Author Archive - danielle

There have always been and will increasingly be terminology confusion in the online marketing field.  Everyday there are new ideas, innovation concepts and cutting-edge technologies on the horizon, and search and social marketers are in a constant uphill run to absorb the latest trends and lingo.

Add all of that with the need to explain what we do to people outside of the industry, and it becomes very important for us to attempt to keep it simple.  Some of my favorite misconceptions are:

• online marketing is easy and anyone can do it
• your website is all you need
• online marketing is a scam

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A popular soft drink company is adapting their marketing tactics in the developing world.  In many communities where poverty is widespread, store owners have bars and chains on the majority of their products, including soft drinks.  Many sleep, gun-in-hand, in their store to ward off any potential night raids.  The threat of crime essentially hinders any relationships that might form between a business owner and their clients.

Realizing this, the soft drink company decided to put the trust back into the hands of the business owners and their customers.  They issued upright refrigerators and asked the store owners to put them outside their shops, right on the streets, so that passers-by could grab their own drink.  Store owners thought this was truly crazy.  Eventually they agreed and since the campaign began, what shop owners are finding is something amazing: bottles are not being stolen.  Isaiah Sakwara, a local patron, says “as a customer, it shows they believe in us, so you definitely won’t steal”.

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How can I possibly relate spiders to chocolate cake?  When I hear a report about how information overload can affect our abilities to make good choices, they were the first thing that came to mind.

The study, conducted by Stanford University professor, Baba Shiv went like this:  Several dozen subjects were split into two groups.  The first group received a 2 digit number, while the second group received a 7 digit number.  They were then instructed to walk down the hall, enter another room and recite that number back.  That was all they thought they would need to do.  So imagine, the test subject is walking down the hallway, recalling the number over and over again so they can recite it back.  Then, out of nowhere, they encounter a person that asks if they would like a snack as gratitude for helping with the study.  The person is holding two different snack options that they can choose from.  One snack, considered not healthy (although some might argue) is chocolate cake, the other snack, a healthy bowl of fruit salad.

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After having just watched two Brian Solis webinars that cover topics from his recent publication, Engage and thinking about Social Media and its relationship to search and the changes that Google is making to include social results in search, the only words that keeps popping into my head are online content creation.  As always, content needs to be the most important aspect for your online marketing campaign.

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Social media development can best be put into practice after it has been fully understood.  There are a plethora of tools and visual aids available, to help companies better comprehend the vast web of the social media community.  Here is a look at a few of them.

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The Mad Men Advertising of Yesterday & The Internet Marketing of Today

This weekend, I started watching the 3rd season of AMC’s Mad Men.  No television means I have to wait until they release the DVD’s, which I actually prefer because I can watch it without interruption. I believe that watching Mad Men is like getting a lesson in advertising history.

The one that started it all... Dyna Moe's Mad Men Illustration: Sterling-Cooper Christmas Party 2007

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Social Media Sites are About Socializing

I heard a report the other day about a “secret” party that was posted on the social media site Facebook by a high school girl.  Her parents were away at a wedding for the weekend and within a few hours, the party got out of hand.  A group of people showed up, uninvited and completely trashed the place.  They threw the parents collection of Samurai swords all over the house and left some of them stuck in the walls.  A playhouse was smashed and thrown into the garden, the tv remote was microwaved and bubble bath was poured into the television. In the next few days, the gang of destroyers bragged about what they had done on their Facebook pages and were brought in for questioning.

Of course teens do silly things and I sure had my fair share of parentally void parties, but hello, don’t people get the whole point of social media sites.  It is about sharing, and when you share with one person, you share with their friends, and then friends of their friends and so on.  In fact, check out Claudia’s post about how the friend effect can keep the fire burning for outreach through social media.  This is what makes social media sites so great.  Here are some other funny, caught by Facebook stories…

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The Real World Social Media Style

I was obsessed with MTV Real World when it first came out in 1992.  At the time I felt it was original, cutting-edge and thought provoking.  In my teenage, worldly optimistic view, I was enthralled with the idea that it could change opinions and in some way promote tolerance.  Exposing people, that would otherwise never make each other acquaintance, and the potential of those encounters to cross racial, ethnic, political, religious and sexual orientation boundaries. On top of that, becoming friends with someone, who under normal circumstances, you would have turned your nose up at and the realization that these people have more in common with you then you would have thought.  Of course, there was the drama, the crushes, and the cliques that may have formed, but in those first few seasons of MTV Real World, in some way, it did feel real.

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Yelp for Business Owners: New Check-In Feature

Combining local reviews with social networking, Yelp has been striving to achieve the perfect balance of legitimate commentary with the gratification of engaging in an online community.  Yelps new check-in feature ups the ante for business owners. For competitors like Foursquare and Gowalla, who have about 300,000 users jointly, as compared to Yelps 200 million plus users, this feature is certainly something to Yelp about.

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I never thought it would happen but it has, I have officially fallen in love with WordPress.  Yes, those of you around me that have been talking about how great it is, can now sit back and revel in fact that I am finally admitting it.  I wave my little white flag as I type.  My obsession has gotten so bad that, perhaps I need to start a WP Anonymous group.  I know there are others of you are out there, enthusiastically popping into the back-end of your admin panel, seeing what other exciting plugins and new widgets you can add to your site.

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