More truth than comedy.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVb8EC1Y2xM[/youtube]
Hat tip to Rachel Timmerman for this one.
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The evolution of marketing after search
Search changed everything.
In the world of advertising, before there was search, there was only interruption. Put as many ads as possible in as many places as possible in the hopes that when a consumer needed something, your ad would be there and they’d think of you first. Spend a fortune on brand so that when a consumer had a problem that your brand could solve, they’d choose you. During the pre-search age, this strategy worked, largely because there was no opportunity for anything better.
Enter search. Search allowed consumers to indicate what they were interested in. Search allowed advertisers to know when a consumer was in the mood to buy, or at least in the mood to shop. Suddenly, instead of paying millions of dollars for impressions, advertisers could pay thousands of dollars for clicks, and the quality of the leads was better because the consumers had self-selected themselves as interested parties.
So here we stand. Search rules the roost. Google’s fortunes are built on it, and everyone is trying to improve search or improve placement in search.
Here’s the fundamental question: what comes next? Does search just get better, or is there a quantum leap that changes the game as much as search changed the game?
I believe there is a change ahead, and we can already see it in various threads. It hasn’t come together yet, but it’s there and happening faster than you think.
Predictive placement.
You see, we know a lot of information. TONS of information. Consumers self-publish information in volumes that marketers could never accomplish. All of MySpace, all of Facebook, all of Twitter – all of this is self-published data, most of it public.
Right now, we don’t yet have the computational capacity to do massive data correlation on an economical scale, though if I had to place a bet, I’d put my money on Google to do it first. Think about what that future might look like, though. We know products and services have seasonality, and we already have some data segmentation capabilities. Massive data correlation will let us aggregate all the consumer self-published data and slice it a billion different ways to determine what customers want, and when.
Consider what massive data correlation might mean – a 19 year old female customer logs into, say, a superstore online, and signs in with their Facebook key (just as you do now with Facebook apps). Instantly, the superstore correlates the data in their Facebook profile with the megadatabase and knows that this consumer, who likes Phish, Liz Phair, CSI, and Lost, and is from the North Shore of Massachusetts is statistically likely, based on thousands of similar customer records, to want and need a student loan in three months’ time. Based on their demographic and psychographic data, the megadatabase knows that statistically, this consumer will probably need to borrow between 12,500 and14,300 in two increments, and based on previous purchase data, they’re likely to need their loan disbursements in the first week of September and the fourth week of January.
The megadatabase makes these notations in a customer profile, sets reminders, and on the first Tuesday of September, Facebook, in concert with the superstore, sends the consumer a message offering them a student loan for $13,000 that can be disbursed by the Friday of that same week – because in the background, the megadatabase has already secured pre-approvals. The consumer is amazed and delighted that Facebook and the superstore knew exactly what they needed, exactly when they needed it, and instead of having to choose a lender, they just go with the lender that was there at precisely the right time with precisely the right offering. The advertisement will not seem out of place, either – because it’s precisely timed, it will appear to be content, just as now, an ad for a service that you need is content, not an ad.
Sound farfetched? In the age of Google, in the age of social networking profiles with copious data, that day is much closer than you realize.
Welcome to the future, where marketing is there for exactly what your wallet can bear, with exactly what you want, to take advantage of the buying impulse the moment you have it – all backed up by massive databases.
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The Most Effective Marketing A Non-Profit Can Do Is Build The Database
I’ve been seeing more and more “brand awareness” campaigns, especially for non-profits and social good organizations lately, and I genuinely have to ask – what’s the value of that? From tweets on Twitter saying “Raise awareness of the plight of…” to advertisements on MySpace like the one to the right, awareness campaigns seem to be everywhere.
What’s the value of awareness?
What’s the return on investment of awareness?
If I were a marketer for a non-profit, a social justice cause, or just about anything like this, I’d have to think long and hard about the value of my limited marketing dollars going towards headshare versus more actionable marketing.
