Make Money Online

By the end of 2009, more than 4.6 billion people had mobile phones, according to the International Telecommunications Union. That’s almost 70 percent of the world’s population. In Europe and Asia, mobile phones are already standard means for consumers to conduct business and make purchases. North America is just now catching up.

Seamless web integration is fast becoming standard on mobile phones, and networks are being pushed to improve data communications speed and capabilities so they can remain competitive. That’s why 2010 could be a banner year for mobile marketing.

A recent blog post by two mobile strategists, Dan Neumann and Allison Mooney, offers a leading edge look at where mobile marketing could be headed this year.  Here are just three of the trends they say will be shaping the way marketers interact with consumers:

Localization

In a previous post, I spoke about the steady rise of interest in Foursquare, which bases its success on users checking in with each other from specific locations, like bars and restaurants. Neumann and Mooney suggest this is just the beginning of a whole range of location-based services that will open up new opportunities to marketers who want to influence local buying behavior.

Think about the possibilities. You could offer mobile coupons keyed to local stores, provide tools that allow consumers to comparison shop, and even allow consumers to interact with digital signage in store windows, using their phones to respond to ads submit messages or place orders. “Mobile will completely revolutionize the way local advertisers can connect with potential customers,” say Neumann and Mooney.

Applications

While branded applications will continue to be popular, Neumann and Mooney point out that the applications marketplace is already crowded. Marketers will need to find other ways to break through on the handset. The developing trend will be “in-app content” – the ability to develop ad-supported applications. Google is expected to be a big player – they acquired a mobile advertising network called AdMob and they’re “creating a competitive alternative business model for developers” to challenge the iPhone’s application superiority.

Social Media Integration

The cross-over of social media with mobile phones is a natural. The growth of Twitter, for example, has been driven by mobile tweeting. But the real future, according to Neumann and Mooney, is not just in consumers’ ability to interact with each other and offer feedback, but in how marketers react. “Smart marketers will do all they can to encourage and act on this real-time feedback. Whether brands carve out a dedicated mobile channel or simply rely on Twitter customer service, we’ll see more embracing the feedback loop.”

This is one bandwagon online marketers should be prepared to jump on in 2010.

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Making Mobile Matter

In his post about Foursquare last October, David Lewis said Foursquare had “some serious weaknesses,” but he admitted, “It’s worth keeping an eye on it.”

Well suddenly, Foursquare seems to be breaking out of its status as a cutesy, fun mobile-enabled game. It has just been discovered by the likes of Bravo TV, HBO, the History Channel, Warner Brothers, and Zagat, according to Advertising Age. The magazine says “These new deals represent an entertainment trifecta for Foursquare – network TV, cable TV and movie studios.”

It’s true that when big advertisers discover a new media channel, it tends to legitimize the channel for other advertisers. My last post about Pepsi snubbing Super Bowl ads in favor of Facebook speaks to that. So is this the beginning of Foursquare’s coming out party?

Obviously, Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley would like to think so. He sees entertainment brands as having significant potential for the company because of changes in viewer behavior. He believes consumers now watch shows on television “with computers on their laps or phones in their hands – multitasking while they watch, communicating about the content, or just killing time during commercials.”

This kind of behavior plays nicely to Foursquare’s shtick: users and friends checking in with each other from specific locations, making lists of favorites and sharing them, winning points for checking in, and winning badges for participating in new experiences. It all may sound a little juvenile, but think of it as a GPS-enabled Twitter combined with enticing rewards. Obviously, some very big advertisers are testing Foursquare to see if it will work for them. Exactly how these advertisers will use Foursquare, or benefit from it, is part of the test.

There are already some advertisers who are proving that Foursquare can pay off. Zagat, a guidebook that rates restaurants, is probably one of the better examples because what Zagat does fits so well with the concept of Foursquare. According to Advertising Age, “[Zagat] has populated five cities with tips that share their expertise – things like drink deals, the best times to dine, and what entrees to order. By checking in at Zagat-rated locations, users can unlock a new ‘foodie badge’ and those that frequent a place most often might be featured on Zagat.com…”

Zagat has an iPhone application that allows users to access content about and ratings of restaurants. It also offers the ability to make OpenTable reservations for those restaurants that accept them directly from the app. But Zagat’s Ryan Charles told Advertising Age that iPhone and other smartphone applications are just the beginning. Foursquare is “a natural progression. There is an obvious synergy between Zagat’s expertise in helping people make quick, informed decisions and Foursquare’s location-based platform.”

Will this latest buzz get Foursquare over the hurdle of being an intriguing if inconsequential technology? And will the current interest from big advertisers help transform Foursquare into a major player capable of displacing Twitter? It’s too soon to tell – but one way or the other, chances are Foursquare will become a player that online marketers will be have to take seriously.

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Foursquare, Seriously

Jeff Molander wrote a post on his blog about social media. I decided to write a response at ReveNews instead of my own blog because, frankly, it is more provocative here. Plus, this is the community that introduced us. And that is the point Jeff misses about social media: it’s about the community.

Mary, Mary, quite contrary

In his post Jeff wrote about Mary, a woman who chose not to hire Jeff or attend one of his speaking engagements. Jeff humbly accepted that Mary was right to reject Jeff based on her logic. Mary thought that Jeff did not tweet enough and, therefore, could not provide value to her on the topic of social media.

