Celeste Bea Kalehoff was born today, July 23, 2008, at 10:39am, at 7lbs and 15 oz. The date is surreal because it also is the birthday of my wife Laura and me. That means 3/4 of this Kalehoff clan have July 23 as their birthday! What are the odds? I’m on a high right now.

I have a growing Flickr photo set here.

I also twittered the day, to keep family and friends in the loop throughout the action. Following is what you’d see if you had followed my feed. Thanks to all my friends and supporters on Twitter, who sent good vibes along the way.

maxkalehoff Laura’s in labor. about 16 hours ago from TwitterBerry

maxkalehoff From the window of the birthing room, I see several doctors outside smoking. about 15 hours ago from TwitterBerry

maxkalehoff Laura’s in labor 7cm dilated and jamming out on her ipod to Eddie Vedder’s soundtrack to the movie Into The Wild. Staying tough! about 15 hours ago from TwitterBerry

maxkalehoff Laura: “I love you Mr. Epidural Man.” about 15 hours ago from TwitterBerry

maxkalehoff OK, countdown: fully dillated. Waiting for baby to drop a little more. about 15 hours ago from TwitterBerry

maxkalehoff Laura’s trying to get some rest before the big push. about 15 hours ago from TwitterBerry

maxkalehoff 10 min to pushing time. about 14 hours ago from TwitterBerry

maxkalehoff Not only is our baby about to be born, it’s also Laura and my birthday today. 3/4 of this Kalehoff clan have 7/23 as their birthday. about 14 hours ago from TwitterBerry

maxkalehoff Taking a little rest. More action soon. about 14 hours ago from TwitterBerry

maxkalehoff Photo: It’s a girl! Celeste Bea Kalehoff. 7lbs 15oz. http://tinyurl.com/6dff7z about 11 hours ago from twitterfeed

maxkalehoff It’s a girl! Celeste Bea Kalehoff. 7lbs 15oz. http://bit.ly/2O9K1I about 10 hours ago from twitabit

maxkalehoff Thanks everyone who sent wishes on Celeste. Just spent 2 delightful hours together. Now nursery for her and Mexican lunch for Laura and me. about 9 hours ago from TwitterBerry

maxkalehoff Pickin up Laura’s lunch at El Paso Tacqueria nr Mt Sinai Hospital. Hear this place rocks! Can’t wait to munch. Haven’t eaten since yesterday about 8 hours ago from TwitterBerry

maxkalehoff Thinking back on the delivery, it’s kind of funny how the nurses spanked Celeste on the butt to get her to cry. Welcome to our world! about 7 hours ago from TwitterBerry

maxkalehoff Laura’s hospital food: salisbury steak, potatoes and brocoli. http://bit.ly/2UIPhk about 4 hours ago from twitabit

maxkalehoff Just got home for Julian duty. About to call it a day. A good day. about 1 hour ago from TwitterBerry

More later. I haven’t slept in over 36 hours. I need to unwind before taking Julian to meet his new little sister for the first time — in a couple hours.

UPDATE (July 25, 2008):

How about a few videos?

Labor Of Love

Meet Celeste Bea

Meet Celeste Bea Part 2

What Do We Think Of Celeste?

Our next SEMPO New York Meetup is scheduled for July 30 at 6:30pm at the Microsoft offices.The July 28 RSVP deadline is approaching, and we have almost a hundred members confirmed with space for 130. Sign up here.

We’ll feature demos of great tech in the search space, from powerful tools to interesting mash-ups. Each company will get 5 minutes to demo their technology and then 5 minutes to take questions from the audience. No PowerPoint presentations allowed — we’re interested only in live product! Confirmed presenters so far include: Clickable (my company), HitTail and Ramp Digital. If you’re from a search tech company and interested in presenting, leave a comment or email me.

