This week we spoke with Rick Rovegno, a former Technical Analyst for PC Magazine. He has been successfully using LinkedIn to develop his online network. Rick shared with us some of the features of Linked In that have helped improve his odds of finding a job using social media. Also joining the conversation, Ryan Goodin of Diligent Brands, Inc., a full-service marketing agency and Mildred Tassone, a digital and social media consultant.
For those of you who didn’t catch it, check out this article about Facebook in New York Magazine: Do You Own Facebook or Does Facebook Own You?
Basically, it is exploring how the Facebook business model effects relationships with both users and implicitly marketers. This is centered around the change in the terms of service, but ultimately its about determining how to deal with ownership of personal information. This is very interesting in that there is the contradiction that it is in fact an advertising-ran system, yet they are dependent on user trust in order to remain relevant. This is a game that many have lost, including Myspace, Friendster, and others. Read the article here.
Youtube has already been determined as the victor in the world of user-generated video. This isn’t news. However, the relatively recent addition of insights in Youtube reveals something that all marketers fear. What if your content is attracting the wrong audience?
Let me give you an example. You are selling lingerie, and your target audience is women from ages 20-40. You find models who make your product look very good, or vice a versa, and you post your video on youtube. Within a week you have over 1,000 hits, and a 10,000 within a month. While you are excited about the virility of your campaign, you don’t understand why it is not generating traffic to your website or any signicant sales increase. Then you look at Youtube Insights at demographics, and find that 80% of the viewers were men, ages 14-24.
The Takeaway:
Remember, segmentation and product placement are not enough alone. You have to generate content based on the values of your target segment. Using themes like pricing and value, or improved body image, could better focus this campaign. While Youtube gives you only basic segment data, this is enough to know if your framing of content is seriously flawed.
Marshall Mcluhan often criticized poor media placement based on the effects of the medium upon the content which was being presented. He best defined these terms by separating media into categories of “hot” and “cool.” In short:
Hot Media is media that is ready-made, in that it requires very little participation from the media consumer. Action movies are hot media, as little is left to the imagination, and it has a beginning, middle, and end.
By contrast, Cold Media, requires a certain level of participation, whether it be imagination, input, a vote. Forcing interaction between the medium and consumer, it wears away the consumers’ ability to remained detached.
Is the internet hot or cold?
Neither is the best answer, both is another possible one. While video, radio, and other inherently hot media are available, they often times can have a cool aspect such as video responses, polls, blogging, and more. It becomes paradoxically both. Facebook is detached enough that you are safe in the confines of your own home, that is completely cool in that all of its content is user generated.
The Takeaway: When creating anything online, you want it be initially hot enough to attract your audience, but cool it down quick enough that your audience response in the way you want, whether it be to buy now, read more, or tell a friend.
Having collected or gained access to a thousands, or even just a few, of potential clients is one sure way to get business moving. Direct marketing, both online and offline, has been seen as one of the best tools to generate real results. However, the question is, once you have your email addresses, what do you do with them?
Rather than creating your own excel files that require upkeep or trying to draft your own html emails (or worse send basic text emails), an email management system is definitely the way to go. We here at The Web Uncovered are crazy about one in particular, Constant Contact, as it has the most value-added systems for its cost.
Not only can you import and export your email lists through Constant Contact, but you also are html email templates that you can customize for your campaigns, such as name-addressing, adding your logo, and more. Also they have a feature to add polls, which is a good way to create user interaction.
Takeaway: Now this is a paid service, so you need to evaluate how much time you think you will save, and how much you think you will use it. For me personally, the feature that put me over the edge was the analytics feature, where you can see who clicked on links in your email. Not only does it give you great feedback on your campaign overall, but I have used this to create personal follow-up emails that closed deals. All-in-all, this is a technology that is unappreciated and may become a make more vital part to online marketing in the year to come.
While there are many aspects to running an effective online marketing campaign, including video is seen as imperative, especially if there is an intent for going viral. The billion dollar deal that brought Youtube into the Google fold only reiterates this fact. Before we can appropriately address how to approach the use of video in online marketing, we need to understand why it works with people.
Coming back to Marshall Mcluhan, media is either hot or cold, either interactive or ready-made. The internet transcends these boundaries. I won’t divulge too much here as this is a post of it’s own. However, beyond the fact that humans are visually-based, and that culturally we put a visual emphasis on everything (“’see’ what I mean?”), video has been and will likely be the quintessential example of hot media. Whether it is a cooking recipe, a guitar lesson, or your product commercial, people will choose a video over a typographical description 99 percent of the time.
Another reason for this is that Video is a mixed medium. It can be visual, audio, and typographical at the same time. This solidifies it as a hot medium.
The Takeaway: Taking this all into consideration, your target audience wants to come as close to experience your service, product, etc, as possible within the confines of technological ability. If you don’t have a video showcasing your value-added, your competition will, and likely already has. To have an online presence to be multisensorial in a mixed medium.
The Web Uncovered
