Here’s a perfect example of social media marketing:
An IKEA in England decided to let 100 cats roam the store overnight. And then they filmed it … and the results are astonishing:
The whole key: do something interesting! Do something different! Do something remarkable … literally remark-able! Do something that no-one else is doing.
If you’re boring … no-one cares, and you can’t do any effective social media marketing. In fact, you’ll be hard pressed to do any effective marketing at all.
Check out the graph on the left. The curves represent different ideas and different starting points. If you start with 10,000 fans and have an idea that on average nets .8 new people per generation, that means that 10,000 people will pass it on to 8000 people, and then 6400 people, etc. That’s yellow on the graph. Pretty soon, it dies out.
On the other hand, if you start with 100 people (99% less!) and the idea is twice as good (1.5 net passalong) it doesn’t take long before you overtake the other plan. (the green). That’s not even including the compounding of new people getting you people.
But wait! If your idea is just a little more viral, a 1.7 passalong, wow, huge results. Infinity, here we come. That’s the purple (of course.)
via Seth’s Blog: Viral growth trumps lots of faux followers.
Wow … they are not shy about promoting their product:
Funny – but also instructive.
I sure hope this is not the future of the web. Where’d the website go?
This is what I saw when I visited a recent story on Mashable: 10 Must-Read eBooks for Social Media Lovers. The post title doesn’t even start until the extreme bottom of the page.
I like free content as much as anyone else on the web … but this is perhaps a price too high to pay.
. . .
. . .
Note: you can minimize the ad – I understand. But by default it wasn’t. This is definitely interruption marketing.
(I was going to link to this permission marketing story as well, but there’s a 10-second interstitial ad.) I guess I did link to it after all … but consider yourself warned.)
Next time, could it be you?
I have been reinvigorated lately by following Hugh McLeod, the Limey-turned-Texan artist, idea vendor, marketer, and self-described CDF (CrazyDerangedFool).
In this economy and in the overwhelming crush of ideas and messaging, you have to be a little crazy, you have to be a little off-the-wall … you have to STAND OUT from the deafening crowd in order earn the attention necessary to tell your story.
That’s why this recent cartoon of his really speaks to me. George’s first plan better be to re-name himself, jump out of line, change clothes, and break out of the ordinary. But – here’s the key – George’s new George needs to not be another mask marketers wear, but a return to what makes George unique. This level of authenticity, coupled with a real eccentricity, gives George a chance.
Perhaps the crazy ideas are better just because they’re crazy. Perhaps the ordinary plans and ordinary ideas will die just because they’re ordinary. As Seth Godin said a week or so ago, the problem is that you are boring. I am boring – we’re all boring … when we’re simply repeating the party line, doing the standard thing, following the company protocol, going through the motions.
What’s going to make people sit up? Pay attention? Work with us? Hire us?
Here’s a big clue: it won’t be boring. It won’t be standard. It won’t be average. It won’t be a commodity, and it won’t be something you can buy at Wal-Mart.
This, from Hugh’s own experience, is remarkable:
Now. What am I doing that is futile and crazy?
What are you doing that is futile and crazy?
Let’s start.
OK. So you’ve launched your new social-viral-mashable-linked-web2.0-connected web place, and you’re tracking a million metrics. Which ones should you actually be paying attention to? Those are your Key Performance Indicators.
As Rhian James at FreshNetworks mentioned in a comment on my recent post about measuring social media marketing efforts, that’s really the key. Burying yourself in a mound of data is unproductive; knowing which data tracks progress to your critical initiatives is pure gold.
FreshNetworks posted on this topic on their blog, and created a valuable SlideShare presentation illuminating the difference:
Measuring the results of social media marketing efforts has been challenging to say the least.
Five or six years ago, when I was helping start-ups put blogging campaigns together to kindle the development of user communities, I didn’t really have a clear idea how to measure ROI. About the only things we measured were visits and sales … which wasn’t too bad, but was only a very small part of the story. And based on our unsophisticated set-up (plus lack of Google Analytics) we really had no clue what the connection between visits and sales exactly was.
Today there are plenty of other ways to measure social media marketing results. Here are just a few, starting with quantitative measures:
A less obvious measure is the number of comments on your videos. While you’re checking that, be sure to get a sense of the overall tenor of the comments: are they positive, negative, or lukewarm?
More qualitative ….
That’s a fairly quantitative list, but there are some qualitative questions to ask as well.
In the final analysis …
… there is no final analysis. Social media marketing, is, after all, marketing. As such, there is very rarely a one-to-one correlation between input and output.
