Tag Archives: Marketing

13 Random Links for Tuesday

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Sometimes when I’m stuck, I go back to see what I’ve bookmarked over the past few days and weeks.  it’s an interesting compilation.

BuiltWith is a website analysis tool, providing technical analysis and SEO optimization information to further your website’s marketing, sales and navigation effectiveness. It seems pretty cool, though, if you want a really neat web tool check this one out website grader

Clay Shirky is a pretty interesting person who has a new book out that I have on my “got to get” list it’s called, Here comes everybody, I read an excerpt and it was really really good.

I have Mike Stopforth’s web site bookmarked, he’s is an entrepreneur, writer and speaker who heads up Cerebra, South Africa’s leading social media company, I thought it best to see what others across the world are doing with social media.

Check out Utterz when you get a chance. With Utterz, you can instantly share your news by creating a multi-media posting in voice, video, picture and text, right from your mobile phone, or online. It works with every phone, on every carrier, which is interesting.

I struck up a conversation with Paul Chaney a few weeks ago and this is his company Bizzuka, I added Paul to my 4 more social media experts post

Here is a great post on…alas.. Taking a class in social media.

I’m always on the lookout for a good solid analytics package other than Urchin, and this one was referred to me the other day, check out Mint.

And lastly, I’m talking with these people tomorrow Ecairn, I’m looking forward to giving it a test drive.

 

 

Listening and social media: 5 videos that drive the point home

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Humility is the defining characteristic of an unpretentious and modest person, someone who does not think that he or she is better or more important than others.

We talk so much about the art of the conversation and how this new age has spurred countless conversations where we are able to share with each other and grow and nourish ideas that could one day create endless possibilities for everyone. But what happens if the conversations are one sided? How many of the conversations out there are taking place between one willing participant and someone who is in it, to win it, so to speak, no pun intended? Are you listening? Or is conversation a dying art?

Here’s an example: Forrester Research Vice President Josh Bernoff highlights one of the five primary objectives companies successfully pursue in the Groundswell: Listening. In this example, a group of twenty-one dedicated cancer centers formed the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) to better listen to patient needs. October 11, 2007 in Chicago.

 

WHY DO WE TWEET

How many conversations take place today or are originated for the purpose of self-aggrandizement? I think more than we will ever know?  Do you think some of our finest web 2.0 thinkers are twittering for the sake of engaging in worthwhile conversations? Are they tweeting for branding purposes? How many of you comment on people’s blog or tweet, but yet bring nothing of intrinsic value to the actual conversation? How many of you don’t care if someone responds or not? Don’t all stand up at once either. Here is twitter explained for all you common folk out there, thanks Common Craft

 

I think we have an inate desire to be heard as well as to be seen and this truly does speak to this generation that I’m calling Generation U for “Generation User” as in generated content. But see, we want to be seen and heard, but rarely do we want to listen, when in actuality, that’s truly where the conversation begins and possibilities are created. Do you spend most of your time listening and reading, or do you create lots of content and vomit the information of whoever and whomever? Do you listen with the intent to understand?


 

So if that truly is the case, do we, or some of our more active purveyours of user generated content, even care about what others might think? Do they even ask what we think? If they did, I would expect the conversations to consist of them choosing to hear what they wanted to hear. God forbid it’s constructive criticism.

Ironically, Chris Brogan has written a post called 100 Personal Branding Tactics Using Social Media in which the first thing he leads off with is… Listening That’s right listening. And not a year prior he wrote solely on the subject of…Listening

I’m sure if you were to ask some of the top social media experts, and I know of about 30 or so, I would imagine that they would collectively say it is more important to listen than it is to talk. How many would understand the importance of listening with humility though? To listen, to truly listen? The disconnect happens when two parties get together and both have these agendas, which they seem to be paying more attention to then the actual conversation itself.

I want the age of conversation to be about what we can do collectively instead of what’s in it for me. The hyper link that preceded that statement, those guys get it. And most do, but I want you, all of you, to start listening, instead of hearing, what someone has to say.

