The Web Uncovered

Thanks to a recent blog post by Andy Beal, We can find the MarketingProfs survey of Twitter users.  What did they find?

Twitter users were asked to rate the reasons why they participate, on a scale from 1 to 5 (with 1=strongly disagree and 5=strongly agree):

• “I find it exciting to learn new things from people”: Average score 4.65
• “I value getting information in a timely manner”: Average score 4.58
• “I like to be connected to lots of people”: Average score 3.91
• “I want to generate new business”: Average score 3.70
• “I find it gratifying to have people follow me”: Average score 3.64

The Takeaway:  Twitter users care more about being heard than listening.  if you are using Twitter as a marketing tool, then you must generate frequent, targetted content that will truly gain the interest of followers after you have enticed them to  follow you.

Thomas Freidman’s flattened world may be appear a bit fictious in certain regards, but one technology that has overshadowed the others mentioned in his book, The World is Flat, is that of mobile technologies.  Since the book has been written, the proliferation of Iphones and Blackberries are rudimentarily changing the fashion by which business is conducted.  As an example of how this effects marketing, I’d like to talk about John Mayer.

Sound a bit out there?  John Mayer has learnt about the capability of marketing to mass ammounts of people several times a day.  How does it do it?  He tweets.  John Mayer’s twitter page has over 685 THOUSAND followers, and I am one of them.  With his Blackberry, he uploads around ten updates a day to over half a million people.  It isn’t the mobile technology that makes this so effective, it is how the technology has allowed his fans to feel as if they are personally connecting with him several times a day.

The Takeaway:

While you may see mobile technology as a tool to execute your marketing plan more efficiently, think bigger.  How can your campaign be adapted in a mobile world?  Neil Postman, an American media theorist from my alma mater, taught that the same message changes on different media, often to the negative effect.  Taking the inverse, to be truly on the cutting edge, we all must explore how new technologies in media create new opportunities to adapt our message.

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.

Marshall Mccluhan maybe remember for his wonderful observations of how the media and society are inseparably intertwined.  However,  the vast changes in technology since his death in 1980 has astounding ramifications for those marketing in the digital age.

If the entity providing the message is the medium, they still may be tied to the message as long as the source is credible.   The appearance of credibility is so easy to create online that it becomes increasingly difficult for media consumers to differentiate between credible sources and well-performed shams.  However, if the medium is the internet, then the message is incoherent.  There is no message on the internet.

But this is not completely dreadful news.  In fact in means that the medium becomes so constant that the only thing left is the message, even if only in hot terms.  However, the issue is that many older marketing managers see the internet as the ready-made fix-all and fail to recognize that not only can content not be developed, but that it must be done in standard marketing terms; segmentation, value-added, and placement.

The Takeaway:

Large-scale web presence requires quality content.  The internet transcends McCluhan’s hot media/cold media labels, so pictures and videos can be followed with detailed descriptions of your product or services, in a multi-sensorial approach.  Technology is great, but the more technology-savvy your target audience is, the more clearly focused your message must be.  In short, online marketing is not a bandaid for a bad marketing plan.