The reality, however, is that your ability to connect with clients depends on your online footprint, and the quality of your online presence. Are you findable online? Are you where your clients are, online? And if they search for you, do you have both a big enough and targeted enough Google footprint that they can easily find you?
Your online success, and increasingly your business success, relies on the answers to those questions.
Whether you’re an individual, brand, or company, it’s good to know when people are talking about you. It’s even better to know what they’re saying.
The last thing you want is to find out that there’s a firestorm of negativity about your latest post, product, or brand when a forest of media microphones are thrust in your face and the media trucks are camping out just off your property. Instead, you want to be in tune with what people are thinking and saying, and you want to be able to enter the conversation with your perspective.
Here are 8 quick, simple, free tools for listening online:
So … that’s 8 ways of listening to your clients and your community that won’t cost you a dime, and in most cases not even much time.
Just saw this via Twitter from Bluefur.
He’s talking about a “special offer” MasterCard sent him for being a “most valued” cardholder:
The special offer was for a Garmin 250 GPS system. I got this exact same GPS navigation system on Boxing Day in 2007 for $150. Even today, you can find it at a variety of retailers for under $200. That’s the standard going price. How much was my credit card company trying to sell it for as a “special deal”? The asking price was a whopping $299.95 or you could split that up into five monthly payments of $59.99.
You might have thought this was obvious by now. But apparently, to many marketing drones at BigCorp™s around the globe, it’s not. THE WORLD IS NOW A VILLAGE.
The points are obvious:
Smart marketing is honest, funny, interesting, and relevant.
Maybe your over-priced GPS can help you find the Cluetrain.
There are good reasons for some start-ups to run in stealth mode for months or years of their early existence.
I was reminded of a few as I was reading Chris Maxcer’s review of Joost for the iPhone. Check out this gem, about the desktop version:
I had briefly used Joost’s client-side Mac video viewing application in its early days, back when Joost had very little content … then forgot about it.
The dilemma is harsh: you want to launch as early as possible to:
But the problem is obvious: launching too soon can blow your buzz as users eat your dogfood and throw up … never to arrive at your dinner table again.
That’s exactly what happened to Chris. In this case, however, Joost is lucky enough (and, frankly, has enough market momentum) to warrant a second look – occasioned by the release of their app on a new platform: the iPhone.
The question is: have they learned their lesson? Apparently not, as Maxcer reports:
The 1,813 reviews on the Apple App Store seem to agree with me: Joost has lots of promise but it fails miserably. The average rating is two stars. Many users, though, noted that they were basically waiting for a non-buggy updated version from Joost.
I saw this on Clientside SEM’s website this morning:
SEO up to now has been mainly technical (and tactical) in orientation. But as basic SEO skills become increasingly commoditized, SEO will require more than just technical ability to grow brands and companies on the Web — it will require a keen understanding of business, marketing, risk management, resource allocation, and creative problem solving.
This is bad news for SEO professionals who are simply technical, blackhat, or who have come in from the quasi-developer side. It’s great news for traditional marketing firms who have understood these things for decades … but only if they can also pick up new skills and techniques.
I’ve come to believe that marketing is easy.
This perhaps somewhat astonishing idea came to me as I was leafing through some personal archives as I search for just the right items to place on my new portfolio site. Some of my company’s old brochures are in the box, and I remember the struggle we went through at times to find the right words, present the right image, frame the right message.
All of that could have been so such simpler … if we had just built our product with more compelling points of differentiation.
Products with compelling points of differentiation sell themselves. Not that you don’t have to do the marketing, create awareness, sell the idea, and all that. But they write their own story.
A good example is the iPhone. If you’ve seen any of the ads, you know the deal. An iPhone ad never says buy me, or iPhone is better than X phone, or heaven forbid, the either of the words “solution” or “device.” All an iPhone ad does is show you capabilities and possibilities. The rest of the pitch happens inside your own head.
The marketing, in other words, ought to be embedded in the product.
When I see this Ford skyscraper ad, I’m assuming that mousing over the ad will show me something about the people.
After all, it says “rollover to see their stories.” So that’s the expectation I have – that I can find something out about two real people who really bought a Ford who really had some experiences with it and really are telling them to me.
It looks like an instance of social media marketing: marketing that uses connecting web technologies and real stories from real people to demonstrate how a product or service might be something that I might want to buy.
So far so good …
But when I rollover the ad and see this, everything changes:
Suddenly I feel misled, even lied to. Instead of a story, I’m looking at an ad. A very standard, old-school ad.
Score -1 for Ford.
The moral: don’t mislead customers, and most importantly, don’t raise expectations of A but provide B.
(Unless, of course, B is obviously better and more wonderful in every way than A. And even then, be careful.)
