Paul L'Acosta
Hi. I'm Pauly.
I live in marketing and work on life.
My tweets are usually about fails and ideas.It's a learning project.
Updates
-
RT @lefreddie: RT @AdFreak: Billboard for The Walking Dead appears right next to a funeral home in England. No brains. http://t.co/MUflbL9
-
"Your idea for your latest venture may not be the one that changes the world but it’s your idea and..." http://tumblr.com/xe523mi2r9
-
"Social business we so passionately claim to envision is made of simple ideas strung together with the..." http://tumblr.com/xe522xd5rt
-
RT @mitchjoel: Marketers... when is this going to end? http://t.co/34uWIUQ
-
RT @griner Groupon's revenues dropped 30% the month of their Super Bowl ad disaster: http://t.co/94kow2A
-
RT @jaybaer: United shows how not to respond to an angry customer on Twitter http://t.co/DYaji10 #marketing #fail
-
Finally, you can explain to your boss how Social Networking is saving your company. #chartsngraphs #HootStats http://ow.ly/4aZVo
-
when You miss the mint http://bit.ly/e2nRfM
-
when Marketing newsletters: What we really need to avoid: What is wrong with all these marketing newsletters I r... http://bit.ly/f2c7sT
-
RT @prsarahevans: When creative goes wrong in #advertising: http://bit.ly/h28YlM (thanks @minutrition)
-
College Loan Forgiveness: When Student Dies, Should Parents Have to Pay? Learn how Wells Fargo deals. http://flne.ws/26459346 on Fluent News
-
"New and uncertain activities make people happier and create more meaning than familiar routines...." http://tumblr.com/xe51carpen
-
"Don’t make your Facebook wall or Twitter stream sound like one endless promotion. People don’t want to..." http://tumblr.com/xe51c449hd
-
"Don’t Hide The Awesome! You are only doing yourself and your company a disservice." - Matt Ridings on Don’t... http://tumblr.com/xe51aibb7o
-
"Leaders want to build something they can’t build alone." - Liz Strauss on The Single Biggest Secret to... http://tumblr.com/xe51aefb4x
-
"Who wants to sponsor my trip to Overrated Conference” is about as exciting as a colonoscopy." - Peter... http://tumblr.com/xe519fe7xq
-
"The best content marketing has a purpose in mind for a particular audience and an outcome or objective..." http://tumblr.com/xe519f5zri
-
"If you are only regurgitating old ideas without new thoughts on how they should work from inside out,..." http://tumblr.com/xe5196ahzz
-
"I’m sorry, but if no one is getting shot at, it isn’t a revolution. Not everything is epic, thrilling,..." http://tumblr.com/xe517xf6ko
-
RT @JessicaRMurray: Biggest pet peeve, ppl who pitch themselves as savvy digital marketers yet have the worst website I've ever seen. #Fail
Updates
-
Playing with a pretty interesting self-hosted app to keep track of time and tasks. Free and with GANTT. http://www.clockingit.com/Posted 3 months ago
-
I believe THIS is how you sell a book http://bit.ly/mQ1qHq Promo video that really makes you buy a copy for answers.Posted 4 months ago
-
Getting ready to head on to Nashville and start our day. Lots of things to tackle on today before the weekend starts, including playing with Illustrator and some CSS while en-route.Posted 9 months ago
-
Why complicate life? A fantastic cheat-sheet: "101 rules for leaders" http://ow.ly/1syqpbPosted 9 months ago
-
when You miss the mint http://bit.ly/dXyCaWPosted 11 months ago
-
Spending time with friend, business partner and most importantly, wife, planning how to accomplish our goals in the new year while driving around in Nashville. Love these moments.Posted 13 months ago
-
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...Posted 13 months ago
-
If you don't update your blog, your Twitter account, or Facebook page since May, why should I update my credit card?Posted 14 months ago
-
Chillin' out for what's left of tonight. Gonna fire up iPad and check out some Pulse. See you all on the flipside.Posted 16 months ago
-
Getting ready to go back to Nashville for a little while. Then having dinner with friends celebrating my "independence" from corporate world. Good times ahead.Posted 16 months ago
-
Beautiful night in Nashville. Sitting down by Panera downtown; store closed, wifi open. Win win!Posted 17 months ago
Photos
Profile
Summary
With more than 11 years of experience in the marketing industry, Paul has been able to offer his ideas and processes to both Fortune 500 as well as small businesses. The design of proprietory solutions has helped CEOs and business owners take calculated and profitable steps toward achieving their companys' goals.
