Archive for the ‘interesting marketing’ tag
Who Exactly Uses Twitter and Other Marketing Stories of the Week
It’s a scorcher out there — well, it is here in Boston, anyway. Why not cool down by staying the heck inside and persuing some of the marketing stories from this week you might have missed? We have something to strike everyone’s fancy, from Twitter data to SEO to insights from CMOs. You know, if you’re looking to make it to the C-suite one day.
And as always, let us know what other interesting marketing stories popped up this week that we should be reading! We’re always looking for more writers and websites to follow and keep us in-the-know.
A Look at the People Who Use Twitter From Brian Solis
Brian Solis published an excellent analysis of some Twitter-focused Pew data on his blog this week. Hailing Twitter as a “human seismograph measuring world events, popular culture, everyday sentiment,” he plucks out some fascinating statistics from the study. When it comes to Twitter use, for example, it’s still dwarfed by Facebook, but rapidly growing: 20% of all internet users in the United States use Twitter in some capacity. Of the people who do use Twitter, though, almost half of them are Twitter fanatics, with 8% of internet users clocking in at least some Twitter use every day. 18-24 year old are also pretty fanatical, with 1 in 5 18-24 year olds reporting using Twitter on their mobile phones, and 15% reporting daily use of Twitter for mobile. Hungry for more stats? Check out the full story here.
CMOs Tapping Into Social Data for Consumer Insights From Bazaarvoice
The folks over at Bazaarvoice also gave some attention to social data this week. They created an infographic detailing how CMOs, whose role they think entitle them to be called Chief Customer Offers, interpret social data. A whopping 83% of CMOs feel that social data is useful for discerning trends or patterns that may impact business — and we wholeheartedly believe they’re right. Addtionally, 81% of CMOs believe that social media impacts customer loyalty. But we also picked up on a statistic we found somewhat disturbing: only 36.8% of CMOs report that their sales teams have access to social data. Yikes. Check out the full infographic and story here.
Internal Linking Strategies for 2012 and Beyond From SEOmoz
We can always count on our friends at SEOmoz to take deep dives into the SEO topics we all need to learn about. This week, the discussion is pointed towards internal linking. One widely-discussed topic that you might not even think to consider: the value and risk of sitewide footers. The verdict: they’re great for user experience, people tend to expect them, but you’ve got to be careful when they’re scaled out across a full website — that’s when your SEO can take a hit. Interested in learning more? Check out the full story here.
(By the way: HubSpot’s Dharmesh Shah and SEOmoz’s Rand Fishkin are hosting a webinar together on August 20! Can we count you in?)
The New Knowledge Management: What Does a Collaborative Hub Look Like? From Forrester
Continuing with the infographic trend, Kate Leggett posted an excellent illustration and explanation of a collaborative content hub on the Forrester blog this week. A tree illustrates the hub itself, with search firmly rooted at the base of the trunk and social listening, analytics, and feedback balancing on the tips of the branches. As outlined in the article, some of the most important features of a content hub include curated and non-curated content, social content, and integration with analytics platforms. Check out the full story here.
Facebook Launching 9 More Targeting Options for Organic Updates
This week, reports circulated that Facebook has started rolling out nine new options for organic updates, allowing for email list segmentation-like tactics for your collection of Facebook fans. Yeah, you read that right, this isn’t for your paid advertisements. The categories available for segmentation include age, gender, education status, and romantic preference. When it comes to attracting customers with Facebook, we have a feeling these targeted categories are going to make a huge impact on your marketing. Check out the full story here.
What was the best inbound marketing story you read this week? Share it with us in the comments!
Image credit: barockschloss
The Best And Worst Of London 2012 Olympic Marketing Roundup
NOTE – To see a full visual roundup of the best and worst marketing, visit my London 2012 Olympic Marketing – Best & Worst Pinterest Board.
As the world turn its attention to the Games in London today, I’ll have to indulge my Olympic passion from afar this time around. I’ve been a lover of the Olympics since I was in college in Atlanta during the games in 1996. They were a big reason I moved to Australia in 1998 and I was in Beijing in 2008 helping manage the Lenovo Voices of the Olympic Games program where we had 100 Olympic athletes blogging their experience in a pre-Twitter world. So yes, I’m an enthusiast.
This time around, I am going to share my passion for Olympic marketing with a platform that I haven’t yet used all that much – Pinterest. As I spent the last week looking at some of the most interesting marketing efforts from around the world – I saw everything from P&G’s emotional “best job in the world” video to British Airway’s unexpected campaign to encourage Britons NOT to fly. One of the best early stories, to me, was the #savethesecret campaign launched to encourage people not to share the details about the Opening Ceremonies so people will still be surprised in watching it – a worthy challenge that I accept (and so you won’t find any spoilers in this blog post).
