Out-Smarts Internet Marketing

The Office Journal recently published a question of mine posed to Brian Scudamore in their 1-800-Got-Question? column. Brian, Founder and CEO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? has grown the company to one world’s largest junk removal service companies since its inception in 1989. Much of this success has been due to word of mouth marketing so I asked for his advice in this area. His answer warmed my cockles as it were because it confirmed some of the benefits of new media marketing I have extolled myself in this very blog such as the fact that its costs less and is much easier than you think.

Here’s the question and Brian’s answer in full:

I have recently rejigged my sales and marketing consulting practice to help clients take advantage of new media marketing solutions such as blogging to help them extend their reach. Viral marketing has obviously played a big role in helping 1-800-GOT-JUNK? establish its brand and grow its customer base.

How much of that do you credit to technology and what would your advice be to a small organisation like mine that is looking to harness viral marketing to spread the good word?

Answer:

Hi Mhairi,

For the last few years, technology has certainly been 1-800-GOT-JUNK?’s best friend to get the word out about our company and our services. The primary reason is that technology has drastically increased the speed at which we are now able to spread our message. The appealing factor of viral marketing through technology for a small business is that once you have a computer, the remaining costs of creating a viral campaign are minimal.

We have utilized several media to accomplish viral marketing, including youtube.com, where anyone can post videos. For us, we filmed a low budget commercial that was actually only run a few times on television. The success of our commercial was actually generated from The video, infamously known as our Rat Advertising Trial (R.A.T.), featured on TBS as one of the world’s funniest commercials and attracting more than one million computer viewers.

Another technological medium that we have found successful is our Business Smarts podcast that we are able to post on iTunes. Podcasting is not only low-cost, but very simple to do. The essential ingredient for a successful viral podcast, which your target audience will listen to, is creating a dynamic topic people will find interesting.

Thanks to Brian for your insights and to Office Journal for publishing the question.

To save me time and effort I like to subscribe to information on the web and have it come to me so that I can read and enjoy when I have a moment. Doing so helps me avoid the frustration of sifting through the internet wilderness trying to re-find cool feeds I have enjoyed in the past. My tool of choice to do this is Google Reader.

I recently wrote a blog piece that describes how to easily set up and use this to your advantage. Read The Scoop on Google Reader for a Google Reader How To….

I’ve been exploring Second Life recently to find out if it really has any potential as a marketing vehicle and I have to say, I can’t fathom what all the fuss is about.

Firstly, it took a new computer to actually have the capacity required to run the damn thing and secondly even with a souped up super computer I still find it slow, sporadic and painful to manoeuvre through.

I managed to graduate from the orientation island quite easily and was set free in the Second Life world. The look and feel is pretty cool but so far there seems to be no one out there. Nobody at the church I came upon (even although it was Sunday!), no-one at Club Wildebeast the crazy dance place and no-one at the Second Life Telus store (where are you Sparkle Dale? - where’s the phone for my avatar?).

The most disappointing Second Life aspect of all is that beyond the cool images and environment, Second Life is senseless and by that I mean: you can’t feel, smell, hear etc. Each time I visit I come away with the feeling I have just been wasting my time……

I’ll be keeping a close eye on Second Life but right now the barriers to entry and the time wasted lead me to deduce that it will be a while before Second Life can be considered as a viable medium for effective marketing. And by then the fad crowds may have moved on to the next big thing - or maybe they have already.

It seems I am not the only one with this sentiment read this post from Darren Barefoot for more.

Here are some great sites that are currently using new media technologies to expand their reach:

http://www.hawaii-aloha.com - uses regular blog posts to provide useful tips and suggestions to help subsribers plan a trip to Hawaii. They also use podcast technology HawaiiVacationConnection to allow vacationers to listen to regular commentaries on hawaii vacation experiences. Its great way to add value for holiday makers and set themselves apart from the competition.

Another great example of companies using new media technologies is Honey Dew Day Spa here in Vancouver which uses the MySpace social networking platform as a forum to promote their spa services. They network and extend their reach by adding MySpace friends in the Vancouver area who meet their typical spa client demographic. That’s how they found me and next time I am thinking about pampering myself, I am going to go there and find out just how successful their MySpace strategy is whilst I am at it.

The subject of wikis came up at a recent meeting so I thought I would repost this gem from last year explaining what wikis are and how they are being used today.

In a recent post I talked about new media marketing and the plethora of tools it brings to marketers. In that article I promised more articles looking at new technologies that can be used by marketers to more effectively serve their customers and spread the word. Today I am going to focus on wikis.

A wiki is a website application that allows users to collaborate. They can update and change content very easily. Wikis are simple to use and easy to set up and best of all, costs aren’t excessive.

