Category Archives: Marketing
Speed blog: site update
Hey ya’ll!
So once again I’ve been neglecting my blog. I think, ultimately, I would prefer to focus my marketing/sales/business topics on the Outspoken Media blog, and start to refocus my site into more local/eating/health/personal related topics, with a smattering of MBA related posts. I know, lame right?
The good news: I’ll still be talking about business topics. The bad news: There is none! Head over to Outspoken Media to hear more from me about business, sales and internet marketing topics. If you’re still around for the ride, stay tuned! There’s more to come.
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Post-Apocalypse marketing tips from Harold Camping
If you’re reading this right now, one of two things happened:
- You and I were not among the chosen ones taken in the Rapture as predicted by Harold Camping and his band of merry maniacs
- The Rapture did not actually happen, and we’re all stuck here on lame old Earth until we die of cancer, car crashes or natural causes
But hey, who knows, the day is young, right? Although he’s been waffling about the exact time and way the world will end, Camping said the fun would begin 6pm EST, about 4 hours from now. Wait, hold on a moment. How do I know that? Why did I, and the rest of the media, care so much about one guy who falsely predicted the end of the world 17 years ago? As in all cases of failure, there is a lesson here, specifically for marketers. While Mr. Camping may be out of his mind, your brand can learn a thing or two from his attention grabbing marketing tactics.
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Can being on a content regimen kill creativity?
Image: Apple's Eyes Studio / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
I’m fairly new to this whole blog thing, but I’m getting the picture that creating content is tough work. Imagine writing a mini research paper every time you decide to post a blog. You start with a great topic that you think will add value to your readers’ experience. It may take you a few hours (or more than a day), but you gather some credible sources to link to, draft and proof read your work and finally click “publish.” Now imagine that after all your effort, nobody reads or comments on the product of all your hard work. In the end, you put on a great performance for an absent audience.
I have tremendous respect for those that choose to put themselves through this painful process for a living. It requires the type of endurance and perseverance that only marathon runners possess. For the rest of us hobby-bloggers it can become too frustrating, and many of us end up tossing our sites into the black hole of inactive blogs.
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Speed blog: our online legacy
Today, it came to my attention that you can download a copy of all the personal information you’ve ever published on Facebook. After logging in, simply go to Account -> Account Settings -> then click on ‘learn more’ next to Download Account Information. A friend of mine was alarmed to learn that Facebook contains 4mb of information about him. Morbidly curious, I requested my download.
I was intrigued and slightly horrified to find out that I currently have 110 megabytes of personal information stored on Facebook. Granted, I’ve had Facebook since it was released to a small group of universities back in the day (when it was actually used for sharing information with classmates. Aaah, youth.) Still, that’s a whole lot of stuff out there about me, for better or for worse.
There’s something thrilling about uncovering a secret from your family’s past. Most of us would need to rifle through dusty old photo albums, listen to hours of stories or (if you’re digging really deep) pour through library archives to find the juicy details of our family history. It may take you a long time, but eventually you could find the location of the house where your great great great grandmother lived. It’s almost like finding buried treasure.
My great great great grandchildren? They’ll simply need to download my permanent Facebook file, by then a few gigabytes or so. Maybe they won’t even need to open a zip file. By then my life will be archived into a few keywords that can be easily searched and sorted. All the nuances and details of my life that have culminated to make me who I am will be washed over by the efficiency of a simple algorithm. They may know that I married Charles Atkins on November 13, 2010, but they might never know why.
All that is sad in a way, but then I started to wonder how if in any way what I say and do online could effect my children. Is it crazy to think that an opinion I express in my early 20s could come back to haunt my daughter during her presidential campaign? I certainly hope that never happens, but it isn’t outside the realm of possibility.
I don’t plan on censoring myself for the sake of my child’s future political endeavors, but it is an interesting question. How much data will be collected from online sources and stored not only about individuals, but about patterns of behavior and beliefs passed down from generation to generation? The optimist in me would like to believe we’re not headed towards such an Orwellian future.
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The MiO Campaign: Can fussy consumers be seduced?
In the competitive world of B2C advertising, what is a marketer to do when it comes to new product releases? An even harder challenge is promoting new food products at a time when groceries are becoming so expensive, and families calculate every cent they plan to spend at the grocery store with no room for impulsive buying. There are plenty of examples, studies and resources about how to use social media for new product promotion, but not every company is able to pull it off. I submit to you a potential success story.
If you use Facebook you may be familiar with a product called MiO, a liquid water enhancer that comes in six flavors: berry pomegranate, fruit punch, mango peach, peach tea, sweet tea and strawberry melon. Last month Kraft Foods launched an advertising campaign on Facebook promoting the release of MiO in grocery stores, offering free samples to the first 100,000 fans to submit a request.
This is not the first campaign of its kind, but this is the first time I’ve ever signed up for this kind of promotion. Perhaps it was because I had just returned to Facebook after a brief hiatus, or perhaps the campaign really was eye-catching. Either way, I signed up and almost completely forgot about it until I got the sample in the mail today.
MiO (and Kraft Foods, by proxy), congratulations. I really enjoyed this product promotion experience from start to finish. Here is what they did right, and hopefully you all can derive a few takeaways for your own marketing and promotion efforts.
