Marketing Hipster

In my last post, we discussed the basics to social media in Online Marketing 101 and how to begin down the social media path. We started by developing a list of keywords and then doing searches to find people communicating online about those keywords. The next step is to be able to quickly and correctly identify which among all the links you have pulled together are coming from influencers versus non-influencers.

Topic: Influencers

Definition: Many people believe that an influencer is already a customer and that an influencer is the same thing as an evangelist. That is actually not always the case. An influencer is someone who can influence your customers and influence your market. An influencer does not have to be a customer to have great influence on the market that you are targeting. Wikipedia defines an influencer as, “An individual that have influence over potential buyers, and marketers orientates marketing activities around these influencers.”

Example: Before we go into further detail, let’s give a basic example. Let’s say that you are a technology company of some kind. One example of an influencer in your industry would be the blog TechCrunch. If you could get a favorable post in TechCrunch talking about your company or product you would see an immediate and huge increase in traffic to your web site and hopefully in sales. TechCrunch is an incredibly popular technology blog that has great influence on its huge readership. Because of the large audience TechCrunch brings in each and everyday as well as prestige Michael Arrington the blog’s author has, TechCrunch is absolutely an influencer when it comes to the tech industry.

Why is this important?

Depending on the popularity of the keywords you have chosen, you could be faced with a HUGE amount of links and information you have pulled together. Many of these links will be coming from people and places that have very little influence on your target market. It is your job to be able to quickly go through all this information and be able to determine which of the links are coming from influencers and who are not.

Did you ever watch the TV show M*A*S*H? If you didn’t, it was a show based in Korea during the war and the unit was a medical unit where they would bring wounded soldiers in to be operated on from their wounds the received during fighting. Each time a bunch of wounded came in, the first thing they did was go through each one of them to determine who was the worst off and needed immediate medical attention. I believe recognizing influencers from non-influencers is that same kind of triage.

How do we start?

First off, you need to be using the Firefox browser. If you are still using Internet Explorer, please immediately hit yourself in the head with a hammer several times. When you regain consciousness, please go and download Firefox, it is free. After you have downloaded and installed Firefox, please install a Firefox add-on called SearchStatus. After installing, restart Firefox and you should now see on the bottom right hand side of your browser the following:

SearchStatus shows you a couple of different things. The first thing it shows is a web pages Google PageRank. Google gives each and every page that it reads and indexes a page ranking of between 0 to10. The higher the page rank, the higher visibility that page gets in Google natural search results. I will do a 101 post about SEO in the future, for now consider the numbers for Google PageRank as follows:

• Anything ranked 0 to 4 – The web site has little visibility in the search engines.
• 5 to 7 – Some decent visibility
• 8 + – Rocking, stud!

So in other words, the higher number the better.

The second bar you see is the web sites Alexa ranking. An Alexa ranking estimates how much traffic the web site gets on a daily basis and then ranks it against all the other web sites it is tracking. For example, this web site, Marketing Hipster has an Alexa ranking of 157,230 which means by Alexa, this web site is the 157,230 most trafficked web site on the web. In contract, YouTube has an Alexa ranking of 3. So unlike the Google Page Rank, the lower the number a web site has for its Alexa ranking the better.

Before I get comments, I will tell you that you need to take Alexa rankings with a POUND of salt. Alexa determines these rankings through anyone who has installed the Alexa toolbar to their browser. This is a very small percentage of users and many of the anti-virus software on the market today actually consider Alexa to be a virus or spyware. This is far from an exact science, but it does serve a purpose when it comes to quickly identifying web sites that need to be looked at further and others which need to be kicked to the curb.

This post is getting to be rather long so I am going to be break this up into two different posts. For now, here is what you can do. Take that spreadsheet that you captured all those URL’s when searching for your keywords and begin going to some of these URL’s with your new searchstatus plugin running on your browser. Start taking a look at what the web site rankings are and start marking down on your spreadsheet which sites have the higher and better rankings.

In the meantime, I will catch you on our next post, Online Marketing 101: Influencer vs. Non-Influencer Part II.

Technorati Tags: Online Marketing 101, influencers, non-influencers, evangelist, TechCrunch, Michael Arrington, Firefox, Internet Explorer, SearchStatus, Google PageRank, Alexa

I have been amazed at the amount of comments and emails I have received from people wanting to get involved with my Online Marketing 101 initiative. First off, let me say thank you to all who have expressed interest. I would absolutely love any and all participation from my fellow bloggers and Hipster readers.

