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So last year The Age of Conversation was published.  This was a book that a 100 or so bloggers wrote stories about different marketing topics.  It was a great experience participating in it and all the money went to a great cause.  It looks like that there is going to be a second go around and right now the organizers are looking for people to vote on this books topic / theme.  If you are interested in voting on the topic or interested in writing for the book, please click here to get info on both.

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

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

About a week or so ago, I was debating with my fiance about Dell’s recent launch of a new set of Inspiron Laptops that came in eight or so designer colors. I believed that people would see through this as nothing more than what I believed it was, window dressing. I could not believe that the deciding factor for people when choosing what laptop is right for them would be because they can get it in hot pink! It just seems mind blowing to me that someone would invest a $1000 dollars or more on such an important item like a computer and the color would be the biggest selling point. I told Leigh there was no chance in hell that people would fall for this.

Well, see Cord eating crow because from conversations that I had today with some of my ex-colleagues at Dell, the color Inspirons are selling like hot cakes. So much so, that several of the most popular colors are back ordered for several weeks. I keep on forgetting that the world is slowly coming to an end and more people are interested in what Brittany Spears is doing with her hair than who is running for the President of the United States.

So I am wrong, something as superficial as a pretty color plate on the front of a computer will actually sell more computers compared to a plain old black or white computer. Oh well, what can you do I guess, this is the world that we live in.

Today, I was emailing with a friend of mine who actually had ordered a pretty color Dell, but was very unhappy that her order was back ordered because her color was out of stock. My friend is a hard core techie who understands technology and computers. So I had to ask her, why oh why would you fall for paying more money for a computer just because it has a cute color? She responded very quickly and succinctly, “Because it matched my cell phone”.

What can you say after that?

Technorati Tags: Dell, Inspiron, Laptops

So my vacation plans ended very early unfortunately and I had to go out of town for the last week or so. It is a very long story and not worth getting into, but lets just say that instead of feeling refreshed and re-energized from a vacation, I am exhausted. Oh well what can you do, I am happy that I am back and back into the swing of things.

During my time away, one evening I was watching some TV and watched for the first time the ESPN original series The Bronx is Burning. If you are a baseball fan, I highly recommend it. John Turturo is truly amazing as Billy Martin. The series is being sponsored by Mastercard which means that during every commercial break, they of course played a Mastercard commercial. Mastercard had one of their “Priceless” commercials with a baseball theme.

What I found interesting at first and then incredibly annoying later is they played the exact same commercial every fricken time! Now it is not a bad commercial, but it gets bad rather quickly when you watch it over and over again. My question is why if Mastercard paid a great deal of money to be the sponsor of this show and they know they will have one of your commercials played at each break, wouldn’t they create more than just one commercial?

It was interesting the night I starting watching this show, ESPN was playing a marathon of all the shows so in a period of three hours I must of saw this damn Mastercard commercial 15 times or more. And I would say right around the eighth or ninth time, Mastercard and this commercial truly made me nauseous. Why or why would they not of created more than one commercial or even if it was a question of available budget, they have like sooooo many of these Priceless commercials why not put more than just the one in the rotation?

I truly learned what the word overexposed means by watching the same Mastercard commercial over and over again. I was so disgusted at Mastercard the next day I was in a store buying a few things when I reached into my wallet and was about to pull out my Mastercard when I decided I was going to have my own little protest and grabbed the Amex instead.

Caught up on a season of The Bronx is Burning – $30 dollar cable bill

Enjoying a few beers while I watched – $20

Wanting to vomit each time the same Mastercard commercial came on – Priceless

Technorati Tags: ESPN, The Bronx is Burning, Mastercard

I thought this was a cute little story in MediaDaily News. Stephen McPherson, president of ABC Entertainment has been taking some flack from TV critics as he made a decision that he was going to withhold some news about the upcoming season of Lost at the Television Critics Association summer meeting and instead release the news the next day at Comic-Con, a huge comic book convention.

The TV critics were not pleased with this and starting throwing temper tantrums.

“I don’t think my editor is going to be very happy when she reads in my blog later today that Steve McPherson promised that news on one of the biggest shows on the network would be going to a fan convention the next day,” said Aaron Barnhart, TV critic of The Kansas City Star.

Oh, boo-hoo what is a person to do? You know what I would say Aaron, BECOME RELEVANT! The reason the President of ABC wanted to withhold the news from the TV critics and release it at Comic-Con is because he knows that the people attending Comic-Con will have greater reach and visibility on the web than a bunch of stodgy TV critics who write for newspapers. McPherson understands that when it comes to creating buzz and excitement for this coming season, you and the rest of your TV critics don’t have any J-U-ICE my friend.

So stop your whining and start becoming relevant. How many times do you post a day? How fast are you at releasing hot news? Are you leading or following some of the biggest TV web sites out there? You are being beaten by kids in their basements while you sit around at your Television Critics Association summer meeting. I can’t believe there is actually a Television Critics Association. 

Technorati Tags: Stephen McPherson, ABC, TV critics, Lost, Television Critics Association, Comic-Con, RELEVANT

Let’s file this one under “It’s About Time”. Yesterday, Yahoo! announced that CEO Terry Semel will be stepping down and will be replaced with founder Jerry Yang. This comes as no surprise as Semel has been on the hot seat for some time as Yahoo! continues to flounder with no real direction or purpose.

What I found interesting was there were a number of articles that discussed how Semel bet on content while Google focused on technology and many authors believed Semel’s bet was a failure. I disagree. I think Semel’s plan was actually the right one. Yahoo! was never going to be able to compete with Google from a technology aspect, but because of the great number of properties and partnerships Yahoo! has, they could compete from a content perspective.

Semel’s problem was not his formula, but his execution. Semel is a Hollywood veteran and I just don’t think he ever truly understood that you cannot run an Internet company the same way he ran a movie studio. As most of you know, the internet moves at much greater speeds than areas in the offline world. If you want to compete, you need a great sense of urgency and the ability to understand what users want and give it to them the first time, on-time and correctly.

I have never seen under Semel’s reign any kind of urgency from Yahoo! across all of their properties. We can look at numerous examples including the much delayed release of Panama, the slow and incredibly poor launches and integrations of Yahoo! Mail, Flickr and most recently MyBlogLog.

I still do not think it is too late for Yahoo! They still have a stable of great properties, they just need a real leader to get the company and personnel back on track again.

One last thing, Jerry Yang posted a letter on the Yahoo! blog.  I particularly liked this line, ” A Yahoo! that executes with speed, clarity and discipline.”  I guess we will see.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo!, Terry Semel, Jerry Yang, Google

This was an interesting tidbit on TechCrunch. eBay does not allow Google Checkout, Google decides to throw a “Google Checkout Freedom Party” during eBay Live in Boston. eBay in return announces that they will be pulling all US advertising off of Google. Google caves like a house of cards and cancels the party. I guess Google chose the wrong company to have a game of chicken with, huh?

Technorati Tags: eBay, Google Checkout, Google