Paul currently lives in good'ol Tennessee where him and his wife are working on a startup company in the pet care industry.
Experience
- Sept 2009 - PresentBlogger and Speaker / Marketing Fails
- Apr 2009 - PresentProject Co-Founder / Marketing FailsPaul L’Acosta started MarketingFails.com with one goal in mind: find what’s not working in the marketing arena and discuss new ideas on how to improve the industry. Marketers of all backgrounds are welcomed to participate in the conversation by avoiding repetition (we all know marketing’s image is tarnished) and instead providing solutions benefitting the professional community.
- Jan 1997 - Sept 2002Co-Founder, President / farTEK Solutions, INC.farTEK Solutions was born as a marketing company during my college years and focused on delivering ad-placement solutions to organizations within college campuses nationwide.
The company was sold to a local advertising agency in Puerto Rico in 2002.
Education
-
1996 - 2001Universidad de Puerto Rico
Additional Information
Posts
Posts
Think about the people who influence you. Do you follow them because they follow other people? No, you follow them because they have a perspective in the first place.
In the end, RIM’s Achilles Heel is not marketing or technology… it’s innovation.
Remove all of the technological hurdles that you have in front of your brand and focus on a defendable and unique market position.
Over time, I identified a single factor that makes the biggest difference between a great meeting and a poor one: PowerPoint. The best meetings don’t go near it.
At its base level SEO is just sound marketing.
The point is that at the end of the day, with regards to marketing your company, it’s not what the thirty other people say or what their opinion is, it’s what you are comfortable with and what you feel reflects you and your company.
And yet, without guidance and clear communication from the CEO, employees immersed in social media might make the mistake of expressing the company in ways that are in direct contrast to its value proposition.
In the world of leveraging Social Media Influence however most of the marketing efforts today do things exactly backwards.
You want to create urgency on the buyer side, not display yours.
Your idea for your latest venture may not be the one that changes the world but it’s your idea and reasoning behind your business that starts the revolution.
Social business we so passionately claim to envision is made of simple ideas strung together with the extraordinary power and complexity of information itself.
You must accept that successful adoption and adaptation of any kind is progressive, not absolute. We must be willing to sell in the value of progress itself.
New and uncertain activities make people happier and create more meaning than familiar routines. Re-train your brain to benefit from the pleasures of surprise and uncertainty.
Don’t make your Facebook wall or Twitter stream sound like one endless promotion. People don’t want to be sold to, they want their problems solved.
Abandoning key ideas for the realm of something new can lessen the power of your marketing content. Embracing monotony with excellence requires a keen sense of creativity.
Don’t Hide The Awesome! You are only doing yourself and your company a disservice.
Leaders want to build something they can’t build alone.
Who wants to sponsor my trip to Overrated Conference” is about as exciting as a colonoscopy.
The best content marketing has a purpose in mind for a particular audience and an outcome or objective according to customer preferences.
If you are only regurgitating old ideas without new thoughts on how they should work from inside out, then you are likely not destined for entrpreneraul greatness.
Audio
Posts
"Did you bring your best today?". When was the last time you heard this during one of your countless meetings? If you heard it recently, then hit the skip button on your reader because this post is not for you.
Marketing has problems. We all know that. What we do to fix them is even more perplexing, as we tend to complicate the living soul of every small problem we come face to face with. How? Well, for starters, with meetings.
The usual routine gets reborn: be on time, sit down, chat about how hot or cold the weather is with the person next to you. Shut up. The meeting director just stepped in. "Good morning sir/ma'am!".
Aren't you already bored by now? I sure am.