Here is how I think we will proceed. If you are interested in participating, just shoot me an email at cord AT marketinghipster.com and let me know what the subject of your 101 article is and whether you would like to publish it on your own blog or like it published here. If you could also please include a date of when you think you can write your post and when you would like to publish it. I would like to stagger the posts so each blogger gets a day that their post goes up and we can all promote each blog with their article.

Overall, you can write about any subject you would like when it comes to online marketing.  Though you need to make sure that it is written for users who may not have the experience you do.  I like to call it a foundation article.  Other than that, the sky is the limit.

I am going to do this on a first come, first serve basis. Please let me know if you have any questions and thanks again for your interest.

As discussed in an earlier post, I am going to be taking a step back from some of my previous posts and start focusing on some basic and foundation articles surrounding online marketing. I am going to be calling these posts, Online Marketing 101. I am hoping that these posts will provide some needed insight to people who may not have the experience that others do in this field and hopefully provide them with some useful information.

I am going to start this experiment by discussing Social Media.

Topic: Social Media

Definition: In simplest terms, social media is when conversations take place online.

Where: These conversations can be taking place all over. This includes the following:

• Dynamic web sites – Amazon.com – Customers can comment and rate a product they have purchased, but other users then can rate the commenter on whether their comment was helpful or not.
• Blogs – Marketinghipster.com – I post an article in which I give my opinion. Users can and are encouraged to comment on what I wrote and express their own opinions and thoughts. I can then choose to follow up their comments with a comment of my own as well even post a new article based on feedback from my readers. Finally, users who read my post can go back to their own blog and post an article discussing my post and their specific thoughts on it.
• Discussion boards/Chat rooms – There are so many of these types of web sites where people can chat in real time or post comments and wait for follow up posts. A couple of examples include Ebay. They have discussion boards for anything and everything in regard to Ebay that both sellers and buyers can discuss anything under the sun. Yahoo Message Boards are pretty much a one stop shop for anything that people have interests in and want to discuss. They run the gamut from discussing finances and stocks to chat rooms for finding love.
• Social Networks – When I log into my Facebook account, I can see everything that my friends have done within Facebook. Whether that is joining a new group, uploading pictures or videos, recommending a movie or a book or just what they are presently up to. I can then follow up with them via email. Other social networks like MySpace have their own blog where users can write about anything they like and choose who gets to see what they have written and who does not.

How does this pertain to marketing & advertising?

For a very long time advertising, marketing and PR has been a one to many proposition. A company or organization wants to promote something, so they hire a marketer to try to get the word out to as many people within their target market as possible. One to many.

Social media is changing that dynamic. Social media focuses on a one to one model. Marketers now need to focus their marketing to an individual and if done correctly that individual will communicate that message to another and then the other person will pass that on to yet another and on and on it goes. This is not anything different than in years past other than that the internet has created a perfect platform for these one to one messages to be passed and spread at incredible speeds.

Why is this important?

We have seen in a multitude of studies done recently that consumers do not trust advertising. And more importantly, technology is enabling and empowering users to take control of who and what markets to them. The standard ways of marketing and advertising that has worked for years just is not working anymore, but our clients are still looking for us the marketers to communicate their message effectively as well as deliver them a return on their investment. Social media is one area that if done correctly can do just that.

How do we start?

The best way to begin is to better understand where your target market congregates online and what they are talking about. Begin by doing the following:

1. Develop a set of keywords that are most relevant to your client. They can include company, brand or product names, competitors, issues, questions, etc.
2. Once you have created this list of keywords, start doing searches with those keywords at sites like Technorati, Google Blog Search, Boardtracker and even through an ordinary search engine like Google.
3. Find links that look interesting, follow and read them.
4. Start a spreadsheet where can start capturing URL’s of interesting posts or discussions you find. Make notes on what was interesting and the main points for each.
5. Once you have captured enough of this information, you will begin to see patterns emerge and begin to discover certain themes that repeat themselves as well as specific areas throughout the web that your target market congregates.

This is the first step into truly understanding where your target market hangs out on the web, but also what is truly important to them. With this information, you will begin to understand what kind of messages will resonate with the people you covet most.

