There is an excellent article in Wired’s February issue addressing social media and how it can evolve into, well, something quite introverted. The article uses an example of a Ms. Evans. She started using Twitter as a grad student – with an interest in poetry her updates were topical to what she was interested in. As such, her following grew slowly with people who were interested in similar things. Interaction is frequent, people comment on posts, ask questions, Ms. Evans replies – it’s a tight little community.
Then Ms. Evans gets the idea to post a short, 140 character recipe. Next thing you know she has 13,000 followers interested in food – a slight diversion from her original use for Twitter. As the following grows, something interesting happens. When you see a person with 100 followers on Twitter they seem more approachable. You see a person with 20,000 followers, if you do in fact have a question, you tend to presume the person wouldn’t reply to your question if you did happen to ask it. So you don’t…and social media just becomes, well, media.
The concept applies to Facebook as well. Amass a group of 500 ski enthusiasts and you can talk about the best mountains, the best days, post photos, share stories, etc. Let the group grow to 15,000 and suddenly people are selling ski equipment, posting “lost and found” information, etc. Ironically enough, the Facebook group starts to take the form of a dynamic newspaper! The founder of the group questions how he or she should interact with this new organism – there’s no way to cater to everybody!
Take a good look at your social media presence and ask yourself what direction you want to go in. Is it really that valuable to reach 10,000 Twitter followers if you no longer receive feedback? Do you really want to be “microfamous”? After all, celebrities are constantly complaining about all the attention they receive. Popular Twitter users might not make the television news, but one consistency remains, the larger audience will always be the less forgiving audience.
Among the clients I work with, iPhone applications seem to be pitched on a weekly basis. I’m not going to argue the “cool factor” of some of the things that are possible on the iPhone and newer mobile phones in general, especially with the involvement of GPS – have you heard about foursquare? But the question is, does your business need an iPhone application?
A quick way to get an idea of how many of your customers/clients are using an iPhone to engage with your products is to check your website statistics. Most traffic analytics tools, including the free Google Analytics tool, will tell you how many visitors you are receiving from the iPhone/iPod devices. This number doesn’t necessarily represent what percentage of your customers have an iPhone, but it does give you a solid understanding about how many of those customers are actually visiting your website on their iPhone.
If you have a high percentage of iPhone visitors to your website, chances are the decision to develop an iPhone application for your business should be an easy one. The next problem becomes what features to build and who to build with – which I can help with if need be. On the other hand, if you don’t see a high percentage of iPhone traffic to your website, that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from an iPhone app.
There isn’t any golden formula that will tell you if an iPhone application will be successful for your business or not. But as more mobile networks start supporting the iPhone, it can be safe to assume that the iPhone will become an increasingly common way for your customers to engage with your brand. The possibilities are endless, but they’re effectiveness is limited by how many of your customers will actually use the application, and remember to use it on an ongoing basis. I’ve heard daunting stats claiming that over 50% of iPhone apps are only used once or twice, then uninstalled or forgotten.
I think the safest way for businesses to approach iPhone application development at the present time is in groups. A restaurant shouldn’t build their own app, they should unite with a dozen other restaurants and build one app to serve everyone’s purpose. Remember, to benefit your business it must be useful to the user, and that user doesn’t want to install six separate applications for his six favorite restaurants. Keep it functional and useful, and considering current iPhone trends, more and more people will come knocking…
The tools available to the online marketer are plentiful, and with a broad topic or a fairly general target market, the possibilities are literally endless. There’s online video, social media, good old display advertising, mobile marketing with ads or text messages, email marketing, website optimization, rss advertising, search engine marketing, podcasts, blogging…well, my goal here isn’t to list them all. The point is that when marketing to a broad group an online marketing consultant or firm has endless options and can spend an eternity optimizing and improving over time. But what does a business do when trying to reach a smaller community? A number of smaller communities, let’s say communities with a population of less than 250,000 people, are in an awkward spot. Newspapers and local television are struggling or closing their doors, and for many businesses those mediums are where the bulk of the marketing budget is spent.
