At my most recent company, we have spent considerable time gaining better alignment between the organizations.  Partnering is critical in this activity.  The reality is that most companies should have a custom marketing and sales process depending upon their prospect purchasing process, product offering, and market dynamics.  However, my search of the web did not yield (to my surprise) richer examples of marketing funnels that integrated the funnel steps, organization roles, points of measurement, and the internal company techniques to help move a prospect to the next step in the buying process.  Our team has landed close to a model that I’ve summarized below.

In future blogs I hope to explain more about each individual component in this model.  Please note, however, that I don’t recommend starting with this framework.  Start first with an understanding of your customer’s buying process and then map the internal activities that help move the prospect down the funnel (and yes, I know some people hate the concept of a funnel and promote an hourglass to recognize cross- and reference-selling).  Then figure out how those items fit together and how to measure performance at each step in the process.  The framework summarized here is a bit of the last two components.  I hope it helps spur your thinking in this area.

Here’s my view on the five key success elements for a webinar or webcast:

Strategic Planning

Understand why you are conducting the webinar.  Many events are corporate infomercials designed to plug products and place a check in the box that 5 webinars happened in Q1.  You need to go deeper.  Is your objective to:

• Build corporate awareness
• Generate new leads
• Nurture existing leads
• Educate influencers
• Deepen existing customer relationships
• Demonstrate technical aspects of your solutions

Who is your target audience, what information do you want to share, and what actions do you want them to take after the session?  These simple questions determine everything from the topic, speaker, target audience, messaging, marketing, timing (start or end off the quarter), budget, etc.  Ideally a webinar would be the conclusion of mapping your customer’s buying process against personas and identifying the best method to move ‘customers’ (buyers, influencers, and users) through the marketing funnel and ultimately to sales.  Webinars are a means to an end, not an event to themselves.  Webinars also need an official owner that is responsible for metrics that align with the goals.

Audience Specific Content (is King)

For your webinar, are you recycling materials from existing presentations?  If so, your content is likely to fail.  The goal of most webinars is to generate new leads. With that premise, speakers should tackle important issues related to your domain that will help the audience better do their jobs.  Help them and build a relationship.  Create content focused on the audience type – end users versus business line – and address their top concerns (deliver value) and position your company as a thought leader.  What data / perspectives do you have that is unique (i.e., don’t be a me-too messenger)?  Can that content be created into a virtual seminar series to establish a longer term relationship and nurturing?  What is controversial in the industry and can you take a stand, be provocative, and add to the conversation with examples and analogies?  Choose speakers well known in the industry (even outsiders) to draw a larger audience and who can deliver unbounded enthusiasm for the topic.  If you are considering a free giveaway to entice attendees (“win an iPod”), re-examine your objectives as most quality leads will not be influenced by low-cost swag.

Tactically, 40 minutes of content should be planned for an hour time slot, slides should have less text, show videos/ demo to break up the flow, and presenters should never use a speakerphone.  If you are a speaker, I recommend personalizing the presentation with the word “you” vs. “the audience” when speaking, consider a scripted start for a smooth beginning, using polling to engage attendees (otherwise they will be taking calls on the cell phone and/or checking email), and focus on a few quotable lines for tweeting.  Finally, keep content about your company to five minutes or less to avoid being an infomercial (#1 turnoff for attendees).

Marketing

The best content is useless without prospective attendees knowing about the webinar.  Extensive promotion should start 30 days beforehand in locations rich in the prospective target attendees (either through online communities, blogs, print articles, event cross-promotion, tweeting, press release, etc.).  Email lists can also deliver good response rates depending upon their quality and your ability to properly segment within target accounts.  Definitely drive prospective to a tailored landing page specific to the event.  I’d recommend using A/B message testing early in the promotion process if sample sizes are large enough for both any banners and landing page messaging.  Evaluate the subject line and content to make sure it is remarkable.  Remarkable content will generate pull (retweeting, forwards to colleagues) and attendance.  Schedule the event mid-day to get both East and West coast and not on a Friday or Monday.  A simple registration process will yield more results but do gather any relevant data points critical to follow-up (e.g., two questions on their platform or business application used).  Don’t ask for lots of contact data – a simple email is often enough early in the lead generation process.  Many events have only 50-70% attendance from confirmed registrants so establish a reminder calendar – immediately after registration, week, day, 2 hours before.  Consider phone reminders for key potential target accounts.  A compelling call-to-action by the presenter should close the session and align with the next step in the funnel process.

