst was when a major news media article misspelled an ecommerce domain in a big story, and it wound up sending traffic to a competitor who had been canny enough to buy every typo in sight.)

My three lessons learned:

#1. When you are proofing marketing copy or ad creative, ALWAYS check the URL first. Even typos in the headline are less important.

#2. If you are speaking with a reporter on the telephone, ALWAYS spell every letter of your domain out loud verbally even if it seems obvious and easy to spell.

#3. If your online ad campaign uses a redirect or tracking system that changes URLs behind the scenes, you should BOTH handtype the visible URL and click on the working link to be sure both are correct.

Hopefully, we’ll never have this problem again — but in the meantime, my hat’s off to NutriSystem, with a capital S in the middle!

I was listening to a presentation by Rab Govil of Naehas yesterday, when one stat really made me sit up. His agency tested mailing follow-up campaigns for two different B-to-B clients. In both cases, they sent the same offer to the same list twice in a row, waiting roughly three-four weeks between mailings. Nothing startling there except for the fact that both campaigns were sent via postal mail.

Now, we all know postal direct mail still works, and, in fact, can work exceptionally well in these days of email overload. But it’s so much more expensive per piece that many marketers I know have cut back on follow-up mailings, which were routine 10-15 years ago. Instead, they may invest in multiple media channels, such as search and email.

Here’s what startled me: in both cases, the results for Rab’s second postal mailing were far closer than I expected to the response rates for the original wave. For example, one original wave got a 1.90% response rate with the follow-up achieving 1.46%.

In the old days, you would expect a second wave to maybe get 50% of the first wave’s success. If you mailed them closely together, perhaps arriving in the mailbox within 10 days of each other, the second wave would drop to only 25%-30% of the first, but the first would leap higher in compensation. (We assumed it was the “reminder” factor where recipients would mail back the first wave’s reply card when reminded by the second wave.)

Anyhow, what this new response data may indicate is that if you have a direct postal mail campaign that’s doing fairly well, you should immediately roll out a second test wave. Key: only mail the second wave to your best lists from your first wave. Never invest in trying to pry responses out of a hitherto nonresponsive list (a.k.a. “sending good money after bad”).

For your best response, I suspect you should strike while the iron is hot and get that campaign into the mailbox within three weeks.

Production-wise, this could be a nightmare — if your first piece was remotely complicated — except, you don’t have to use the exact same piece. In fact, a cheap-to-produce “reminder” postcard can work as well or even *better* than a fancier piece.

And the Internet Age is perfectly suited for reminder postcards because these days you can load up creative and lists online to a postcard specialist house for one-week turnaround, including printing and mailing. Plus, you can promote an online landing page URL (plus phone number, of course) for replies. (Note: I would never suggest doing away with a printed response form for fax or mailback in your first wave. In my experience you have to give people as many reply options as possible for best results.)

In his speech, Rab actually mentioned he had tested a campaign last year with both a multipage catalog-style self-mailer as well as a follow-up postcard. He got far less than 1% response rates from people who got either the postcard or the self-mailer. However the people who got both resulted in a 3.78% response rate.

Now, take that with a grain of salt, because, obviously, the people who got both were the core, most-worth-investing in, section of his list. So, you can’t assume just any old list would see a giant leap with two mailings. However, if you have a core, consider investing more in them.

And. please, let me know how it works out. Are your direct postal mail response rates different in 2007 than they were in 1997?

Related links to this blog

Rab Govil’s agency:
http://www.naehas.com

Today, I write you from Sombor, Serbia, a mid-sized town a couple of hours from Belgrade. I have been planning the move since, well, perhaps since I was a young girl reading storybooks of world travel, but it’s still all a bit of a shock.

Forty-odd years of dreaming, and now it’s real.

I’m in a small home office about two blocks from downtown Sombor, where there are more bicycles than cars and local farmers come every day with fresh fruit and vegetables to market. My Internet line is great, if a bit spotty on occasion. My work phone line is great, if insanely expensive for calls back to America.

It’s just like working from a home office in the US … except for the six-hour time difference and utterly alien snacks at the supermarket. I’m already missing corn chips, hot sauce and Diet Pepsi.

How did all this come about? Well, first, back in late 1999 I founded MarketingSherpa. Then, I grew the company until it was too big for my taste. I was spending more time on HR, legal, accounting and IT than on researching and writing about what works in marketing. Arrgh! I wasn’t cut out to be a company president.

On the cusp of this intense work frustration, my personal life was also transformed. Out of the blue, I met and became engaged to the man of my dreams, who just happened to be a former Yugoslavian.

Together, we agreed on a “deal.” He would stand by and support me while I built the company into a solid-enough organization to be able to stand on its own without me … and then I would sell to the best possible new management team and let them take over things. “Then,” I promised, “we can live anywhere in the world you want us to live … just as long as I have Internet access and I can still write.”

And, that’s pretty much just what happened. As you may recall, Sherpa was bought by MarketingExperiments’ parent company a few months ago, with their management team combining with ours to form a stronger organization. While I’m still on staff as a writer and researcher, I have very thankfully relinquished operational duties.

Plus, now I can work from home anywhere in the world. So, here I am in Serbia through September, with weekend trips to Belgrade and Zadar, Croatia.

Then I’ll be back in the States in October for the MarketingSherpa B-to-B Summits (my suits will probably feel very odd to wear for the first day or two). In November, we’re moving to Pokhara, Nepal, for the winter. From there on, I’m not sure. Both Brazil and New Zealand have been touted as stars on the horizon.

I’ve always thought the Internet would make this new home-is-anywhere lifestyle possible. But, I’ve never actually experienced it. In practicality, will this work or will I dash screaming back to my home office in Rhode Island?

Only time will tell.

In the meanwhile, may all your dreams come true just as mine have.

Useful links related to this article

Wikipedia for Sombor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sombor

Past blog written when visiting Zadar, Croatia:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=27237

MarketingSherpa B-to-B Summits
http://www.sherpastore.com/B-to-BDemandGenerationSummit.html