Throughout the Games, great marketing stories will continue to emerge … and so I plan to collect and share them through my Pinterest board - London 2012 Olympic Marketing – Best & Worst. Over the next three weeks, if you see any great marketing examples, I would love to see you share them there as well. In the meantime, let’s all get ready for the international spectacle of the Olympics … there really isn’t anything else like it.
The History of the Internet, And Other Marketing Stories of the Week
Seems like the majority of the American marketing world was away on vacation this week. Whether that means you were reclining in a hammock on the beach or partaking in a BBQ or two with your family and friends for the 4th of July, we hope you enjoyed your getaway from everyday life. (And if you were still stuck in the office, cheers to you, committed marketer!)
Now, instead of scrambling through the 1,000+ unread articles in your Google Reader, let us catch you up on some of the more interesting marketing stories of the week.
The History of the Internet, In One Pretty Infographic, From Mashable
On Thursday, Mashable published an awesome, interactive infographic on the history of the internet. While not explicitly dedicated to marketing (don’t worry — we’ve got that one covered here!), the infographic details the rise and evolution of the platform upon which inbound marketing was built. So we definitely recommend spending some time brushing up on your digital history. Take a gander at the infographic here.
Deciphering Earned, Owned, and Paid Views in Video Marketing, From ReelSEO
This one comes to us from ReelSEO. It’s an interesting piece about one aspect of video marketing that many marketers fail to consider — the differences between owned, earned, and paid views in video marketing. While the distinction will make sense to marketers familiar with the different kinds of traffic you can attract from search engines, this article offers a simple explanation for an often overlooked aspect of video marketing. Given how often the buzzwords ‘viral video‘ are used in marketing, it’s important to familiarize with these concepts so you can effectively measure the impact of your video marketing efforts. Check out the full story here.
Understanding the Why of SEO, From SearchEngineLand
Shari Thurow of SearchEngineLand goes beyond the execution of successful SEO to discuss the ‘why?’ of keyword classification in this interesting article. Her focus is on common search query classification mistakes, and how important it is for marketers to consider keyword classifications before proceeding with their SEO strategies. Like the video marketing piece we mentioned above, this too is a well-researched look at a specific aspect of SEO that many marketers probably overlook. Read the complete article here.
Twitter & LinkedIn Break Up, From HubSpot
Last weekend, we covered the public breakup of LinkedIn and Twitter on our blog. Twitter and LinkedIn announced that their partnership, which was forged in 2009 and enabled users to automatically share tweets on LinkedIn, was no more. Speculation about the break-up not being mutual (we’ve heard rumors that Twitter did the dumping) has flown about the digital world since the break-up was confirmed. Twitter has hinted at more important announcements coming out in the near future, so stay tuned to see how the network asserts its newly-single self! Read the full story here.
Has Social Media Crossed the Chasm? From Business2Community
This last story comes to us from Business2Community, which investigates whether social media has become easier to use over time. To answer this, they took a look at three published surveys of social media practices, relaying the data in crisp infographics. There are some surprising stats included in the results that marketers should all be interested in, so this research write-up is definitely worth a look. Check it out here.
What other interesting inbound marketing stories did you stumble upon this week?
Image credit: orangelimey
How To Find The Perfect Diagram For Your Presentation
My life would be a lot easier if I could give the same talk to everyone. I would just show up at an event or a client site, or get onto my webcam, and say the exact same thing to everyone. But I know I’ll never do that. One of the main reasons is because I obsess over any presentation I work on. I spend hours thinking about the flow. I have a personal library of hundreds of images purchased from various places like iStockPhoto. Anytime I find an interesting marketing idea or website, I take a screenshot and save it to use one day in the future. I am a presentation slide collector.
Yet one thing I struggle with routinely is finding the perfect way to visualize a complex idea or data point or program. Sure, I could use the dopey “SmartArt” that comes preloaded on PowerPoint, but the results usually look pretty ordinary. And as I struggle, I keep a collection of books on my shelf all about beautiful slide design by several authors, including Garr Reynolds, Dan Roam and Nancy Duarte.
I admit I often suffer from design envy because of how great their slides look and how wonderfully they simplify complex ideas. I wish I could do that more easily. So when I got an email about a new tool that Nancy Duarte and her team are launching today called the Diagrammer, I almost picked up the phone immediately to call her and say thanks.
