Posted: Tuesday, April 08, 2008 - 2:38:28 PM

This is just an observation I've made.  True or not, it seems like we have a large number of marketing agencies that are finally using technology (sometimes kicking and screaming) to help their customers.  Its extremely unfamiliar territory for them.  These companies have used technology for a long time in creating demographic reporting and direct marketing, but never really embracing what modern communications can really do.

A lot of the old agencies which have the big accounts have especially been hesitant to move into this area.  I ran across one of these older PR agencies recently that clearly didn't understand the online world.  They were still thinking of a website as merely a destination and not a tool for reaching out.  It wasn't much more than a brochure.  I give pity to their customers as they are just missing the boat completely.

It seems like the smaller, newer marketing agencies are starting to run circles around the big and older shops.  We've seen that web companies are also more successfully entering the traditional marketing space.  They understand how to use technology and how to combine traditional marketing into their offering.

I believe we're finally seeing the convergence of these two industries.  Its no longer enough to be just a marketing or PR agency.  Nor can you just be a web design shop.  I know we've been hearing about that this has been going on for some time.  We've seen a push in both industries to enter the other, but they never really made the transition.  They simply didn't understand each others business.

But now the web agencies are starting to win more contracts.  The old agencies that are not trying to aggressively adapt are dying and falling apart.  Given another 5 years and the old world agencies are going to be gone, replaced by companies that are agile in technology, aggressive in relationship management and can adapt to a rapidly changing industry.

Well, my 2 cents anyway.

Comments(0)

---

Posted: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 - 8:22:58 AM

I've been hearing from younger generations that they don't use email very much to communicate with their friends. My knee-jerk reaction is usually to bluster and laugh them off as inexperienced and not in tune with the realities of communication. But since this is the coming workforce that I'm going to be hiring, I thought I'd attempt to put aside my bias and look at it more closely.

What do we do with email (other than delete spam)?

1. Communicate to a group of people about a specific topic
2. Communicate with individuals about something specific
3. Send documents, pictures and dumb jokes
4. Targeted and mass marketing

All of the above list can easily be achieved with email, but deliverability is a big problem. It seems like my email lists, even though they are getting bigger, are actually getting to fewer people these days. Why do dumb joke emails always seem to get past filters? Anyway, on top of that, maintaining a clean list of valid email addresses of subscribers is a pain.

I must admit that sending documents by email and communicating changes in a project I work on is really nice. But that has problems as well in not knowing if an email was read or at least read accurately.

Ok, so email isn't perfect, but more of an addiction. So what do the teenagers do to communicate?

1. Cell phone and text messaging
2. RSS and Podcasts
3. MySpace and Facebook type services
4. Instant Messaging

I must admit I haven't ever sent a text message. I simply don't use cell phones for anything other than making a call. RSS is much better than email for ensuring subscription deliverability. The Blog services are nice except they are for a group of people and not even remotely professional. As for Instant Messaging, there are many corporate versions coming out where everything you type can be tracked.

There are of course other apps that teens use, but those are the main ones. As for the 4 things I use email for:

1. Communicating with a group of people can now be better handled with collaboration tools and actually is quite a bit better for projects. You can even get free collaboration tools these days that are web based that do a much better job than email.
2. Sending documents is also handled in collaboration tools quite well. I figure people wouldn't mind a dumb joke being posted in those now and then.
3. Targeted and mass marketing are handled quite well using tools like RSS and LinkedIn social applications.
4. The only problem I see is the individual communication for the business world. There are times I don't need someone to respond to me immediately like a text message or IM. Blogs are for groups of people.

So my conclusion is that there are truly better tools now than email for working with people in the business world, but I'm still looking for something to deal with one on one communication that isn't real time. If someone solves that, maybe I can ditch my addiction and kick the spam.

