Yesterday, I wrote about Stevel Rubel’s presentation at the New Media Academic Summit. He mentioned that they published a paper “chock full of with actionable insights for businesses”. You can directly download the PDF. 

I found particularly useful a list of 10 conversations for companies to monitor and I’ve added some of my own thoughts.

It’s very easy with current technology to set up automatic alerts to track mentions of your company’s brand name, website and key personnel (we’ll show you tomorrow how to set up a Google Alert) – but the paper suggests this is not enough, you need to be looking for particular conversations and you should be treating different types of conversations differently. Some of these conversations may never even mention your brand (at least at first).

1. The Point of Need: If you can meet people at their point of need, you are not interrupting or pitching, you are helping and responding to an expressed need

This is often why Google Adwords is so successful with certain search keywords. People are looking to solve a problem at that particular point in time so they are far more receptive to advertisements that fit exactly with their need. Read the rest of this entry »

I thought I’d write a few of my thoughts on the Thirty Day Challenge. (If you’ve never heard of it, have a look at our Thirty Day Challenge Super Summary).

I recommend the Thirty Day Challenge to anyone who has a business online (or is considering taking their business online) as well as anyone else who is interested to learn more about internet marketing, with some provisos.

Don’t get caught up in the hype

There’s a lot of hype around the Thirty Day Challenge and I believe a lot of misconceptions. It is pitched by its creators as a free course that teaches you how to make your first dollar (or ten) online but a lot of people hear that as a course that shows you how to make your first million online. It doesn’t, there’s usually a lot more that goes into making a million dollars but the skills you learn as part of the Challenge will help you along the way.

What it will teach you is some really great foundational skills that you can use for any business and any market (if you are flexible and use your imagination).

The importance of market research (and keywords) Read the rest of this entry »

Offline advertising and marketing- print, TV, radio and direct mail – have lost a lot of their shine as more people turn online. But don’t just write it off just yet. After all, even the masters of online advertising Google do Print Ads as I mentioned yesterday.

It really depends on who your target market is. Realise that there are still significant parts of demographics who don’t spend any or hardly any time on the internet at all. Kids and Generation Y may be on all the trendiest social networking apps, but they may not be your market and may not want or afford your product/service.

Print in particular can have a lot of value. People can tear out a coupon or an ad with an address on it. It’s a physical item that is likely to cross their paths again – it can serve as a constant reminder. Whereas even bookmarked pages on the internet are easily lost amongst the hundreds of other bookmarks that an average person can quickly accumulate. Paper can be stuck on a refrigerator, links cannot (at least not yet – the internet enabled fridge is a number of years off becoming a common household appliance).

There’s something too about the tactibility of paper that can lead to greater engagement and attention. Think about hard copy magazines and trade journals and think about e-zines and e-newsletters: do you treat them differently? Would your target market?

It may be as marketers focus their attention online, there will be less competition for attention in the offline space. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve noticed less unsolicited mail coming in my real life mailbox – but way more spam (fortunately my Gmail spam filter is very good so I hardly if ever see any of it). And when I do get something in my mailbox, it’s a bit of a novelty so I’ll open it.

There’s a term in direct marketing called “lumpy mail” – it’s the strategy of putting something in the envelope other than a letter, something that creates a lump. That lump in turn turns the unsolicited piece of mail into a mystery and opening rates soar as most people can’t resist the temptation to find out what that lump is. If the lump is something of value or use the person, then you also tap into the psychological phenomenon of reciprocity – people tend to want to reciprocate when others do nice things for them (and often they’ll reciprocate above the value of the original benefit – one theory is to cancel out the uncomfortableness of being in “debt” to someone else). I think it requires more skills to create an equivalent online (Video and audio, I think are the online equivalents of lumpy mail – they are something different, they use different senses and provoke interaction on multiple levels.)

The online world will only get more and more important but don’t forget the offline world. You may find some offline campaigns more effective. Just remember to know your target market!