Scott Smigler's BlogFounder of Exclusive Concepts and Conversions On Demand

I returned from a one-week cruise today. It was a long overdue family vacation. We visited Cozumel, Costa Maya, Belize, and the Bahamas. We were joined by family friends, which made for a big, fun-loving group! Pictures are coming soon, too.

Trip highlights?

- Watching my mother go parasailing in Cozumel (I’m still shocked she got up there)
- Scuba diving in Belize (I highly recommend it)
- Morning Margaritas in the rain in Costa Maya (what a day)

What was also cool about this trip is the sheer fact that I was able to be completely disconnected for a full week. 2 years ago I could barely take a day off without compromising my business. Now, thanks to a great staff and managers, I was able to leave for a full week with the full confidence that everything would go on without me, and that our clients would receive top-notch service as always. It’s just an amazing feeling knowing that I have such an incredible and dynamic team around me.

As for the title of this post, “123 Emails,” that refers to the one negative thing about going away on vacation: coming back. Over the week I received about 1,000 emails, and I responded to 123 of them today. That’s a personal record for me. Fortunately a significant percentage of the 1,000 emails were spam – which means I’m almost caught up!

If the relative frequency of Google searches related to a major news story is an indicator of overall public interest, American people were far more interested in learning about the Rove leak scandal in July of 2005 than the Foley scandal.

The graph below from Google Trends shows the number of times “rove” has been searched for relative to the number of times “foley” has been searched for on Google.

Even if you’re just a casual online news/newspaper reader or television news watcher, you certainly could not have escaped news of these scandals. What’s interesting is that people flocked to Google more in reaction to the Rove scandal than in reaction to the Foley scandal, despite the substancial coverage the Foley scandal is receiving, the proximity to the November election, and the potential that the Foley scandal will lead to the Speaker of the House resigning.

This morning I had the pleasure of speaking at The Presidents’ Forum of Boston, organized by The Entrepreneurship Institute (TEI). The event was attended by over 100 CEOs and Presidents of small to mid-market companies ranging in size from $3 million to $100 million.

There were some dynamic speakers today with very interesting stories to tell. Colin Angle from the iRobot Corporation spoke, as did Randy Papdellis from Ocean Spray Cranberries.

I was fortunate enough to speak on a panel with Sandy Lish of The Castle Group, and Don Kaplan of Kaplan Marketing. The subject: How to use marketing to bring your business to the next level.

An interesting discussion is guaranteed when you bring in the principal of a successful PR firm like The Castle Group, an experienced marketing strategist like Don Kaplan, and an Internet marketer like myself. That goes double when you are speaking to a group of sharp CEOs.

We didn’t agree on everything, but we all seemed to agree that businesses are best served when they take the time to develop a real marketing strategy, such that they approach marketing (PR, direct response marketing, Internet marketing, viral marketing) from a strategic mindset, rather than a tactical one.

I particularly enjoyed my fellow panelists because, although they’ve become leaders in the kind of marketing that pre-dates the Internet, they’ve still spent the time to understand and (where appropriate) embrace the Internet. Unfortunately, a lot of marketers don’t even know what the word “blog” means.