How do you brand yourself for career success? The answer in 24 slides:
(I saw this first on ReadWriteWeb.)
I just spent 20 minutes prepping a no-longer-needed-textbook for sale. One of the places I thought I might sell it was Amazon Marketplace, only to be presented with this:
Obviously, Amazon Marketplace is not looking for your average Craigslister, and probably not your media eBayer as well. Rather, they’re looking for bookstore owners, high-volume eBay retailers, and so on.
It’s an interesting strategy – definitely designed to capture the fat front end of the long tail and not the thin whippy extremity. It probably results in a lot less hassle for Amazon.
But it also does leave a significant portion of the resale market for eBay and, increasingly, Craigslist. And it leave a bit of a sour taste in the mouth of loyal Amazon clients, such as me, who have bought thousands of dollars of books and other products from Amazon, but can’t use the same service to recycle redundant items.
Here’s a response I posted this morning on a Seeking Alpha story on Apple’s brand that seemed to imply it was all about marketing:
“All Day Breakfast” hit the nail on the head.
What people who don’t really understand branding don’t understand is that the best branding, the longest-lived branding, and the most financially remunerative branding is branding that is a result, not a cause.
The brand is authentic because it first arises from actual value and actual experience.
Brands that are invented via marketing alone are typically short-lived, expensive, and doomed to crash and burn. The product and the client experience need to be what the branding says in order to generate long-term value.
(The comment’s not showing up yet on Seeking Alpha … I had to sign up … they have an email authorization … I haven’t got the email yet … )
Seth Godin posted an article on really bad branding a couple of days ago, pointing out some company names that don’t differentiate companies very well:
Jewelry Central is a really bad brand name. So are Party Land, Computer World, Modem Village, House of Socks and Toupee Town.
It’s a bad brand name because Central or Land or World are meaningless. They add absolutely no value to your story, they mean nothing and they are interchangeable.
Why is differentiation such a key marketing strategy?
It’s simple – you only truly succeed as a brand, and as a business, by being top-of-mind in your targeted clients’ minds. And you can only be top-of-mind in your clients’ minds by having a clear, identifiable, distinguishable identity … ideally an unique identity with a story.
The name is a piece of it – an important piece. The image is an important piece. The story is an important piece. The products you choose to create and market are important pieces. The successes you build are important pieces. The customers that you enable are important pieces.
Put them all together, you’ve got a brand.
But if it’s not differentiated … if a client can’t distinguish your name, image, story, products, and successes from competitors … all of it is meaningless.
Because that client will open up the yellow pages (in other words, Google), search, find you and your competitor, and go eeny meany miny mo. Which means that all your hard work and all your investments in marketing mean nothing. Differentiation, which needs to start before your marketing, and even before your product development, is an effort to ensure this doesn’t happen.
This is all obvious. So why are so many companies not differentiated?
Here’s why: differentiation requires discrimination. If you want to be differentiated, you must say no. There must be certain products you won’t build. Certain markets you won’t pursue. Certain clients you don’t want. These are all clear and undeniable corollaries of choosing certain products that you will invest in, certain markets that you will pursue, and certain clients that you definitely do want.
However, many companies can’t say no.
They fail to see that in saying no, they gain increased capability to say a very focused, powerful yes.
I love this sign I saw in a art dealer’s window in New Orleans last week:
I still can’t decide if it’s hilarious (that someone who had a “big sale” essentially typed something in Word and printed it from their computer, and pasted a – dirty – 8.5×11 sheet of paper in their window).
Or is it pure genius (simple, clear, obvious, and impossible to miss because it’s exactly where the Open/Closed sign would be in many other small stores).
You decide.
I simply cannot believe how some vitamin companies continue to create deceptive packaging. Essentially, they’re lying with their bottles.
In this case, here’s a bottle of Jaimieson vitamin D that my wife picked up this week. I opened it today, shook one pill into my hand, and then looked inside.
I had to look deep to catch a glimpse of the small pile of lonely pills at the extreme bottom of the bottle.
The discrepancy between the size of the bottle and the amount of vitamin inside it was so large I took them all out, put them beside the bottle on a side table, and took a picture. Click on the picture to see a larger version.
A couple of thoughts:
I think we all understand these days that packaging sells. I think we also have a right to assume that packaging does not also magically make 100 tablets look like 1000.
Companies that fail this test deserve an F for truthfulness, and an F for integrity.
UPDATE Feb 21: pls note Trisha’s gracious reply below …
I can’t believe believe people are still sending out link exchange requests:
Hello,
Recently I contacted you regarding a link exchange request. I was hoping that you’ve had the time to review this request and consider my proposal. We are developing a reciprocal link area on our website and would be happy to trade text links with your website. You links will be on the PsPrint.com website, although we are not entirely sure where at this point in the project.