Jeff called out Mary for looking at the quantity of tweets which is a statistic and does not denote value. On this, I think that Mary is more correct than Jeff, even if she cannot or did not express why.

Well, there’s this Guy

Jeff gave a little detail on Guy Kawasaki’s use of Twitter. What he left out is that @guykawasaki is really just @alltop with each item tweeted and retweeted at least 3 times (often and unfortunately more). Guy added the @alltop account after I asked about his self-retweeting and started a heated debate that continues today.

@guykawasaki is widely followed. While it started out with stories that Guy himself probably found interesting, it now appears to be operated by the Alltop staff. It links to Alltop articles that give an inferior summary and often make it difficult to find the link to the information that sounded interesting in the tweet that got a follower to the page. Which begs the question if/when Guy leaves Alltop, who keeps @guykawasaki?

Guy’s third Twitter account is @guysreplies. This is the account that Guy tweets from. If you reply to @guykawasaki, oddly the reply back to you is from @guysreplies.

The problem here is that Guy isn’t present. He is not a part of his own community. His blog post that is the heated debate is a debate in the community but Guy is not a part of it. This is what Jeff should be talking about. Regardless of the amount of tweet volume, Guy is absent from his own twitter account, in his own community, on his own article.

It’s in the conversation

So why was Mary right and Jeff wrong about the quantity of Jeff’s tweets? Jeff lectures on social media but he is not a member of the community. He does not take part in the conversation. If Jeff finds articles that others have written, he rarely tells his Twitter followers about them. If Jeff is active in commenting on a blog post he thinks is provocative, he doesn’t tweet about it. To me (and I think to Mary), that shows that Jeff doesn’t get social media.

Jeff tweeted a link to an article about what 1-800-Flowers has done wrong on Facebook. That post criticizes 1-800-Flowers for not taking an active role in its community. The author writes that 1-800-Flowers has little more than Facebook posts of Monday, Wednesday and Friday contests and a stock answer to anyone who has a complaint. That is not showing your community that you care. That is not taking leading the conversation, let alone even taking part in it.

We can discuss metrics to measure success of a retailer’s social media campaign another time. The real issue Jeff should be looking at in order to counsel retailers is how a retailer can be an active member of its own community whether on its own pages or that of others.

The beginning & end

The tweet that got me going on this was your ability to create meaningful biz outcomes w/ social media rests in your ability to act on this single realization. The single realization that I think you need is that to succeed in social media, you need to be active, proactive and a leader in your community. Hey, that’s no different than how people used to succeed in the brick-and-mortar world of days past.

[Author's note: I found Jeff's article via a tweet as I follow him on Twitter and then I read the article on his blog with a domain I used to own.]

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Taking an Active Role in Social Media for Your Business

The best marketing campaigns are rarely created, but instead are often found. And they’re out there waiting to be discovered.

In April 1999, an under the radar article in the Indiana Daily Student about an obese Indiana University coed hardly seemed like the genesis of a company’s 10-year advertising campaign, however; it    provided the basis for  resounding success for one company and has changed the landscape of the fast food industry as we know it.

And that is exactly what happened when Ryan Coleman wrote about an obese dorm mate and caught the right person’s eye. How exactly did this come about?

In his article Coleman wrote  that when this student  “registered for a class, he didn’t base his choice on professor or class time like most students. He based which classes to register on whether he could fit into the classroom seats.” What an emotional situation, one that is geared to spark an uncomfortable emotional reaction and empathy from the reader for the student in question for s getting himself into this situation.

But the story has a twist, one that involves this student having a serious medical scare  that prompted him to  lose some serious weight. Enter a new attitude and a new diet. Three months into his diet, he weighs in at 330 pounds, almost 100 pounds lighter. The pounds kept flying off…300, 275, 250, 225, 210. Believe it or not he got down to 180 pounds, a whopping 245 pound loss!

How did he do it? (The subsequent marketing campaign was so effective you probably already know this part of the story…)

Simple. He ate at Subway.  A lot. He developed his own diet based on Subway subs and stuck to it.

His name…Jared Fogle. You know him. The guy who had the 60-inch waist but now can fit his entire body into one pants leg. The guy who has been the centerpiece of Subway’s marketing campaigns for over a decade now. Yeah, that guy.

The first Jared ad ran on January 1, 2000 and soon the “Subway Diet” was featured on the news, on morning shows, in USA Today, on Oprah even! Sales for Subway began to boom and all because of an inspiring story that everyone can relate to on some level. The commercials were, and remain today, pretty simple. No fancy graphics or high-paid celebrities, although Jared himself is now a bit of a celebrity. Just Jared talking about how he lost weight and showing off the newest healthy sub.

Soon, every fast food chain under the sun began to offer healthier options and yet Subway remains at the top of the list in terms of people’s perceptions of healthy fast food, thanks in large part to the visual reminders they give us of Jared every so often.

How effective was Subway’s campaign?

According to data compiled by Compete in 2008 (the 10th year anniversary of the campaign being launched), Subway’s Fresh Buzz site which was launched to help customers engage with Jared and continues to provide diet and health information today, is 5x more likely to be visited by consumers who are focused on diet and health. More than any other national fast food chain, including McDonalds.

