Sage marketing advice from marketing gurus like Dan Kennedy refers to “Kennedy Results Triangle” based on getting the Message, Market and Media right.

For an excellent lesson on this, see Dan Kennedy’s No B.S. Direct Marketing book — less than 10 bucks on Amazon. Here’s a link if you need it:

Even if you get the message and media right — you’ll do no good if you don’t reach the right market!

Case in point: we received, in our letterbox, a flyer/menu for a local Pizza restaurant in Pascoe Vale. It talks all about home deliveries. It’s full colour, A3/tabloid size, heavy gloss paper, much bigger than others we get in terms of what’s on offer.

But they don’t deliver to our suburb. It lists the suburbs on the front of the brochure in small print, and we ain’t there. In fact, they deliver to a neighbouring suburb which is further away than our house (although we are on the Brunswick West edge of our postcode/suburb, Moonee Ponds).

Right message, Right media, Wrong market. All 3 work in tandem.

The flyer ends up in the bin. What a waste of marketing dollars! The best copywriting “message” in the world, if it was in this flyer, would be wasted on me, as the company doesn’t deliver to our suburb. The ideal menu distribution via letterbox, the “media” is low-cost and effective — but only to the right market!

What a great feeling for the “regular” golfers of the world… watching more than a third of the world’s best golfers on the US PGA Tour dunk their ball into the water at the short-but-treacherous 120m 17th at THE PLAYERS Championship last week.

94 balls were hit in the water on 17 for the tournament, shattering the former record of 67 in 2005 — and 50 of those were in the first round. By the end of Friday, that record from 2005 had already been broken. See all of the stats for the 17th.

So it’s not only us amateurs that can come apart when the terrain is tough.

The TPC is known as the unofficial “fifth major” and in 2007 had a $9 million prize purse, so it definitely attracts the top players on the US PGA Tour.

But as the stats for the 17th show, even the world’s best can be intimidated. It’s no wonder the TPC at Sawgrass Stadium Course’s 17th is rated one of the most difficult holes in golf. Forget the path leading to the green from the rear of the hole… you could probably walk across water on top of the golf balls in their watery grave.

It doesn’t matter what your golf skill, holes like this one prove just how much of your golf is played “between the ears”.

Mind you, during the tournament, two players managed to make an albatross (double eagle) “2″ on a par 5 — Hunter Mahan and Aussie Peter Lonard, the first two in the history of the TPC — let alone the bevvy of eagles and chip ins making the tournament a spectator’s delight. So the pros aren’t about to give up their status as the best in the world!

One word sums up this picture, for every golfer… intimidating! It’s fascinating to watch even the world’s best tackle this kind of challenge.

PS: Must get to this course one day! And another interesting stat — the clubhouse is apparently nearly twice as big as the US White House.

Throwing some ideas from my brain into pixels here…

Web publishing tools. Here’s my current thinking:

Evaluation
Looking for tools that are mature, actively developed, have a wide userbase and active forums, are open source, can have both open source and paid support, can use our own PHP knowledge to customise, and obviously suit our hosting environment at Pair Networks.

• Super-static site (well, even with some PHP): Dreamweaver. It’s now Adobe, and definitely “industry standard” for offline content creation. Even has the Contribute client editing option for client-based updates.
• Basic CMS: WordPress. Open source, large large user base. Active development, can be extended. A little frustrating in terms of client publishing tools, as clients understand things like tables or good media management, and WordPress ain’t so good at in-line table-based designs. Can add a blog/news function. Basic hooks into other programs, like PHP List. Still really designed as a blogging platform though. Frustrating also in terms of support: huge userbase doesn’t necessarily translate into useful support: some support posts (many?) never get answered, lost in hyperspace without answers. Great for smaller standalone sites.
• Advanced CMS: MODx. Powerful application framework, my only concern is the size of the userbase and “speed to market” of progress. Some good loooking add-on resources, I think this would be the most flexible option. May use add-ins such as the Asbru web content editor for client publishing. Info-marketers sites? Hmmm, not sure yet. May still fall into either the WordPress or Joomla categories.
• Commerce CMS: Joomla with VirtueMart. Impressed by the Joomla userbase, again (as all CMS here) open source and active development community. Great range of extenstions/plugins etc, covers most needs beyond WordPress environment without in-depth/advanced nature of using MODx. Seems more consumer-friendly but still pretty powerful. Combined with VirtueMart, good online commerce tool. Looking forward to 1.5 release away from Mambo branch, so long as time from beta 2 doesn’t stretch too far down the track. Business-level tool with plenty of available freelancers for paid contributions/support.

All of the CMS options give me room to customise (especially MODx), but also WordPress and Joomla in a more supported environment. Can see ease of finding Joomla freelancers, as its a very popular solution. No so for WordPress, as it is much less business-orientated, but not really needed. Would like to explore more of MU WordPress for ease of ongoing maintenance. Those options should cover just about all of the areas I need to cover!

I saw a website online today for a Sydney-based graphic design company (I won’t name names, to protect the guilty!) — and splashed on their front page was the slogan:

“Near enough is never good enough…”

Then… on their sample page of work, they have a category for “Stationary” and “Recent Stationary”

Why can’t designers spell stationery the right way?!? Sheesh!!!