For those of you struggling to find ways to extract value from Twitter consider these tools. Twiangulate can be a useful networking tool for those of you whose actually “know” your follows or followers in real life. Use this to triangulate your follows with those of two close friends or colleagues. You’ll find out who you have in common, who they have in common and the app gives you a convenient way to follow others with one sure thing in common. Twiangulate calls them your tweeps, but don’t let the cheesy moniker get in the way of using this tool.
TweetStats gives you, well, stats based on your volume, keywords, and followers. TweetStats keywords are presented in a cloud so it’s easy to spot your most frequently used. It looks like I tweet about VLG, people, marketing and Texas. It also gives you your #hashtags in a cloud. #Marketing is a clear front runner. Twitter volume could help you adjust and schedule your tweets so you aren’t slamming your followers. If you want to stay top-of-mind throughout the day this will help you adjust accordingly. BTW- Su.pr is a handy tool for scheduling tweets and I’ve found more time and attention goes into what you tweet when you schedule for the future.
Give these a try and give us some feedback. Do you have a favorite Twitter app?
How important will be is mobile advertising and mobile marketing? It’s difficult to wrap your brain around that fact that advertising is being disbursed on a one-to-one basis so quickly and into so many emerging markets. As long-time advocates of one-to-one marketing we want to embrace this shift and seek new and better ways to tie mobile into consumer or B2B marketing programs. Researching…
The Economist sheds new light on why we (Americans) are not the center of the universe when it comes to mobile marketing. However, many of our current customers are now reaching out to decision makers in these markets as technical infrastructure, cloud computing and other solutions find ways into India, Africa and Eastern Europe. That happening today.
Inspired by Colin Alsheimer’s Social Media Challenge (follow @levelten_colin, #smschallenge) that encouraged all of us to stray from mainstream content and share a little more variety in our tweets, I have a somewhat related challenge to lay before you.
My wife uses Facebook and I’d guess spends at least and hour on the site spread throughout the course of a day. I don’t. Rarely do I use facebook to communicate with others. In fact I go days without even logging in. Despite having 302 Facebook friends, 261 LinkedIn connections and 177 followers on Twitter I probably communicate with no more than 10 people across all three media in a given week—so, not very social.
For the next five days I’ve decided to challenge myself and I encourage you to do the same. Whether you are a heavy user or passive participant in social media let’s put social media to the test.
The Challenge:
I challenge you to contact twenty-five people over the next five days that you’ve friended, connected or followed.
The Rules:
Only contact those you friended, connected or followed, but have not communicated with since that day.
Use only social media to make contact (e.g. post to a wall, send a LinkedIn message, direct message when you can).
Share:
We want feedback. Whether awkward or awesome please post comments here, on our Facebook page, or LinkedIn group. Tweet about it using #25in5 and suggest others you think we should follow. I’ll aggregate comments/thoughts on the blog next week and you can follow live action here:
If you’re a passive user of social media like me this will take you out of your social media comfort zone. Otherwise it’s just an excuse to check in with old friends, acquaintances or random people you friended on the Internet.
For any of you that will or will not admit to answering email, tweeting, or texting while in the WC, might relate to this excerpt from The Colbert Report. Social media brings new meaning to the WORD ubiquity.
Chris Anderson, Wired magazine’s editor in chief, follows a trend in media these days whereby media no longer interviews an expert, but becomes the expert. Despite this I still tuned in yesterday for a synopsis of his new book “Free” which you can relive here.
As heavy users of 37signals products we’ve been on the consumer end of a freemium business model. We first signed up for free Highrise and free Basecamp. We experimented with free BackPack before dropping it at no cost. Now we pay for Highrise and Basecamp as do several hundred thousand others at about $50 a month. Read more about this business approach here.
But what about the services industry…
Without software or packaged goods to sell what do we give away for free. Would you, our customer, commit to spending dollars or euros with us down the road after we give you “X”. Other than this blog and a couple tweets per day we don’t really have freebies out there. To be honest, I’m not sure we have a clue. Can the freemium business model work in the services industry? What should we give away?
Any advice? via Comment or Twitter @wefightboredom
If you already use Wufoo and Highrise you know that form submits go directly from one to the other. If both are new to you I encourage you to check out this Wufoo blog post and learn more about sending form data into the Highrise CRM.