Until recently, I hadn’t realised the marketing potential that wikis provide. I attended the most recent Case Camp Vancouver where a local Vancouver organisation called Open Road Communications showcased a successful implementation of its Thought Farmer intranet portal - a wiki based platform that allows employees to post/make changes, interact and setup discussion groups that in turn build strong corporate identities and cultures. If you want to be successful marketing your product to the external community, you must first and foremost believe in your offering by succesfully marketing internally to build brand identity and corporate culture within the organisation and wiki based tools help you do do this.

Wiki’s are not just useful as internal portals. They also present a great way to enhance customer service. An online wiki that allows both internal and external users of your product/service to share tips/improvements and to generally help them get the most from your offering can only serve to enhance the user experience.

I was talking about wiki applications to Julie Anderson, Director of Marketing at Peoplemaps a client in Scotland that provides on-line pyschometric analysis for employers and jobseekers and she brought to my attention some of the neat wiki applications they use. They take advantage of software from PBwiki to allow online partner collaboration as well as to provide a media centre that is easily updated by employees and gives all the information potential clients, media and folk like me need to know about the organisation. People maps is also using wikis internally to allow easy and cost effective collaboration on new software projects (their developers are in the Ukraine and its saving them a ton on phone calls) and to provide an internal portal for their staff (similar to the Open Road application). For more information, check out the Peoplemaps blog On the map: Easy as making a sandwich?

In addition to the customer service enhancements and internal marketing applications, wikis can also be used to reduce the load on e-mail servers by collaborating via wiki rather than sending large documents via e-mail; they have great potential to improve CRM applications by allowing remote teams to share client information and they can act as a great central repository for file sharing.

If you want to check out some of the enterprise wiki solutions out there, go to:

www.socialtext.com
www.jotspot.com- now owned by Google
www.pbwiki.com
www.atlasian.com
www.twiki.com

Good collaborating!

I wrote an article recently for Bluelime Media called “RSS not so simple after all!” that talked about RSS from the user perspective. Now I want to look at RSS from the corporate perspective.

Incase you didn’t read the article, RSS is a means by which information can be easily be published and made available to subscribers in a central on-line repository.

From a corporate standpoint, their are many reasons to take advantage of RSS both to publish information and for research:

1. RSS makes it easier for prospects to find your articles;
2. subscribers get the latest and greatest information;
3. helps establish connections to your web site and drive traffic;
4. gives you the ability to research multiple sources at once;
5. great tools for disseminating information throughout the organisation.

So as an organisation, how would you set up an RSS Feed? The first thing you have to do is contact your web designer and find out if your site is set up to support a syndication feed (if you have a blog you may already have a feed set up). If not, its easy to set one up by entering a few lines of code - check out O’Reilly for help to do this.

Once the feed is set up, you should let people who visit your site know by adding the RSS Feed button which usually looks something like this:

I created the graphic for free by signing up with Feedburner but I am told you can do the same with FeedForAll. Having the button on your site in a prominent place will allow people to easily click to set up a feed that brings your article directly to them as its updated.

To complete the process, have your web designer add code to your website templates so that the RSS feed readers can find your posts and submit your feed to syndicators and search engines to make it easier for your audience to find you.

The next big Internet phenomenon seems to be Twitter . The people at Twitter call it a “global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing?”. You can answer the question by IM, cellphone or online on the Twitter site.

To me, Twitter appears to be simply a paired down instant messaging system that allows bored people to spend some time on whimsy. However Twitter is not to be taken lightly. With an astounding growth rate (in one week in March its traffic increased by over 55%) its definitely taking off with the online community.

I decided to take a closer look for myself to size Twitter up from a marketers perspective:

The Twitter registration process is simple and speedy (I am Outsmarts if you want to look me up). Once you get in, its easy to enter your one liner and read those of others. I made the mistake of adding the BBC to mine and was inundated with million messages about what seemed like every BBC TV show ever produced! So beware who you add.

From a marketing perspective I can see Twitter as being a way to promote a consumer product and it has great potential to enhance communication between remote team members but beyond that I am afraid the Outsmart jury is out. I’d like to wait and see on this one.

That said, my favorite Twitter is that of Borat whose satirical one learners have me in stiches. It’s light relief and for now thats all Twitter means to me. For now.

I came upon a copy this article by Khemal Dole called “Beginner’s Guide to Internet Marketing” in a MySpace blog of all places. Its a great synopsis of how video marketing and podcasting can be used to increase exposure and to make money for your business. Its longer than my usual blog entry - but well worth it.

