Digital Marketing (3)

Posts Tagged ‘Digital Marketing’

If Twitter Had A Fairy Godmother…

Wednesday, January 13th, 2010

It would be nice if there was a Twitter intervention service.

I’m thinking of something like a fairy godmother that would step in and gently correct those misguided businesses that are out there shouting.

Alright, cue bad sitcom dream sequence…

—–

@newtosocialmedia: Right Now! 50% off every single thing from our summer stock! Check it out http://snip.li/026a07 #michaeljackson

@therealfairygodmother: @newtosocialmedia you’re doing it wrong, dear.

@newtosocialmedia: @therealfairgodmother Thanks for the RT love! 50% off every single thing from our summer stock! Check it out #britney

@therealfairygodmother: @newtosocialmedia I’ve cut you off. ur tweets aren’t going anywhere right now.

@newtosocialmedia: @therealfairygodmother what? #haiti #google

@therealfairygodmother: ur tweets aren’t going anywhere. except to me. and stop using those hashtags.

@therealfairygodmother: that’s the first lesson : – )

@newtosocialmedia: I don’t understand #tcot

@therealfairgodmother: exactly.

@newtosocialmedia: ?

@therealfairygodmother: You ran in and started shouting before you had a chance to understand what it is ur doing.

@newtosocialmedia: I’m marketing my business.

@therealfairygodmother: You’re making an ass of yourself. And your business.

@newtosocialmedia: But how do I sell things to people using Twitter if I don’t, you know, sell things to people. Using Twitter. ?

@therealfairygodmother: That’s just it. You don’t.

@newtosocialmedia: Then why the hell am I doing this?

@therealfairygodmother: Good ?

@therealfairygodmother: Social media isn’t for direct sales. Or, it is if u want to spam. r u a spammer?

@newtosocialmedia: No. I just want people to know about my business.

@therealfairygodmother: Awesome. That’s a great place to start. What’s the best way to talk about your business?

@newtosocialmedia:
Radio?

@therealfairygodmother: lol no. If you went to a party, and someone asked you what you did, would you tell them everything they could get for 50% off?

@newtosocialmedia:
No. I’d tell them what I did.

@therealfairygodmother: Right. And what if they asked you where the best coffee was near you?

@newtosocialmedia:
I’d tell them.

@therealfairygodmother: Right again. And what if they told you about the bad day they were having? Would you give them your specials?

@newtosocialmedia:
No, I’d probably tell them that joke about the mother-in-law who dies and she’s talking to St. Peter and he asks her to name her sins.

@therealfairygodmother: Okaaaaaay.

@therealfairygodmother: What I mean is, you’d have a conversation, right?

@newtosocialmedia:
Right.

@therealfairygodmother: Well, that’s what Twitter is. A way to have conversations. Some of those conversations will be about what you do. Some won’t.

@therealfairygodmother: But you can’t choose all the time. That’s selling. And selling isn’t having a conversation. It’s selling.

@newtosocialmedia:
And Twitter isn’t about selling. It’s about having conversations, meeting people who have some interest in me, and vice-versa.

@therealfairygodmother: Now you’re getting it! Nice job. I’m going to put you back in the stream now. Go use what you’ve leaned.

@newtosocialmedia:
Cool. #superbowl

@therealfairygodmother: : – ( alright, let’s talk about hashtags first…

Tags: content, Digital Marketing, Social Media, twitter
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Social Media Stragglers Get Skewered

Tuesday, January 12th, 2010

It’s January. 2010. Time to step things up.

If you’re a small business, a destination, an event, you’ve got to get on the ball. You need a social media plan.

Because you can’t be one of those people that says, “We need to be on Facebook,” or, “Better start Twittering,” or, “We need to ‘do’ social media.”

You really can’t. It wasn’t okay before, either. But now it’s totally out of the question. You must change.

There are more reasons why than I could even go into. But I will say that everything about digital marketing has changed, and it will never go back. Keep up or get left behind.

And before you start, you have to plan.

Here are four quick ways to start planning for digital marketing today, pokey…

-Learn Jumping into social media without learning about how to use it it is a lot like every single item here. You can do some pretty serious damage to your brand just screwing around. So learn a little about the parts and pieces before you run in shouting about your company.