THE MORE YOU KNOW, THE MORE YOU REALIZE WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW

So if you think about, look around and look at what everyone is talking about, it’s the conversation, it’s the word of mouth marketing buzz. We talk about it from the one side but not the other, the listening aspect. The art of listening.

We have more tools than we have ever had that help us with the conversation but we need to really start listening with humility, with a deep understanding of what the person or person’s across from us, is saying. All of these social media tools allow us more access than we have ever had in our lives, to conversations. A way for us to listen and to understand. Lastly, Look what Todd Defren has to say, it’s a quick blurb, so make sure you listen!. By the way, I told Todd I would add him to my new updated list of social media experts coming out soon.

 

So what sayeth you? I’m listening. Do people hear what you are talking about? Are you talking over their heads? Or vice versa? How can you improve the dialogue?

 

 

 

Emerson Direct Marketing Observations cracks Adage top 500 blogs

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The Emerson Direct marketing observations blog has cracked the Adage Power 150. The Power 150 is a ranking of the top English-language media and marketing blogs in the world, It currently ranks more than 500 blogs written about all types of media and pretty much every imaginable marketing discipline.  Thank you to everyone who has contributed, and thank you to everyone who has read and reads it….Now lets get to it!

Social Media Dumbed Down

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Common Craft is a two person, husband and wife company that makes videos that are short, simple and focused on making complex ideas easy to understand.  One of those ideas/videos that I absolutely love is about social media. It’s “dumbed down” to levels that even the most stubborn, stodgy, old school, CEO can understand. They use a whiteboard-and-paper format that is designed to cut out the noise and stick to what matters. See what you think and share with others!


 

Social Media marketing, is there room for the small players? 23 talking points

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I was driving home yesterday going past hundreds of small companies that are all in the same economic boat right now. They need to drive traffic, sales, and business. And you can best believe that they are willing to try any and all things that can possibly do that. And that includes utilizing social media.  I mean we can find plenty of blog posts and articles about whether large companies can succeed using social media, and my answer would be “uhhh… yea!” 

So one of the questions I would have as a small business owner and even a medium sized in some cases would be:

1) How can I drive sales, traffic and business to my click and mortar site using any online means available?  Wow that’s a broad question. But wouldn’t you ask the same thing? Tell me what’s out there and I will use it, if it helps.

Let’s assume that you have a website and you use email. If you don’t, you can stop here because the rest won’t matter. But unless you’re reading this post at the library or you’re over at your Aunt Evelyn’s, I’m going to assume that you at least have a computer. And since you are a small to medium size business owner, you damn well better have a website! NO MATTER WHAT KIND OF BUSINESS YOU HAVE, YOU BETTER HAVE A WEBSITE.

Lets get to it, Lets go over this checklist and see if there is room in the social media marketing space for the small players.

2) Do customers use your website? If they don’t maybe it’s because they don’t know you have one. What efforts have you employed to market or optiimize your current site?

3) Do you give them any reason to go to your website? If you are not letting people know your site is out there and what it has to offer, then you can answer that question pretty easily. But is your site a marketing tool. Can customers get a better deal on a service or a product if they go there?

4) What do they do when they are there? Whats the bounce? What do your analytics tell you? You do use some type of stats package right? If you don’t what your customer does on your website, it’s the same as if you stayed in your office all day and never came out to see what was going on in your business or store. In order to understand the customer you have to see their tendencies. You have to know where they are coming from and how they found you.

5) How well do you utilize your URL on other marketing materials? You have signage, billboards, print ads, business cards, letterhead, email, Is your web address there?

6) What is your presence like locally? How well are you branded locally? Do they know you, who knows where you are locally? What efforts do you make to brand you and your company locally? The “if you build it, they will come business model”, doesn’t work too often.

7) What are your current marketing initatives like? Do you support them online? Do you have a budget? What do you use it on? Is it a print ad? Do you do anything that can drive business on a consistent basis?

8) With a limited marketing budget, what would you do with it? What DO you do with it? Is that something that even is on your mind or lips? Are the economics of what is happening right now preclude you from even thinking about budgeting for marketing? Wouldn’t this be the most opportune time to be spending?

