Eggblogg

Marketing has to change and I can't wait

This excellent post by Amber Naslund inspired me today: On social media and culture shift.

There's no denying that the 'media' is changing, driven (it seems to me) both by technology and attitude shifts, and as a result we have the new, and rather scary 'social media' landscape. Accordingly, marketing, and much of what is held up to be traditional marketing practice, must change.

I suppose this belief makes me a somewhat unusual marketer. I've always been a bit disillusioned by certain aspects of traditional marketing, and I seem to spend more and more time now telling people that most of what they've learned about marketing from text books is dead.

This may not appeal to potential clients who are looking for the same old, same old when it comes to marketing. But when it comes to keeping my head down and doing stuff that people ask for, while knowing in my gut it ain't gonna work, ("the client is always right, and besides, this is what we were taught on that CIM diploma 10 years ago..") I just can't do it any more.

So it's thrilling to hear it put so well by people who really do know what they're talking about: things need to be done differently, right across the company. Social media is not an add-on. As Amber says in her post, "for most companies, adopting social media means changing their mindset about how they do business".

Luckily, there are organisations out there, small businesses in particular, with less 'company culture' baggage, that are open and interested in doing things differently, prepared to experiment and unafraid of change.

eTips: 3 tips for taking your email marketing to the next level

This month's eTips revisits email marketing.

It's far from dead, as research shows it's still a highly effective tool for generating repeat sales, something everyone needs during a recession!

If you've been broadcasting an email newsletter for a while you could probably do with taking it to the next level. If so, this article's for you.

Read the June edition of eTips here ...

When should PPC be used to supplement organic optimisation?

Should money be spent on PPC rather than organic SEO? What about if it's public money?

I came across this post, written in January 09, complaining that the government's 'Change4Life' campaign website was being promoted in the paid listings, while its organic optimisation was being ignored.

However, checking the SERPS today, I see that the campaign website is now top of the Google rankings.

This probably illustrates the time lag between carrying out organic SEO and the results kicking in.

Using PPC to start off a campaign, while waiting for the natural indexing to happen, is a legitimate tactic. It seems that in this case the accusation of wasting the tax payers' money was a bit premature.

However, do they need to carry on running the PPC campaigns, as is still happening, now that the organic results are there?

Interesting stuff I've seen recently on Twitter

Several times over the last week or so I've found myself in the position of being asked, in fact almost bombarded, with questions about Twitter. At a workshop on PR (where I was a participant), at a dinner party, in the pub.

What is it? What's it for? Is it like Facebook? What's the point of it for businesses? Isn't it just people saying what they just had for breakfast?

Clearly the broadcast media has fuelled a Twitter frenzy, but it has very few answers to the questions on people's lips.

One of the things I always tell people is that Twitter is very much in-the-moment. It's like a conversation that passes very quickly, and if you weren't there when something happened or was said, it's easy to miss it. I found that out the hard way on Friday morning, after I'd spent the previous evening at an event and hadn't been online since midday. When I got to work and caught site of a tweet about Michael Jackson, without pausing to check out the story I tweeted 'Did MJ really die or is it an Internet rumour?"

Within minutes I'd been inundated with replies, ranging from the straightforward ("yes, he'd dead") the ironic ("well it's on the BBC so I guess it's probably true") to the condemnatory ("Don't you read the papers/watch TV or listen to radio?")

It has since occurred to me that not everyone is 'in the room' when a story, question or discussion takes place, and therefore quite a lot of good stuff probably gets missed on Twitter. OK, so no-one in the entire universe could now be in any doubt as to the sad demise of Michael Jackson, but here are a few interesting stories I retweeted that you may have missed this week.

- About the death of local newspapers, interesting piece by Jonathan Guthrie in the FT
- Excellent article from @marketingwizdom: If you're in business you must read this: The forgotten cost of discounting
- Retweeted by @chriskeene: the Guardian on library uses of twitter
- How @msofficeus plans to carry on using Word to render emails in Outlook, killing standards support. See http://fixoutlook.org
- Tweeted by @journalismnews Twitterers claim victory over loaded Daily Mail poll
- Tweeted by @getshust: A Collection of Social Network Stats for 2009  <--useful for presentations, pitches

Social media and the end of TV's supremacy, and why it's great for small business

This week I'm giving another workshop presentation for ProfitNet, this time for the Crawley group.The subject is 'An introduction to social media for business', and although it's not the first I've given I find myself doing yet more last minute research to try to ensure what I say is as up to date as possible.

Things change so quickly, and I love uncovering other people's thinking on this as it's all so new and we're all very much learning.

I was excited to come across this from David Armano - an insightful diagram to explain the social engagement spectrum. The comments on the blog post are just as interesting - more than one person suggesting a circular rather than a linear representation may be better. But generally I think it's a great way of setting out the key changes that we're seeing in the media.

When leading a session about social media marketing, my starting point is always how changes in the media, driven by changes in technology, regulation and indeed attitudes, means that our thinking about marketing needs to change too.

Although Armano maintains that the 'old ways' of marketing still hold, in that TV and mass broadcasting are still necessary to build awareness, I think for small business in particular the important thing to realise is that they no longer have the supremacy they once had. Thirty years ago a small business had no hope of marketing itself to a national audience, because TV advertising was the only way to do it and it was too expensive for the little guys.

In the old days, 'creatives' were the agency people who created adverts. These days everyone can be a creative - someone who thinks creatively about the full spectrum of the media and comes up with ideas about how to work with it in new, innovative ways. The move away from dependence upon the old mass media channels has to be good news for small business marketers.