-Plan Here’s how you end up with an online billboard instead of a communication engine: don’t plan. Can you imagine going through the whole process of building your online marketing, only to have something completely useless at the end of it? Wait. A lot of you don’t have to imagine it.

-Prepare Not the same as planning. Preparation comes when your plans are in the works. What will you do when your plan for digital marketing is launched? That’s what you’re preparing for. One big preparation tip: Put one person in charge. Nothing suffers as much from committee creep as social media.

-Listen So you’re ready to jump in and start friending and poking and tweeting the crap out of the place. Great. The best way to start is to shut up and listen. Social media is a big cocktail party. Get a feel for the conversation. Hell, find the conversation. It’s worth taking the time to listen before you go around shouting; it might encourage you to actually use social media in a way people appreciate.

Which is to say, being social.

Tags: content, Digital Marketing, marketing strategy, Social Media
Posted in Social Media | No Comments »

Best Ideas Of The Week

Friday, January 8th, 2010

It’s Friday once again, and time to roll out the best ideas of the week.

One note here- these are the best ideas for our week. That doesn’t mean all of this stuff came out last week. Sorry if that’s misleading at all. But a good idea is a good idea. Let’s just use the time frame as context, not constraint.

Sound good? Awesome.

-Here’s a link that was intended for the holidays, but really is worth checking out regardless of the time of year. It’s a list of 10 interesting talks from TED, a regular stop for thought provoking video of thought provoking people.

-And in that same line of thought, why give up all of the “best of” lists just because New Year’s is over? Here’s one worth reading from Inc. Magazine. Come on, there’s nothing going on until, like, Valentine’s day.

-Chris Brogan has good ideas pretty regularly. This week, I thought he really nailed an idea I like to visit over and over again with partners- how relationships improve sales.

-Would you like to check out the evolution of the website? Here it is- booneoakley, only on youtube. Something like this might not be right for you. But it could be. Which is why it’s there. So cool.

-Finally, here’s something that falls squarely in the “word geek” category. Cliff’s Notes (yes, the ones you used in high school with the bumble bee yellow and black covers) now produces the classics in manga. For those who aren’t familiar, manga is a wildly popular form of comic book from Japan. You know, with the kids.

Anyway, hope you liked these links. We’ll be collecting them again next week, so let us know if there’s something you’d like to see here.

Tags: blogs, books, content, content marketing, Digital Marketing, motivation, Pat Strader, Social Media
Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Why Digital Marketing Matters

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

I just got a note from a partner thanking us for introducing him to social media.

How cool is that?

Actually, I can tell you exactly how cool it is: Very. Totally. Super. Way. It’s actually Ice Cold.

Here’s why: I spend part of my day reading the biggest and best marketing blogs. These are posts written by brilliant folks who have defined digital marketing in some way.

They are the game changers. It’s fascinating to have at my fingertips the tools, the tips, and (most importantly) the thinking that goes into what they do. I constantly try to steal as much as I can from them.

I’m not one of those guys.

At least, not yet. I’ve got some great ideas about digital marketing, mainly the content side of things. But it’s going to be a while before the book comes out (titles, anyone?).

One of the advantages, as I see it, to being one of “those guys” is this: you don’t have to convince anyone to listen to you. People are either interested, or they’re not. (Disclaimer: Those people work their asses off saying things worth listening to. There’s a difference.)

In other words, game changers aren’t getting the call unless businesses are, in a big way, already on board. CEOs like the tune, and want the whole album. Or MP3. Or insert your own metaphor that doesn’t suck as bad as mine.

Not so with a lot of small businesses.

As marketing changes, small business owners are (correctly) suspicious of the Next Big Thing. They don’t have teams of marketers doing research for them; they’re running most of the business by themselves, keeping all the plates spinning at once (that metaphor’s a little better).

And people hate change. That’s a given. Change in business is an efficiency vs. value equation. Is it more efficient to stay the course, or is the value of the coming change worth the struggle of getting on board?

I got to ask Chris Brogan a question about this on an online radio show not long ago. It was something like, “Hey, Chris. Thanks for taking my question. You’re brilliant. (I didn’t actually put that stuff in, but it was implied.) What do you do when you work with a company that you have to work to convince about the value of social media?”

Honestly, he was stumped. He good natured-ly said something like, “That doesn’t really happen.” And I know what he meant. But it was a case of same planet, different worlds.

