Going Digital

GOING DIGITAL

Tools for the New Age Marketer

For years, marketing has been done traditionally through direct selling and advertising on trimedia – print, TV and radio.  When out-of-home (OOH) advertising was introduced, marketers reformulated their marketing mix to include billboards, transit ads and street signs to be visible to more customers in less time and less cost.  As I recall, during my days working for an Ad agency, OOH was still in its infancy. Advertising was mainly done on mainstream TV, Radio and Print and those that are seen in Light Boxes, Bus Waiting Stations and Public Transportation were considered rogue or guerilla style marketing. However, those are days gone old.

Since technology keeps on growing and evolving, creating more digital distribution channels that can reach more consumers in a more timely, relevant and personal fashion, advertising through mobile phones and the Internet have received much preference from majority of marketers today – this is called DIGITAL MARKETING. For most of us, we actively use our emails to correspond and send information. A huge majority of society has forgotten to use traditional or “snail mail” since the internet came about.

I truly believe that any innovation brought about by creativity and out of the box ideas are born due to demand, and this has been the life blood of marketers in general as we see today. As St. Peterian Marketers, the following are suggestions of how to utilize current technology that could easily translate into sales going above and beyond one’s quota.

For this month, I would like focus in on maximizing the usage of these modern instruments in terms of Sales and Marketing. For introductions, let me capture your attention on a few glaring facts that would surprise and excite you about the web in general.

Pinoy Facts

We Pinoy’s do know that TXTing is our favorite past time. We use it 24/7 for work and play. If you are like me, my cellphone is next to bedside table like an invisible umbilical cord that is attached wherever I go, even in my sleep. Aside from the mobile communication, a growing number of Filipinos do actively participate on web activities either for emails, information, gaming and networking.

Many of us have our own nook in the web either in Friendster or Facebook where we interact and socialize with our friends, families and associates. This is called Social Networking.

According to Media in Mind TM 2006…

1. There are about 20 million Filipinos who access the web everyday
2. 75% percent log on to an internet café, while 19% access them in schools
3. As our population is relatively young, a huge portion is dedicated to internet gaming (as seen in most internet café’s)
4. Drop in print media such as newspapers and glossy magazines contribute circulation loss and ad reduction to free news on the web wherein Ad spending is allocated elsewhere

Where Internet is often used (Nielsen Media Index 2008)

Here are some additional facts from Nielsen Media Index of 2006-2008 that may shed light on the increase demands for below the line activities.

1. Radio, DVD’s, Billboards, Cinema and Internet have even or growth indicators that Filipinos often participate and listen to.
2. Steady decline on TV and Print in the past 2 years of the survey
3. There are indicators that the market seeks other alternatives than the norm. Innovation and creativity play a vital role

Pinoy Activities on the Web

Aside from email usage “gaming” is another popular web past time at 45% (Nielsens Media Index of 2008) perhaps mainly due to the youth populous of the nation supplemented by numerous internet café’s where internet is cheap and accessible.

For marketers, advertising on known traditional media is no longer the norm. We have to explore other below the line platforms to get our message across. In recent years, television, radio and print have been dropping steadily as measured by Nielsen Media index of 2006 (see graph below)

Ad Agencies, Marketers and companies seek newer and more innovative ways in bridging the communication gap with the audience. Relatively, internet and mobile usage seems to be the growing segments that provide some opportunity among various media platforms available.

Some Digital Marketing Examples…

1. Email Marketing/Email Blasting

Email Marketing uses this opportunity to send an advertising or promotional message to a targeted audience using a mailing list or database.  Email Blasting can reach a large number of people in just a click of the ‘Send’ button and compared with direct mail or printed newsletters, email is less expensive.    A great example is when you access your yahoo email account (I am pretty sure, you have one) located at the right hand side of your screen are Ads that push their content and message in an email. But beware…

Push emails can lead to Email Blasting (don’t we hate those, personally I do!) Make sure that your mailing list has consented to receiving your promotional emails otherwise you are guilty of spamming.  According to Wikipedia, spam is the abuse of electronic messaging systems (including most broadcast media, digital delivery systems) to send unsolicited bulk messages indiscriminately). Spamming in Marketing has an adverse effect rather than sending a good connection with your target, spams result to annoyance leaving a bad taste in one’s mouth offsetting the real motivation and objective one’s program. Ergo, use with prudence and discretion.

