The definition of marketing varies depending upon who you ask.  One of the definitions I've heard over the years which resonated with me is marketing as a process of building long-lasting relationships with customers.  Marketers often focus on inundating current and potential customers with messaging focused on corporate goals and their own bottom line.  Rather, marketing should be a series of communications between related parties featuring content that both the marketer and the customer find interesting and compelling.

One of our marketing projects that just went live is our autumn sale offer to current free site administrators.  This piece is visible when logging on to the eteamz admin area and accessing a free site.  The purpose being to spread a little autumn/holiday cheer by offering 20% off PLUS as well as to educate about why eteamz PLUS is the best web site solution for teams and groups.  More storage space, increased customization, a laundry list of features and tools...there is nothing you can't do with PLUS!

For those who missed out on the autumn sale piece, all you need to do is enter the coupon code: AUTUMNSALE when purchasing PLUS in order to take advantage of the 20% discount.

We'd love to hear your thoughts on the autumn sale piece as well as eteamz marketing in general.  Are our offers compelling?  Do you find our creative interesting?  Would you like to hear from us more?  Would you like to hear from us less?  We're all ears!

Cheers,

-Eric

As many of you know, the two most popular Web browsers available today (Microsoft's Internet Explorer and The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox) have recently released new versions. I won't bother to get into a discussion (or more likely a rant) about the browser war. As far as eteamz goes, it's not much of a war with nearly 92% of all page views going to IE.

For now, most people are still using the "old" version of IE so, for the time being, we'll continue to focus the majority of our support on that browser. However, we encourage our users to upgrade to the newest versions of both browsers. You pioneers will be able to help us identify and fix any anomolies that may appear.

eteamz will continue to support the most commonly used browsers and we'll try to make sure that, during this transition time, we quickly address any issues that arise. We, and all future IE 7 and Firefox 2 users, thank you!

Some of you may know that November is National Novel Writing Month (sometimes known as "NaNoWriMo," or just "NaNo" for short). I learned of this fantastic idea last year when I came upon it searching the web and thinking about writing. And it means pretty much what it sounds like - take a month to write a novel, which they define as 50,000 words. Doesn't have to be perfect, doesn't have to be pretty, doesn't have to make sense - just write and write and write some more.

I gave it a try, but I'm sorry to say that I got to about 7,500 words and had to give up. But this year, I'm determined. At the very least, I'll beat my previous total, but if you've followed some of my posts here you might think I've got it in the bag.

One of the only ways to complete a novel in a month is with a lot of support. Folks get together for a "write-in" where they meet at a coffeehouse or someplace and just challenge each other to write about a certain topic or just cram as much writing into 15 minutes as possible or whatever. Having everyone together in a group is a surprisingly good motivating factor.

So what in the world does this have to do with eteamz? eteamz is a perfect place to build a website for a sports team, since that's really been the primary purpose. But eteamz is pretty flexible and you can do a lot of things with it. There's no reason why you can't use eteamz really for any group activity where you want to communicate, post information, create a schedule, have your own message board, post photos, etc....

NaNoWriMo is a great excuse to get involved with a writing group, and what better headquarters for your group than eteamz? Of all the dozens of sports eteamz offers, I don't believe writing is one of them... yet. But build a site and choose "Other" as your sport and off you go! Publish your calendar with your scheduled write-ins. Set up a message board to chat with your group. Post the latest news and photos from your recent write-ins. Heck, you can even publish your novel when it's done!

Well, the first day is almost over, so I better get to it. I really do hope you check it out and give it a try. I see new ways to use eteamz almost every day and thought I'd share this one with you. Good luck to everyone in November.

WC:427