Following also is my latest MediaPost column…

Employee Brands Must Be Part Of Your Search Marketing Strategy

It’s simple: Employees steward personal brands that drive intrigue among customers and other external stakeholders. These employees include senior management, client project leaders, engineers, sales managers and customer service reps, among many others. So it’s no wonder employee names become frequent and critical keywords that drive targeted search traffic to company Web sites. Which begs the question: why don’t marketing departments embrace employee brands as part of their search strategy?

If a company’s HR department embraces search to recruit the best people, then the marketing department should embrace people to boost overall company search performance. Strategically, you should think of your employees as critical brand assets within your company. And just like your core company and product brands, market activity will generate awareness and interest.

What stimuli drive personal brand searches to company Web sites? Consider news coverage, new hires, word of mouth, sales and customer-service interactions, due diligence on significant project engagements, agency staff assignments and performance awards. With infinite drivers of searches for employee names, companies should consider how to capture that stakeholder interest and connect in more powerful and relevant ways.

Here are six key factors to consider in embracing personal employee brands in your search strategy:

1. Employee Prominence. Employees who play more visible and important roles in the execution of a company’s products and services should be weighted more heavily in search strategy. Of course, like with any branded search strategy, you’ll need to consider things like segmentation, name competition and differentiation.

2. Paid Search. Just as you would for your branded products, you should consider purchasing keywords for employees with significant brand names. Invest in quality landing pages so quality score goes up - particularly, unique employee-branded pages. Optimize your buys around key market events, like an employee’s conference speaking engagement, or association with a new product launch or other promotions.

3. Search Engine Optimization. Including key employee names and bios on the Web site is key for SEO. But go further and give individuals their own profile pages so there are more quality pages for search engines to index — which you’d want anyway, for paid-search quality scores. Even better, presuming they’re up to the challenges and responsibilities, empower employees with company-hosted blogs so they can generate more search friendly-friendly content. Also, encourage employees to cite your company brand externally — especially on professionally oriented social networks and directories, like Linked.In or industry-oriented message boards and groups.

4. Employee Buy-In. Incorporating personal brands into search strategy can extend into uncharted territories of personal privacy. Whether disclosing, exposing, associating or advertising names, be sure you have buy-in from those employees.

5. Practice Etiquette. I’m sure you could come up with many examples of poor etiquette, but I think a top contender is buying the personal-name keywords of your competitors.

6. Defensive Strategy. Finally, define a nimble, defensive strategy to manage the fluid nature of employee-employer relationships. While search is becoming a more important facet of demand capture, employees are becoming more dynamic, sometimes transient company assets. They often resign, are terminated, join competitors or break out on their own. Inevitably, some become negative forces on your brand reputation — sometimes in high-profile cases, and others in stealth, but targeted ones.

How do employees and personal brand names factor into your search marketing strategy?

I participated today in a CMO discussion on search marketing, hosted by Pete Krainik of the CMO Club. With me were three other heads of marketing, including Bill Muller of iProspect, Robin Caputo of Ciber, and David Cumberbatch of SimpleTuition. (For the record, I’m technically not a “CMO,” but am marketing head for my company.) You can listen here (and you don’t need to be a member of the CMO Club for the download).

My key message? Foremost, hire a business-savvy, statistical ninja to build and maintain a disciplined customer conversion funnel with sophisticated performance analytics. Then tackle search, and all other marketing activities, within that construct. We hired a brilliant performance-analytics director, Ben Seslija, at Clickable. The payoff has been amazing.

Within search, specifically, I offered the following recommendations for CMOs (largely informed by my aformentioned colleague).

• Recognize that search is a demand-capture strategy, while branding is a demand-creation strategy. The two must be tightly integrated.
• Ensure a disciplined strategy and tightly defined program so you can measure your execution and variables with precision.
• Install sophisticated performance tracking systems so you can constantly test and optimize.
• Leverage analytics to drive search with other critical business decisions, including customer- segmentation and conversion-probability models.

I’m a little biased here, but I think another well-justified contribution to the discussion: Stay on top of the burgeoning tools market. Marketing automation is a big deal and makes practitioners more efficient and effective. Embracing tools means gaining a competitive advantage over those who don’t. Besides, they can have immediate and lasting impact on your own bottom line.