The great news for the rest of us is that every company has a Jared, someone whose emotional story about their brand or product makes for such a compelling argument to buy that customers can’t help but respond to message. . Everyone likes to be inspired and inspiration leads to action.

Jared’s story is not about healthy eating or losing weight. It’s about a guy who reaches his potential and overcomes the odds, with the help of a certain product.

You have a Jared you just need to find him. Ask your customers to share their stories, it helps increase their since of affinity to your brand by tying their story to yours.  Get real stories from real people. It works in the online world just as well as the offline world.

Jared’s story is a vivid reminder that great marketing ideas are rarely created, but found. Go find yours today!

Credit:
Finding Your Inner Jared: A Must for Any Company

In the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) world, when Procter & Gamble (P&G) makes a move, every one of its competitors take notice. That’s because P&G is the world’s branding powerhouse, owner of 300 brands with such legendary names as Crest, Gillette, Ivory and Tide.

P&G has long been known as a marketing innovator. The company was, of course, among the first sponsors of “soap operas,” but more recently, P&G has used every media imaginable to relentlessly push its brands. That’s why it’s more than curious that P&G has been somewhat late to the social media party.

In fact, in November 2008, Ted McConnell, P&G’s general manager of interactive and innovation, told a conference in Cincinnati, P&G’s hometown, that he was anything but enthusiastic about Facebook. “What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend? …I don’t think everything every consumer says to someone else and writes down is somehow monetizable by the media industry,” McConnell said.

My, Ted, how things have changed. Little more than a year later, P&G just announced that it has opened a Silicon Valley office specifically to “help develop social-networking systems and digital-marketing capabilities,” according to Advertising Age. Venture capitalist David Hornik, who met with P&G executives, reported that “P&G’s explicit goal for 2010 is to assure that each of its brands has a meaningful presence on Facebook, and they are willing to pay dearly for that. …[P&G leaders] view Facebook as a must-have for digital advertising and brand building.”

When P&G does anything, it does it in a very big way, so this latest move is clearly signaling that social media is to be taken seriously by P&G – and therefore by the whole marketing industry, which follows its every move.

Interestingly, on the very same day that the P&G story broke, Advertising Age also  reported that Clorox (a P&G arch-rival) was seeking a full-time in-house legal counsel to focus on social media. This is yet another sign of how important social media has become to big marketers. A Clorox spokesman told Advertising Age:

“Social-media channels are a growing focus for consumer communication and stakeholder engagement for our brands and company. As a newer communication channel, the application of existing laws to this medium is evolving. For those reasons and the rapid pace of communication in the Web 2.0 world, we’re seeking an attorney to focus on social media as well as talent rights.”

Maybe it doesn’t seem like such big news to hear that Procter & Gamble and Clorox are finally focusing on social media, but it matters. These guys are now drinking the social media Kool-aid. When you see companies of this size and stature going full-speed ahead with the likes of Facebook, you know mass adoption of Facebook as a business marketing medium for all CPG companies, and all marketers for that matter, is just around the corner.

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P&G Finally Embraces Facebook

At various times I, and my ReveNews colleagues have talked about Twitter as a sleeping giant when it comes to business usage. Google “Twitter business usage” and you’ll see that it’s a topic worthy of hundreds of articles and posts.

As 2010 unfolds, it seems likely that the business usage of Twitter will skyrocket. Why? For one thing it’s a way to reach huge numbers of people – Nielsen says Twitter had over 18 million visitors in December alone, a 579 percent increase from December 2008. For another, it’s one of the easiest, quickest, least expensive ways to get disseminate information, and that could mean gaining a significant competitive advantage.

A recent article in ADWEEK  gives us some inkling of where the business use of Twitter is headed. In the article, Brian Morrissey says businesses are now using Twitter as “a default content-syndication channel, pop-culture icon and real-time content source.” As a “real-time source of consumer-to-consumer recommendations,” says Morrissey, Twitter excels, and brands could leverage that ability to their benefit. “Retweets” have become the preferred virtual pass-along mechanism, meaning that a brand’s messaging can extend well beyond the original tweet.

We all know that the Coca-Colas of the world discovered Twitter long ago, but now the lesser-known brands are jumping on the Twitter-wagon. Morrissey cites the fact that even the most pedestrian brands have discovered the business benefits of Twitter. Two examples he mentions are Sweethearts candies and Tasti D-Lite.

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, NECCO (New England Confectionary Company) is adding “Tweet me” to its collection of imprinted sayings on Sweethearts, those silly little candy hearts. The best-selling Valentine candy has been around since the 1860s, so it’s nice to know Sweethearts can keep up with the times. NECCO has gone social, too, creating iPhone and web applications so users can tweet Sweethearts messages to friends.

Tasti D-Lite is a chain of low-fat frozen dessert treat stores that started in New York City and has expanded to New Jersey, Florida, Tennessee, Texas and just recently, Arizona. Morrissey says Tasti D-Lite has made Twitter “the backbone of a customer loyalty program. It lets users earn extra rewards points for broadcasting their purchasing activity on Twitter and mobile social network Foursquare.”

You wouldn’t necessarily associate candy or frozen desserts with Twitter – but that’s the point. Twitter is everywhere, and businesses large and small have figured out how to use it. Morrissey points out another key fact in the Twitter business usage explosion: “Twitter’s decision to open its application programming interface (API) has allowed brands to weave Twitter into campaigns, rather than have stand-alone Twitter strategies.” Aha, interactive integration – it’s just what every advertiser wants, isn’t it?

