Tag Archives: Marketing

Marketing Idea: FourSquare Venue Plugin for WordPress

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So I added a wid­get to my blog side­bar to show where FourSquare thinks I still am. Use­less per­haps, but a lit­tle neat. While pok­ing around the vast reaches of the Word­Press Plu­gin Repos­i­tory, I found the Foursquare Venue Plu­gin for Word­Press, which looks inter­est­ing. If you have a venue that peo­ple may check into, you can extend your Word­Press site to show a real-time dis­play of who’s there and who’s the mayor. Add an incen­tive for who­ever the cur­rent mayor hap­pens to be (free refills, fries or a dis­count of some sort, what­ever) and you may just encour­age more FourSquare users to turn up and check in. Nice. Very Guer­rilla, and social too.

Why Your Campaign Won’t Go Viral

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I was read­ing The Viral Mar­ket­ing Cheat Sheet from KISS­met­rics, which turns out to be not a bad guide to viral cam­paigns. Ana­lyz­ing as I read, I came to the graph of the top ten viral cam­paigns of 2010, and noticed that the list con­sists of gen­er­ally well-known brands. Ones who can afford to drop some coin on a cam­paign that doesn’t adhere to an age-old for­mula, and have it flop. They can afford to experiment.

What about the rest of us, the smaller brands with less name recog­ni­tion? When those brands spend money, they want some assur­ance of return. They want some­thing tried-and-true, and don’t want to pay the cost of exper­i­men­ta­tion. As a result, it’s pretty hard to hit it out of the park. It just doesn’t happen.

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Social Media ROI & Unicorn Mortality

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Einstein on Social Media ROI and Unicorn Mortality Last week I attended the first meetup of the Mar­ket­ing & Tech­nol­ogy group, which turned out to be a great first meet­ing. Since the inter­sec­tion of mar­ket­ing and tech­nol­ogy is where I’ve lived and played for more than a decade now (since it was just a lonely cross­roads), I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing the group grow and evolve.

The first meet­ing fea­tured a dis­cus­sion panel, to which Ryan Caligiuri posed a num­ber of ques­tions. Sev­eral of these had me want­ing to inter­ject, like the ques­tion of mea­sur­ing social media ROI (Return on Invest­ment), a prac­tice which some have com­pletely dis­counted as inad­vis­able or down­right impossible.

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Letters of Reference

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It should be an obvi­ous tac­tic, but for most peo­ple it’s just an after­thought that occurs too late. I’ve recently started ask­ing each of my clients for a let­ter of ref­er­ence that I can use in my port­fo­lio. All are will­ing and most are even eager to pro­vide one, which is for me a sure sign that the client is happy. If ever one weren’t this would be a good way to uncover and address an issue… another reminder that a wrap-up meet­ing is a good idea at the end of a project. This is the nat­ural time to review what’s been done, do any train­ing nec­es­sary, and plan future steps. My favorite email response though, was this one:

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The Three C’s of Web Strategy

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Ten years ago I was edu­cat­ing peo­ple about what they might expect from their web­sites. For many medium and small busi­nesses, it was their first web­site, and they wanted to know how it was going to make them money. Nowa­days, a web pres­ence has become a part of almost every busi­ness’ “price of admis­sion”. Ten years ago, you weren’t cred­i­ble with­out a busi­ness card and a Yel­low Pages list­ing, and peo­ple were already see­ing that before long a web­site would become a part of the min­i­mum cred­i­bil­ity standard.

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Unintentional Brand Association

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Last sum­mer, one of the wine stores[1] 605868_glass_of_wine_with_cork_2 that I fre­quent most announced that it would be mov­ing later that fall. Since the name of the shop included the street name where it was located, they would be chang­ing their name — and they were hold­ing a con­test for cus­tomers to sug­gest a new one. The win­ner got a $250 store credit, so I was keen on win­ning… but my sug­ges­tion, La Dolce Vino, didn’t win (maybe some­one else can use that). When the relo­cated store opened ear­lier this year, I was quite sur­prised to see what did win. Per­son­ally I found the new name unin­ter­est­ing (maybe that’s sour grapes!), but the big­ger sur­prise — and mis­take — was the unin­ten­tional brand association.

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