You Decide 2008 | You Decide 08

75 Million Votes Up For Grabs

By Jim Peake

As a small media outlet focused on entrepreneurs and small businesses My Success Gateway, LLC wanted to interview some of the 2008 presidential candidates for our small media outlet web site My Success Gateway, LLC to learn the candidates positions on small businesses. I contacted the big six candidates, Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards.

If the way the candidates are running their web site businesses is any indication of how they will be running our country in 2008 we are in deep trouble. The first problem is that some of the candidates cannot distinguish between a “small media” inquiry and a potential voter. They ALL want our doantions which is hard currency and they want our votes.

This is where the big problem lies. Try and find any information on the candidates web sites about US Small Businesses, there are only 25,000,000 of them in the United States employing 51% of the work force and providing substantial receipts to the Treasury in terms of tax revenue funding things like the War in Iraq. Try and find anything about senior citizens issues or medicare or the cost of prescription drugs, you will not see it. The good news is we did find 3 mentions about our veterans on McCain’s, Obama’s and Clinton’s web sites.

John Edwards was on the small business committiee when he was in the Senate but right now he seems to is concentrating his efforts on poverty. Mitt Romney was a small business owner and moved to large business. McCain’s camp did say that there was a possibility for an interview which would be great and we will see if it actually materializes and he wants to address the 25 Million small businesses by doing an interview with one of them.

Working with Eric Graham a web site conversion expert we produced a Webinar and reviewed the big six candidate web sites. We were looking for solutions from the candidates as opposed to issues. We were also looking for information on three key groups of people and how the candidates addressed them: Small Businesses, Senior Citizens and Veterans. All three groups add up to over 75 million voters. We thought that the candidates would have some information on these key groups in their web sites. We thought wrong. You will not find much at all. There appears to be a lot of empty suits or web sites all asking for money and votes, not much else.

The solution for the candidates, the media and the American public is this. The candidates put all of their “issues” into an RSS feed going out of their web sites. Next to the “issues” are their positions and SOLUTIONS. Each time they go on the campaign trail they update this content framework and make it available to the different folks who subscribe to the RSS feeds. I’d like to put this challenge out there to all candidates to come up with a top 25 issues/solutions to put into their RSS feeds.

Jim Peake, 48 is an Entrepreneur, Small Business Owner, Founder & CEO of My Success Gateway, LLC which is an information provider, a “consumer reports” ranking engine & community for entrepreneurs and small business.

I have been interviewed on National Fox News, Forbes.com video’s, Massachusetts Local Newspaper Feature Article in Business, I was the catalyst for putting the Internet on the front page of every newspaper in 1996 when I sold the Web event Kasparov vs. IBM’s Deep Blue Chess Challenge. I have been interviewed on multiple radio stations around the USA with My Success Gateway, LLC.

Customer Registration Platforms

I left the Web boom for the custom software development frontier and sold a bunch of projects with an MIT start up in Cambridge, MA that was bought by a NYSE listed graphic arts firm. With moderate success I moved forward to a dot com software Warranty company. With no success there I moved into Speech Recognition Sales. One of the things I figured out early on was that in order to make money in Speech Rec. I needed to sell a lot of phone calls. (We are a Speech Rec. application developer).

It dawned on me clearly in the parking lot one day to leverage my Warranty background (consumer electronics companies, appliance manufacturers and computer companies) to create a “product/warranty registration application” that would automate that process using a telephone. A telephone had a few things going for it that a web site and a paper registration card did not: The phone had the following preferences:

1) you could use a phone to fill out a registration card
2) you could multitask while phoning in your registration
3) the customer data capture process was a lot faster
4) the process was equally accurate (especially with reverse look ups on name and address databases
5) the biggest benefit by far was response rate—hands down

I went from one Speech Rec. start up to another in California and had not problem finding or selling the value proposition to Speech Rec. techies. Where I did have a problem was selling the concept to the industry. While I had success with companies like Hewlett Packard, Holmes Product Group, Proctor and Gamble I had a hell of a time rolling this product out past the expected pilot stage. I was not able to create enough momentum in the market to create a category killer.

In hind sight I know why I did not have massive success. Companies that are large multinational companies move very slowly and they typically do not do a lot of direct marketing to their consumers. For example Sony: here was a company that manufactured or OEM’s DVD players, they also had an entertainment division. I pushed and pushed for their ATTENTION to get them to see the value of registering a DVD customer with a telephone then uplifting them into an Action Adventure Movie of their choice. Their entertainment division was their razor blades division of the company.

This blog has a premise that can fulfill the following:

Who is doing successful lead generation today?
How to measure the success of lead generation: i.e. % of leads closed?
What is the typical cost of a lead using the 1,000 lead quantity as a starting benchmark?
Where are the new technologies?
Distinguishing on the different types of leads:
Web lead (banner ad, splash page, paid search etc…)
Direct mail lead
Newspaper lead (display and classified)
How fast can the leads be delivered from origination?
Is your lead company a lead origination company or a lead reseller?
How many times has the lead been sold before?
What are the new lead generation platforms? i.e. On product leads? For example I put stickers with 800’s on humidifiers and asked consumers to “call for important product information.” This is a very soon to be hot area that direct marketing companies have yet to exploit. So with this said I am interested to learn how you or your company are actually making a difference in the lead generation business?