The next 101 post will be a quick checklist on how to recognize from all the information you have just gathered which people are truly influencers and who are not.

I hope this was helpful. I apologize if it was a bit long, but I wanted to try to get in as much as possible. I really welcome any and all thoughts on what you liked about this and what you did not so I can continually improve. I also want to invite anyone who would like to get involved with this to please do not hesitate to post an Online Marketing 101 on your own blog. I ask that you please provide a link back to my blog as I have added a new column to my sidebar where I will post links to anyone who posts an Online Marketing 101 article of their own. And if you do not have a blog, but would like to participate in this, please do not hesitate to contact me as I would welcome any guest writers to post right here on the Hipsters.

Oh yea, if you like the my Online Marketing 101 logo that I created on the top left hand side of this post, please feel free to use that as well.

Technorati Tags: Online Marketing 101, Social Media, Dynamic web sites, Blogs, Discussion boards, Chat rooms, Ebay, Social Networks, Facebook, advertising, marketing, PR, target market

Over the last few months, I have had the opportunity to either speak in front of several different organizations or participate in some panel discussions.  I really enjoy this for a couple of reasons.  First, these events provide me a great opportunity to meet new people or people who I have known through their own writings and finally get to meet them in person.  The other big reason why I enjoy these events is that it really gives me the opportunity to listen to other people’s thoughts and questions.

I participated in a social media panel discussion with Jim Tobin and Nathan Gilliatt sponsored by Business Wire last week.  It was a great discussion as we pretty much just had an open Q&A with Jim, Nathan and I giving our thoughts and opinions on social media to what I thought was a pretty interested audience.

As I have been participating in more and more of these discussions and presentations, one thing is becoming abundantly clear to me.  As marketers, we are not doing a very good job when it comes to educating and explaining all this online mumbo jumbo that we do.  It continually amazes me the type of questions that I hear during these events.  They are usually incredibly basic, true “101″ online marketing questions.  And please do not get me wrong, I am not blaming the people who are asking these questions.  What I am trying to say is that I think we as online marketers need to realize that the people we are trying to reach, the marketing managers, directors and CMO’s of a great deal of companies are no-where close to truly understanding the basics of online marketing and we need to do a better job of educating them.

As this has been rattling around in my brain, I have come to the conclusion that one of the reasons why this might be happening is who we are writing for and reading ourselves.  Before I started writing this, I took a quick look through my RSS reader to see the feeds that I try to read everyday.  They consist of all top online marketers in one form or another.  I read these authors stuff and think that I need to write at this level because they are setting the bar at that level.  I also think I am writing at this level because a great deal of my readers are also at this same level.  Though arn’t we missing out on a huge audience of people who are just not there yet?

So here is what I am thinking.  I am going to start this week posting a few articles each week that are more basic and foundation posts than maybe what I have done in the past.  I am going to title each of them, Online Marketing 101 with what ever the post is about.  I want to see if some of these posts might strike a cord with people who may not be as inundated as I and others are in this world of online marketing.

We will see how it goes.  What do you think?

It has already been wildly reported on the announcement from Facebook that they are going to be selling ads on users’ profile pages on items that users might have already purchased or recommended for others. In layman’s terms, Facebook is hoping to deliver the best targeted ads that we have ever seen online. An example of that might be if someone goes to Amazon and purchases a book. Amazon would ask the buyer at the time of purchase, would you like this purchase to be included on your Facebook profile? If you say yes, every single one of your friends will see the book you bought and where you bought it from. Very cool, but also a bit creepy.

I think anyone who has been in this business knew that this was eventually coming from Facebook. Now the question is whether it is going to work? I think there are still a lot of unanswered questions. The first one of my list would be whether this is going to piss off Facebook users? Facebook has always been the anti-MySpace. While MySpace was the wild wild west and when you signed on you got thirty different flashing and totally annoying banners and pop-ups. While at Facebook, you logged in and got exactly what you were expecting, the run down on everything that your friends have been doing all nicely structured and controlled. How much of that will change?

Another important question and still an inherent problem with online advertising is that for Facebook advertising to be successful, users are going to have to leave their beloved Facebook and go somewhere else. So again, using the Amazon example I used earlier, if I see one of my friends purchased a book, I am going to have to leave Facebook and go over to Amazon to buy it as well. We have seen a multitude of data that people do not like leaving their cozy little social networks.

