Social Media 101

Social media 101

Social Media is huge and becoming huger. ( is that a word ???  M where are u ??)  Anyhow my clients are tripping over themselves because marketing carpet bombing and push marketing is on its knees.  Go figure after treating everyone as a group we are now getting personal. Its real and now we as marketers have to get real. We have to engage and talk. To guide you on your  path here is a grab bag of some great free booklets on social media  that  Chris Brogan a ten year veteran of using social media has brought together. Thanks Chris. Great work

In his blog Chris writes:

“It’s interesting what you can find when you look around a bit on Google. I thought I’d look for a few new ebooks to read. I found 20 different ones that might be interesting to you. It never hurts to get a few different perspectives. In all cases, the first link is to a PDF file, the second link is to the site where it’s hosted.

20 Free eBooks About Social Media

1. The New Rules of Viral Marketing – David Meerman Scott
2. Marketing Apple – MarketingApple.com
3. Masters of Marketing – Startup Internet Marketing
4. Podcast Marketing eBook – Christopher S. Penn
5. Google Adwords Secrets – SEOBook
6. Get Viral Get Visitors – Stacie Mahoe
7. Marketing With Case Studies – Dynamic Copywriting
8. How to Write a Marketing Plan – Geisheker Group
9. SEO for WordPress blogs – Blizzard Internet
10. Social Web Analytics – Social Web Analytics
11. Geeks Guide to Promoting Yourself With Twitter – Geekpreneur
12. The Zen of Blogging – Hunter Nutall
13. What is Social Media – iCrossing
14. A Primer in Social Media – SmashLab
15. Effective Internet Presence – Effective Internet Presence
16. Introduction to Good Usability – Peter Pixel
17. Increasing the Response to Your Email Marketing Program – CRM Transformation
18. We Have a Website. Now What? – Craig Rentmeester
19. Blogs & Social Media – PRSA
20. The Podcast Customer Revealed – Edison Media Research

Where were the experts for Sarah Palin???

Sarah Palin Republican VP

The essentials for getting onto the  world stage  and being prepared online is beautifully illustrated by  the story  of the Republican VP mate for John McCain namely the chosen Republican VP Sarah Palin.

Why this stern warning?  Well Sarah Palin who  is a virtual unknown in political circles outside of her home state of Alaska, where she presides as Governor was recently chosen as John McCain’s running mate.  Here is the shocker  well apparently McCain’s running mate Sarah Palin does not own her own domain name   www.SarahPalin.com. What was she thinking when she neglected the online world and what were handlers thinking?   Someone is about to get rich.

PS:  Take a lesson. Before you launch yourself into the digital domain  as a business, a personal brand or a politician make sure you own your name or identity   on facebook, fliker, twitter etc.

Here is what I found be warned.

Viral Marketing as it should be done

Viral advertising is a crap shoot as most ‘viral’ ads are made on a shoestring budget on purpose. They  are cheap and nasty and in most cases they don’t really do much for the brand they’re trying to promote, at the best they  supply a mildly entertaining video clip for people to enjoy and forget.

But now “Tah Dah” and please a round of applause for this effort. Ooops I nearly forgot go and check out this viral ad for the new Samsung Omnia i900. This baby rocks and  is more on the money. A great production and a welcomed twist in the usual Gizmodo-type gadget unboxing video.

6 essential naming tips

BRANDS AND NAMING

Naming is an art that all of us have tried to figure out. It’s a brand strategist’s nightmare. When it comes to choosing a name  we all want to know what works best – should the name be literal, evocative, new, or a historical allusion?

As I said naming is art, craft and magic. To find that perfect name learn from the past and use these 6 classical essential naming styles that will help you find that perfect name. (They all have a cost so beware!!)

Enjoy them and you’ll be on your way to winning the naming game.

Good Luck..

THE CLASSICAL 6 NAMING METHODS

• DESCRIPTIVE
  Descriptive names describe a brand’s offering. Salesforce.com is a good one. Its straightforward and self descriptive. My tip is use a descriptive name when developing a suite of offerings under one larger brand or company name.
• SUGGESTIVE
  Suggestive names imply a market position (or positioning attribute) Yakking away on your cell phone and online is absolutely evocative of twittering. Twitter gets my vote. The benefit of “suggestive naming” is that it allows one to be more evocative or emotional opportunities.
• METAPHORICAL
  Now this is an odd one- hopefully you don’t choose something to obscure. When you use a metaphorical name what is happening is the brand is being directly compared to seemingly unrelated subjects. Jaguar wins my vote. When using metaphorical names, it’s a great way to imbue a car brand in this case Jaguar, for example, with the attributes of a jaguar that is full of grace and sophistication.
• NEOLOGICAL
  Kodak gets my vote. It’s a new word and .why not create a new word? (PS just have a big budget to explain what its attributes are) Ps: One way to make this a success is to add morphemes—the smallest unit of language that carries meaning into the name.
• HISTORICAL
  Historical names work best when the brand has a heritage allusion or reference. If your brand has equity in its heritage, use it but do it carefully. Historical characters have skeletons in the closet. Consider the name of the founder, or the first product ever launched. This method often has great “legs” and allows for meaning to be unpacked for years. Voyageur gets my vote- I can see the canoes with strong reliable finding a safe passage.
• ARBITRARY
  Apple is an example of and arbitrary  brand  with developed distinct characteristics. Arbitrary brands take time and cost a lot of money and these names have almost nothing to do with the brand’s position in the market, nevertheless, people will make meaning of it by connecting your name with what the brand does . Arbitrary names are among the most legally defensible.

