The Web Uncovered

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.

A few years back, Myspace was seen as the best marketing tool available on the internet.  Marking the early stages of the web 2.0 era, many successful campaigns were executed on Myspace, including that of bands, products, non-profits, and politicians.  Not so anymore.

Myspace has became increasingly worthless for generating meaningful traffic to target websites.  Formally ranked the website with the most traffic, Myspace is now #9 on Alexa Top 500 rankings.  This however isn’t the real reason for it’s increasing irrelevancy.  The lack of protective measures by Newscorp’s management of Myspace has made it increasingly impotent to hacking software that allows spammers to abuse Myspace.  This relative increase in noise has led many to flee Myspace for more secure and interactive social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn, where not only were prof

The take-away: Not only has Myspace began driving away valuable customers, but it has driven away marketeers as the remaining traffic on Myspace appears to be bots, software ran profiles used to promoting useless things like Multi-Layered Marketing programs and Pyramid schemes.  The one HUGE exception of this rule is in music, where music industry leaders may in fact look at the Myspace profile of a band before even looking at their website, as play count and traffic give good insight for a artist’s fanbase.  In short, if you’re not rocking it out in a band, get yourself to a new social network.