Please let me know if you are interested in discussing this further. You can contact me at trisha@psprint.com or 510.224.2106. If you are not interested in a link exchange, please let me know and I will discontinue contacting you regarding this matter. Thank you for your time.
Trisha Fawver
Marketing Manager
PsPrint.com
510.224.2106
Create. Print. Mail. Faster.
This is now the third email I’ve gotten from Trisha, which is starting to approach spammishness. Note the veiled threat in this statement:
If you are not interested in a link exchange, please let me know and I will discontinue contacting you regarding this matter.
In other words, I’ll continue to receive unsolicited emails until I say yes or until I waste my time composing an email saying no.
From Reuters via Information Week:
Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO)’s second-biggest investor urged Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) to raise its $42 billion bid for the Web pioneer and warned Yahoo it has few options left, raising the pressure on them to seal a deal.
Isn’t it somewhat hard to argue both of those positions at the same time? Wouldn’t that almost be like talking out of both sides of your mouth?
You would think, huh …
If you ever needed a visual explanation of how marketing can shoot itself in the foot, see this:
First line: PROFESSIONAL WEB HOSTING (emphasis added)
Third line: Starting at $4.95/mo (emphasis added)
. . .
. . .
‘Nuff said.
Recently posted on Flickr …
Wondering why this bottle of kid’s vitamins is less than half full, straight from the store. Annoying, wasteful, unethical.
There’s a reason why SMS is a hundred billion dollar industry … and it’s simply that phones companies are unbelievably greedy.
Note: the three examples cited are, respectively: from your internet service provider via high-speed modem, over standard text messaging systems, and snail mail via the United States Postal Service. All are assuming that data is transmitted digitally (in the case of the snail mail, the bits are written on paper.)
COSTS OF TRANSFERING 2,560 MP3s:
TCP/IP: $1
TCP/SMS: $61,356,851.20
USPS: $307,072.00 (Bits written out on paper)So getting a SMS delivered is bit for bit 200x more expensive than getting a message hand delivered to your doorstep anywhere in the United States.
What exactly justifies making SMS messages sixty one million times more expensive than ISP data and 200x more expensive than TCP/USPS? How come technology, communication, and infrastructure is getting cheaper while the costs of SMS messages are increasing exponentially? My theory: SMS messages are transfered over air made of solid gold.
Full article here. Well worth the read!
(I originally saw this at Slashdot. As noted at Digg, here seems to be a technical issue with that page – if you don’t see the article at that link, try the home page. It should be the top story there for a while.)
My 11-year-old daughter Gabrielle has gone into business designing and selling t-shirts.
Her first creation is far too cool for words:
Available at our Cafepress store, naturally …
🙂
[ update February 9 ]Here’s Gabrielle’s latest – for babies:
If I ever want to kill any readership of Sparkplug 9, I know exactly how to do it. I’ve received written instructions in the mail.
Email, actually. I recently received one from Kim Tompkins, a “junior media buyer” at Red McCombs Media. It’s a proposal any self-respecting blogger would swiftly upchuck at:
Hi there,
I am a Media Buyer with Red McCombs Media. I am contacting you today because we are looking to place some 800×600 small business related pop-unders. I can give these pop-unders to you at a $2.50cpm, targeted to US visitors.
These pop-unders only contain content relating to small business and will not rotate in anything inappropriate, pornographic, etc. Please let me know if you are interested at your earliest convenience! We would love to get you set up as a publisher immediately! If you could just get back to me with how many impressions per day we can expect from your site we can move forward from there. Please let me know if you have any questions!
If you would like to learn more about our company please feel free to visit our website http://www.redmccombsmedia.com. Look forward to hearing back from you and hope we are able to get something started!
Thanks!
Nothing good starts with “hi there.” And no, I have no intention of putting pop-unders on my site. $2.50 per thousand is a very small amount for my integrity.
I’ll stick with Text Links Ads.
Just wanted to give a big shout-out and thank-you-very-much to my advertisers and supporters:
Thanks! You help pay the bills, and it’s much appreciated.
Yesterday I bought 27 books from Amazon – mostly from the marketplace. Why not? The book are almost new, and they’re easily half off or less.Today I got a notice that a book I bought via the marketplace was previously sold.
No biggie – I just went back to Amazon, chose the next available seller for the book, and bought it again.Here’s the deal: when Amazon sends out that kind of email, they should include a link to re-purchase. That would probably increase their sales from people whose purchases are no longer available.And would make an already very usable store even more so.