9) Do you do any type of digital marketing now? i.e. email, seo, sem? If you don’t then that will explain your lack of any traffic on your website, along with the design you have to let people know you have a web presence.

10)  Do you know what social media is?

11)  Do you understand it? Do you know what the essential elements are of social media?

Before I go any further, lets throw something out there right now and that’s lets assume that you have answered all of these questions the “right” way. Let’s assume that you are ready to do this, you are ready to “try” some element of social media marketing. And lets hope that you’re not fighting or resisitng to try social media You’re next set of questions are going to be:

1) Is there a company or someone out there who can help me?

2) Do they have experience working with my type of company, my type of customer?

3) What guarantees do I have that this will work?

4) What will it cost? What can I expect?

5) Will it fail? What is the downside?

6) What is the upside? What, after all is said and done, will be the net result?

7) How long will it take?

8) Is it a process?

9) Is it measurable?

10) What do I look for in my results?

11) How do I pay for something like this?

12) What if it backfires?

13) Now what do we do?

 

Ok so we now have 23 talking points to get the conversation going. There are questions that small to medium sized business owners need to ask of themselves in regards to their current marketing efforts and the general state of of their advertisng efforts and there is the next set of questions that these same owners need to ask of any individual or company that comes knocking that is going to pitch them on social media marketing.

The point is this, there are so many “conversations” going on right now in regards to how corporations are wrestling with implementing social media into their marketing efforts. In fact Jeremiah Owyang recently wrote a post about the 5 questions that companies ask about social media, but it concerns large outfits and not the little guys. I think the small players are being ignored. It’s not that it can’t be done, it just needs to be very focused. Why can’t everyone participate in the conversation?

 

 

10 reasons why you have no business launching a widget, yet.

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“Whip up some numbers that make it look like we have, like, I don’t know, a thousand HD channels.” – Cable Corp, Inc. VP

You know those DirectTV spots that have been running as of late? A bunch of suits sitting around trying to guess what the customer might want. That’s happening a lot lately. What’s funny is that in a lot of situations, these groups have some really talented people sitting at these tables and yet they blamestorm or better yet, come up with really shitty ideas that are fast-tracked. I don’t get that. How can good smart people come up with such bad stuff? That’s probablyy a whole ‘nuther blog post in and of itself but for today we’re going to talk about something that I guarantee you is on the lips of some of these aformentioned people. Widgets.

I got a great idea, lets make a widget, that should drive some major traffic!

 

You don’t have a clue do you?

Reason #1 You probablly have heard of a widget but in actuality you don’t have a clue as to what they are. Widgets are essentially cute little applications that you can run on your desktop that will entertain you, provide informtaion, keep you in the loop etc. All in little snippets.  Here’s an example.

This widget helps you find cheap gas in your area. Good luck with that.

 

 

So anyways, you’re a marketer or an executive and you’ve now heard of these and sorta seen them in action and you think, we need widgets. Which leads to:

Facebook, what’s Facebook?

Reason #2 You probably don’t even know where to put your “company created” widget. Do you even know where to put it? “ok it’s built, now what”? If you’re group created it, does your company have a Facebook presence to support it since that’s generally where they thrive? How about a blog?

My audience is…

Reason #3 To build and distribute your widget, that would mean that you know exactly who are your target audience is and know that they would benefit from a widget. How well do you know your customer?

Let’s sell something and cut to the chase!

Reason #4 You will probabally bust out the sales speak on your widget and the pitch will be oozing all over your widget because you think it’s a way to sell more product. Wrong. Widgets are about branding, are about fun and are about entertainment. Though utility driven widgets are useful, they do not have the same impact as one that needs to be shared with others.

Yea we have a website, my son built it at school..

Reason #5 If your internet presence is not where it needs to be then you really don’t need to be jumping into the mix with a widget. To begin with, how do you rank organically in the search engines. What about any type of online presence? Does it exist? It’s one thing to brand a new product, but how about establishing some branding objectives for an existing product or company? What if your outfit has some negative stuff out there in cyberspace? What’s a widget going to do?

