Marketing and all things related

My friend, Chris Carfi, of Cerado, recently wrote about a concept called "beacons".

He describes them as the following:

"A beacon is a post in a public place, such as a personal blog, meant to draw the attention of a service provider to an issue the customer is having with the company's products. In essence, beacons turn the service model upside down, drawing companies to the customer's site to help them, rather than forcing the customers to go through the often onerous support process prescribed by the vendor organization."

Beacons are a fasinating example of the power that social media is putting into the hands of people. The way that companies react to these posts will be critical to their perception in the market place of the future. 

Google provides a couple of great tools for watching for beacons via its Alerts and Blog Search Feed Subscriptions. These tools give you a free way to track online content activity around certain key words (e.g. your company name or your compeitors' names). 

In the social media, Web 2.0 and entrepreneurial arenas, there are few names bigger than Techcrunch right now. With with virtual army of readers (150,000+) and a team of writers, the blog is breaking big stories right and left.

Now, one of TC's former writers, Marshall Kirkpatrick has spilled the beans on how he reads feeds to find the hottest and best info for his posts. There is some great advice in here for anyone else trying to drink from the fire hose that is the blogosphere. 

At the very least, you should check out ZapTxt. Connecting RSS to your phone via IM/SMS seems like a brilliant work around for staying up-to-date without needing to invest in some form of special technology. 

 

 

Recently, I was at a group discussion that centered around creating sustainable user generated communities. One of the items that came up was this research study from Jakob Nielsen about the distribution of participation in online communities. Basically, his research reveals that:

User participation often more or less follows a 90-9-1 rule:

• 90% of users are lurkers (i.e., read or observe, but don't contribute).
• 9% of users contribute from time to time, but other priorities dominate their time.
• 1% of users participate a lot and account for most contributions: it can seem as if they don't have lives because they often post just minutes after whatever event they're commenting on occurs.

That 1% is incredibly important. Yet how often is our marketing strategy to appeal to the masses? Is there are way you could find out what that 1% is and appeal just to them? The masses will follow.  

The Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg School recently released a study that reveals some very interesting stats and trends in American Internet usage.

Some of the highlights:

• On average, Americans spend ~9 hours/week using it
• 90% send email
• 56% of community site members log in at least once at day
• 51% shop online
• 24% post photos online (more than doubling in the last 3 years)
• 13% maintain their own website
  
• 7% blog (doubling in the last 3 years)
  

The bottom line is that the web is getting more and more social as we spend more and more time on it.

Is your business ready for it?

How are you participating in or, at the very least, monitoring the conversation?

Prosumer is a term that you're going to start hearing more and more. Wikipedia defines a prosumer as:

"Prosumer is a portmanteau formed by contracting either the word producer or professional with the word consumer. The term has taken on conflicting spins: the business sector sees the prosumer as a means of offering a wider range of products and services whereas activists see the prosumer as having greater independence from the mainstream economy."

It was originally coined over 2 decades ago in by futurologist Alvin Toffler in his book The Third Wave but it is now starting to gain some major momentum on the back of trends like crowdsourcing, social media, and the plummeting cost of technology.

Can you think of a way to leverage the rise of the "prosumer" to help your business?

MobileWeb Metrix (a joint effort of Telephia and comScore) recently released a study comparing the usage of certain Internet applications on PCs vs. mobile phones.

The relevant graph is:

It is worth noting the very small usage numbers for mobile search compared to usage on the PC.

However, that's not the big thought I want to leave you with. The real questions are:

Is your marketing strategy ready for the mobile web?  

Is your website mobile accessible?

Do you have a mobile advertising strategy?

Are you personally ready for ads to hit your cell phone?  

Like most quant jocks, I like online marketing because of how measurable it is. However, it just drives me crazy to know how much data there is out there that I can't see. Thus I love it when I run across a tool that pulls back the curtain on some of that hidden data.

SpyFu does just that on the "secrets" of pay per click (PPC) advertising (i.e. it shows costs, clicks, advertisers and traffic). It is the evolution of a similar service called Googspy and offers 20x as much data. The site is powered by an application called Velocityscape Web Scraper Plus+, which constantly extracts data from search engines, Alexa, Dmoz, and other sources.

SpyFu is incredibly useful for competitive research and I encourage you to head over and check it out. Before you go though I should warn you that it is pretty addictive. 

 

No, I'm not talking about Spanish, Russian, Chinese or any of those
other cool international languages that spies speak. Instead, I'm referring to geek, shopper, athlete, parent, salesperson, gamer and the myriad of sub-languages within our own.


I spent last weekend at Seattle Mindcamp, an “unconference” for geeks, in an effort to brush up on my geek speak. The acronyms flew like rain on a Seattle fall day and my  eyes did glaze over once or twice. Yet, despite almost drowning in the flood of HTTP, XML, RSS, EC2, CGM, and UNIX, by the end of the conference I was chattering like a native.

And the next time I need to market to a geek, I’ll be ready.

How many languages do you speak? Not enough? You can pick up the basics of a new one today.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:
• Invite someone fluent in the language you want to learn out to lunch
• Pick up, or better yet, subscribe to a magazine in that space
• Check out the wikipedia entries on it

Marketing Blurb once worked in the fashion industry. Okay, so it wasn’t really the fashion industry, but home decorative products—a subset of the fashion industry. We used to subscribe to a color forecasting service, which alerted the company to what colors would be hot in wallcoverings, furniture fabrics and accessories. We knew twelve months ahead of time that every hotel lobby in North America would redecorate to dusty rose and sage green in 1984. But we haven’t really thought much about color forecasting since, because the forecasting industry missed the whole translucent candy color movement launched by the original Apple iMac in 1998. We learned from The Seattle Times, however, that brown is the new black. And we’re not talking any old brown, but the earthy color of Starbucks coffee. We’re not talking dirt or earth brown here, but rich and robust brown. Of course, we did not need a color forecasting service to confirm we have trendy drinking habits. PS—no caramel, whipped milk, cream or other nonsense made the forecast.