And my final question would be how is Facebook going to handle the high wire act between targeted advertising with their users privacy? Facebook members love Facebook and they trust Facebook. Now that Facebook is going to be mining this incredible wealth of data they are capturing each and everyday to better target users for advertising, will Facebook lose that all important trust factor with its users?

These are all important issues and in my opinion, Mark Zuckerberg has continually made the right calls so I think he is going to be successfully doing this as well. I still get a little dizzy when I think of him turning down 1 BILLION dollars from Yahoo many months ago, but look who is laughing now.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, targeted ads, Amazon, online advertising, privacy, Yahoo

One of the challenges I deal with on a daily basis is trying to effectively communicate both the complexity as well as the challenges that come with social marketing and blogging. For people who are not entrenched in this medium, I think it is very hard to understand what it actually takes to be successful. I just don’t think that a lot of people really “get it” yet and I look at that as a challenge for both myself as well as the other marketers trying to introduce new and innovative ways for their clients to market to their customers.

This issue was really punctuated for me when I reading a post on Weblog Tools Collection. If you are not familiar with this site, it is an excellent site for anything and everything that has to do with WordPress which is what I use for this blog. I was checking out some new themes when I noticed a link that read “WordPress Blogger Wanted” under the job section on the web page. Just for the hell of it, I decided to click on it to check it out. I am not going to post a link directly to this job page, but this is what the job post said:

“We pay per post you make to one of our WordPress blogs and you can write about anything except porn, gambling, drugs, hate, it just has to be original writings and of course make sense. No links can be in the posts and all posts have to have a minimum 150 words. We will pay anywhere between 25 cents to $1 dollar per post.”

They will pay between a quarter to a dollar per each post?!?!?!? Earth calling person who does not have a clue, come in clueless. You have the audacity to pay someone a lousy quarter for 150 words?

So in other words, someone is going to take the time to sit down and using only this person’s intelligence and talent and write four 150 word articles and he or she might just be able to afford a Snickers bar? I understand that whomever placed this ad could never write a blog for himself as he has the intelligence of a door knob.

Do you have a clue what kind of not only talent, but absolute dedication it takes to make a successful blog? Look at the guys who are flourishing at their blogs. They dedicate hours upon hours of not only writing, but reading and researching so they have new and innovative posts day in and day out.

I was thinking if anyone is interested, a bunch of us could get together and write some of the worst posts we absolutely can come up with and submit it to this idiot and see what his reaction is. What do you think? Maybe we can come up with some titles of posts that we can write?

Here’s a couple of the top of my head.

1. My Laundry and Me – A Dirty Tale

2. Where does the Sun go at Night?

3. How to Spell Mississippi.

Give me some of your ideas of great titles.

Technorati Tags: social marketing, blogging, WordPress

Last night, NBC‘s Sunday Night Football hosted by Bob Costas turned off the studio lights and did their entire show under candlelight to promote NBC’s new Green is Universal campaign. This could of been one of the stupidest ideas I have ever seen in my entire life. Now please do not get me wrong, doing small things to try to save this planet and the environment is a good thing. And I think NBC trying to promote a green initiative is also a good thing. But to turn off the lights in the studios during a live broadcast is beyond contrived.

I would like to list out several reasons why this could of been the dumbest idea I have ever witnessed in my life.

1. Yes, you turned out the lights, but there was still a dozen or so HUGE video monitors all running. I would be willing to take a gander that the video monitors take more power to run than the studio lights.
2. Your promoting during your lights off green event how Matt Lauer, Al Roker and Ann Curry have flown to opposite sides of the earth. Hmmm, how much jet and car fuel did it take to get each of them along with I assume pretty big crews to those places at the end of the planet? Yea, once again, I bet a lot more than what you saved by shutting off the lights.
3. Most importantly, you are doing this while the color guy of the broadcast John Madden drives to each game in a GIANT tour bus that burns a hell of a lot more energy than you turning off your little studio lights.

This was beyond a dumb idea NBC. Maybe you guys can discuss it on your next corporate retreat as you fly out on several of the NBC corporate jets?