Let’s take this Zimbabwe campaign, for example. Ask the average American to locate Zimbabwe on a map and you’ll have an appallingly low success rate. Heck, ask them to locate the continent Zimbabwe is on and you won’t do much better. Why advertise an awareness campaign on a predominantly US-centric web site to an audience that likely can’t even find the target, and advertise in a way that has no action?
If I were trying to market this campaign, here’s how I’d approach it. If MySpace is the venue where in fact the audience for this campaign exists, fine. I’d put up a simple widget, maybe some scrolling scary pictures of what Mugabe does to his people, and have a “sign the petition” form with slots for name, address, email, etc. right below it, and the requisite opt-in to the mailing list checkbox, pre-checked for your convenience. Maybe make it a Flash widget that scrolled and displayed the last 50 petitioners’ names and locations.
This widget would in turn feed a nice SQL database that would aggregate the petitioners’ data and dump it into a mass mailer like Blue Sky Factory (disclosure: BSF is a sponsor of one of my podcasts, Marketing Over Coffee) and start soliciting donations. Sure, we could print out a list of petitioners and drop it on a politician’s desk, but I’d bet it would be far more effective, once a huge house list was amassed, to offer a politician’s PAC an email to the constituency on their behalf in exchange for their vote/support/introduction of legislation.
Forget spending money on awareness. We live or die on our database. The database is a tangible asset that has real, stored value which we can use for barter, trade, or sale (assuming you have the permission of the audience to do so). If you have scarce marketing dollars, if you have scarce resources, building up a marketing database is one of the fastest ways to add value to your non-profit, stay in touch with your constituency, drive donations and funding campaigns, and make real change in the world.
Yes, you have to use your database wisely, perhaps sparingly, always with the privacy and security of your constituency top of mind, but having an effective database is an incomparable value.
In the information economy, the non-profit with the most information, effectively used, wins.
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The Online Marketer’s Web Strategy
I had the privilege of attending and presenting at the MarketingProfs conference over the past two days, and it was a phenomenal conference, full of lots of good ideas. However, one thing stood out among the various discussions that I wanted to make a point about. There is a definite structure and strategy to online marketing that you need to follow to improve your likelihood of success.
During a number of sessions, folks were talking about all the social media stuff available to marketers, about how to choose and how to get started. Social media was the buzzword at the conference.. Social media is sexy. Social media is the hot new thing.
Social media comes LAST, gang.
That’s right, last.
What comes first?
You first must have CONTENT. Something worth talking about. If you want to be in social media, the social part is conversation and discussion. If you have nothing worth talking about – and nothing worth others talking about you – then any effort you put into social media will largely be a waste of time.
Once you’ve got content, USER INTERFACE comes next. Make a web site that’s attractive, easy to navigate, easy to find stuff on. Hire a professional designer or information architect to help you with this if you’re not so good at it, or use a proven templating system. Whatever you do, focus on putting your content into an easily managed format that is a pleasure to use. Make sure you have at least one way of converting a visitor into a database entry somehow, whether it’s a simple mailing list, or a complex lead generation system.
If you’re marketing online, you’re marketing with a web site. Do your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION next. Make sure your web sites validate with W3C standards, at least minimally. Make sure you optimize your sites, build some links, do all the basics. Check out Hubspot’s Web Site Grader for a great starter tool. When you set up profiles on other social networks, make sure you link back to your web site, always. SEO is all about capturing passive traffic, capturing people who are looking for your content.
Only after you’ve completed the steps of great content, user interface, and search engine optimization are you ready to dive into social media. There’s no way you can win the road race if your car is lacking tires and an engine. Content, UI, and SEO are the basics you MUST have in place prior to diving into social media, or else you’ll be wasting time, energy, and the limited slice of attention your audience is giving you – and they won’t give you again.
Photo credit: CC Chapman
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I’ve been looking again at MySpace, as a recent blog post detailed. One of the things I’ve been looking at is the depth of engagement. Is a friend relationship enough to market on? What is the value of a MySpace friendship?
Over the last five days, I’ve been sending out 200 messages a day or so to my MySpace friends, advertising the Financial Aid Podcast. It’s themed pretty basically:
How’s it been going?
