Escape the Mundane + Experience the Remarkable

How Twitter Can Save The TV Commercial

4 Comments
Marketing

Ask anyone with a DVR if they watch television commercials and I bet you’ll hear a resounding “NO”!

But follow that question with asking if they use their laptop, iPad or smartphone to browse the web while watching TV and you’ll probably hear an emphatic “yes.” Or at least a “sometimes.”

We’re living in an age of attention multi-tasking. We can watch TV with our peripheral vision while catching up on emails and reading the latest news headlines & blogs. All while scanning Facebook & Twitter to see what our friends have going on in their lives.

Where does this leave the traditional marketers? We are barely watching TV anymore, let alone the commercials. So what are advertisers to do?

Television advertising, as we know it, is dead.

Or is it?

I’m a fan of Mark Cuban. He’s a go-getter powerhouse in the world of business. And I’m happy to report he is on the new season of Shark Tank on ABC.

Anyway, I follow Mark on Twitter and noticed that he was live tweeting during the show. His insight was remarkable. And it lead to a host of people chatting about the current happenings on the show.

The TV Commercial Savior

Welcome Twitter hastags. And its unbelievable communication power.

The #SharkTank chat was interesting because it highlighted a pathway for the revival of a live & largely communal television watching experience. (While it’s not the first instance of this, the chat is a great example)

If you truly were interested in a show, you most likely would be interested in chatting with others about the show. Since we live in such a private society – watching TV from our living rooms – Twitter is the best option for us to interact with ease.

There are four huge implications of live tweeting:
[Read more...]

The Lazy Way to Grow Your Twitter Follower Count

22 Comments
Marketing

The beauty of Twitter is that you are allowed to follow anyone you’d like. And anyone can follow you. Unlike most other social networks, there is no requirement to reciprocate follows.

However, the entire concept of Twitter is foreign to most people. It’s not a valuable microblogging platform as initially intended. Nor is it effective as a popularity contest. Rather, it’s a powerful communication tool. And is only as effective as the level of trust and authority your followers associate with you. Let me repeat that:

Twitter is only as effective as the level of trust others associate with you.

But with most people misunderstanding Twitter, they look at what others are doing. And what they have found over these past few years is that people with large follower numbers notoriously have equal or greater following numbers.

Seeing these inflated numbers, the majority of Twitter users interested in an expansive following blindly follow back every follower they receive. Or they may have adopted software that automatically follows whoever follows them as well as searches for & automatically follows new people. In their strategy, a follow gets a follow, no questions asked. Nor any engagement needed.

As a matter of fact, the well known Twitter advocate Chris Brogan once employed this strategy. However, he said no to this autofollow strategy in 2009, but it was to late. He had already accrued too large a number of people he was following (as of this post, he follows around 138,000 people). And now he has a heck of a time managing it all.

The autofollow has created a false idea for most Twitter users. And have even given rise to large groups of people (eg. #teamfollowback) who follow you if you follow them. But the second you unfollow, their software instantly unfollows you. This does not build trust nor authority.

The Long-Term Flaw of the Auto-Followback

We all have our specialties and expertise. And we all have our interests.
[Read more...]

Social Media Marketing in a Small Town

6 Comments
Marketing

Ask anyone from a rural area about technology and you’ll hear two common responses, “limited cell phone coverage” and “slow Internet speeds.” Which means most of the residents in low populated areas can’t easily access YouTube, communicate on Twitter or check-in on Foursquare.

Do you want to become a big, well-connected fish in a little, low-technology adoption pond?

This lack of social media adoption in small towns unfortunately leads to small businesses believing that the old methods of marketing (eg. newspapers, phonebooks, local TV) are the best strategies.  Yet, most businesses fail to realize it’s 2011 and technology is improving rapidly. While AT&T may be crappy today, tomorrow (actually let’s be serious, AT&T will be horrible long-term)… Verizon, Sprint and the like are quickly improving their coverage and speeds. Add to this the expansion of high speed offerings farther into the boondocks and we will be discovering that social media is on the verge of much higher adoption rates in low population areas

The Implication for Small Town Brands

If you are marketing your business in a small town and have yet to create an account on the top social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, FourSquare, YouTube, etc). Nor have you found the tech innovators in the town or set alerts for your brand and town, do it right now. The sooner you can learn the networks and establish a presence, the more prepared you will be against the competition.

Specific Strategies to Start:
[Read more...]

Building Your Audience: What Ellen’s Gold Digger Machine Can Teach Us

2 Comments
Marketing

The Ellen DeGeneres Show is genius. She is smart and funny, a tough combination to achieve.

One of her segments is Gold Digger, in which a viewer gets a few moments in a box with flying money up for grabs.

But a common theme I’ve noticed is the contestant usually freaks out and tries to grab the biggest clumps of cash. However, reflexes aren’t as fast as the fan blowing the money. So by the time their hand reaches the large wad, it’s gone. They try for the big bucks, yet end up with nothing.

Having grown up on an Indian reservation (blocks from a casino), I’ve watched these cash boxes in action first hand. And I’ve always noticed the participant grabbing for the clumps while winding up with nothing. However, what rarely happens is the contestant thinking logically.

We know the clumping strategy doesn’t work because we’re slower than the fan. But what does work is concentrating on one bill at a time. Humans have the ability to focus on one flying item and pluck it from the air. Maybe it’s an innate quality passed down from our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Whatever it is, we can focus and grab one item at a time. No matter how fast it’s flying.

To reiterate, grabbing one bill at a time is the key to tons of cash.

Building An Audience

So what does this have to do with building your audience? In one word, everything.

All to often, brands try to take a shortcut and grab for clumps of followers. They think it’s possible to bypass the need for individualized attention of their fan-base. This simply does not work.

A friend of mine shared with me a Wall Street Journal article today about a company, Bill.com, complaining that their B2B business is not seeing any positives from social media. But as I explored deeper into their strategy they are failing to understand how to cultivate a following. The article states that they have over 10,000 customers. Yet hardly any followers.
[Read more...]

The Secret Behind David Ogilvy’s Brilliant Headline Copywriting

12 Comments
Marketing

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
~ David Ogilvy

David Ogilvy is one of the greatest ad men ever. His contributions to the marketing industry are incalculable. And anyone in advertising couldn’t imagine a world without his iconic ads.

In his day, marketing budgets were spread amongst the traditional marketing outlets; magazines, newspapers and commercials, for example. But as we have transitioned into the digital age, what could we possibly learn from this classical ad man? Turns out, a lot.

Appealing to Your Audience


The above ad contains what is arguably considered the most famous headline of all time. But why is this? To answer that, we must think critically about the underlying message here and what Ogilvy is attempting to convey to readers.
[Read more...]