AT&T just announced (via text message) that iPhone owners will have free wifi access at AT&T hotspots. As far as I know, this is a new development, even though it’s been announced several times, only to be rejected. Here’s the text message I just received:
Your Apple iPhone now has free AT&T Wi-Fi access at thousands of hotspots nationwide, including Starbucks*. For info visit www.att.com/attwifi.
The people who run the online dating site SpeedDate.com have taken the quest for new customers to ridiculous extremes. The service reportedly has purchased the Facebook game Oregon Trail — based on the classic game about leading a band of pioneers to the West Coast without drowning them or having them die of dysentery.
What does speed dating have to do with a classic educational game about leading a band of pioneers along the Oregon Trail, you ask? The answer is nothing. But that doesn’t seem to matter much to the folks at SpeedDate, who intend to ditch the Oregon Trail game, and replace it with their own SpeedDate application on Facebook. The purchase of Oregon Trail is simply a way to snatch up a bunch of users at one time.
Sure, there are ethical questions to raise about buying an application simply to turn it off and replace it with an unrelated application. But what kind of marketing is this? It’s symptomatic of the kind of thinking that says marketing is all about “eyeballs.” And it doesn’t matter whether those eyeballs are actually engaged in what we’re selling. As long as they glance at our product, we’ll count it as a marketing victory. It’s exactly backwards.
Even if 12,000 people log into Facebook to see the SpeedDate application, there’s no reason to expect any of them are interested in it. After all, they signed up to play a version of a 25-year-old educational computer game they remembered from their childhood.
So next time you think about what you’re doing to market your product or service, ask yourself whether you’re pulling a version of the SpeedDate/Oregon Trail bait-and-switch. If you’re just thinking about “eyeballs” and not about engagement, you’re missing out on a lot of potential marketing power.
Lots and lots of people never visit social networking sites. But you can still use social media to reach those people. ReadWriteWeb has 5 ways to use social media to reach people who don’t use social media. Here’s the list, but you should read the whole post for details:
1. Develop relationships with people who bridge the gap inside other organizations.
2. Use Web 2.0 tools to learn about real life public events.
3. Make your blog an email newsletter and promote it elsewhere.
4. Look harder. Your audience probably is using social media that you aren’t aware of.
5. Use the Internet to make yourself smarter in real life.
It doesn’t look like marketers are pulling their money out of online/digital marketing because of the looming economic trouble. A new survey for Epsilon (reported by Chaos Scenario) shows a shift from traditional to digital marketing. Take a look at marketers’ planned budgets for both kinds of marketing:
Interactive/Digital Marketing:
* Decreased… 14%
* Increased… 63%
* Stayed the same… 23%
Traditional Marketing
* Decreased… 59%
* Increased… 13%
* Stayed the same… 29%
Online marketing is a cost-effective way to reach the people you want to reach — provided you’re willing to engage them in conversation instead of simply talking at them. It remains to be seen how many marketers are willing to change their mindset to be successful online.
Next time your boss asks you why the organization should have a blog, tell him this story. Mack Collier writes about the efforts of baby equipment-maker Graco and its successful blog:
On the flipside, if you launch a blog and all you do is tell customers to ‘buy your stuff’, then your efforts not only won’t work, but you will do harm to your company’s image. At SBMU, I referenced Graco’s blogging strategy. Instead of using its blog as a direct-promotional tool, Graco positioned its blog as a vehicle to reach parents, and to discuss parenthood with them. Very little promotion of the company is involved, instead, it’s a blog written by parents, for parents. As a result, mentions online of Graco have almost doubled since Graco launched its blogging strategy, and positive mentioned have increased from 68% to a staggering 83%. That’s the power of a well-positioned blog.
Mack points out that for those numbers to be true, almost all of the post-blog mentions of Graco would have to have been positive. That’s an amazing impact on the conversation happening among customers online.
The key, of course, is to use your website as an extension of your organization — not just an add-on brochure about your organization. People should be able to learn from you and interact with you online. That takes work, and it means you should have someone dedicated to participating in that relationship. But if you take the time to do it, the rewards are huge.
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