Good luck with your naming.. email if you have trouble. TR

Rooibos Tea exposes Whole Foods

WHole Foods

Whole Foods is one of those stores that met the boomers and the great wave of the happy days  Those were the years from 2000- 2007. We all remember those times   when being hip and cool meant paying the price.  It seemed to be so cool  – “hey we can be cool even though we have gobs of money look we are organic etc”.

I am a South African expat and I love  rooibos tea.  It’s tasty and it has loads of health benefits.

So how does this tie back to Whole Foods. Here is the rub- this is a company that  didn’t read the tea leaves and their roibos is crazily priced.  In the happy days they were unique when the selling point was luxury. Now  the  economy has turned, other competitors have joined the fray and  Health Foods seems to be a price gouger. There is nothing unique on their shelves. For half the price you can get what they have and more.

Their positioning is horrible and their revenues are consequentially down. Its no surpries that the  shareholders spoke. How the hell does  management explain why consumers are fleeing in droves.

May I suggest that it may be  a serious dose of management hubris coupled with an average selection and inflated prices.

In a nutshell – they are not positioned for the market. And may I say that their Rooibos tea is grossly overpriced. Simply put Whole Foods didn’t get it. They are on gross margin strategy and forgetting they need to read the market  have an authentic positioning.

Here’s my advice to Whole Foods: Dudes and Dudettes – smell the roses- reposition as the best priced deliverer of yummy and healthy foods.

Remember selling retail- is about the consumer and their delight.

Good luck Whole Foods !!!

Simple question- who was asleep at the switch ???

Are we stupid and other summer thoughts

Proust and the Squid

First I must apologize and do my “mea culpa” … I skipped town as soon as a taste of summer touched the air- without explanation  and my readership understandably  plummeted. Go figure the writer left the building- and that is not good.  My deepest apologies but I needed to do it.

I needed to step back from the art and craft of marketing to review my place on this little blue planet of ours.

I have done a lot of thinking and I will share that over the next few weeks.  Hopefully it will make sense. One thing that has really got me bothered is close to home. I love tech and I love the reality of the web- easy search- comments and interaction- social networks and the global community. That was until I read over the summer Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf.  Its a rough read and unnecessarily academic but it has a punch. Is she right is it possible we are getting stoopider?

I think she is onto something – we have become lazy and  we allow Google to think for us…..

Summer has been glorious but that is  another story.

How to get a teens attention

My neighbors spotted teenager asked me about cool adds and I pulled out the well known mustached milk adds. He is after all a key market segment. His comment “whatever” told it all.
Since that humiliating experience I have been on a mission to catch his attention. A few days ago I heard about the California Milk Campaign which tries irony. Think shades of Spinal Tap and a retro young ironic hip cool vibe? Who would have thought to put milk inside a guitar? In the hands of a musical phenom by the name of White Gold?
And you may ask what was the spotted ones response. Coool or something like that. Anyway it seems irony is the new cool. I am cool again. Respect.

Measuring Social Media

Measuring Social Media is something like sucking and blowing at the same time. You can build brand awareness and but To often the metrics are hard to get to. But there is help at hand. Fast Company has launced a new show entitled Global Neighbourhoods TV which is hosted by Shel Israel.

They are all good shows but the one that caught my attention is the most recent where Shel interviews Kami Huyse about how she used Social Media for her client SeaWorld San Antonio. Its sounds like a huge success. The Show

Interesting article in Marketing Vox “Social Media Marketing Still Lacks Strong Metrics“

Email Campaigns and deliverability

All marketers have silver bullets that they pull out when sales plummet. Usually they are e-mail campaigns, refined PPC, SEO tweaks and so on. To often however the favorite weapon in a slowing economy is e-mail campaigns. They are fast and quick.

Be careful of the temptation to do one more spin of the wheel and do yourself a favor and read Josh Aberants article “The banes of deliverability” in this weeks DMNews

What caught my eye in Josh’s article is that even if you did everything right as he said “by crafting appealing offers, providing relevant content and targeting those most likely to benefit, some of those e-mail messages still won’t get through”

Apart from the need to be clear on what people are opting in for one also needs to be careful of list fatigue and consumers getting peeved off. The distance between driving them to report your e-mail as spam is very low. Josh Aberant reports in his article that “half a percent is a common threshold —ISPs will take action to block your messages or deliver them to the junk folder.”

Hillary Clinton, Rocky Balboa and Barak Obama

Today Hillary Clinton compared herself to Rocky Balboa in that classic movie “ROCKY”. Addressing a meeting of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO Tuesday, the former first lady and New York senator said she, like Rocky, wasn’t a quitter. She said “When it comes to finishing a fight, Rocky and I have a lot in common. I never quit.”

Two things really came home. Hilary Clinton knows at last that she is against the ropes and she is finally realigning the Hillary Clinton brand. It may be to late for brand alignment. But good luck Hillary. You know you are the underdog by comparing herself to Rocky Balboa. Here is my advice Hilary come out swinging but don’t go toe to  toe  as Rocky did . Thats a losing strategy. Be aggressive, align yourself quickly , set a new agenda and command the media.

This ding dong battle between Hilary Clinton and Barak Obama is a study in branding, Public Relations and marketing. Barak Obama has done very well. It seems Hillary Clinton has misread her audience and will potentially lose the race.

My advice rise up above the underdog and swing as a victor. Drop this underdog stuff.