Comments(0)

---

Posted: Monday, February 04, 2008 - 8:07:37 AM

Ok, I admit I haven't paid a huge amount of attention to football this year.  So much so that I had to ask who was playing in the Superbowl the week before.  I went into the game wanting to watch commercials.  Thankfully the game itself was a fantastic game.  The commercials though were pretty lame compared to previous years as far as ingenuity goes.  Having small kids roaming around the house, I did miss a number of the commercials.  After the game, I thought, hey, I bet someone from YouTube has these up online already.

Well, I was correct, but I couldn't get them to play.  I guess everyone else had the same thought.  Well, if you searched for Superbowl commercials, about 4 down was a service from AOL Sports offering up the ads.  I figured they would be down as well, but WOW was I surprised! The commercials ran like a charm.  Little to no buffering, they were laid out beautifully in a nice slick interface by quarter.  I was very impressed.  There was a lot of other things I could do "socially" with the commercials, but I was really only interested in watching them. 

This experience reminded me of just how importantant it is to keep everything running nice and smooth when you are servicing the consumer market.  Both AOL and YouTube have a huge amount of bandwidth, but I left satisfied and complimentary of AOL and annoyed at YouTube.  Does it mean I won't use YouTube in the future?  Of course not, but it placed a checkmark against them, which as a consumer, can be earned back over time, but still hurts for a little while. 

When you are doing business online, its inevitable that you will build up some scar tissue.  People do forget over time your mistakes, but its much simpler and less painful, if you plan and invest ahead of these failures to minimize these wounds. 

Comments(0)

---

Posted: Monday, January 21, 2008 - 8:58:01 AM

Ok, social bookmarking, which has been around for awhile but didn't really get steam until delicious and digg, is starting to become an annoyance in my opinion. Granted its a nice service for keeping my links, finding useful information and marketing my client's website, but just how many of these systems are there? 10, 20, maybe 50? Nahhh, think over 100 and increasing every day.

I've given up trying to keep track of them all. Its relatively pointless. The day of consolidation is coming. Not sure when, but hopefully soon. The craziness is a pain to keep up with and how many different ways can you really put a spin on a bookmark?

My opinion is to stick to the top 10 for now and ignore the rest. Most people are going to stay with only one bookmark engine and there is power in numbers. So just go with the most active (digg) or the most well funded (Google).

Comments(0)

---

Posted: Monday, January 07, 2008 - 4:13:35 PM

Its time to pick on social networks.  When it comes to social networks, size matters, but only as it relates to your needs. 

The big social networks such as mySpace and LinkedIn I have never found to be all that personal. You can make mySpace personal in appearance, but anybody in the world can post and if pay attention, very little ever really happens on most of those pages.  mySpace is mostly just a oversized "Post Comments Here" application. 

LinkedIn, as good as it is in helping you find people, doesn't foster anything social other than leads for jobs or maybe to impress your friends with how many people you know.  Of course, that is the purpose of LinkedIn.  As much as they want to tout it differently, its not a social network, its merely a place to exchange business cards. LinkedIn is a very good tool for finding people, but it doesn't foster personal interactions.

My opinion is that you can't get personal with these big social networks.  You see many people try, usually with not so good results when they try and find new jobs, but these big tools are not truly social.

So where are the real social networks?  The places that people interact with one another on more personal level? I haven't found any yet that are really good at this.  Most try to accomplish this, but when it comes to electronic communication, even though I hate to say this, email is still better. Where are the real social networks?

Comments(0)

---

Posted: Friday, December 28, 2007 - 4:41:08 PM

Social bookmarking, though it has been around a couple of years, really hit it big in 2007. I thought I'd take this chance to describe what social bookmarking is and why as a business or organization, you should care.

Everyone knows what a bookmark is. It is a way of saving the link to a webpage you've been to in your browser so that you can find your way back to it quickly in the future. Wikipedia gives a good definition:

Social bookmarking is a meta-data based method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

When the search engines weren't great at returning relevant results, creating bookmarks was extremely useful to find stuff at a later date. Over the last several years search engines have become better, so most people have been relying on search engines for finding sites again. Creating and saving bookmarks in your browser has pretty much been abandoned.

