Ideas, insights and inspirations.

The fusion of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0 is creating a new Donut Marketing (TM) paradigm, which combines content you create on your website with content others have created on social media channels. Read details.

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A copy of my presentation that I gave to non-profit and for-profit members of Business Volunteers Unlimited in Cleveland is included below. Marketing 2.0 & PR 2.0 from abunoaman Enjoy it.

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Here is a summary of my presentation I gave yesterday at the Pittsburgh Technology Council. 1. Marketing is conversations. 2. The consumers have shifted from tv/print to web and are now increasingly mobile. Marketers better move too, if they want to connect with their audience. 3. Consumer psyche has changed. They expect conversations. They reject authority. They want transparency. They love stories. They are both content consumers and content producers. 4. Great websites are conversation starters. Conversations begin by great storytelling at the site blogs+communities, and buzzworthy linkbaits. 5. Emarketing tools carry the conversation starters outside the organization. Email marketing, event marketing and sweepstakes are examples of these. 6. Social Media sites are conversation hubs. 7. PR2.0 aims at influencing conversations. 8. Search Engines are conversation finders. 9. A whole breed of conversation listening tools have emerged, such as Google Alerts, Blog Pulse, Tweetdeck, Ennect Survey, and the major search engines. I wrapped the presentation with a couple of real … Continue reading

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The Internet and mobile devices have changed not only our lives, but entire disciplines. Marketing is no exception. Marketing 1.0 vs. Marketing 2.0 In Marketing 1.0 world, marketers could get away with producing brochures, ads, press releases, events, and promotions. It was a world world where opinion makers ruled in mass communication mediums. Accountability for performance was fuzzy at best; metrics such as brand impressions were bantered around and were found acceptable. Half of advertising was effective, but no one knew which half. In contrast, Marketing 2.0 is about doing all of that in a new ecosystem where your prospects and customers are now living in print, on the Internet and carrying mobile devices. Opinion makers are moving aside and social networks are the new opinion shapers. Direct to consumer PR new channels are exploding. The new currency of conversation is demand generation and accountability for performance. Campaigns better be measurable, or else you risk joining the statistics of short-tenured … Continue reading

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Even though Marketing budgets are being slashed, online marketing spending is on the rise. Here are some reasons for this paradox: 1. eMarketing provides better ROI. 2. eMarketing is more measurable. 3. eMarketing provides better tracking. You know what is working, and exactly the things that are working. 4. With eMarketing’s lower costs, marketers can do more with less. 5. You can adapt fast, pull triggers faster. 6. Most importantly, prospects and customers have shifted to living online. A soft, yet increasingly important benefit is that eMarketing lets you play a part in saving the environment. As we all know, necessity, not goodwill, drives true behavioral change. The current recession and explosion of online life, not the green movement, is real force behind the shift towards eMarketing.

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A few symptoms: 1. Unbeknownst to them, their brands are being discussed on twitter, blogs, Facebook, YouTube and other hangouts. 2. Many don’t realize that their brands are losing the PR wars in social media space. 3. They are too busy obsessing over formulating corporate guidelines and policies instead of testing and embracing social media and going on the offensive. 4. Most of them are unaware that search engines reward socially active brands, which generate fresh content. 5. As a result, many of them are missing opportunities to surround and engage their target audiences with keyword driven social media tactics. Opportunities missed include: 1. customer service 2. brand building 3. sales 4. PR 5. branding

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An eMarketer newsletter late last year was headlined “CPG Starts Thinking Outside the Box,” and projected that CPG (consumer package goods) companies “will spend $920 million on all forms of Internet advertising (2007), up 33% over 2006,” with that number going to $1.81 billion by 2011. I remember many years ago when Proctor & Gamble’s then-CEO Ed Artzt admonished ad agencies (where I was working at the time) for not “stepping up” and fulfilling the promise of what was then termed “interactive marketing” (though, if you want a counterpoint, read “Interactive Marketing: The Future & Present” AMA & NTC Books, 1995. It’s an interesting read that profiles the beginning of much of the marketing we’re seeing happening or about to happen today.). The idea then was simple: there are lots of ways to connect with the customer (and remember, this was the early ’90s) and marketers continued to rely on network TV advertising. Today we see what in some marketers’ … Continue reading

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Back when my day job was advertising, the Holy Grail of advertising was WOM: word of mouth. If your spot or print ad could generate positive WOM (“buzz” in those days was something only insects did. By the way, this was only 8 years ago), it was golden. I just blundered across an eMarketer report today entitled, “Word-of-Mouth Marketing:
Winning Friends and Influencing Customers” which notes that “64 million US adults regularly share advice on products or services, and over 25 million of them (26.4, to be exact. That’s 17.5% of the online population) wield their influence online.” In just four years, by 2011, eMarketer predicts that over 35 million adults — representing 20% of the internet population — will be online influencers. Increasingly then, another facet of electronic engagement is going to be iWOM: internet word-of-mouth. Which forces the question, how do we as marketers go beyond “viral” and “buzz”, which to me have purposeful or “manufactured” implications, and get … Continue reading

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I recently took my 6-year-old son to the Ringling Brothers Circus and was really impressed with the focus on the customer. Buying tickets from Ticketmaster was comparatively easy (though the nanoseconds you have to actually make the purchase could be extended), and printing out your tickets ala airline e-tickets was great, but the really impressive stuff happened upon arrival. While we were in line to get into the arena, we passed the essential “guy selling programs” (I’m sure there’s an official title for this, I just don’t know what it is). We bought one ($7 as I recall; not cheap, not expensive: good price point) and instead of the usual take-your-money-enjoy-the-show moment he paused, looked directly at my son and me, and said “I hope you enjoy the show” with real earnestness (and, it seemed, sincerity). A long time ago, when my then-girlfriend and I frequented a very small restaurant called the Fallen Angel, the maitre d’ there (Geoffrey: a … Continue reading

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We are full-on into what Joseph Pine and James Gilmore dubbed “The Experience Economy” in their 1999 book of the same name. No news to marketers, right? Well, maybe. Although Amazon comes up with 48 books in the immediate neighborhood of “experiential marketing,” and Google weighs in with 495,000 hits, do you really treat marketing as an experience? Do the shops, suppliers, partners, and vendors that you’re a customer of treat you to an experience (and is it a good one? Merely good? Awesome? Nonpareilled? Un-be-freakin’-lievable?) For many customers, the prelude to any “user experience” with you is going to be an electronic engagement, usually though the web site or an email. And while designers and programmers (good ones, anyway) worry a lot about the “user interface,” do marketers worry nearly as much about “user engagement?” Because before you can have a “user experience” you have to have user engagement, and while user engagement may start with the user interface, … Continue reading

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