2. SMS

A few years ago, when part of my job was to use SMS as a medium for advertising, we have utilized SMS as one of the below the line activities for companies and individuals to market their service and product cheaply. Hence, the Philippines being known as the TXTing Capital of the World, usage of this medium is but obvious to most advertisers. On the average, Filipinos send 400 million text messages a day.  Like Email Blasting, SMS is direct, immediate, time saving and cost effective. It makes customers and business available to each other 24/7.  SMS ads can also be personalized (i.e. using images in MMS) to suit and appeal more to your target market segment.

Telecommunication companies are highly regulated and have set guidelines for the entire telecommunications industry.  SMS ads must always have the consent and permission of the recipient and contain instructions for opting out of the marketing communication otherwise can be considered as spam. SMS ads should be within these regulations otherwise the company/individual might be sued for committing such violations.

Furthermore, mobile ads are normally limited to 160 characters of text and 3MB of images or audio/video files. Nowadays, SMS ads, push and pull messages are done by content providers or aggregators licensed by the big mobile operators. (source from HAS Communications)

3. Blogs and Forums

Most of us are familiar with websites that are a wealth of information of almost any topic known to man. However, a sub-category of websites are known as blogs and forums that have interactive tools creating dialogue between consumers and audience.  Most modern companies use blogs to relay information and explain about their products and services to their user community and sometimes become information resources. They are also an excellent way of getting feedback if one’s products and services meet the demands of consumers. It is also one way of widening your social network as blogs and forums cut across various interests, professions and hobbies from all walks of life. Usually, blogs create engagement with the reader or audience in a participative manner enabling them to give feedback immediately. Many trends and news information begin on blogs nowadays and snowball from there. Blogs and forums should be taken with caution. As they are public information, hence a bad comment could be easily translated to bad publicity snowballing into a media disaster.

4. Social Media

Social media refers to websites that publish user-generated content.  Two of the top four websites on the Internet today are social media sites namely Youtube and Facebook.   With FB alone you can create buzz   (viral marketing) and it building relationships with customers and potential clients.  You can also link your social web pages to your corporate/personal web site to generate more traffic. Last year alone, the Marketing Department of St. Peter ventured into the usage of Facebook with the Pink Casket as the primary focal point. We used our own photos and others inside the Pink Casket during St. Peter DeathCare Week. This social experiment proved to be a huge success with over a hundred of Pink Casket photos across Facebook transcending to Television news clips, and foreign news headlines.

Conclusion

With society and the environment moving at a frenzied pace, the ways of communicating to everyone get more varied and deeper. No can say what’s the next best thing in terms of utilizing technology for communication and marketing means. As we speak, Apple just released, the iPAD the next breakthrough in the line of MAC products addressing the need for ebooks, internet access, presentations and applications. Would I buy it? Perhaps. In the same manner when I switched to using an iPhone. I may be a hardcore book reader but reading on a digital pad may take sometime getting used to.

Technology as exemplified wit mobile phones, computers, the iPAD and others. The trick is to adopt to the situation and evolve with it. As a Marketer, let us use these tools than conform with social and environmental changes to our advantage-representative of the New Age Marketer for the 21st century.

Sources:

Media in Mind TM 2006

Nielsens Media Index 2006, 2008

Wikipedia (definition SPAMMING)

HAS Communication – SMS Messaging

M Ads 2008

[Via http://punkmarketing.wordpress.com]

What Self-Published Authors Can Learn from Big Publishers

Self-publishing is on the rise. Arsen Kashkashian, the buyer at the great independent Colorado store Boulder Book Store (which we know as Boulder Books) reported on Twitter that self-published books account for more than 1% of sales. “Many look like books from major houses,” said Arsen. “We have three, four, five authors coming in almost everyday to get their books on our shelves. We charge a fee; still they come.”