Enter social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is rapidly becoming an easier way of finding more useful information than search engines provide. The downfall of current search engines (Google included) is that you have marketing companies spending big money to be the top ranked sites for keywords that you are looking for online. This means you are not necessarily getting the best results you want, you are actually getting the best marketed websites.

Social bookmarks have a leg up over search engines in that the sites people bookmark the highest are those that the masses have determined are valuable. This type of "voting" helps to drive the better content to the top of the heap, and it usually occurs pretty quickly. From a marketing perspective, this means you can no longer just consider optimizing your site for search engines. Social bookmarking is turning into a type of search engine. The top search engines are scrambling to release their own versions of social bookmarks just to keep their loyal users. Social bookmarks deliver real value to those people who use them. The downside to social bookmarks is that you can have the best content in the world, but if people don't know about it, it won't be used. Additionally, the top items are voted on by the masses, which isn't necessarily what researches want, but it for a marketer, its gold.

For businesses that take Internet communications seriously, that want to build awareness to drive sales, social bookmarking can not be ignored. You have to start generating relevant news, blogs and content that people will want to bookmark and use these applications to attract an interested audience.

Comments(0)

---

Posted: Monday, December 24, 2007 - 10:18:41 AM

I was recently wondering if email campaigns still matter. With sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Digg and Flickr, is email doomed to failure? 

My personal opinion is that it is not in the foreseeable future.  Its still a big part of the toolset used by today's savvier marketers.  With all the kids using social networks and so many companies adopting wikis, why does email still matter?  The answer is simple.  Because it is the defacto mode of communication for businesses is still email and email is proactive.  With all of the social networks possibilities, for now, you still have to go to them to find out what is new.  Also, there is very little privacy with these networks.  Granted, email isn't that private, but it at least gives the illusion of privacy and it is delivered to your doorstep.

Now, there is email for marketing purposes, and there is email for business communications.  I do feel that email for marketing purposes is decreasing in value, but it still is extremely effective.  Email campaigns still deliver a large number of customers to your doorstep.  Email campaigns I work on for our customers still deliver a significant and measurable value when it comes to marketing.  When tracking email campaigns for our customers, we often see a three to five-fold increase in traffic and purchases to the website.

Spam has severely hurt email marketing. If it wasnt for junk email, email marketing done correctly would still be the best vehicle for marketing, but so many companies do it wrong.  They hurt themselves and they hurt those companies trying to legitimately use email marketing.  If you can get past the email spam filters, and you are targeting specific customers legitimately, email marketing is still one of the best tools for reaching your target audience and can not be dismissed. 

Comments(0)

---

Posted: Monday, December 17, 2007 - 9:10:35 AM

I was recently asked the question on what is social marketing? As a society, we have seen social marketing around us since the early days of man. Social marketing is nothing more than generating enough interest in individuals that they feel it is their obligation to tell someone else about it. Word of mouth marketing.

The most common social marketing you see these days is within political campaigns. Political candidates are able to recruit volunteers who recruit other volunteers, all who are focused on one product, the candidate. In recent years social marketing has become much less expensive and much faster because of the Internet. If you can create a product that not only compels you to tell someone else about it, but a component of it is actually used to communicate with other people (ie my personal Technorati profile ), it becomes a powerful tool in the hands of the company. The classic example is of course Hotmail.com, but more recent examples include sites like ElfYourself.com , Facebook.com and LinkedIn.com .

Social networks were a big promise in the late 90's but never really made it. It wasn't until sites like MySpace and Wikipedia showed up that people started really to feel empowered by the capabilities of the Internet. Savvy companies (and politicians) are figuring out how to use these social networks to reach a larger volume of "customers" faster. The companies using these tools correctly are seeing a significant return on their investment. Those that don't are finding that these networks will elicit a backlash to their message. Thus you have to be careful and do your homework before using social networks for any social marketing campaign.

Comments(2)

---