Here’s the “official” description of the site:
Diagrammer is a library of 4,000 slide diagrams comprising all of the essential concepts and relationships common to business and professional communication. But it is more than a database of images. Diagrammer is a unique visual taxonomy that enables communicators to understand their ideas in a more nuanced and accurate way, and guides them to find more evocative and harder-hitting means of conveying their messages.
She had me at “library of 4,000 slide diagrams.” For just 99 cents, you can pick up the perfect visualization for any big idea. More than that, the library will offer some amazing suggestions for new ways to diagram out ideas that you would never have thought of. I could tell you to bookmark this page, or save it, or check it out by clicking this link. Even that doesn’t feel like enough of a recommendation.
If you ever need to put together a presentation, you need to visit the new Diagrammer slide library and visualization tool from Duarte Design. For anyone like me who creates presentations relatively often, just go ahead and make this site your new homepage. I’m pretty sure I will too.
Honda Masters The Art of Marketing Timing
Every year at the start of the new year there is something that most of us do without realizing it. It is related to making new year’s resolutions, but it is more about sequencing your long term goals into the order in which you want to achieve them. One example might be saying to yourself, “I want to be married and then have a kid before I turn 35.” Life is full of these little promises. So full, in fact, that often we make them to ourselves without even thinking. It raises an interesting marketing question as well.
What would it take to get a customer to reevaluate the life sequence they have already set for themselves?
It becomes a particularly important question when you consider a brand selling a product that is all about fitting into the right stage in life. A product, for example, like a car. When you consider when people buy new cars, it is very much about life’s stages. Graduating from college, landing a new job, getting married or having a kid. Each of these life changes can often be triggers to consider buying a new car.
Honda’s new campaign for the CRV may have found one way to solve that challenge. With their Honda LeapList campaign, they encourage consumers to go online and make their own lists of what they want to accomplish before they turn 30, or what they want to do before they get married. It is a brilliant way not only to encourage people to dream and perhaps even act on their longstanding dream to travel the world, but also to encourage them to think about how getting a new car might fit into that sequence. The underlying message is a perfect one for their consumers: why wait? You can do all the things you want to do, and you can do them on your own time. But maybe you should just think about buying that car right now instead of waiting.
Sure it’s clearly a marketing message – but what they perfectly prove is something that any marketers would do well to remember. Sometimes the most powerful thing you can do to sell your product is help your customers to imagine exactly when they should buy it.
CCP Games hires David Reid as chief marketing officer as Dust 514 nears launch
Gearing up for a big marketing campaign, Eve Online game publisher CCP Games has hired David Reid as its new chief marketing officer.
Reid joins the Reykjavik, Iceland-based company as it prepares to launch its biggest game in years, the first-person shooter sci-fi title Dust 514. The hire gives CCP Games some veteran marketing firepower, as Reid previous served as marketing chief for Trion Worlds, GameTap and Microsoft’s Xbox 360 business.
CCP Games has operated the sci-fi massively multiplayer online game Eve Online since 2003. Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, chief executive of CCP, said in an interview that the game has been profitable since 2004 and it has grown its user base every year. Right now, it has 350,000 subscribers, up 10 times since 2004. Those players have shown great allegiance to the title, where they can fly starships around a galaxy, mine resources and build things from them, and fight against players in other alliances. Players are devoted to the hardcore game in part because it has a robust economy for players to buy and sell objects in the virtual world.
Reid (pictured) said in an interview that he is excited about CCP’s opportunity to greatly expand its universe of players with Dust 514, which is a first-person shooter game on the PlayStation 3 that takes place on a planet within the Eve Online universe. What makes it interesting is that Eve Online players can battle above the planet with their starships and make a difference in the battle on the ground. Likewise, the players on the ground in the first-person shooter game can influence what happens up in space with Eve Online. As such, it’s a unique opportunity for groundbreaking cross-platform game play and marketing, Reid said.
Not only is Dust 514 an interesting marketing challenge, it’s also a big technological challenge, Pétursson said. The company has had to more than double its computing power to accommodate a single game environment and backend that is shared by both games. On top of that, CCP Games has to synchronize game play across the PlayStation 3 and PC game platforms.
Reid will also drive the marketing strategy for World of Darkness, an upcoming MMO with a vampire and werewolf theme. That game is in pre-production now.
CCP just recently launched Crucible, the latest free expansion for Eve Online, and it also has a private beta test going for Dust 514. Reid will be based in the San Francisco Bay Area and report to Pétursson. Reid will run marketing activities such as branding, corporate communications, PR, advertising, social media and customer acquisition.
Most recently, Reid helped launch Rift, the fantasy MMO from Trion Worlds. He managed a team of 50 people and helped get Rift to more than 1 million paid activations in just a few months. He orchestrated the Rift ad campaign, which used the tagline “We’re not in Azeroth Anymore,” a reference to the chief rival World of Warcraft.
