PowerBlog Review: Joseph's Marketing Blog

Editor's note: We are pleased to bring you the seventy-third in our regular weekly series of PowerBlog Reviews of business weblogs. This week's review is being guest-blogged by Martin Lindeskog. Martin Lindeskog has a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from Southern New Hampshire University (2000). He graduated in May as an International Project Coordinator. Martin Lindeskog is seeking international job opportunities and is planning to start his own small business. He is a deputy member of the Swedish National Association of Purchasing and Logistics (Silf, Western Region).

By Martin Lindeskog

Joseph's Marketing Blog's tagline says "Rants of Marketing, Business, and Daily Life." Joseph DePalma started his blog in February by saying: "I'm probably going to turn this into somewhat of a business-experience blog." For being in his twenties, he has lots of business experience. I got curious about his different companies, so I sent him an e-mail and asked for an description of his ventures.

Here's some other information I can tell you: Vertora, Inc. is my main focus that everything sort of "falls back" to. It's a brand consultancy focusing on building amazing brand experiences (focusing on customer interaction, more so than graphic design and the like.)

AerialText, Inc. is a text message advertising firm that I'm currently selling. It's opt-in text message advertising. Currently there is no site for it because of this sale and how things are moving over.

Digital Charisma, is a web development firm I've had for years. it provides top notch web design and user experience - bottom line.

My favorite project, outside of brand experience consulting (which I absolutely love) is coming up. It's called OpenBeat - it's an internet radio center for independent music. Musicians will be able to sign up for a small annual fee, and we will promote their music on our 10 radio stations, give them a personalized artist website which we will also promote, and handle all payment processing for any CDs they wish to sell. It's a very exciting project, and we ran into some big delays with it, but it'll be going live in the next 2 months or so. Anyone will be able to go to the site and listen for free, and buy artist CDs right through our site. I can't wait till it's live. (E-mail, 07/09/05.)

From the About page: "In his spare time, Joseph writes this blog as a way to share his experience and knowledge." Joseph DePalma seems to be very good at managing his time, running all these different companies and at the same time being an active trader on the stock market. I bet he has read something by "productivity guru" David Allen. Joseph told me that he likes to read books. His favorite book is Good to Great by Jim Collins. I read Jim Collins's book, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, in my Organizational Leadership course. Talking about leadership of an organization, I have to recommend the book, The Blackwell Handbook of Principles of Organizational Behavior, edited by Edwin A. Locke. I think that chapter 10 (Motivate Performance through Empowerment, pages 144-145) by Jay A. Conger, could be of special interest to Joseph DePalma and his readers. The author is listing Richard Branson of the Virgin Group, and Jack Welch of General Electric, as two positive examples on how empowerment works. See Joseph's reading list for books by Jack Welch and Richard Branson, and read his post, The Power of Empowerment.

The power of Joseph's Marketing Blog is the focus on how to build a better brand through customer experiences. I want to end this review with an excerpt from Joseph's post, Marketing is Life.

Marketing is not an afterthought. It should be integrated into the entire product or service right from the beginning. So many businesses focus on rushing to create a product or service, but never really think about the marketing behind it. (JosephDePalma.typepad.com, 05/16/05.)