E-Marketing Outlook for 2010

SMART Marketing & PR is advising clients to act on the following advice in 2010.

This will be a year in which social network advertising will intersect with other types of advertising.

• Integrate Social Media Into Your Advertising
- Find Customers, Where They Are, Online
- Contact Your Repeat Customers (easier to keep than get): LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
- Prospect for New Customers Based on Your Best Customer Profiles: Groups in LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
- Create Content Once – Publish Many Places
- Use the One Campaign, One Message Technique and A/B Test: Don’t Sell – HELP!
- Use the Mixed Media in Multiple Channels That You KNOW Your Customers & Prospects Use
- Separate Landing Pages & 800 Numbers for Each Channel to Measure Results
- In Addition: Social Ad Networks Will Expand
Expect more momentum behind advertising that is targeted based on information from social network user profiles. News Corp.’s Fox Audience Network (FAN) and services from startups 33Across, Media6° and others are already up and running. Meanwhile, some advertisers, such as Discovery Channel, have tested ad formats that are personalized on the fly by using Facebook profile data.

• Continue Search Engine Marketing and Target the Right Social Networking Sites and Groups in Those Sites.

• News Release, News Release, News Release at Least Twice a Week. When you are successful at this, the press will come to you – the expert.

• Expand Your Content Marketing Strategy. Helpful Content is King and It Makes You the Expert in Your Field.
- Twitter is Expanding. Make Sure You Follow the Influencers and More Importantly, Get the Influencers to Follow You.
- Think Beyond the Desktop. Mobile is Moving Into the Mainsteam!

> Look to the 55+ Age Demographic for Internet Usage Increases
Does your product or service "fit" the 55+ market? Internet usage will continue to rise, as consumers find more ways to access the Internet. Plus they have CASH. The continuing proliferation of laptops, smartphones and Internet-enabled TVs, MP3 players and gaming consoles will be the main force behind this trend. Teens and young adults are already active Internet users with many devices. The change will be seen among adults ages 55 and older, many of whom have always had an interest in consumer electronics and now are discovering social networks and other media.

• Traditional Off-Line Media Must Have Online Measurement Components
Set Up Separate Landing Pages and 800 Numbers For Each Channel/Ad. Measurement Saves You Marketing Budget.

If you need help implementing this advice, contact me! mikebrown@BrownLtd.com

"If It Bleeds It Leads" Just Doesn’t Work Anymore

I think we're in a great position to offer more for news and advertising. What do you think?

Our mantra at IBM in the 1980's was to change the communication world from one-to-many, to many-to-many communication, as we were inventing multimedia technology and predicting what the Web would become.

We believed that newspaper companies would either evolve into web-based media companies or not make it. When I showed Web prototypes to the NY Times in 1990, they just scratched their heads in amazement.

Back then, some said nobody would read that much on a computer screen. Now we watch our teenagers, heads bent over all the time, looking at a cellphone screen.

I’m just surprised newspapers haven’t totally switched or gone under yet.

TV has taken a long time to adapt because the engineering architecture of TV and a computer are completely different and incompatible; and, it’s taken a while for the network (transmission pipe) to get big enough and fast enough.

Radio and other audio were pretty easy to move to the web. I remember getting voiceover talent to come into our studio and do recordings. Now, most of the VO talent lives in Costa Rica, Hawaii, wherever they want, and they have an in-home studio with ISDN lines to deliver what they do. We listen-in while they’re recording.

I pass by Rush Limbaugh’s house here in the Town of Palm Beach everyday and it’s funny to think he’s about to go live on the air from his “compound” on the beach, referring to his small studio space as a "network."

I was asked today what I thought of all the media changes. Here's my answer.

To communicate, inform, market, and sell has almost completely changed and the change is getting faster.

Moore’s Law, once only applied to integrated circuits. Now it applies even more to information.

Since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958, the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit has increased, doubling approximately every two years. It has continued for over half a century and now they are so small you can put them in ink, along with transmitters (Radio Frequency Identification), so that labels on anything have “item-level intelligence” and can be tracked on a wireless network.

Click to read my blog article about RFID technology and it will blow your mind:

What Item-Level Intelligence Will Mean to Marketers

Because of all this technology, and the masses need for unbridled communication, information is expanding exponentially.

George Lucas told a group of us at a lunch in Las Vegas in the early 1990’s that everyone was going to become a producer… His prediction became reality: YouTube and Google Video is just a start.

I replaced a $5 million post production video studio (2001 dollars) with about $125.00 worth of software on my laptop and still don’t need all the features it provides.

I talk to media advertising reps and members of the press all the time and most are wondering if they will have a job in the next 5 years.

Google now gives advertisers the ability to bid on space and place ads in most offline major market newspapers, much like their SEM AdWords, including a way to deliver camera-ready ads. Plus they offer the 800# and online measurement service for that offline ad – for free.
Newspapers don’t offer measurement and what do you need a media ad-rep for if you can do it all online using Google?

For news, the media covers a very narrow channel of information. People want more than this:

1) If it bleeds it leads (celebrity death is right up at the top, wars and riots if there is a lot of death, airline and mass transit crashes, etc.)
2) The latest sex scandal
3) Stories about animals - mainly cute ones
4) “Newsworthy” information – euphemism for: If it’s very confrontational or controversial, we’ll run it.

That’s it. That covers just about all they publish.

With the many-to-many channels available and a huge body of other information that is of interest to consumers and businesses, the savvy marketing and PR folks among us have figured out a way to do an end-around on the press to deliver stories, so the press aren’t gatekeepers anymore.

If done effectively, the press ends up coming to you.

Media has changed and I think in many respects, if used for good purposes, many-to-many is better. You can be in charge now. Those that don’t adapt quickly will be left behind, and even more importantly, out-of-touch.

Learn Web 2.0 technologies and techniques. Keep up with them as they evolve and get ready for Web 3.0 (more in another article).

Become excellent storytellers and "reporters," and publish a wide scope of interesting content and you will lead your organization to become a stronger brand, engage all your stakeholders, create a much larger lead bank full of qualified prospects, and your reputation and sales will go up!