Logistics – First Impressions Matter

The #2 webinar turnoff is when the first 5 minutes are spent trying to get the slides or speaker audio to work.  That is a huge opportunity and brand cost when you are fighting for mind share.  Always test connectivity, phone connections, and conduct dry runs of the materials a few days in advance with both speakers and moderators.

Twenty minutes before the event, put up a welcome slide so attendees know they are at the correct site and have rotating slides that include common questions such as how to ask questions and obtain the slides after the session.  Respect your attendees and start three minutes after the hour and end on time.  I would also strongly advocate using a moderator to introduce the speaker, handle any transitions, and ask a few canned questions during the presentation (give the presenter a short break).  I recently dialed into a presentation from a top enterprise software company where the presenter did not forward the slides, never checked his Q&A to see all the complaints, and effectively wasted everyone’s time.  Not a positive brand builder for the speaker or company.

Analyze and Follow-up

After doing all the work associated with having the event, I have seen many occasions where momentum is lost.  All registrants (attendees and no-shows) need to be entered into your lead management system for proper follow-up.  A post-mortem about the event should be conducted a few days later to ensure follow-up, gather lessons learned, and improve the next webinar:

• Share response rates from different promotion sources and examine yield to attendance
• Evaluate the speaker and presentation / polling  flow.
• Discuss the follow-up plan with no-shows and ensure transition into another program element.
• Ensure that attendees are promoted to the next stage of the nurturing process.
• Build plan to clean-up and reuse the webinar recording.  Consider breaking the content into shorter micro-viral videos for easy consumption on other web properties.
• Send a link to the content to attendees within 24 hours as promised during the webcast.

Webinars are a great tool to use within your marketing programs.  However, a poor webinar experience is just as bad as a poor face-to-face meeting.  Respect the audience, execute the tactical, and prospects will look to build a relationship, and ultimately, become a customer.

Why Do Leap Years Exist

Leap Years are necessary to align the Gregorian 365 day calendar system to the astronomical year of 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds (time it takes for the earth to circle the sun once).  While those 6 hours don’t seem like much, it shifts the calendar a full day every 4 years.  For reasons connected back primarily to religion (e.g., Christmas on the 25^th and Easter near the vernal equinox), a correction needed introduction.  This occurred first in 45 B.C. under Julius Caesar and was later adopted by the Nicaean Council in 325 AD for all of Christendom.

However, since the shift isn’t exactly 6 hours (those 11 minutes and 14 seconds matter), every 128 years a day shift occurs in the opposite direction.  Pope Gregory discovered and corrected for this in March 1582 by dropping 10 days and establishing the Gregorian calendar system.  Gregorian adds conditional rules to account for the extra minutes and seconds: every 100 years is not a Leap Year, every 400 years is a Leap Year (e.g., 2000), except the year 4000 and its multiples (there is lots of math relative to Leap Years).  For the sake of brevity I have omitted how other calendar systems (Muslim, Jewish, Chinese) handle these differences.  However, the entire subject of history, calendars, and religion is highly intertwined.   To read all the detail, visit Wikipedia.

Choosing the Correct Day to Celebrate

When do I expect people to give me presents?  Most people believe that Leaplings have the option of celebrating either on February 28^th or March 1^st.  Often, Leaplings will prefer the most convenient, i.e., on a Friday versus a Thursday.  We also believe that our birthday exists, so quit the joke about not having a birthday (it was old by our 9^th calendar year).  And we do deserve extra special birthday parties in real Leap Years.  In reality, there are two analytical options to determine the correct date:

1. Adding 6 hours to your birth hour every year.  For example, if you were born at 8pm on February 29^th, the following year would be 2am on the following day, or March 1^st.  However, this means that most non-Leaplings born after noon are celebrating the wrong birthdays during the last two years of a cycle.
2. Using a known reference point, e.g., on the last day of February (my preferred method).