So with newspaper circulation dwindling and the future of local television undetermined in many smaller communities, now is an important time for businesses to start considering online marketing. In the past one could argue that a business can remain competitive using traditional marketing tactics – chances are that if you’ve spent a number of years marketing with newspapers, you’ve learned a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t. But as marketing budgets adapt to take advantage of new online marketing opportunities, these already struggling traditional mediums are going to be pulling in smaller percentages of their advertiser’s budgets.
A common excuse used to avoid using online marketing is that the company website isn’t up to par, and the good news is web development costs aren’t as high as they used to be. The bottom line is online marketing is becoming less of an optional marketing tactic and more of an obligatory tactic – but after a business gets that first taste of the new opportunity, measurably and flexibility online marketing offers, I just know the investment will be worth it.
The best part is you don’t have to jump into the deep end. I can work with your business to create an online marketing strategy that fits your budget and makes sense for your brand. Just drop me a note with any questions or thoughts and we’ll go from there!
While slightly off topic for my online marketing blog, this video is worth a post. The Internet has created entire industries, revolutionized business and communication, and it was created thanks to competition between nations, the threat of war, and ultimately, the desire for progress.
Google has just announced that it will be including YouTube Promoted Videos within AdSense advertisements. This affects two different groups of people in two different ways. Quite simply, including YouTube videos within the network of AdSense sites may be the most powerful video promotion factor outside of YouTube itself. The other group affected is the website publishers. The immediate thought, which Google mentions in their release notes, is that YouTube Promoted Videos will increase the amount of ad competition, which should translate into publishers earning a higher cost per click.
But ask yourself this. Has someone ever sent you a link to a video and you find yourself watching that video, plus several more videos, and 30 minutes later you look back and wonder where the time went? YouTube has created a very intelligent “related videos” feature which entices visitors to watch more videos. I’m sure if you could put a dollar value into the work that YouTube has spent on optimizing this feature, we’d be talking about a serious figure. So thinking about AdSense ads on a website – a visitor clicks on a traditional ad, the publisher makes a few cents, the advertiser pays a few cents, and Google skims some off the top. The visitor is then brought to a website, and maybe the website is of decent quality and the visitor ends up spending some time on that advertised site, or maybe the visitor even makes a purchase or signs up for something. Thinking through YouTube Promoted Videos changes that scenario. The website visitor clicks on the AdSense ad and, financially, the process is similar. The publisher makes a few cents, the advertiser spends a few cents, and Google takes it’s fair share. But in this case, the advertiser is paying for that visitor to visit a Google owned website – YouTube. That Google owned website has spent millions of dollars making sure people get sucked into the endless entertainment possibilities that YouTube hosts.
Does this mean video creators are essentially paying Google to deliver more traffic to it’s own website? What a concept! Sure the video gets a viewer, but after that first video view chances are the visitor will watch a few more related videos, which may or may not be owned by the original video producer. This in turn helps YouTube serve even more ads.
For many YouTube content creators I’m sure this is an outstanding feature, but for the majority I just don’t see it being ideal. Unless your video content is consistently on message and you actually have a well designed YouTube channel, I’d think using a regular image ad within AdSense and linking to your own website remains the better option.
For those interested in promoting YouTube videos, here’s their introductory video:
There is an excellent article in Wired’s February issue addressing social media and how it can evolve into, well, something quite introverted. The article uses an example of a Ms. Evans. She started using Twitter as a grad student – with an interest in poetry her updates were topical to what she was interested in. As such, her following grew slowly with people who were interested in similar things. Interaction is frequent, people comment on posts, ask questions, Ms. Evans replies – it’s a tight little community.
Among the clients I work with, iPhone applications seem to be pitched on a weekly basis. I’m not going to argue the “cool factor” of some of the things that are possible on the iPhone and newer mobile phones in general, especially with the involvement of GPS – have you heard about 