Beginner’s Guide to Internet Marketing

Online advertising is exploding. With it has come new technology that turns blogs into the best platform to run an online business. The video stream has been described as a savvy use of a cheap toy for online marketing. In fact, some of the most profitable videos on the Internet today were made on webcams or digital cameras.

The two main purposes of a marketing video are to create awareness of a product or service, or to educate visitors.

The video ad is a virtual commercial that is viewed on a website, or sent through RSS feed to other websites through services like Adbrite and Google. These are short commercials. However, because they are made for a computer screen, a professional can make the video for less than $5,000.00. And, a determined do-it-yourself director can make one for under $400.00.

A web video is created to educate visitors and lead them through your web site’s presentation. It increases sales by educating visitors. This overcomes the main reason why visitors leave a website.

A visitor’s failure to understand instructions, or their refusal to read instructions, is the number one reason for lack of sales. Video forces visitors to pay attention to instructions and stops them from leaving the page.

There are dozens of video companies who will make expensive videos for a web site and then offer hosting. At first this appears to be an easy and effective way to introduce video to your website. Unfortunately, the cost is almost never justified. It is better to make a homemade video, and change it monthly. Once you see how easy it is, and how good the quality, you’ll be sold. If you doubt this, go to MySpace or YouTube and look at all the great quality videos made by amateurs.

YOUTUBE & GOOGLE VIDEO

Sticky websites are the main tool for today’s content site managers. They are finding it more difficult to build an opt-in list. It is difficult to keep visitors connected to the web site until they purchase. They need a real strong hook to keep visitors.

YouTube is a free service that lets webmasters embed their own video, or other video, onto a web site. Imbedding a video clip from a famous author, an industry guru, or even a news clip that relates to an article dramatically increases the impact, and sticky factor of the web page.

YouTube allows users to upload their own video and then embed it, with player, on their web site. This video can instruct, sell to, or build trust between the visitor and the product. In fact, it can become the product.

As for the marketing power of video, YouTub recently surpassed CNN’s hits per day, and MySpace video has surpassed AOL, according to Alexa. No wonder Google recently purchased YouTube for more money than many small countries are worth. This is a mute testament to the power of video.

Each of the three main video hosting sites have their advantages and disadvantages. MySpace is social based. Its ignorance of hard core porn leaves a bad taste in many Social Networking and SEO webmasters. There are very few intellectual videos on MySpace, and there is no way to easily embed them onto your web page. This means that people must leave the site to see them, or the webmaster must embed a video player.

Google video is too complicated. It can take more than twenty minutes to sign up. And then there is a complicated tutorial.

This leaves YouTube, as the leading service for most webmasters. YouTube allows a webmaster to sign up and embed video on their website in less than two minutes.

PODCASTING

Podcasting, or audio streaming, has been around for several years. It ranges from creating a radio station with syndication, or setting up a small web based audio sites, to uploading an audio stream onto your website.

Podcasting is the most cost-effective method of retaining customers, improving sales, and educating visitors. However, it is time consuming. It takes at least 30 hours of streaming, rotated in four hour blocks, to effectively create a 24 hour broadcast. The content should be continually updated. Even tutorials should change every few weeks.

Another setback for podcasting is the bandwidth and storage requirement. While there are cheap $5 a month services, you can find site that offer a complete service with royalty management, few webmasters are utilizing the services properly. Those web sites that are using these services are not scripting and editing, resulting in poor content.

The place where Podcasting excels is in short online tutorials. Many web sites utilize them with a PowerPoint presentation, creating a tutorial. While this is a ‘poor cousin’ to the Macromedia flash tutorials, Powerpoint has the benefit of saving each slide as a .gif, making it easy for amateurs to incorporate on their web sites.

It is easy to imbed an audio stream. Just upload the file, and then hyperlink it to a button on the web page. When the button is clicked, the user’s Media player will play the audio.

An audio file can even be linked to photos. A shopping cart with ten cameras on a page can include separate audio streams discussing the benefits of each. The visitor only needs to click a link and/or the image to start the audio stream.

The internet is tiring of web sites that sell ebook downloads. Instead of writing an ebook think ‘new trend.’ The emerging trend is online tutorials, either audio and PowerPoint, audio and photo, Macromedia flash, or video streaming.

HOW TO PROFIT

Each of these tools are used to create a sticky web site. They are used on blogs, web sites, and in forums. These tools ‘tease’ users. Then, when they are hooked, a full video course can be offered.

Bloggers do this. They offer ‘how to courses’ that span 500 blogs, or, the visitor can purchase the ebook, or download the entire course in an audio file.

Video has one main advantage over ebooks and podcasts. While an ebook may fetch $50 - $100.00, the exact same content packaged in a video course could fetch as much as $1,000.00.