I started with a Feedburner number of about 1,000. The show had been static around that number for a while, a couple of months at least. Today? Hit a new record – the last four out of five days.
Ask. Ask those in your network to get connected, ask them to take action, ask them to be more involved in your community efforts. If you don’t ask, you definitely won’t receive.
Funny – here at work at the Student Loan Network, I just had a meeting with our marketing director about a press release. The topic of the press release was to emphasize how we’re still open for business despite all the credit market turmoil, how not everyone is going out of business, etc. What was funny was that the entire press release and discussion could easily be summed up in one picture, but it’s difficult to make that fit the press release format.
Instead of four dense paragraphs, what if I put this graphic up on the Student Loan Network homepage?
I think that would have about the same meaning as the press release, but it would convey that meaning almost instantly. Here we are. Open. Even late at night.
Hat tip to Chip Griffin for the photo under Creative Commons.
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I had an epiphany of sorts in the shower.
What a lot of new media folks talk about – audience building, impressions, and the dreaded M word, monetization – is not marketing.
Marketing is the sharing of ideas.
So what is all the stuff we in new media talk about? Sales. Whether it’s pay per click ads, podcast subscriptions, blog readers, speaking gigs, whatever your metric is around getting someone to take action, that’s sales.
Marketing is the sharing of ideas.
Sales is the conversion of ideas into actions.
It’s the job of marketing to share ideas with the audience, to help them to understand what they’re missing out on, what value is awaiting them. It’s all about the content. Content is king, so the cliche goes.
It’s the job of sales to turn those ideas into actions. Create the path for people to take. Make it easy for people to do what you want them to do. Tell them what you want them to do. Click here. Subscribe now. Call the comment line. Leave a comment on the blog. Upload your webmail contacts. That’s all sales – do, do, do.
Once the sale is over, it’s back to marketing, back to sharing. Marketing takes over and reinforces to the audience that the action they took was the right one. Marketing continues to provide value upon value until the customer is so enamored of what you’re doing that they are compelled to share with their friends – and they become your salesforce and marketing team.
Share. Act. Share. Repeat.
This is especially relevant because in many ways, I think we’re reading the wrong books.
Most of my friends in new media are brilliant people. Smart, insightful, good at creating ideas and sharing them. Most of them also wish to be more, do more, achieve more, and this is where the disconnect is. There’s a gap between sharing and acting. Go to any blog and figure out what the action the blogger wants you to take is, and how easy it is to find. Get out your stopwatch, go to any podcaster’s web site, start the clock, and see how long it takes you to subscribe.
Folks like Seth Godin, Chris Anderson, and the marketing folks are perfectly okay. They’re sharing the ideas, and they’re a source for our own inspiration.
Note, however, when you ask any prominent blogger, podcaster, networker, etc. about their bookshelves, they never mention Tom Hopkins, Zig Ziglar, Ira Hayes, Dan Kennedy, Brian Tracy, etc. They never mention the sales books, the sales guys who can help get you from idea to action. Once the customer knows who you are and is willing to make a commitment, you as the new media outlet have to change gears and guide your customer, your audience, into action.
If you want people to do more with your new media outlet, complement your marketing knowledge with sales knowledge, and you’ll blow past the competition in a heartbeat.
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As a followup to my previous Snapple Antioxidant Water post, Deana over at Snapple sent me a sample pack of Snapple at the behest of Chris Abraham, who I presume is marketing Snapple to bloggers. I got a 4 pack.
Thoughts:
Is it good? I suppose if you’re a Powerade/Gatorade drinker, you’ll probably like some of the flavors. Personally, I’m more of a Red Bull/Rock Star fan than Gatorade for sugary drinks, on the premise that if I’m going to suffer the consequences of extra empty calories, I’d better get damn jittery from it, too. If Snapple made a “Closest Legal Alternative to Meth in Fruity Flavors” I’d give that a try, if for no other reason than the product name alone.
As for the antioxidant water? I’m going to stick to regular water now.
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What I’ll Be Sharing at PodCamp DC
A few people have wondered what I’ll be sharing at PodCamp DC. I’ve got two sessions blocked out, plus possibly a panel – we’ll see about the last part.