Interesting Leap Year Factoids

• A Leap Second exists whereby a second is inserted into the year (usually on New Year’s Eve) to make up for the earth’s rotation slowing down.   Amazingly, people have catalogued the electronic addition of the second for prosperity.
• An old English tradition (credited to St. Patrick in 5^th century Ireland) exists whereby women may propose marriage on Leap Years.  Men have to accept or face a fines ranging from 12 pairs of gloves to fabric to make a dress.  A movie called “Leap Year” was just released with this premise (no, I did not see it).
• Famous people born on Leap Day – Pope Paul III to Cam Ward (hockey player)
• In Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, Frederic the pirate apprentice discovers that he is bound to serve the pirates until his 21st birthday rather than until his 21st year.
• Proposal to rename Leap Year Day to Galileo Day in 2012

Are you a Leapling?  When do you celebrate your birthday?  Thanks for being educated and be nice to us.

Enter HubSpot and their Inbound Marketing University program.  It is a free program that I recently completed (see Certificate at bottom of post) and highly recommend for all but the most accomplished online marketers.  It addresses the inbound marketing front end processes.  HubSpot offers a SaaS marketing platform to help SMBs improve the top end of the marketing funnel and reduce leakage through the conversion process.

If you are a business line executive (such as Sales, Services, Operations or Management), this program is too detailed.   However, you need to understand this seismic shift occurring in your colleagues world.  Learn from it and think about parallels within your organization.  Some introductory materials would be:

1. HubSpot State of Inbound Marketing 2010 webcast
2. HubSpot CEO Guide to Internet Marketing webcast
3. Seth Godin blog (innovator of Permission Marketing)
4. David Meerman Scott ebooks (create a World Wide Rave, Lose Control of Your Marketing and Viral Marketing)

HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing University program is especially beneficial if you are a marketer and:

• Terms such as blogs, social media, SEO, Page Rank, landing pages, lead nurturing, conversion rates, Twitter, and Facebook are confusing or
• You are not immediately sure how to apply inbound marketing (content creation, SEO, and social media) to sourcing, nurturing, and converting prospects into leads.

The University program is 16 hours of webinars followed by a 50 question timed exam.  Certification requires a minimum passing grade.  There is little value of taking the exam just to get the certificate.  If online classes are not your method of learning, CEO Brian Halligan and CTO Dharmesh Shah recently released a book entitled ‘Inbound Marketing’.  The book is better organized for first time exposure to many of these topics than the webinars but does not go into as much detail.

If time is limited, I would recommend watching these three sessions at a minimum:

• David Meerman Scott on ‘Viral Marketing’ (session 5) – excellent presenter and full of great example stories.  Use of personas and how to create a world wide rave.
• Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz on ‘Advanced SEO’ (session 6) – great analytical and qualitative explanations of SEO ranking with separation of opinion versus analysis.
• Avinash Kaushik of Google on ‘Advanced Analytics (session 14) – turns normal business intelligence into valuable metrics that focus on tracking change versus the baseline numbers (also has great technical blog).

Some example key takeaways from the sessions included (there were many more):

• Inbound links are 5x more important than the page keyword content for SEO
• Lead conversion expressed as an equation — 4*Motivation + 3*Value + 2*(Incentive – Friction) – 2*Anxiety
• Testing is critical – use A/B splits, but knowing what to test is hardest aspect
• Content is 50x more likely to be viewed by removing forms to collect personal information
• Lead nurturing focus on only a subset of qualified prospective customers (those that want nurturing)
• Use correct analytics such as Bounce Rate = # people who come but leave right away; track referrers that are staying and engaging; fix top pages with high bounce rates
• Analyze what is changing over time – follow top 10 rising and falling, not the top 10 overall
• Twitter usage for Business beyond responding to customer support issues is still undefined and needs additional evolution.

There were also some good quotes:

• “Don’t forget that leads are people” – Brian Carroll, inTouch
• “Don’t suck” (stated about 50 times) – Avinash Kaushik, Google
• “Clarity trumps persuasion” – Jeanne Hopkins, MarketingExperiments

Aspects of the Certification program (kudos to Rebecca Corliss) that impressed me are:

• A topical expert taught each of the subjects instead of a HubSpot employee.  This provided attendees exposure to a broader network of experts for follow-up with specific issues.
• The courses were free flowing and thus more interesting.  However, listening to the Q&A it became clear that many attendees needed more basic overviews, definitions, and examples to understand the rest of the sessions.
• The number of hours of content is non-trivial and requires participants to make a real investment in gaining skills.  16 hours rivals many other introductory industry training programs.
• The exam questions were not pure fluff designed to give a false sense of accomplishment for attendees.