How far will this trend go? Will traditional publishers disappear? Certainly some will, but we don’t think that this marks the end of traditional publishing—but publishers had better be nimble.

One thing big publishers do well is cultivate audiences and maintain sales channels (i.e. distributing books to the marketplace, either directly to readers, or indirectly through retailers). Self-published authors can do the former through a robust speaking schedule and online presence. The latter is tougher, though a lot can be accomplished by tirelessly doing events, getting in catalogs (which can mean paying), and selling online.

Publishers are good at the nuts and bolts that require special expertise: editing and development, design, production, distribution, pricing, channel management, marketing, and sales. A self-published author would be wise to invest in some equivalent of these roles, since no one person, no matter how talented or brilliant, can do everything well. 

[Via http://authorenablers.wordpress.com]

If This Is How You Determine Who You Follow On Twitter, You're Doing It All Wrong.

Screenshot from justunfollow.com ’s landing page. Great for people who use the service as a popularity contest – “What! You don’t wanna follow me?! FINE. I won’t follow you!”

You can follow me on twitter: @connectwithcoop. I may follow you back if you provide some sort of value to the conversations, if not, don’t expect me to follow you just to be nice.

Thank you for connecting,

Cooper

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Hey, if you enjoyed what you’ve read here today you may want to subscribe to my blog  (click image) to receive future updates automatically as they are published.

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[Via http://connectwithcooper.wordpress.com]

How Social Media (probably) Got a Small Hotel into the NY Times

No other tune could accompany this post as well as Ella Fitzgerald’s rendition of There’s a Small Hotel from the album The Rodgers and Hart Songbook Volume 2. Check out the rarely-heard verse! Hit the play button below, or if you’re getting this by email, visit the blog to listen.

 

Today my RSS feed coughed up a New York Times article by Susan Dominus about the joys of www.foursquare.com. Read the article or go on the website to learn about Foursquare. That’s not the point of this post.

Susan Dominus met one of her sources for the article at the Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington Ave between 47th and 48th. From my experience, the choice of venue might be no coincidence. And it represents the power of social media.

First let me say that, in my opinion, the Roger Smith is one of the coolest unsung spots in NY City. Its president is talented Connecticut sculptor James Knowles. The property is maybe the last remaining property of his wife’s family’s hotel holdings. The couple has lovingly embraced the Roger Smith, renovated it and given it one of the most delightful personalities in all NY hotel-dom.

I first met Jim Knowles in the early 1990s through a client Joe Scott, founder of upscale Connecticut landscape design firm Glen Gate, who engaged Jim to create an award for his most creative designers. At the time, Jim hosted Monday evening starving artist dinners in the penthouse of the Roger Smith. They were unspeakably charming and so supportive of the New York arts community.

Over time, I’d stop in there to view the artwork on display and noticed that the hotel was succeeding in attracting international visitors. But I will go out on a limb and say that it has become uber-popular with home town folk since social media guru Chris Brogan has made it his official NY stopover.

Chris tweets about the Roger Smith to his almost 125,000 Twitter followers – including me — and frequently mentions the hotel in blog and newsletter posts. So when a New York Times reporter doing a story on the website Foursquare.com hooks up with interviewee “Damien Basile, a 29-year-old social media consultant, and several of his Foursquare-happy friends”, it stands to reason that this person likely learned about the Roger Smith from a Chris Brogan post and might well be wanting to establish Foursquare mayor-dom and badges at Chris’ NY hotel of choice. (Again check out Foursquare or the Times article to interpret the aforegoing.)