Session 1:
New Media Marketing: How New Media Powers Business. 10 AM Saturday. I’ve been working on refining this ever-evolving presentation which now includes aspects of sales, internet marketing, search engine optimization, and just about everything else, all linked to a framework that you can take home and apply to any product, service, or organization.
If you’re thinking about using blogging, podcasting, social networks, or other new media tools to promote the ideas you care about, this session is for you.
Session 2:
Power Your Personal Network with LinkedIn. 3 PM Saturday. I’ll be co-presenting with Dan Williams, another LinkedIn Power User, on how to use LinkedIn to power your networking skills. This is a session by request from a few participants who’d asked early if there was going to be something about LinkedIn. I’ll be sharing a few of my tips about using the service, what it’s good for, and how to help you build your personal brand with it, including simple but effective techniques you can start using immediately for better results.
Dan’s got even more juice to add to the discussion as the person on LinkedIn ranked #1 in the country for recommendations. He’ll talk about his LinkedIn stories and power tips as well.
Session 3:
Speed Mentoring: Promoting Your Political Ideas in Social Media. 4 PM Saturday. This is an idea based on Dan Patterson‘s PodCamp NYC panel about how social media is changing the political landscape. In this session, I’d love to put a bunch of us together and workshop either a candidate or cause’s social media efforts, showing where social media can optimize a campaign’s efforts to share and spread ideas.
It seemed funny to have a political discussion panel at PodCamp NYC and not have one in the heart of politics itself, Washington, DC.
This is not a discussion on politics itself – this is a collaboration, a brainstorming session, to help those individuals working at organizations with causes to power up their efforts. The ideas and techniques we discuss should apply equally to all parties, beliefs, and campaigns.
If you plan on attending any of the sessions at PodCamp DC that I’ll be participating in, please feel free to ask questions in advance of the event itself – just leave comments here!
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Andrew Baron Selling Twitter Account, Database For Sale?
Chris Brogan raised the question people should be asking about Andrew Baron’s eBay sale of his Twitter account.
What are you buying? What’s the value?
Laura Fitton said on Twitter: “you can’t sell relationships.” You can’t. But you sure as heck can sell data.
In the case of Twitter, you can’t export meaningful amounts of data from Twitter followers from Twitter directly.
If Baron put up his Facebook account, that’d be a different story, because I can extract real data from it – names, email addresses, other contact information. At that point, it’s a database, and we buy & sell databases all the time.
What would I pay for that? The going rate is about 1.50 per valid identity on the commercial markets – you can buy header files from credit bureaus with roughly the same data for about1.50 a head if you’re buying in bulk. Experian, Transunion, Equifax – all of them are selling YOU already, at a cost far below what your personal worth is.
Companies are buying and selling your data all the time. I can’t give specifics, but of the companies I’ve worked for in the last decade, most of them bought customer lists at one point or another, and the sad reality is that your personal identity, information, and privacy are dirt cheap.
You are for sale.
A piece of Andrew Baron is for sale, as is his followers on Twitter.
He’s just being transparent about it.
Incidentally, if I were a current or future Rocketboom advertiser, I’d buy this account in a heartbeat and run some analytics on it. Who DMs or @s Andrew the most, about what topics, and are those people running media channels of their own that I should advertise on?
Also, you can’t export data from Twitter. But you can cross-reference data pools you already have with Twitter. A social graph of Twitter cross-referenced with your house list and other social networks will tell you quickly who participates in that account’s first level relationships. THAT has value to someone who wants to market to Andrew or his connections.
Combine that with other data pools, and Twitter is giving me something truly usable, something that might be worth paying for.
With the right tools, if I started with a million address email list bought on the cheap from a broker, I could use social networks – especially high profile ones like Andrew’s – to cleanse my list and determine if the addresses were of value. Remember, you can’t pull any data from private or protected profiles publicly – but if you bought a high profile account, you’d gain access to those individuals who established relationships privately but are still hidden publicly. Value.
Oh yeah, and if you see a LinkedIn profile for sale, be afraid. There’s lots of usable data in there.
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