Items that I would like to have seen covered better include:

• The situations where inbound marketing becomes less valuable.  For example, if there are only a few dozen potential customers, marketing and sales activities need advanced tailoring to the target accounts.
• An integrated visual framework to organize all the content (Mike Volpe’s version is extremely high level)
• Discussion of ancillary marketing tool categories (beyond the email marketing) for Web CMS, lead nurturing, web analytics, and CRM integration
• Hand-off process from marketing to sales and how to help sales teams (Sales 2.0)
• Broader perspective on closed-loop tracking and analytics
• Expand nurturing to include existing customers for cross and up-selling

Having created certification programs for other companies, HubSpot’s program should also be commended as a marketing tool and for the core design:

• Using industry experts reduced their cost to product meaningful content significantly but also ensured that information would be more generally accepted by potential attendees.
• The industry experts will further advocate the usage of HubSpot solutions within the marketing community and validate HubSpot’s thought leadership.
• HubSpot’s success requires that customers create more ‘remarkable’ content than normal to receive the benefits of inbound marketing.  The HubSpot certification helps marketers overcome any basic fears and concerns and establishes a foundational set of validated skills within HubSpot’s customer base.

While not an independent industry standard, HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Certification program should still be viewed positively by the marketing community.  If it achieves the goal of evangelizing the concepts of inbound marketing, both marketers and customers fed up with mass marketing techniques will be happier.  I’m excited to be part of this change.

Are you considering taking the University courses and exams?  I’m happy to answer any questions.  Good luck.

Cloud computing is all the rage.  The big debates are public vs. private, open source vs. proprietary, and SMB vs. enterprise.  While these are emerging trends, an enormous shift that has occurred over the last few years is the start of what a few are calling the “personal cloud”.  A personal cloud is your collection of online service providers that facilitates your digital information creation, sharing, commenting, collaborating, and connecting with others.

Today, our digital lives are increasingly shifting from the home PC to your work laptop and a host of online cloud service providers.  Personal services includes productivity (email, calendaring, instant messaging, etc.), sharing (photos, documents, videos, etc.), and communities (social networks, gaming, travel planning, etc.).  Business service examples are numerous too with LinkedIn, Yammer, Twitter, Facebook, etc.  More innovative services are becoming available daily.  The combination of cloud computing, Web 2.0 productivity, and mobile has exploded the possibilities.

Four challenges worry me most about the current state of my personal cloud:

1. Our personal information and life data has been spread across each of these services.  A higher level organizational construct (a personal meta-cloud) that can assemble the content from multiple providers is needed.  This would not only assist viewing and tracking but also allow multi-channel syndication of new information out to our multiple services and networks.
2. The tools to manage the split of information being shared and managed across the public, business, and personal arenas do not exist.  One can only manage data in each silo independently – a huge time sink – leading many users to assume an “oversharing isn’t bad” mentality.  We need more granular controls built into the services and ways to maintain visibility into what information different communities are consuming.
3. My data longevity is not safe.  Just as take advantage of new services, we are losing data residing in older services.  Services go out of business without a way to extract the data and meta data (e.g., I left MySpace long ago leaving behind my profile and all the conversations).  There needs to be a centralized personal cloud that holds my master data and syndicates it out to my online communities at a granular level, as well as automatically captures, organizes, and archives my content from those communities for long-term storage and potential reuse.
4. There is no connection back to my physical world.  As we continue to network the home with smart energy, digital security, and home entertainment, we are creating yet another silo of our digital personal information.  A key impediment to bringing this online is connectivity speeds from any cloud-based provider through the last mile.  Users will continue to expect near instantaneous response times with any controllers.

The conclusion is that there is a business opportunity for a vendor to become the aggregator that facilitates, controls, and maintains my personal cloud.  Given # 4 above, there will likely be a home-based IT component for heavier applications like digital home video libraries until the bandwidth issues get resolved.  In the meantime, I would like a personal cloud provider.  Unfortunately I do not think Google is that provider due to their needing to mine data for advertising.  I would be willing to pay for a stand-alone service.