Customer service 101 and our monthly email blast

Reason #6 If you’re not talking to your customers, then you have no idea what your customers would want from a widget. If your marketing efforts are intrusion based, then chances are your widget would be the same.  If you’re talking at them, then chances are, your widget is going to miss the mark. If your marketing efforts consist of a monthly email blast with hundreds of bounce backs, then you got it going on.

If we build it, they’ll come

Reason #7 If you think your widget is going to drive traffic and sales, then you’re missing the point. Widgets are about building brand loyalty. Successful widgets encourage, promote, gather, share, and provide ways to communicate with…ta da… your customer. And ultimately a successful widget is viral.

I heard it works, isn’t that enough?

Reason #8 You don’t know what you want, and you don’t even use them, nor do you have any familiarity about them. Ahh that makes sense, let’s do it! Doesn’t it make sense to test drive something before you adopt it? Before you launch something, shouldn’t you see if its something that you are comfortable with? Do some research, knucklehead, don’t just listen to me! Here’s a nice snippet on What is a good widget from Phil Butler.

Just do it, we’ll worry about the little stuff later

Reason #9 You can’t build it on the notion or the premise that you hope it will work. You need to have a clear idea of why you’re doing it and what your expectations are. Is your message clear or will it be? Do you know what you want the deliverables to be? How you are going to measure the results?  If building a widget is something that came up in a meeting, move onto something more tangible.

The competition is doing it and thats good enough for me

Reason #10  Widgets can be and are a logical extension of your brand, but only if you’re knee deep in the online world.  You can’t just have a brochure ware type of site and expect that to be enough to push your brand over the top with a widget supporting it. The customer, the user, that you are trying to reach, is doing more now with the tools provided, than ever before.  Widgets, blogs, pod-casts, online video, pr, and microsites/landing pages are all ways to extend the reach of your brand online. But first things first. Make sure your offline house is in order and then do the requisite online things necessary before you even think about having the conversation about launching a widget. 

Have you had success building and launching a widget? have a horror story? Know of a clueless boss? What Sayeth you?

11 things that Social Media is not

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I was ready to tell Geoff Livingston what social media wasn’t and then I had an acid flashback and I started ranting about something else completely unrelated. he was still waiting as of this post. Well. it’s not the first time, I left someone hanging or wandered off track. I’ll be lucky if I can keep this on point.

Thanks in part to Scoble we know that Social Media is not:

  • Newspapers.
  • Magazines.
  • Television.
  • Radio.
  • Books.
  • CDs.
  • DVDs.
  • A box of photos.
  • Physical, paper mail and catalogs.
  • Yellow Pages.

But we all spend so much time explaining to each other and anyone willing to listen, what social media is, perhaps if we turn it around and tell people what it is not, then maybe that will help define it better. If anything, it will be a fun excersise in twisting everyone’s interpretation of what it is. So here are 11 more.

1-Social media is not about the above mentioned entities now being able to talk with us. It’s not about mass media. It’s more about the audience finding it’s voice.  Hell, those guys, the old school, they are some of the most resistant adopters of anything that remotely resembles social media. They are stuck in their one to many, cul-de-sac marketing ways.

Brainstorm: Cul-de-sac marketing-The marketing efforts go in the same way as they come out with exhaust fumes in their vapor trail, and within that trail are the buyers of their  marketing elixir. Their schtick.

2-Social media is not up to them, it is up to you and your voice

3-Social media depends on but is not predicated on many to many, and 4-is not one to one, but it can be. But it certainly is better than one to one and wait. It’s one to one, realtime. 5-Social media is not closed to anyone. It’s blind to race, creed and color, social status etc. All it cares about is your ability to communicate. The rest, the particulars, have a way of sorting themselves out.  6-Social media is not calm, sedate, unresponsive, or static. It disprupts. It’s in your face. 7-Social media is not passive. 8-Social media is not laryngitis. 9-Social media is not just for kids. It’s for Gen X, Gen Y, Gen C, and the Boomers. 10-Social media is not mainstream, yet. And finally, thanks Brian Solis 11-Social media is not the final frontier of marketing

Please feel free to add to the list of what social media is not. I could only come up with 11 thus far. Hook me up.

