Archive | March, 2007
Shel Israel today has perfectly summed up the nuance in how “new marketing” differs from “old marketing.” I spent about 15 minutes yesterday trying to come up with this description for my own blog, and I finally gave up and figured I’d come back to it later. Thanks to Shel, I don’t have to:
A marketing guy figures out messages and the devises ways to insert them into people’s foreheads, even people who do not wish to have them inserted. This is no longer what I do.
Lately, I’ve started calling myself a “markets guy,” which is someone who finds markets relevant to a business and joins or starts conversations that are useful or interesting to those markets. If you think about it, this is very different.
Shel also has the same issue I have with what’s come to be called “public relations.” PR isn’t really about a relationship with the public at all. It’s about crafting messages and, as Shel writes, ” injecting them into the markets.” Real public relations, after all, should involve a 2-way relationship with the public.
Technorati Tags: marketing, PR, public relations
Toby the Marketing Diva has some advice today about using social media as marketing tools. In a nutshell, she says you’ve got to have a strategy. Don’t just jump in and build a MySpace page willy-nilly because it’s the cool thing to do. Toby suggests 10 ways to use social media. Among them:
1. Open customer communications .. listen and learn.
3. Improve Customer service
8. Build community
But one of the great insights in this post is Toby’s discussion of the “value add” in social media. Building on the thoughts of Amy Gahran at The Right Conversation, she points out that we all gain something when we communicate with our customers or our constituents or our members. We are building goodwill, we are learning from diverse perspectives and creativity, and we are growing in a host of other ways. Those things might not be classified as part of a “strategy,” but they are nonetheless benefits.
Rocketboom’s not making it with ad revenue. Marketwatch reports that the daily video podcast can’t make decent money despite having 200,000 downloads a day. Those numbers aren’t enough for advertisers, who would rather reach millions. I don’t blame them.
The trouble with Rocketboom is not that its audience is too small for big advertisers (though it is). The trouble is that Rocketboom is mass media dressed up as niche media. It’s general entertainment on a smaller scale than TV networks and major media websites can achieve. Because Rocketboom reaches a general audience, it’s really not any better an advertising bargain than a cable TV channel. It’s relatively cheap to produce, but that advantage is likely offset by continued hesitancy of advertisers to jump into such a new area.
The future of online media is not in big shows like Rocketboom, which reach 200,000 people of divergent interests. The future of online media is in shows of all sizes with much more narrowly focused content — shows like Podclimber or TWIT. The future of online media is about communicating with people effectively, consistently and authoritiatively — not renting out billboard space on someone else’s channel.
Scott Bourne chimes in with some thoughts on whether Rocketboom is representative of all online media. I agree with him that it’s not — and for a lot of the same reasons.
HT: MicroPersuasion
In my continuing effort to shamelessly, selfishly reap the benefits of Seth Godin’s huge brain, here’s his latest riff on taking shortcuts to get traffic to your Website:
Others spend time studying the algorithms of Google and Yahoo to figure out the very best way to jump ahead in the rankings for their blog or corporate site. Is it reciprocal links or careful metatags? What if I create some sort of ring so that the spider won’t realize the scam?
Hey. It’s not so hard. If you make great stuff, people will find you. If you are transparent and accurate and doing what’s good for the surfer, people will find you. If you regularly demonstrate knowledge of content that’s worth seeking out, people (being selfish) will come, and people (being generous) will tell other people. It turns out that it’s easier and faster to do that than to spend all your time on the shortcuts.
Come to think of it, that’s another reason your newsletter may not be working. Maybe you’re just not making great stuff. It’s not that you can’t do it. You have great stories to tell about the things your organization does. Maybe you’ve just believed the fiction that you don’t have time to tell good stories well. Stop believing that, and start believing in the power of your great stories. They’re all around you.
Technorati Tags: marketing, shortcuts, newsletters
You hate writing your monthly article. The overworked receptionist hates nagging contributors to finish by their deadline. Spam filters are catching about half the newsletters you send out, and people aren’t even missing it. Even if they get through, a lot of them end up in the trash box before they’re opened. And within the last 72 hours, you spent time fretting about what you’re going to put in the newsletter next month.
You may not even realize it, but your answer is a blog. Why?
1. You can add content whenever you want, in small pieces, instead of in a big monthly article.
2. The receptionist saves the time spent nagging you and the other people who contribute an article.
3. Your opt-in feed doesn’t get caught in spam filters.
4. Readers get more control of what they read and what they don’t read. And their opinion of you goes up, because of it.
5. This kind of website probably looks and performs better than the static website you have now.