Makes sense to me. But more important, and what I’d share with clients, is that recognition in the social media realm has real dollars and cents value. The fact that Chris has established authority and endorses the Roger Smith likely makes it a destination for social media types and probably led to the NY Times recognition. Chris…you’ve proved it before, and if I’m not all wet here, this proves it again.

Obviously, I’m connecting the dots, but if somehow Damien Basile sees this post, please let me know if I’m right or paddling in the wrong pond. Or if Chris Brogan learned about the Roger Smith from Damien or other NY social media folk I’ll reverse, of course. But it was one of those tasty moments that seemed more than coincidence. And Chris’ endorsement of the Roger Smith certainly can’t hurt – regardless of who learned about it from whom.

[Via http://newprwordsandmusic.com]

It's all about perception

With marketing, perception is more important than reality.

For instance, there has persisted for some years a widespread perception (based mostly on marketing hype) that Toyota and other Japanese autos are in many ways superior to American autos.

I never bought into that notion, which I always felt was based more on perception than on solid facts.

Want a job in Toyota marketing department?

And now we have irrefutable facts that (to me, anyway) prove that Toyota autos are not what they are cracked up to be –

• To date, more than 8.5 million Toyota vehicles have been recalled (by far the largest auto recall in history).

• The four separate recall programs are not because of minor problems. Every one is due to factory defects of major, critical components that, during malfunction, can cause a driver to lose control of a vehicle –

1. Accelerators that arbitrarily stick (even at high speed) and cannot be unstuck;

2. Accelerators that arbitrarily get hung up on floor mats;

3. Brakes that arbitrarily stop working;

4. Drive shafts that arbitrarily crack and fall off of vehicles, causing the driver to lose control.

• Mr. Toyoda (that really is his name), the highest exec for Toyota, has drawn sharp criticism around the world, and especially in Japan, for his mishandling of the whole fiasco.

Nobody knows for certain how the Big Toyota Recall mess will all play out, but to me it clearly proves my point that perception generally means more than reality.

Yes, I know there are many who can provide stories about his or her amazing Toyota, Honda, Nissan, or Mazda vehicle that has been such a wonderful, reliable vehicle. And when folks tell these stories they always talk about how the vehicle has over 120,00 or more miles on it, etc. etc., etc.

To which I say: “Big deal. So what?”

There are just as many owners of Chevys, Fords, Buicks, Chryslers, Jeeps, Hummers, Cadillacs, etc. that can provide the same sort of stories. Just take a random look around you while you drive anywhere around any U.S. city or town and notice the large number of GM, Ford, and Chrysler (or Dodge or Plymouth) vehicles that are 15 years and older still on the road.

Consider my own story. Here’s a list of GM vehicles my wife and I have owned since the late 1980s — a 1986 Olds Cutlass, a 1986 Olds Ciera, a 1989 Olds Ciera; a 1986 Chevy Suburban; a 1995 Geo Prizm; a 2001 Chevy Impala; a 2003 Saturn Ion; and a 2005 Chevy Equinox.

Now, get this track record –

When I traded in every single one of these GM vehicles, each one had more than 120,000 miles on it. And guess what — NOT ONE OF THE VEHICLES HAD EVER BEEN IN ANY SHOP FOR ANY TYPE OF MAJOR ENGINE REPAIR. The only type of repair work done on any one of the GM vehicles we drove were the typical routine jobs that are common to all vehicles — things like replacing a battery, or replacing worn out belts or hoses, or replacing turn-signal bulbs. And I was so glad I drove a GM vehicle the few times I’ve had to make minor repairs, because there’s never a concern about finding parts. GM parts are readily available nearly everywhere, and almost always cost less than equivalent foreign brand auto parts.

We are still driving the 2003 Saturn Ion, which is now approaching 140,000 miles and “runs like a top” (as the saying goes).

Wonder how many auto owners are able to match that sort of performance — 8 GM vehicles, each one providing more than 120,00 miles of reliable service, with no major repair work (just typical, routine maintenance).