Do you want better control over your personal cloud?  What other issues need resolution and who might be a likely provider?

Gmail rocks.  Everyone should use Gmail unless they only have very basic email requirements (i.e., are a baby boomer with limited computer skills and need a highly streamlined user experience). Up until about 6 months ago, I used Outlook at work and Yahoo Mail for personal messaging.  While the Yahoo interface is easy-to-use, the poor performance searching contacts and email often frustrated me.

I made the switch.  If you use one of those “other” providers, I know you’ve been considering moving to Google Mail.  Don’t put it off.  It’s easy to transition all your data.  And you will get back hours of your life.

10 Reasons to Switch

1. Emails are a two-way conversation and Gmail automatically links together all the emails for a topic across the email participants.  Gmail calls this ‘threading’.  Threading saves lots of time searching for old emails to refresh your memory of the latest exchange.  The more diverse your email topics the more valuable this will be.
2. Spam filtering is far superior.  My old Yahoo account would receive 50 spams a day (yet another medical breakthrough) and occasionally some non-spam would slip in.  That required me to check my Spam folder periodically or risk losing real email (waste of time).  I receive 2 spams a week with Gmail.
3. Gmail search is incredibly fast and the search results are presented in an easy to read manner.
4. Gmail provides 7.5 GB of storage making deleting emails unnecessary.  Instead, I ‘archive’ them (although I can easily delete them if desired) in case they might be needed in the future.  Archiving hides the emails so they do not clutter my inbox.  However, search results include these emails making it easy to find the needle in a haystack.  Considering that many people have corporate email accounts and frequently are unable to send/receive due to being over their email size limits, this saves enormous time scrubbing attachments as well.
5. Calendering is very integrated and the scheduling of meetings with contacts is seamless.  The interface is also easier to use than Yahoo for multiple calendars (e.g., a shared family calendar, contact birthdays, or your favorite sports teams).  Reminders can be emailed or set as pop-ups on your computer.  Labs widgets further improve the usability experience (dim recurring meetings, attach documents).
6. Gmail email, contacts, and calendaring are easily setup for mobile synchronization on my iPhone 3gs.  Follow these instructions and never worry about housekeeping these again.
7. You can keep your old email account and send emails from within Gmail with that return address.  Some people may want to keep multiple accounts or their old account in case someone doesn’t receive your update about switching.
8. Gmail has Google Docs which allow you to create, read, or edit any document, presentation, or spreadsheet online without needing Office.  It is also a powerful collaboration hub to share items with other users and work on joint materials.
9. Chat is embedded within Gmail and optionally shown on the same page as your email.  This makes online talking easier within the context of your everyday work.
10. Access to future innovation.  Google continues to innovate faster, as an example Google Wave.  While currently an emerging platform (combining e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking), Google Wave will continue to evolve from its first generation incarnation as people find new ways to apply the platform to specific use cases.  Other recent innovations include Gmail Offline and other Lab widgets.

Limitations

While Gmail is the best offering, it does still have some limitations:

1. Contact management is critical as I have 1300+ contacts.  Google contacts still does not do enough to gear the user interface towards regular contacts.  I also want smart prompting to help me maintain communication with important people on a semi-regular basis.  Xobni is heading in this direction and Google should adopt better social media integration features.  Adding new contacts is also non-efficient as Groups assignment happens as a second operation after adding a contact.
2. Google also does not allow creation of recurring tasks, something many others are asking for in the enhancement forums.
3. Another serious gap is Google’s lack of “notes”.  I’ve had to adopt Evernote to fill the void.
4. The user interface is not as similar to Outlook as Yahoo, making it harder for less technical users.
5. Privacy.  Actually, I don’t have any issues with this.  Yes, Google will scan your emails and use it to better target advertising at you.  Yes, this is scary if you think a person at Google wants to read your personal materials.  However, most of us are just too boring in the grand scheme to make this an issue.

Did I cover your favorite unique features in Gmail or are there major capabilities that you would recommend?  What are you not happy about with Gmail?  Let me know.

For those that decide to make the transition, see my recent blog on suggested steps to follow.