So now’s the time to ask yourself if you are making the best use of Twitter for your business.

Read more here:

Twitter, long the poster child for hype-heavy, profit-low Web 2.0 sites, may finally be seeing where the money is.

This week, Twitter started to roll out a business-friendly feature which may portend a direction of more corporate focused applications. With its new “contributors” feature, businesses are going to enable designated Twitter users to tweet on their behalf. Those updates would be labeled as being by a specific author.

The nitty-gritty behind what Twitter is doing is not the new feature, which is fairly benign, but what looks like to be the site’s first steps into a much more sophisticated system for business.

In screenshots of the new feature, Twitter offers a glimpse at its advanced settings, which allow businesses to offer enhanced levels of access for users.

But the settings also hint at a Twitter dashboard, which will ‘soon’ be available to users. This is where Twitter will find a selling point. If your business is able to access important analytics of the way other users interact with your tweets, you will be able to tap into quite a lot of valuable information.

Dial back to what Twitter has done up to this point, including enabling geolocation of Tweets and the list feature, and then you see how it adds up to the creation of a great storehouse of info for businesses. With these analytics, coupled with geo-tagged Twitter users, business will be able to see where clusters of followers or Retweets come, as well as where they are getting no traction. They may also be able to get very granular detail about followers, follower’s followers and so on.

This may be where Twitter comes in and tells businesses they can have this all for the low, low price for $X a month. Suddenly, for the geniuses behind Twitter, a business model.

And who knows where Twitter can go from here, once they show businesses that there is real data to be dug out of the 140-character service? Red tweets for Coca-Cola and blue tweets for Pepsi? There is much to be done with those few little words and Twitter is the only one to peek behind the curtain so far.

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Twitter for Business Services

With the launch of extensions for Google’s Chrome browser one of the most interesting and potentially troubling pieces of the Web has popped back into the picture: Google’s Sidewiki.

What is Sidewiki? It’s a creation by Google that allows comments by anyone on any Web site. Sounds innocuous enough, but in the hands of any lurker on the Web with a vendetta against a company or a competitor, it may send Web messaging into a tailspin.

Picture this: Someone running Sidewiki goes to your site looking to buy your product and on your homepage, in the Sidewiki window, is a comment by a rival on your high prices – with a link to their site. If you are a more controversial company or blogger, a systematic campaign could be build against you of Sidewiki commenters.

“Just like Google bombing, in an attempt to influence the top Google result for a specific search term, I suspect people will quickly master the art of Sidewiki bombing as they attempt to get their comment at the top of the Sidewiki comments on key pages,” wrote Adam Turner of ITWire.com.

When it was first launched earlier this year, Sidewiki caused a scare and a bit of unease, but failed to have gain much traction. The addition of it to the extensions of Google Chrome, which make for a one-click addition to your browser rather than the clunkier add-on to the Google Toolbar that it was, could see it grow in popularity.

Furthermore, Google has some rules built in to make sure that people play fair – in theory. According to its’ terms of service:

If you believe that someone is violating these policies, use the “Report Abuse” button within Sidewiki. We’ll review your report and take action if appropriate. Just because you disagree with certain material or find it to be inappropriate doesn’t mean we’ll remove it. We understand that our users have many different points of view, and we take this into consideration when reviewing reports of abuse. Although not all reports will result in removal, we do rely on our users to tell us about materials that may be violating our policies.

That’s tricky language to navigate: “We understand that our users have many different points of view, and we take this into consideration…”

Initial impact I think will be limited because, while Google dominates the world of search, its footprint with both Chrome and its apps are small, though influential. It would take a significant shift in user habits for Sidewiki to hit the mainstream. In essence it comes with the baggage that savvy Web users are going to be both aware of it and able to manipulate it. Ultimately Google might find limiting the manipulation of such an app in the wild, more trouble than it’s worth.

If you are a site owner, you need to be prepared for the baggage Google Sidewiki will bring and be prepared to spend additional time monitoring your brand on the web. Policing Sidewiki could become a daily routine for those who are sensitive about their brand’s image. The bottom line is that Google, not you, has ultimate control over what appears there and it, not you, will determine which comments to boot.

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Has Sidewiki Trouble Been Reignited?

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are behind us, but they were just the beginning of the holiday shopping season. Now is a crucial time for companies to book sales during an otherwise lackluster year. And this is the time of year when it pays to watch what major advertisers are doing.

There’s a marked increase in advertisers using a well-coordinated combination of print, television, and all forms of online media to get the biggest bang for their buck and to reach consumers in the media of their choice.

One example worth looking at is MasterCard’s current campaign. MasterCard is a different kind of advertiser because it is essentially a generic brand. There is no such thing as a pure MasterCard credit card – it must be paired up with a bank that provides the financial mechanism for providing credit and completing the credit transaction.

Still, MasterCard is in a perennial battle with its direct rival, Visa, and with American Express, for credit card supremacy. That’s why MasterCard has been running the “Priceless” campaign for years – to reinforce the brand image and encourage consumers to use MasterCard credit cards over others.

Now MasterCard is putting a new twist on the “Priceless” campaign by adding an interesting online app, the “MasterCard Priceless Gift Finder”.