I remember when I was about to purchase the 2001 Chevy Impala. I did a lot of Internet research, and had narrowed my choices down to two vehicles — either a Chevy Impala, or a Toyota Camry. I chose the Impala, and here’s why — the Impala’s sticker price was less, the Impala got the same gas mileage as the Camry, the Impala had more interior space and more cargo space, and the Impala had a smoother ride. Boy, am I ever glad I chose the Impala, which turned out to be perhaps the best vehicle we ever owned. The only maintenance it ever required was regular oil changes. That’s it. Period. It gave us nearly 130,000 miles of trouble-free service before we traded it in.

The original tires on that Impala lasted for more than 90,000 miles. When I put new tires on it, there was still enough tread on those tires to perhaps push it to 100,000 miles, but I did not want to push it. The tire store owner was amazed that the tires were the original tires and had so many miles on them. “But, then again, in some ways it does not surprise me,” he said. “That model of Chevy Impala is one of the most perfectly balanced vehicles ever made, and I’ve heard so many stories about what a great car it is.”

And so, while perception may continue to sway many in what they purchase, I, for one, always try to base my purchases on solid facts and personal research (that’s also why I have purchased only Apple Macintosh computers for many years, and why I stick with Nikon digital SLR camera equipment).

[Via http://rnvanya.wordpress.com]

Why scoreboards matter

Humans are compelled to count. We count everything. Days, weeks, months, years, birthdays, money in the bank, salaray levels, years of experience. It’s part of the human condition, even to the evolution of civilization.

As startup entrepreneur we need to let our people count something. Whether it’s the savings they made or they friends they have, there needs to be a way for them to keep track. So our people know they have made progress. Commerce is an anthropological game of football. So we must keep score. But it must go beyond the corporate scoreboard of profit, share price, turnoever, number of employees… it has to be an audience focused score. Like followers on twitter. It has to be about them, not us, it’s how humans roll.

[Via http://startupblog.wordpress.com]

New marketing articles from CEO Jeff Rutowski

I have just published five new articles to help you with your 2010 marketing efforts. The keys to marketing are planning, time management, evaluation and understanding of your goals and taking action. The best plans will wither without action.

Selling your products and services is all about the benefits that they provide to your clients and prospects. When the ask, “What’s in it for me?” do you have the right answer? In Features versus Benefits Marketing, Jeff Rutowski shows you how to discover the benefits of your products and services through self-interrogation.

If you don’t have a marketing plan or if you think that you don’t have the time to create one, I have created the tool for you. My free mini e-Book (it’s a mini e-Book because you’re too busy for a long one) can help you propel your marketing to the next level. The mini e-Book is titled Marketing Plans That Create Profits: 6 Marketing Plan Quick Tips On How To Create Powerful Marketing Plans In One Hour. That’s right, an hour and it’s free. If you don’t have a marketing plan, here’s a great tool to get you started.

Time can be a friend or a foe. In Time Management For Marketing Business Planning, I provide 5 practical do-it-today time management tools for immediate implementation.

Understanding Prospects discusses intelligence gathering for your target industry and market. Stay on top of industry changes so you can be ahead of the game. Government and Trade publications can inform you as to new regulations, providing you with new opportunities to address new issues, fears and concerns

In Evaluate Your Marketing Plan, I show that marketing planning is the process of defining who you are trying to reach, discovering the best way to reach them, and delivering a message that will help them. The key to business success is a marketing calendar that uses a targeted, rational approach. These are practical tips that you can put into practice today. The key to success for any marketer is to take action.

The best marketing plans will fail if you and your business fail to launch. Marketing requires consistency and frequency and ACTION. Implementing Your Marketing Campaign gives you specific steps to take to get your marketing plan launched. Successful business people are action oriented and your marketing plan will succeed only if you follow-through.

Please share this post and the articles with friends and colleagues. Let’s discuss your successes, questions, and challenges here.

[Via http://businesslistpro.wordpress.com]