The following also is my latest MediaPost column…

Want To Win Customers? Don’t Be Like A Wireless Carrier

As a consumer, I’ve found that wireless carriers are among the most difficult companies to do business with. But as a marketer, their flops underscore live-or-die principles in how to win customers - or how to make them hate you. My wireless carrier - which I’ll keep nameless - recently made this abundantly clear.

After I’d spent three years with the same Palm Treo 650, mobility became painful: disintegrating call quality, a cracked casing, a broken hands-free outlet, one-hour battery life and a number-three button that no longer worked. While I remain fond of the Treo, I decided to upgrade to a more stable business-productivity workhorse: the BlackBerry Curve 8330. (And, no, the new iPhone is not ready for prime-time business usage.)

Simple switch, right? No, thanks to my wireless carrier. Here’s why:

1. Disrespectful of Customer Time: I drove to my wireless carrier’s nearby store and waited in line for 30 minutes with my 19-month-old son, only to be told the model I wanted no longer was in stock. “We don’t have it any more. Try another store or go online.” My experience with the carrier’s retail outlet suggested they didn’t respect my time.

2. Broken Promises: That night, I ordered the model I wanted on the carrier’s Web site. I chatted online with a service rep to ensure it was available and confirm the rebate, which was mysteriously missing from my order summary. I was promised my new BlackBerry would ship immediately and arrive in a few days. After a week with no shipment, I felt let down. My experience with an inaccurate Web site and clumsy order fulfillment suggested I’m not important. Failure to notify me in a timely fashion when a promised order couldn’t be fulfilled made me think the carrier simply didn’t care.

3. Indifferent Problem-Solving: After calling my carrier to hunt for an explanation, the rep I reached said, “Oh, it’s on backorder. Sorry for the inconvenience. We’ll inform you if we can’t get it after 30 days, or you can cancel your order now.” Disgruntled, I decided to wait. Thirteen days after ordering, it arrived. It was a relief to finally receive what I paid for. But it shouldn’t be that way, I thought.

4. Painful Activation: Activating my new BlackBerry was relatively painless - at first. However, there was no customer-care infrastructure to ensure I upgraded my data plan to maintain basic, legacy services I was accustomed to on my old Treo. I had to figure that out myself through trial and error - troubleshooting on day one. Second, my carrier sent me outdated software drivers to sync with my Mac. After attempts with three customer-service reps, I hunted down the answer myself in an online forum. To add insult to injury, I had to speak with two additional reps before I was informed that the upgraded Internet plan I had just signed up for was not compatible with my company’s email server. Oh, the “Microsoft Exchange Enterprise Activation” will cost extra - on top of all the hours I spent troubleshooting.

5. Ill-Equipped, Uninspired Service Agents: While my carrier’s service agents were all cordial, very few were sufficiently knowledgeable in their products and services. However, the last agent I spoke with during this debacle - from my carrier’s BlackBerry advanced technical division - was extremely knowledgeable. I asked why so many of her fellow reps were so clueless. She confidentially informed me that her service center provides, on average, only two demo models for every 150 technical service reps. That’s a far cry from your average Apple retailer or Apple Genius Bar, where every rep seems to own, master and love all the products they’re selling and troubleshooting. Because of this rep’s superior knowledge, I asked for her direct line. She didn’t have one in her call-center bay, so she offered me her personal email address so I could signal her to call me directly.

I’m not here to rant. But if you want to know the secret to winning customers, the answer is simple: Don’t be like a wireless carrier. Do the opposite:

1. Respect your customer’s time.
2. Keep the promises you make.
3. If you can’t keep promises, deal with them proactively and enthusiastically.
4. Make activation and use of your product simple and instant.
5. Empower your technical and service support with the training, infrastructure and culture to execute on the promise.

It’s that easy. Now, what are the odds my unnamed wireless carrier will acknowledge my experience and do something about it? For them, I’m sure it won’t be easy.