A few weeks ago, MasterCard launched television and online ads that will run through Christmas, featuring football quarterback Peyton Manning and “How I Met Your Mother” actress Alyson Hannigan. The ads humorously address the importance of giving the right gifts and promote the MasterCard Priceless Gift Finder application as the way to do it.

The Gift Finder website is slick in its execution. Peyton and Alyson act as video guides, helping consumers find a perfect gift for a Facebook friend, or “for a friend who isn’t on Facebook.” The application connects directly with Facebook, so a user can bring their friends from Facebook to the Gift Finder, and use the Gift Finder to publish content to a user’s wall.

The application leads a user through a gift selection process by asking questions about the user’s gift recipient and then suggesting gifts to purchase via Amazon.com, the Gift Finder’s “featured” online store. Peyton and Alyson appear at various intervals during the selection process to liven things up. The application can be shared through a Facebook page, Twitter account, or via MySpace, Delicious, Digg, or StumbleUpon.

MasterCard takes this a giant step further with its “Priceless Picks” application for the iPhone. This free application lets iPhone users find “priceless things” – thousands of user-recommended priceless experiences, shops, and restaurants – share them with friends, and add their own “priceless picks.” This app perfectly integrates another channel, mobile, into the Gift Finder campaign.

Cheryl Guerin, a senior vice president with MasterCard Worldwide, told Brandweek magazine that the Gift Finder is designed to leverage the way a consumer shops: “The utility of the tool makes it easy to select these perfect gifts, while tracking a budget and managing a holiday shopping list using social media applications that are already a part of many shoppers lives.”

Expect to see more advertisers put media integration to effective use this holiday season.

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A Lesson in Media Integration

Books are a wonderful thing. With the variety of media available to us it is often easy to become oversaturated and forget to pick up a book. So to get your entrepreneurial spirit inspired and get you reading for the holidays, ReveNews is having our first annual book Giveaway.

From November 30th until December 19th, 2009 we will be giving away two books a day via the @ReveNews Twitter account.

Our picks for this holiday giveaway are:

Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith (interview by ReveNews’ own CT Moore)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Twitterville: How Businesses Can Thrive in the New Global Neighborhoods by Shel Israel

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod

Click here to view the embedded video.

Putting the Public Back in Public Relations: How Social Media Is Reinventing the Aging Business of PR by Brian Solis

Click here to view the embedded video.

Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion by Gary Vaynerchuk

Click here to view the embedded video.

Be the first to DM us on Twitter with the right answer to our trivia question, which will be about one of the authors, win the book of your choice from our five holiday picks.

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Get Inspired: ReveNews Book Giveaway

The 2009 Cone Consumer New Media Study, results of which were released on October 20, shows the continuing growth of consumer empowerment.

Cone, a strategy and communications agency that specializes in cause branding, looked only at users of “new media,” defined as “dialogue among individuals or groups by way of technology-facilitated channels” – social networks, blogs, games, message boards, and the like. Over one-third of the respondents use new media two or more times a week.

Highlights of the study include the following:

1.    Consumers are increasing their interaction with companies and brands online. Almost 80 percent of new media users interact with companies or brands via new media sites and tools. This is an increase of 32 percent from the 2008 study. More than one-third of users (37 percent) interact via new media at least once per week, up from about 25 percent last year. New media users “overwhelmingly believe companies or brands should not only have a presence in new media, but also interact with their consumers in this space,” says Cone. In addition, consumers “think more highly of companies or brands when they or their friends can interact with them in a new media environment.”

2.    Consumers believe they can influence businesses by voicing opinions online. Sixty-two percent of respondents believe they can influence business decisions by voicing opinions via new media channels. About one-quarter have offered their opinion on an issue or contacted a company directly. Consumers are also interested in and influenced by information they get online. A large majority of respondents (85 percent) want companies to tell them what is in products and how they are made. Three-quarters of new media users say new media channels are an effective way to learn about Corporate Responsibility efforts.

3.    Supporting causes is important to new media users. Seventy-nine percent of respondents believe companies and nonprofit organizations should use new media channels to raise money and awareness for causes. Eighty-five percent of respondents say new media provides them with an opportunity to learn about new issues. Eighty percent say new media provides another way to support their favorite causes. Sixty percent have used some form of online or new media to support a cause. However, only 18 percent of users have made a cash donation through new media. Why? Nearly 39 percent said they didn’t trust that their efforts would actually help the cause, and 31 percent said they’d rather support causes offline. While no single cause had a majority of attention, leading causes supported via new media include animal welfare (29 percent), health and disease (28 percent), education (23 percent), the environment (22 percent) and human rights/equal rights (21 percent).

New media users appear to be active, interested and engaged. They are influenced by information they get online – and they believe they can influence businesses by communicating with them online.

It is clear that Internet-savvy consumers have high expectations. They want businesses to use new media. This is good news for online marketers, but there is this cautionary note as well: Businesses need to be ever-vigilant about using new media appropriately, and they must be responsive to consumer inquiries and comments.