Why don't we approach the same situation with the energy and enthusiasm we all feel when attending a summitt? You know, that rush we all share when we get ready to meet new people, sew new connections, leave with a better understanding of who we are and where we should go.
There are also agendas at summitts, but the variation is that we have no idea how the topic will be handled by the speaker. It could suck. It could blow our minds. Oh, what would it be! The excitement of finding out is what keeps us down on our seats.
We can try adding a little of the summitt ingredients at our next meeting just by following these 3 simple rules:
1. Assign a topic to each person. Make it public by sharing their name in the agenda. But give it a twist: if it's a topic very well known by Maria but no so much by Steven, voila. Give it to Steven and encourage him to make it memorable.
2. Create the title "Meeting Coordinator" and have that person organize the whole meeting. Why so many people jump in to be the president of a Party Committee? Because humans like to organize things. Just take a peek at your Google Calendar! Organizing freak, a marketer's long-lost nickname.
Also, have the coordinator think about a simple menu of food items to bring to the meeting. I mean, summitt. Pastry? Drinks? Nurture creativity. Simplicity is key but this is the one area that no organizer should ever fail at. After all, we could be attending the most interesting conference of our lives but we all dream of "When is the break?".
3. Start with an activity. Don't complicate it, and please stay away from the "How was you all's weekend?". Google "meeting activities". Spice it up.
Stop being a robot. This is a summitt, not a meeting. Any other ideas? (And no, you do not have to raise your hand.)
Twitter. Facebook. Email. Meeting. Google Reader. Phone call. Fax. Repeat.
How many of us make this our daily routine? Yet somehow when we look at the clock we fool ourselves by wondering where time has gone.
When do we sit down and create something new? How many times a day you actually come face to face with yourself and say: "The next two hours are open for my creativity."?
It is not turning off the computer. Or silencing the phone. Or taping a piece of paper to the door saying "Silence Please".
It is finally realizing that to be successful in the time we have on this world, we need to create something new, every day, for the rest of our days.
You can easily write on your agenda "Learn something new". After all, that is what we have been programmed to do.
But what about switching gears and right below it add "Create something new". It does not have to be tangible. For all I care, it can be a new scribble on the back cover of the same agenda. That's new. Write down the date beside it. You made it through the day.
We need to stop curating time, for it is the most valuable assett both you and I have.
Someone gives you $10 to buy groceries. Would you spend $9 on just one item?
As this tweet by Robert Scoble points out us, marketers usually forget to be mindful about aligning our spending with our objectives. With so many low-cost ways to advertise at our disposal on this day and age we still opt for the easiest and most conventional. These tools, by default, follow rules and policies of yesteryear; and because of it, eat up our budgets and time.
For the monthly price this company pays to advertise on this billboard, wouldn't you agree it makes more sense to:
- Have an employee working at least part-time connecting on a one-on-one basis with customers through Facebook and Twitter?
- Send a promotional item to 100 of our best customers thanking them for your business, therefore refreshing brand awareness?
- Or simply saving the money to invest later while brainstorming on new out-of-the-box ideas?
What other things can you think of doing with this budget?
Me? I just prefer the idea of buying 10 items of $1 each when grocery shopping.
Thousands shout on every corner of the web that this new platform you and I call social media is nothing more than a ephemeral phase in business development. Judge for yourself by briefly studying this job posting:
Modernism. Renaissance. Industrial Revolution. All of them great eras of achievement and success.
I hope you ended up reading this not because the title evoked a malicious feeling but because you indeed want to sell yourself... in a proper marketing way.
Here's a reason why you can't and shouldn't text while you drive: it's just not possible!
Next time you're driving late to a meeting and it just seems like that red traffic light isn't understanding how impatient you are, try this:
- Take out your phone.
- Open the SMS app.
- Breathe. If you don't, chances are you'll die not because you're defying thousands upon thousands of anti-texting supporters, but you'll probably just pop a vein.
- Voilá! There's your green light!
I invite you to just try it. Don't text; the anti-texting supporters are right: it's not safe. If not, watch this:
Thousands of viewers of this picture have wondered what were these people thinking when making this tag for their sport clothing line. If this is your first time, then, what do YOU think they were thinking?