Technorati Tags: NBC, Sunday Night Football, Bob Costas, Green is Universal, stupidest ideas, Matt Lauer, Al Roker, Ann Curry, John Madden

Let me reiterate the title of this post, I think Larry King is a tool! If you are not familiar, Larry King, I believe, might be the luckiest human being on the planet. The guy has been in broadcasting for almost 100 years. (I might be a little bit off on that, but it is has been a really really long time.) The guys whole shtick is those suspenders he wears every night. I have always thought King was a tool because every time I watched an interview he has done, all he does is throw softballs and would not know how to be controversial or ask a tough question even if his life depended on it.

Last week, Jerry Seinfeld was on his show. Unless you have been living under a rock the last couple of weeks, Seinfeld has been everywhere promoting his new bee movie coming out. Anyway, Seinfeld was being interviewed with Larry King and Larry showed his ignorance and began asking Jerry some ridiculous questions that anyone who has been actually ALIVE for the last decade would of known the answers to. In response, Seinfeld kind of took Larry to task. Watch the video below and then we can discuss this.

So I have seen some comments to this video that people felt Seinfeld was out of line which I could not disagree more. I thought Seinfeld was right on the mark and even held back. After watching this video, I decided to do a little research on Larry King and found an interview he had done which he commented that he does not like to prepare at all for interviews and likes to just go in cold to each interview he does.

WOW! There’s someone to really look up to. What do you think my boss would say if I told him that I prefer to not prepare to learn anything about what my job is and hmmm just make it up as I go? Yea, I don’t think I would have a job too much longer. Don’t you think it is time that we start holding everyone to a higher level these days? And I mean everyone; politicians, broadcasters, writers and marketers!

I would like to nominate Larry King as the Hipster’s Tool of the Week. Do I have a second?

Technorati Tags: Larry King, Jerry Seinfeld

For anyone in the Triangle area, I am participating in a Social Media Panel discussion this Thursday November 8th hosted by Business Wire. You can learn more about it here. I guess I am still being listed as “more to be announced”.

Anyhow, it should be a pretty low key event. There will be no Powerpoint presentations just an open discussion between the panelists and the audience. Hope to see you there.

Thursday November 8th
JK’s Restaurant
4381 Lassiter @ North Hills Ave., A100
Raleigh, NC 27609
919-781-3913

5:30 pm – 6:00 pm – Registration & Networking
6:00 pm – 7:30 pm: Presentations and Audience Q&A

$10 fee for non-members

I know what you are saying, “Holy cow, he has actually posted something. Where the hell have you been?” Let me start by apologizing for my utter silence over the last several weeks. I have had a number of things going on and for one reason or another, I decided to take a step back from writing and laid low for a while. I am going to absolutely try my best to start posting regularly and I appreciate all the emails I received from people expressing concern.

One of the things that I have learned about myself recently is that I am a man of timing. I once thought of myself as a pretty spontaneous person, but I guess as I have gotten older, getting into those rhythms and routines of doing certain things each day have become pretty important to me. For example, this blog. For quite a long time, I was in this rhythm that every night I would come home from the office, do some work, maybe watch a little TV, read a bit, if I was lucky hang out with the wife to be and finally, do some writing for this blog.

Though when I took a break from writing, I got out of my rhythm and it is once again going to take some time to get back into that rhythm again.

This got me wondering whether these some type of rhythms play a role when it comes to marketing. With all the new and innovative ways marketers can now market on the web are we doing a disservice by developing these campaigns for only short periods of time? Does it make more sense to get out marketing messages continuously over longer periods of time hopefully integrating into the rhythms of our target markets’ daily lives?

It seems that a lot of work I have been doing recently have more been kind of hit and run marketing. We swoop in, we do whatever we are going to do to try to gain the attention of the target market we are coveting and then maybe several weeks or even a couple of months later, bam, we are gone without a trace. Kaiser Soze style. (If you do not get my reference, immediately go out and buy Usual Suspects on DVD).

I understand the argument against what I am saying that most marketing these days are ROI focused and doing some kind of long-term marketing plan would seriously hurt the return on investment compared to a shorter more targeted campaigns; and I agree with that to a point. My opinion is that we as marketers might be able to have the best of both worlds. Create short, right to the heart campaigns that gains big attention and hopefully bigger dollars while in parallel develop longer term, but lower cost campaigns that help integrate the brand into the daily lives and rhythms of the users we are targeting.

I apologize for being away. I hope you will give me the opportunity to gain your trust and time back when it comes to spending time here on the blog. Thanks!

Cord

Technorati Tags: rhythms