Read the rest here:
New Media Study Shows Increasing Consumer Empowerment

Last weekend, I flew Southwest Airlines for the first time. What really struck me about the trip, aside from the several hour delay,  was the tone of the Southwest staff. Here’s a quick sample from the flight attendant’s safety presentation:

“At this time, please pretend to pay attention as we go over the safety features of this plane. In case you haven’t been in an automobile since 1964, the seat belt is fastened by inserting the flat end into the buckle until it latches. If cabin pressure is lost, a yellow oxygen mask will drop from the ceiling. Affix the mask over your face and breathe normally (yeah right…you’ve seen Fight Club haven’t you?). In the case that this flight becomes a cruise, we will provide fashionable yellow life jackets. Pull the tabs to inflate automatically. For overachievers, inflate the life jacket by blowing into the tubes located on either side of the jacket.”

The FAA requires flight attendants to go through this spiel. They know that we know the routine, and we know that they know, so most of us tune it out. Most airlines have their attendants go through the motions as quickly and generically as possible, dutifully fulfilling their obligations to their captive audience. But Southwest at least takes this opportunity to entertain their passengers and lighten the mood, which is much appreciated, especially after a long delay like mine.

A quick YouTube search of “funny Southwest attendants” reveals that my experience with Southwest is not unique. Undoubtedly, this novel approach to the mundane drag of regulatory compliance was part of the staff’s training. The practice turns out to be very astute for two reasons: it gets people to listen and it makes a memorable impression.

Like flight attendants, Web writers are representatives of a company and whether drafting a sales letter, providing copy for a website, or addressing customers through a newsletter, we  speak  with the voice of the company. While the safe route is to adopt mind-numbingly innocuous corporate language – “Moving forward, our company’s vision is to add value to the paradigm that we have pioneered through our excellent service and award-winning innovation” -  in many cases, it can be more successful to connect with readers in your target audience by adopting a more relaxed tone. After all, on the Web something more interesting is always a click away, and if the medium doesn’t hook the message will never be delivered.

We see the benefits of a friendlier, sometimes irreverent tone in such phenomenon as Woot.com. The main idea of the website which features one product a day seems unimpressive at first. But the light-hearted yet still informative product descriptions and the self-referential humor in its blogs help build a sense of community and enthusiasm about the website where a staid, rote delivery would not. Web readers see dry, standard phrasing and “safe” language and assume, often correctly, that it’s something that they’ve read before and skip over it.

Apple’s humble hands-in-the-pockets, “It just works,” attitude versus Microsoft’s  eager shedding of its businessman appeal shows that a more down-to-earth presence can effectively translate to larger operations, but there is a fine line between connecting with your audience and sounding like an out-of-touch dad trying to level with his teenage kid.

For example, Virgin Mobile’s automated customer support line greets you with a youthful “’Sup, it’s Virgin Mobile” and the holding music is some kind of cheesy rap-rock. Granted, I was never a Limp Bizkit fan, but it’s been almost a decade since I’ve seen any rappers gone rock (or rockers gone rap) climb the charts and I don’t think I’ve greeted a friend with “’Sup” un-ironically.

In essence, the goal of any company communication is to establish professionalism and show genuine concern for your customers. Traditionally, the white-washed, buzz-word stuffed, chiseled and polished corporate phrasing exuded a stern and steady image that comforted those who sought solace in reliable institutions. But on the Web, where scams, marketing ploys and misleading content are scattered indiscriminately amongst the trustworthy gems, a position of transparency and unpretentiousness is more valuable. Corporate gibberish is far more imitable than a playful, fresh-voiced outlook. Whereas a standard mission statement evokes a company merely going through the motions, a humorous take belies a smart, self-awareness that promises an operation that runs on human reason, rather than corporate policy.

Today, many customers would rather do business with a person, rather than a faceless corporation. Because of this, showing your human side in your communication is more vital than ever. Consider this the next time you are writing a company blog or a company announcement.

Excerpted from:
Skip Dry Corporate Language if You Want to Instill Confidence in Your Readers

Remember part 1 and part 2 of my interview with Gordon Magee of Drs. Foster Smith? It’s been a while and I’m back to wrap up sharing what I was able to learn from this pioneer of e-commerce video.  I probed Gordon for details on the strategic, long-term approach he’s using to drive multi-channel sales with video.  In all honesty I did NOT learn of the rigid, measured direct-response strategy that I had expected. What I did uncover was how important trust is to a company that is, yes, financially precise and metrics-driven.  Trust, as it turns out, appears to be the main driver in the company’s early, yet large, investment in video.

Uh oh, is this “branded entertainment”?

Now as many of you know I’m not a big fan of traditional, mass media “branding” advertising.   In fact, I view most of it as a poorly executed, glorified art form — not a science.   It thrives on waste.  How many times have you been in a meeting and fallen back on the comfortable excuse of, “well… it did help brand us.”  Unfortunately, many marketing failures are labeled “branding wins” when, in fact, the man or woman running the show (CEO, CMO, COO/CFO) knows better.

In many cases, a campaign’s tactics failed to produce a tangible, strategic business output.  It failed.  You can call it a win but they won’t when you leave the room.

I mention it because most use of video on the Web has been rather gratuitous.  They call it “branded entertainment.”  It has a tendency to be aimless eye-candy that marketers hope gets passed around and… and… and well… create attention/awareness, interest, desire and action (with the action piece being completely un-tracked and rather blindly assumed).

In this tough economy we need new, improved (ie. trackable, reliable, PROVEN) strategies not glorified tactics.  Some call it marketing science and it’s time has arrived.