Because that happens all the time. Just because we work in digital marketing doesn’t mean we don’t have to sell the idea of digital marketing, social media, content strategy, and the rest. And in order to do that, there’s a lot of education that goes on. Both ways.

So, when I get a note like I did this morning, it means there’s one more business that’s joining the conversion. One more business that’s listening to what its customers have to say.

Another business that’s being more than its marketing.

Man, that’s a great feeling.

Have any notes like that one to share?

Tags: business relationships, content, Digital Marketing, marketing strategy, partnerships, Social Media
Posted in Digital Marketing | No Comments »

Spoiler Alert: Social Media Dies In 2010

Monday, December 28th, 2009

Kind of. It’s a semantics thing. Talking about “social media” will ID you as an outsider. More on that in a bit.

I love end-of-year lists as much as I love new year’s predictions. I think it’s worth a little reflection -hey, we just went around the sun- and history’s a great teacher. Plus, you can check in on what brilliant people are thinking, which is always a good way to spend time.

Now’s the time to make (spot on) preditctions for the new year…

-”Social Media” will lose it’s distinction. In 2010, the internet is social media. The medium thrives, but the name will distinguish active participants from newbies.

-Content Strategy will be a touchstone for good digital marketing. If your content is the substance of who you are online, your strategy determines how it will all walk and talk in any online medium. Why is this new? Because before 2010, very few people planned for it.

-Video is going to be more important than it used to be, which is to say, pretty damn important. Good marketers are going to have interesting video to post, in lots of places.

-Search engine optimization is going to be more varied, more interesting, and more demanding than ever. With all of the avenues that social search is opening, SEO once again will be the digital discipline that’s needed by everyone, and understood by few.

-Nearly every online business will have some sort of regularly refreshed content. Either blogs or microblogs will define how well business know their customers. More determined businesses will create more ways to connect (podcasts, slidesharing, or the aforementioned video).

-The biggest challenge for businesses online will be how they’ll use those tools to distinguish themselves. The ones that try to please everyone will fail, or at best, not improve. The ones that create their own voice in a space that’s crowded with voices will reach their goals.

-Whoever gives the most will win. This has long been the information age; it’s now becoming the free information age. It’s not a huge stretch from where we’ve been. Everyone wants to give away good information about what they do. The success of your information will be determined by how easy it is to get, and how reliable you are when you give it.

Well, that’s what’s on my mind. What’s on yours?

Tags: content, content strategy, Digital Marketing, online reputation management, Social Media
Posted in Digital Marketing | No Comments »

Best Ideas Of The Week

Friday, December 18th, 2009

Friday seems like a good time to reflect.

That’s what this new feature on the Matterhorn blog is about. Pat and I are online a lot, of course. And we stumble on some pretty cool stuff throughout the course of a week.

There’s a lot of things that we see that we’d like to write whole posts about. So we do. But other things don’t fit for one reason or another (usually a time shortage). That’s what the Best Ideas Of The Week is for.

Enjoy…

“This I Believe” is an amazing series of short radio essays from people across the spectrum of American life, many famous, some not. Here’s one by movie and TV producer Brian Grazer about leaving your comfort zone. And surfing.

One of our favorite thinkers and marketers, Seth Godin released an ebook called “What Matters Now”. It’s available for free download, and is the kind of thing you really want to share with as many people as you can.

We’re big believers in quality content, partly because of Joe Pulizzi (@JuntaJoe on Twitter). He’s been writing about how to use content strategically for a long time on his blog. This week, he posted a list of 100 predictions for 2010 on content marketing and social media. These are thoughts from some of the best and brightest; it’s well worth a look.

If you’re an iphone user, you probably need the type-’n-walk app. Amazing that this didn’t come out earlier.

18 minutes well spent is a big deal in the age of the internet two-point-whatever. Robert Ballard, an oceanic explorer with too many discoveries to name, gives a fascinating talk about the new age of ocean exploration, and how much left there is to know about 3/4 of the planet. It’s the kind of thinking that gets you thinking.

Finally, if you’ve never heard John Henry Faulks’ Christmas story, you owe it to yourself to gather up your loved ones and have a listen.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from Matterhorn.

Tags: business relationships, content, dec_14, Digital Marketing, marketing strategy, Pat Strader, Social Media
Posted in Digital Marketing, Partnership, Social Media | No Comments »

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