Once you are prepared to profit, it is time to trash your homemade product and create a professional one.

Camtasia is an easy software system that allows video editing. It is moderately priced at $299.99. Camtasia Studio 4.0 makes it easy to publish videos and MP3 files for iPod, or other portable media players. Now your marketing message, screencast, lecture, or training video can reach anyone, anywhere, on the bus, in a coffee shop, or even while they’re jogging. Camtasia is easy to learn, easy to use, and affordably priced.

BRINGING IT TOGETHER

Today’s generation has been acclimatized to video. It is part of everything they do - their work, their education, and definitely their entertainment. They will not easily tire of video and audio streaming.

Webmasters do not need to worry about investing money into these mediums, only to have them go out of vogue like so many other Internet Marketing tools have. And, best of all, video is fun to create, easy to use, and very profitable.

Khemal Dole owns and operates http://www.PaychecksDirect.com, a completely FREE service which helps many first-timers and even experts find their perfect Work At Home job. Visit http://www.paychecksdirect.com right now and see for yourself why so many are flocking to his site.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com?expert=Khemal_Dole

Over the last few years the Internet has brought great change for marketers. There are many new tools available that give us the opportunity to reach a wider audiences, establish and enhance brand awareness, improve customer service and retention as well as understand our customers better. Perhaps the biggest attraction of these “new media” technologies is that they offer all these benefits at a much lower price point than traditional direct marketing vehicles.

In a series of upcoming posts, I’d like highlight these new innovations and help you understand how they could be used by your organisation by showing you examples of other organisations using these to their advantage. Today I am going to look at Corporate Blogging and Podcasting - watch out for future posts on using wikis, v-logs and virtual worlds to your marketing advantage.

Corporate Blogging - perhaps the best know corporate blog here in Vancouver is the Vancity blog. Vancity is a local Credit Union known for its leading edge approaches to establishing its brand. The “change everything” site is aimed at growing a community of like minded people looking “to change themselves, their communities or their world” and it contains information on environmental issues, local community and charity events alongside financial tips. Anyone can register and contribute valid blog articles. Vancity doesn’t use the site to sell or promote but to identify itself as a corporation that cares and by doing so it is making this community aware of its brand and further establishing loyalty.

Corporate Podcasting - Podcasting tends to be associated with traditional media organisations extending their reach. My favorite and one of the pioneers of podcasting is the BBC which makes many of its radio shows and TV programme highlights (including last year’s Queen’s speech!) available for download anywhere in the world via podcast. But podcasting is not limited to news providers. Other corporations are recognising that this forum offers them a real opportunity to provide a better standard of service for its customers and community. One of the best known is First Direct - a subsidiary of HSBC in the UK that uses podcasting as a way to keep customers up to date with changes to their services and with developments in the finance.

I mentioned earlier one of the main benefits of new technologies like podcasting and corporate blogging is their cost effectiveness but another huge advantage of these is the relative ease with which you can start using them in your marketing arsenal. That, together with the growing use of these technologies in the mainstream makes them very attractive vehicles that you can use to further your marketing efforts.

At a time when mass media consumption is in general decline, I was interested to read a Toronto Star that the number of newspaper readers in Canada is actually increasing (well over 50% of adults regularly read the news). Granted, the increase across the 34 Canadian markets studied is marginal (only 2% since 2002) but given that people are turning off their TV’s in droves and aren’t exactly flocking to the box office its interesting to see an old media stalwart that is resisting the long tail trend.

So why is the news industry managing to hold its own? In my view, the industry’s relative success compared to other old established media outlets is a result of 2 important factors:

The first of these is the fact that newspapers were quick to adapt to the Internet. The NADbank study in question included a question regarding the time spent reading online newspapers: 17% of Canadians read online papers – a number that has been growing steadily since it started being surveyed. Rather than fighting new media like the TV and music behemoths are still doing (witness YouTube being sued by Viacom for infringement and the constant stream of litigation against peer to peer music download sites), newspapers, in contrast, were quick to adopt new media as an alternative distribution channel. As a result, newspapers are managing to evolve and withstand the new media storm more effectively than their counterparts.

The second reason that the newspaper industry is managing to keep its head above water is because we are becoming a society addicted to information. The Internet has made information on every subject available to everyone, everywhere. We’ve been exposed to this mine of information and we want more regardless of the form it takes (a trend validated by the fact that book sales are also increasing). Which is good news for society as a whole.

Only time will tell if newspapers will continue to maintain their readership levels through online channels but when considering how new media will effect markets in the future, their lesson is important to any company - adapt and grow or resist and risk being left behind.