Now I’m not suggesting Gordon was or is wasting his marketing budget.  What I AM suggesting is that the direct response metrics were left unclear to me and, perhaps, with good reason.  Maybe DrsFosterSmith.com is too early on to really use them or — heck — reveal them to the world.

Increased trust as a valid goal

Let’s assume “better trust” or “more trust” among customers (new and old) is a valid business output.  How tangible is it?  How measurable is it?  Heck, should it even be measured at all?  Now we’re getting into dangerous guru territory where some believe ROI to be a silly pipe dream.  But what if we could assign some tangible behaviors that customers demonstrate to “increased trust?”

Even more wild — what if we just assumed that part of a holistic marketing strategy was a foundation that must be built without expectation of measurement?

Gordon says…

“… we probably have more articles on pet care and more veterinary articles online than anybody in the country. So to go into video and do the same thing was just a natural outgrowth of what we have been doing for 25 years really.”

Why so much content?  Trust.  When it comes to pets and doctors (veterinarians) it’s not about price.  It’s not about color, flavor, speed, accuracy or anything that would be desirable (aspirational).  It’s about TRUSTING someone to help you take care of your pet’s health, well-being or a disease.  Trust matters — in this case perhaps more than anything else.

Measurement: The details

Says Gordon, the future is all about…

“… a blending of a branding relationship development type strategy along with an ROI measurement.  The ROI will be much more difficult to measure in some respects. Certainly we can use analytics tools to find out what people are clicking through on and if they have watched a video and what they did and so on. But frankly some of that gets so granular, you can have data overload, that you’re better off looking at the larger picture to determine what’s going on.”

Now typically these kinds of comments fly red flags with me… but I’m starting to wonder at this point.  Gordon continues as I push him for details on WHAT he measures, why and what it proves…

“Are our sales moving up? Are people spending more time on the site? What’s actually happening? If we then try to drill down to every little item — at some point it becomes impractical apart from what some speakers will tell you at the Internet Retailer or show.

The first thing I study when I want to find out how we are doing is… what did we sell yesterday? What were our overall sales? What products were selling?”

Now at this point I was really starting to wonder, I’ll admit.  This sounds like a BRANDING campaign and perhaps so… one aimed at creating or fostering trust.  Gordon continues…

“Yes, we will look at email returns. Did this email do well? etc. Are people clicking through? What’s our click through rate? Those high level metrics are important so you have got a clue. But at the end of the day, if you have got all kinds of clever little analytical measurements that are telling you what people are clicking through and where they are going… well if you’re not selling anything that doesn’t matter.”

So I think you work from the other end of the pyramid, the sharp point of the pyramid being, ‘Did we sell stuff?’ Then drill down as far as you need to, to find out how you got there. Then stop before you drive yourself crazy.”

Ok… Gordon seemed to come back to measurement as being a worthwhile strategy at the end but it left me scratching my head a bit — but in fairness to Gordon and the company that’s just fine.  It sets us up to ask more questions later

User / customer generated video

And what about user generated content (UGC) — specifically video?  It would seem ripe for opportunity in the pet realm with all those cute cuddly little creatures of all sorts out there.  To my surprise Gordon said no.  His reasoning was remarkably sound and, not surprisingly, all about TRUST.

“Jeff, we will likely not get too much involved in that.. and part of the reason has to do with us being owned by veterinarians and people having that trust relationship with us regarding the information that they get.

We want to make sure that there are no misunderstandings about the veterinary pet care information that we provide. A misunderstanding could happen if we would have, let’s say, a customer quote something that isn’t the latest veterinary information from research and so on… have another customer read that and go, ‘Oh yeah, I should feed my dog X because customer Y said that’s the right thing to do,’ and maybe they didn’t read three entries later our analysis of, you know, ‘That’s actually not a good idea,’ kind of a thing.

I’ll give you just a quick example of something simple. We were on television here a few weeks ago. We brought pets down to Chicago’s In the Loop with iVillage. Had our veterinarians on, the question came up, ‘Is it OK to give milk to my cat?’  Of course, I’m from Iowa.  We grew up doing that. And one of the vets said, ‘Actually, you know, it’s really not a good idea because they can have digestive problems. It’s really not what you should be feeding them.’

So little things like that that seem to be so common knowledge but incorrect are the kinds of things that we would not want to have on the website.

So we probably won’t do that. Our goal is to brand us… and not the other customers. We may at some point have a forum… where people can interact with us, but the scale of that, at times, it becomes so huge that management becomes a challenge. We just started a photo contest this past week. Right now we’ve got 5000 photo entries already in one week, and we’ve got to manage those and determine the winners, and so on.  And I think ditto would happen with a forum.

Now, sounds like a really good marketing message to say, ‘Gordon, did you just hear yourself? If you can bring that many people to your site, wouldn’t you want to do that?’

Well, we do want to have them come but we want to have them be provided accurate information and not just have a cool Web 2.0 interaction with them . We want them to interact with information. At some point we might do the forum so they can interact with each other — I would say there’s some merit to that — but management’s part of the issue for us.

Candidly I think DrsFosterSmith.com’s approach is either a little from the hip or he is just holding back a bit.  In either case I hope Gordon might share more details with us in months ahead.  We marketers are living in historically difficult times where new tools are needed for marketing in the new economy.  As my loyal followers know, I have a decent nose for sniffing out marketing waste and I’ll continue to share my research moving forward.