 

Social media: A cocktail party

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So Im on Linkedin and someone I should reask a question about social media tools. the question was: What are the best practices and available tools in the social media marketing space?” and what are the methods to measure them ?

One of the first responses I received was from Rosemary Reilman in which she said:

This is the $64 Million question. And whoever has all the answers could probably make themselves very rich.
As far as the best available tools – I’d say the ones that your audience are going to. There are so many sites it really depends on who you’re trying to reach. If you’re trying to reach high school kids or college, probably Facebook or MySpace. If you’re looking to reach Tech-Savvy Professionals, then something like Twitter or LinkedIn might be the route to go. I think it just involves some research on who is where.

As far as best practices, I went to a really good workshop with the AMA and a speaker Jim Tobin of Ignite Social Media gave some common mistakes (which I guess is the opposite of best practices but still helpful) I had a link to his blog below. Also my thoughts on the presentation as well.

I think the most important thing to remember with SM is that it’s not the same as regular marketing campaigns. It requires not just pushing out a message but allows for your audience to talk back.

Those are some of my thoughts on your question!

Great answer, so I went to her site and actually one of the links on her site referring to social media as an online cocktail party in which she provides great insight into a workshop she attended  called the Social Media Marketing workshop. her synopsis of what went down was cool, but I had to give my 2 cents of what I thought marketers thought of social media marketing, since there seemed to be some lively discussion of what exactly it was that we, them, they do and think. Here is essentially what I wrote:

 

I’m not sure where to begin Rosie, well first thanks to the response on Linkedin which led me here. Your post was great, it brings up a lot of things and I’m not sure which one should be addressed first. Well, let me start by saying that I think marketers stick with what has worked for them in the past regardless of the medium. Be it, email, tv, radio, print, event, whichever worked, they have taken it and honed into their craft.
Now we are all abuzz and all are talking about this phenomenon. This new way of doing it. Talking to the customer… And surprisingly it’s not necessarily a new way, it’s a new means. Marketers have wanted to talk to their customers for years, and for some they knew if they did, it would give them more insight and sales etc. But they always relied on older mechanisms for reaching out, i.e feedback forms, but what social media has done has allowed them more ways of connecting. Its not like all of a sudden we’re cavemen and we discovered fire, its that we’re cavemen and someone gave us a lighter. and the word has spread from cave to cave that someone has dicovered, not the mystical and powerful properties of fire-we get that, it’s that someone has something that can grow, sustain and spread something virally that we all need, want and desire. In this case, customer interaction on steroids…

 

 

 

What do you think? Am I right? Partially right, sorta right? or am I missing the point?

Chasing the dragon that is social media

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Social media…….social media…. I was reading Geoff Livingston’s latest post and he had a clip on there from Tech Cocktail in which he, David Armano, Frank Gruber and Danielle Wiley opened with a “what is social media” intro.. Which got me wondering, ranting, or just pondering first a) am I too close to the subject and b) c) d) e) and f) and g) are below…

This is what I wrote to Geoff..

Let’s talk about what social media is not. In fact, what if the term social media was banned from our lexicon, what would we call it then? Is it an accurate term to use? Have we trounced on it too much? Or is it still this mystical nirvana like state that marketers, advertisers, agencies, and corporations are all chasing? Are they chasing the dragon? Are we forcing them to chase the dragon? Is it elusive? Are we making it that way? Can we dumb it down? Does it need to be?

 

It’s not really a rant per se, more of just “lots more questions” from maybe a different point of view. Some might say that social media is merely the flavor of the moment for marketers and PR people. Uhh no, it’s where we are headed, and we can choose to integrate and embolden and implement or we can get steamrolled by the ones who decided to embrace it from the get-go.  Who is the person that said “a computer in every home will never happen, it just doesn’t make sense…” Who would like to step up and say, social media is nothing but another internet phase…a fancy web based app…go ahead and throw the first stone.

 Here’s a link to the Vid