Before joining Trion as senior vice president of marketing, Reid was president of publishing at NCsoft West. He was also vice president of marketing for game portal GameTap and director of the Xbox global platform marketing for Microsoft.
Pétursson said, “We’re very happy to have David joining us. We are innovating in this space and have been looking for the right people to help us expand. David is a great evangelist.”
Reid acknowledged that Trion Worlds was an interesting company to work at, but he said he felt that the job at CCP was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“We had a great launch with Rift and I have nothing bad to say about it,” Reid said. “But I have kept my eye on CCP for a very long time.”
“The success of CCP has been astonishing year after year,” Reid said. “The company has staggering potential, with Dust 514 coming and World of Darkness aiming for a broader audience. CCP is doing something that is very unique among the MMOs. “
“As we enter one of the most important years in CCP’s history, we’ll rely heavily on David to help us bring our revolutionary gaming experiences to even more players, on more platforms, around the world.”
Reid said he would ramp up efforts to get Dust 514 in the hands of the press and will start publicizing the game through a variety of means.
Filed under: games, VentureBeat 
President Obama Newsjacks Iowa Caucus by joining Instagram
On Tuesday, the Obama campaign joined Instagram, using the @BarackObama ID. The account will be managed by his campaign staff.
As I wrote about yesterday when I talked about the Jon Huntsman for President campaign and the use of social media in a post called Marketing advice to Jon Huntsman and his daughters, I totally geek out about the marketing and PR aspects of the US presidential campaign season. I'm convinced that all marketers can learn from presidential campaign strategies.
The timing of Obama's joining Instagram is fascinating because it was the same day as the Iowa Caucus.
Newsjacking.
By attracting the attention of some of the world's media as they are intensely focused on the results of the Republican contest, President Obama shines a small amount of light on himself and his campaign. Read more about the marketing and PR technique of Newsjacking.
Advice for the Obama campaign on using Instagram: I hope the president shoots some photos himself. Here’s a suggested first shot. I really want to see a photo of his view from the podium while delivering the State of the Union speech, which is currently scheduled for the evening of January 24, 2012. Now that would be a historic photograph. The first President to photograph his own State of the Union would generate tons of buzz and energize the many millions of young voters who use photo sharing like Instagram every day.
We’re in for a fun ride this campaign season. I’ll report from time to time about the interesting marketing aspects.
Remember, this is not a political blog. I write about marketing and PR. I am not endorsing candidates like the President or Jon Huntsman by writing about their marketing strategies and tactics.
‘Playboy’ Readers Sing for a Virtual Striptease
Playboy in Argentina came up with some interesting marketing for its Mariana Diarco issue by combining two of everyone's favorite things: heavily airbrushed nudity and karaoke. Diarco is famous for having an affair with a rock star (think of her as Argentina's version of Carmen Electra), so Playboy (and Grey Buenos Aires) put together a website where visitors can sing like a rock star themselves—to which Diarco responds in true groupie fashion by revealing a racy photo of herself. The resulting footage of the guys singing isn't pretty, but Diarco is, so the site became a viral hit anyway. This follows the audio print ad by Playboy Brazil earlier this year. That's Playboy—always finding new ways to sell the oldest product in the book. Via The Denver Egotist.
The Peculiar Marketing Trends Among The Social Software Industry
The social software space has been conducting some interesting marketing techniques, and I’m here to comment on what I’ve seen. Being an attendee at dozens of shows a year, also receiving more emails than I can count from these vendors, I wanted to provide a broader perspective, and then get your comments.
In addition to the usual forms of marketing from working with PR agencies, press releases, taking over SERP pages of a competitor, brochures, white papers, case studies, webinars, and the lot, I’m seeing a few interesting trends in their marketing mix I wanted to highlight:
1) Social software vendors ironically invest in airport display advertising. While I’ve heard about it, I saw it for the first time in Chicago airport this week, Buddy Media’s print advertising was prominantly displayed, here’s their blog post touting the campaign. Given their hefty investment raise of $54 million a few bones tossed on display advertising seems like a small play. Yet Andrew Jones, Altimeter Researcher heard first hand from brands we interviewed that they did not want to see a vendor they would hire invest in that way. I’d argue that Chicago is ripe for brand managers, agencies and the lot, and because no other vendors are deploying on print, this is a smart play. Marketing is, after all, integrated, right?