Still not got your fill of Gordon?  Check out this short interview he was good enough to give me recently while in Chicago.

Excerpted from:
Using Video to Drive Sales in a Down Market

As has been noted both in this space and elsewhere, traditional news media is in trouble. Not only have papers like the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News shut down their presses, but other big names are cutting staff and tightening their belts for the rough ride ahead. The New York Times Company (NYTCO) just announced at least 100 more job cuts throughout its operations, as well as a 5% pay cut for all remaining employees. All of that is in addition to the 500 positions cut in January with the closing of City & Suburban, NYTCO’s wholesale distribution business.

Putting aside for a moment what this means to the advertising industry, both online and off, the grand failure of all these publications to survive in the world of new media poses another problem, one that fundamentally changes the way we in press relations and marketing get our messages out to the world. It’s hard enough to get someone in the news media to pay attention to a press release in the best of times; it’s harder still when there’s no one on the other end looking for it.

As with so many things these days, this challenge means adjusting our thought process to include non-traditional means of information dissemination. That doesn’t mean that press releases on no longer useful, but it does mean that the word “press” just got a little broader. Consider the example of Netflix.

About four years ago, Netflix marketing management took a pretty narrow view of dealing with information requests from the press, according to Steve Swasey, Vice President of corporate communications for the Los Gatos, California based online multimedia delivery company. If someone who wasn’t from the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or NBC came looking for a statement or an interview from Netflix, they likely were out of luck.

Among those in that crowd? Mike Kaltschnee, the writer of a blog called Hacking Netflix. Contrary to its name, Hacking Netflix is dedicated not to exploiting the service, but in Kaltschnee’s words, “the desire to fully understand [Netflix], and … learn as much as we can about this company and share this information.”

When he joined Netflix, Swasey was shocked  no one had reached out to Kaltschnee, if for no other reason than to make sure the information posted on his site was accurate in its portrayal of the company. “There’s no one out there focusing more on how we do business than Hacking Netflix,” says Swasey. “In fact, the main stream media often go to Hacking Netflix for unbiased, objective, third-party information about us.”
From that point on, Swasey made it a priority not just to respond to requests from small online operations like Hacking Netflix, but to make sure  blogs and online publications were included in press releases and corporate announcements.

In September of last year, the relationship with online publishers came in quite handy when Netflix needed to let its customers know about an unfortunate service outage that caused shipment of DVDs to be delayed. Since Hacking Netflix routinely receives more traffic than Netflix’ own community blog (according to compete.com), giving up-to-the-minute information to Kaltschnee kept the Netflix community more informed that Netflix could do on its own.

The lesson here is that someone, perhaps many people, on the Internet is likely having a conversation about your company. And even if that person doesn’t have a press badge, it’s in your best interest to participate in that conversation.

Excerpted from:
News Media: The Definition Just Keeps Getting Broader

This is the slogan of a regional coffee company, Dutch Bros.  This article isn’t about their great coffee, instead it is about how Dutch Bros.’ innovative marketing strategy has helped them thrive in a slow economy.

As people struggle to make their monthly bills, sacrifices in their daily routine must be made. The day of the $4 coffee is quickly vanishing as evident by Starbucks recent announcement of the closure of 100 stores nationwide.

Dutch Bros. has succeeded in this struggling economy for a couple of reasons:

•    Word of mouth marketing
•    Viral campaigns
•    Community involvement
•    Outstanding customer service

Dutch Bros. understands the value of word of mouth marketing. For example, the owner of a local franchise frequently shares daily specials with close friends and loyal customers who in turn spread the word to their friends. On several occasions my wife has been surprised to discover several of her friends arrive almost simultaneously to take advantage of offers they had heard about separately via word of mouth.

A canned food drive on Valentine’s Day was promoted exclusively on Twitter.  Followers of @dutchbros were notified of a promotion to donate 3 cans of food and enjoy a free cup of coffee. This year’s canned food drive set a record number of donations and I am sure the use of Twitter impacted that. Utilizing Twitter to announce this year’s can drive is one example of their successful viral marketing campaigns. It was also an excellent way to increase visibility and involvement within the communities they are in.

I spoke with Dave Morris, VP Marketing/Advertising at Dutch Bros. and this is what he had to say about their overall marketing strategy,

“Instead of spending resources on big flashy advertising campaigns we’ve always liked to give it back to the people through free coffee days, give back to the community days and other Dutch Luv events such as Buck 4 kids Day, Cans 4 coffee, Relay For Life and MDA Day. We donated nearly a million dollars to local communities last year…that feels great and is what spreading Dutch Luv is all about!”

Consistently delivering outstanding customer service, regardless of services rendered, is another solid way to build your customers trust and loyalty. Franchise owners are often seen talking with their customers while in line, thanking them for their business and getting to know them personally. This type of service builds strong relationships and increases customer loyalty. I’ve been in this industry as an affiliate manager for nearly 4 years and building relationships with my merchants and affiliate partners has been crucial to successful partnerships.

While many companies, large and small are struggling in this economy, I wanted to take time to highlight a small company with a passion for their customers that is continuing to pay off.

What are you doing to add value to your customers while remaining profitable?  How are you sharing the passion for your product and brand?

Read more:
Keep It Real, Keep It Fresh