My recommended process would be to:

1. Clean-up the structure of your Yahoo account by removing any unnecessary email folders or contact categories.  You don’t need to spend lots of time but make sure the organizational structure of folders and contacts is up-to-date.  These will be used to map to new items in Gmail.
2. Signup for a Gmail account using first.last@gmail.com (this increasingly is a standard and will be good if you use the account for anything professional or to tie to other social media outlets).
3. Contacts (access from list in left column)
   • Create Gmail Groups for each of your Yahoo Categories.
   • Export Yahoo contacts to your local computer using CSV and import to Gmail.
   • Check that the same number of contacts is in each system and check a few most-used contacts to make sure the proper contact information transferred.
4. Email
   • Create Gmail labels for each of your Yahoo Folders from the ‘Settings’ area.  This will allow Gmail to automatically populate assign the label during the import process.
   • Gmail has partnered with TrueSwitch to power the importing of email.  Go to Gmail Settings -> Accounts and Import and follow the instructions.  Note that I did not have a good experience using TrueSwitch to import contacts which is why I recommend the manual process above.
   • Monitor the importing as it will take several days.  Gmail will add a label to the emails for the importing account name as well as the correct Label that matched your Yahoo categories.
   • Create filters to have specific emails by-pass showing up in your Inbox and going automatically to a Label.  This is a bit confusing to do.  Select the email, then action of “Filter messages like these” and the two key selections are to “Skip the Inbox (Archive It)” and “Apply the Label”.
5. Calendar
   • Yes, you can export your Yahoo calendar and import it easily into Google Calendar.  Follow these simple steps that require first saving to your local computer.

That’s it.  Now you can announce your new email to others as desired.  I would also suggest setting up your email signature (in Settings) and hiding Chat in the user interface if you don’t use it (at bottom of page).

Another decision to make is whether to disable your existing Yahoo account.  I would not.  First, they are always people who do not update their contact information and will continue to email your old account.  Second, there are plenty of services that you’ve signed up for that you will need to slowly transition over to your new email information.  I put these into a new folder and would take 15 minutes every few days to slog through the transition.

Good resources for new Gmail users are the About.com Gmail Overview and Jim’s Gmail Tips.

Have you made the switch and found other steps critical to ensure a smooth transition?  Let me know what I missed or if there are even better resources available.

My personal technology cloud continues to morph regularly.  My personal cloud is the mix of web services that I use as part of my everyday life.  As with most people, I continue to evaluate my cloud on a regular basis as new entrants mature their offerings.  The list below describes the winners and loser for 2009 – please share your suggestions for the right mix of providers.

Before adding or changing a service provider, consider the following items to guide your decision making:

• What is the switching cost?  Just like with businesses, there is a cost to make changes from provider A to B.  Can the data be moved and how difficult is the process?  Will any data be lost?
• What is the value proposition of the new service?  Many services capture our attention with a few new capabilities but it is critical to ensure that it also provides all the core elements as well.  Sometimes these might be coming in later releases.
• How does the new service fit into my current mix of technologies?  For example, a new service that does not support my mobile device cannot be adopted.  Also, a service that requires data duplication rather than synchronization from an existing master data location will cause you plenty of headache trying to reconcile data in the future.
• How is this service differentiated from competitors?  I have noticed an increasing trend that most service categories have at least three to five vendors.  Wikis are a prime example.  You will need to do some research to find the best providers.  How many variations does one need?

Not everyone’s needs are the same.  I am a mid-30s marketing / business executive, travels frequently (both business and pleasure), works from everywhere, enjoys technology, and is willing to invest to learn how to best take advantage of more advanced features.  If you share some of my characteristics, the list below highlights some of my major adoption changes that have enabled me to become more productive.

To keep the length manageable, I will share the full list and blog a few categories at a time.  Please subscribe for future installments! Let me know if you disagree with any of these selections or have others to suggest.   Enjoy.

1. Email (-> Contacts -> Calendar -> Tasks): Gmail has replaced Yahoo Mail

2. Document Management & Collaboration: Google Docs and OffiSync have replaced a company solution

3. Mobile: iPhone 3gs has replaced Blackberry Curve

4. Browser: FireFox has replaced Internet Explorer 7

5. Personal Portal: iGoogle has replaced My Yahoo

6. News / Special interests: RSS with Google Reader has replaced Personal portals

7. Bookmarks: del.icio.us has replaced Xmarks

8. Note taking: Evernote has replaced Yahoo Notepad and Post-It notes