We offer our clients the ability to do the same into Highrise, Salesforce.com or Sugar CRM, so you can eliminate the manual labor and use that intern for something a little more productive. Your intern will thank you. Trust me.
VW’s campaign in 2009 might be a bit dated, but it lives on in viral form here and elsewhere on the web. You can see all three experiments at TheFunTheory.com. Here’s our favorite. This leaves no doubt that fun trumps dull and boring. Enjoy.
How do we sell ourselves (interactive shops) to potential new employees? If you’re pouring over RFP responses or shopping for a new ad agency keep in mind that these new hires will build brands, execute marketing campaigns and help drive demand for countless companies. We’ve been fortune and never really felt the need to advertise for to bring in new people. Others aren’t so lucky. Would you work here?
We have over 800 budget conscious, retail bleeding, merchandise loving, sofa sleeping, car driving, pizza eating, market activating, comp sales crazy, ROI focused team members in many offices around the country! –Zimmerman
We fuse media, creative, strategy and technology to achieve brave, accountable marketing solutions. –Moxie
Our relentless focus on client service leads to groundbreaking work and outstanding results. And fun permeates everything we do - from weekly happy hours at our in-house Beer Bar, to friendly Wii competitions in our Game Lounge and annual all-agency outings like 360i’s Amazing Race or Beach Olympics. –360i
You eat, breathe, and dream not just about design—but interactive design. You’re a bit of a technology geek, too. Good news is we’d love to talk to you. –Partner & Napier
It’s only fair that we include our simple, short blurb.
We fight boredom! –VLG
We also eat, dream, focus, drink, drive cars (not after drinking) and have fun.
That’s how much time today’s 8- to 18-year old spends in front of a t.v., computer, mobile phone, and/or iPod each day. Thirty years ago that same demographic spent 1.5 hours in front of digital media each day, but that’s probably just because we didn’t have very much digital media. Bad or good this is a trend unlikely to reverse itself.
How will this change how you target these up-and-comers? Almost 8 hours of digital leaves very little room for print media, so that’s out. Tech savvy children won’t know what it’s like to sit through t.v. commercials. Heck, what’s a t.v.? Facebook ads, PPC, iPhone app banners, and other ad delivery vehicles will likely lose influence and go the way of the classified ad in the Sunday paper.
Peer pressure. That little thing we all want to resist will be the new way to advertise. Social influence is huge and will only get bigger, especially in this young demographic. Peer pressure is not a new thing, but the availability of new social media tools is amping up the influence both in volume and distance. Think that all night Halo 3 marathon in four states and two countries holds any sway over kids today.
It becomes very easy to see why the advertising landscape evolves so rapidly. It’s too hard to see how the landscape will change, so the best option is to be the one driving change. They’re the only advertisers that will know where they’re going.
These days everyone has a formula for marketing success and no two are exactly alike. We either adapt our clients to our direct marketing approach, or adapt strategy to the goals set forth by the client. Giving clients solid advice along backed by previous campaign metrics creates an healthy partnership and solid dialog marketing campaigns. It takes a delicate touch to offer advice without talking down to clients. Many agencies fail here. You should hear our clients relay stories of agency egos the size of conference rooms.
Revenue generation is a team sport. Marketing starts with solid prospect or customer lists.* High mail-to-web rates drive these same prospects and customers into the marketing funnel.** Sticky microsites educate these folks and prime them for discussions with sales. Sales cycles grow shorter as sales gets into deeper and deeper conversations. Decision makers and those that influence the purchase get involved. Revenue is won. It all started with established campaign expectations and a solid customer-vendor relationship.
Not all clients buy into our approach 100%, but together we find ways to leverage our creative work to meet organizational milestones and goals. At the end of the day it’s about communicating expectations, setting goals before the first brainstorming session, and executing against those goals. That’s where the rubber meets the road.
*Marketers spend far too little time cleaning lists. Traditional direct mail took a shotgun approach. You could afford bogus data, because the per unit costs were somehow justified. Not so with dimensional mail. Higher-end mail pieces help keep lists smaller with better, targeted contacts.
**Once you have a solid list it’s up to us (VLG or whatever agency you use) to deliver a value proposition to those future/current customers. Look for mail-to-web (or visit rates) over 20%. Our Dialog Marketing gives you a leg up with real-time behavior tracking online and notifications via email, SMS, or RSS feed.