2) In a bite-sized world, Infographics are the new White Paper. I’ve seen a number of changes as our attention span decreases (first of all, thank you for making it this far in my post) as vendors shift from long form white papers to shorter form content. This trend? I say we’re moving away from an appetite of content steak to shish kabob –yet the balance is frequently off. The earliest pioneer in this space was Mint, which aggregated user data and published financial index data to compare young Gen X males to each other. Lately, we’ve seen a heavy output of infographics from Eloqua (a client) which is used to reach influencers, tap into their egos, and get them to trigger discussions. Proof? This Blog Tree infographic is such link bait, and yes Web Strategy blog is an orange leaf (but I ain’t fallin yet). Their team tells me they show an increase in relevancy from these discussion, all tracking using their tool set, and they work with premium infographics firm Jess3 and DIY infographics for marketers from Visual.ly for the rest of us. Up next? eBooks are on the rise. Wait for it.
3) Female Promotional Models Continue to Lure on Conference Floors. As one of the keynotes at a large software conference, I ventured onto the vendor show floor. Surprisingly, I found many incumbent software and marketing software firms still hiring promotional models (also known as “booth babes” –which feels dirty even to write), do note that Salesforce doesn’t dictate what happens in these booths, it’s dependent on the vendor. While these attract cameras, and a certain type of eager male, I hesitate on how this may limit bringing executives who don’t want to be seen near them in our always publishing twitpic world. Furthermore, we know that many of the Corporate Social Strategists are women climbing in their career, I can’t imagine this would attract them to their booth.
4) Humanizing the Brand with Real World Mascots. Beyond just the cutsy logos of Seesmic, Placast, Hootsuite and beyond, we’re starting to see full costumed mascots appearing. Yet, often, these mascots appear in the enterprise social space, such as Sassy and Chatty from Salesforce, and Get Satisfactions JarGon, an anti-mascot who highlights old school IVR. We’re also seeing street teams at Oracle and Salesforce conferences do battle over your attention, an old trend, not-unlike any local marketing effort. While they are great for the conference TwitPic and comedic relief, to me this seems more than ironic as social software is to humanize the brand –so why don’t we use humans?
Now, I’d love to hear form you? Do you think these four forms of marketing from the social software vendors are sufficient to cut through the noise? Is airport advertising, infographics, promo models, and walking mascots the future of social software marketing?
Combining Traditional and New School Rules for Marketing
Recently I had the chance to watch my colleague at WMT (wild web woman Lorrie Thomas Ross) speak at a local event for business executives on the topic of traditional and new marketing rules for increasing money and your business success. Specifically the talk was titled “Double Your Money Marketing with Traditional & New Rules for Success!” and the concept was pairing a traditional PR firm with our “new rules” web PR approach for a panel discussion on the topic.
Lorrie stole the spotlight with her ability to relate to what people need and by really making the audience feel empowered to help themselves lasso the wild web and all of it’s marketing offerings.
Here are few things from the discussion, both from traditional PR to the new school web marketing, which I found useful and interesting:
Marketing is about maximizing relationships: The ideas are the same for both traditional PR and web marketing strategies; you want to connect with an audience whether it is writing the perfect press release to get you noticed in print or sharing your expertise on a blog.
List all of your media channels and do your research: Just like anything you do for your business you want to know and understand what your options are. Make a list of all of the media channels available to you (radio, tv, magazines, newspapers, web) and do your research on them. Understanding how you can maximize these channels will give you and your marketing an upper hand.
Something to always keep in mind: Publicity is free and advertising is paid. Getting on the front page of the paper can’t be bought people!
Utilize the freebies: Marketing can be tricky but don’t underestimate the power of educating yourself. Find free sources to learn the tricks; just because you don’t have a huge PR budget doesn’t mean you can’t do it! Great sources for press release writing and other free marketing tools can be readily found on the web. Here are few examples that were brought up in the discussion:
- Web Marketing Therapy’s PJ PR-How to Generate and Distribute Your Own Powerful Press Releases WMT offers a great selection of free E-books to get you going.
- PR Web is a great source for learning how to write and distribute a press release. See their Press Release Writing Fundamentals and get writing!
- Google Places: get your business on Google for no charge. Simply follow the steps and wait for you confirmation postcard. Free!
Marketing Multitask: Put your traditional PR press releases to work and repurpose them in a blog post. Highlight your organizations spotlight in the media by housing a press page on your website. Co-mingle the traditional PR work with your web marketing arsenal and you have got yourself a powerful partnership.
So the moral of today’s post: don’t limit yourself in your marketing strategies. Traditional PR and web marketing strategies go hand in hand. The same concept of maximizing relationships applies across whatever method you choose. Utilize both schools of marketing and multitask your way to greater visibility and credibility for your organization.
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