Marketing Blurb has spent countless hours engaged in market research studies. We have studied secondary research. We have crafted and conducted primary research. Some of this time proved valuable and productive, but for the most part, market research is a colossal pain, and of dubious value. Of course, top researchers already know this, and 30 top research firms gathered at the "Research Industry Summit for Improving Respondent Cooperation" in Cincinnati last week to complain and discuss a mutual concern: The unwillingness of so many consumers to participate in surveys. We can spare you the details, but surveys are meaningless unless the sample is valid. These days, it is almost impossible to create and then query a representative sample of anybody. Response rates to consumer telephone surveys has dropped below 10%, and marketers cannot get a handle on the psyche of non-responders, who are disproportionately male, black, Hispanic, and young. While Marketing Blurb is not a market research specialist, we have come to believe that observing behavior is the only valid approach. The cost of behavior studies is reasonable online, but costly offline. Using your gut is very inexpensive, and to our knowledge, yields results comparable to more costly primary research. Search the literature first, but then make a decision and get on with your life.

When we think of motherhood, we do not immediately think of KFC. But the Colonel loves moms, because he knows they include fast food chicken in their families’ weekly menus. So with that in mind, KFC enlisted consulting firm Just Ask a Woman to recruit moms with young children from across the country to join a 12-person advisory group. The idea is to “tap into the experience of motherhood and to use that knowledge to better meet mothers' needs, the company said.” The advisory board called KFC Moms Matter (honest) will meet, hold conference calls and host dinner meetings to advice the Colonel on trends that impact families, and to suggest promotion or new product ideas. We presume that one of those trends is not healthy eating. The advisory moms will also help KFC build an online community intended to reduce stress for moms and provide a forum for prize drawings and other promotions. We learned about this from Promo Magazine.

When we teach marketing, we always dread the required textbook chapter on integrated marketing communications. While marketing textbooks easily explain the concept, we tell our students that precious few marketers understand how to implement IMC. Now it seems there is a research study supporting our contention. Forrester Research discovered that only about 14% of marketers can even define the term. Only 9 % of marketers are currently practicing optimized IMC programs. According to DM News, “Forrester’s definition of integrated marketing goes beyond marketing coordination across channels and creates an emotional experience and sustained relationship with the customer.” Marketing Blurb believes that large companies lack internal coordination, and use too many independent resources to achieve any sustained integration of their marketing communications. Class dismissed.

Now you might think that the best way to pitch your product to college student is via celebrity endorsement, and you would be wrong, naturally. According to a new study Alloy Media and Harris Interactive, college students rank corporate social responsibility over celebrity endorsement in their choice of consumer brands. (Social responsibility is considered contributions to social and environment causes.) The online survey polled almost 1800 students aged 18-30 currently enrolled in college. 33% of respondents prefer brands known for their association with non-profit causes, community activism, or environmentally-friendly practices. Celebrity endorsements were considered by 2% of respondents in their purchase decisions. Brands deems socially responsible were identified as Ben & Jerry’s, Body Shop, and Yoplait.  Marketing Blurb is skeptical of these findings. Instead, we believe students were asked to choose from a force list for easily tabulated results. Qualitative techniques are better suited to this kind of information, folks. We learned about this from Media Post Publications (free registration required.)

If you are to believe a new report from research firm Mintel International, Americans are hankering for new flavors. It seems that vanilla doesn’t cut it anymore, so we are expected to adopt bold new flavors from Latin American and Asia. Candidates for the American palate include yuku, a sour Japanese citrus fruit, and longan, the fruit of the evergreen tree, or taro, and Asian tropical root. Yuku already appears in Hain Celestial’s Mountain Sun Pure Blends fruit juice, and and Williams-Sonoma's Red Miso Glaze. According to Brandweek, "Consumers today are more interested in bold, exciting flavors. Flavor drives repeat food purchases," said Marc Halperin, culinary director at food consultancy Center for Culinary Development, San Francisco. "Marketers are not exploiting the abundance of global flavors as they could." With Americans reeling from war, and high gasoline prices, Marketing Blurb is not convinced these flavors will take hold. Think comfort food. Think McDonald’s Big Mac.

When we teach marketing, there is an obligatory discussion of Gross Rating Points from the textbook. While students are usually intrigued by the concept, I remind them that reach and frequency are losing their meaning in a world where you can download episodes of Lost for your video iPod. But that said, a company called McPheters & Company has just announced a new GRP-like measurement service for popular magazines and newspapers. Their service is called Readership.com and uses continuous gathered surveys. A press release from the company says “This new methodology allows the active, time-starved reader to weigh in on his or her reading choices,” says McPheters. “Our surveys are easy to fill out and have no interviewer bias. Because the surveys can be completed at a time and in a manner chosen by the respondent, we are able to get the participation of those not easily accessed by other methodologies.” McPheters compares the system to Nielsen TV ratings, although Nielsen is preparing to abandon their diary system over the next few years. Marketing Blurb always welcomes metrics, although we are not sure we understand this one from the press release.

Marketing research has changed dramatically over the years. Traditional print or telephone surveys are now online, and observing actual consumer behavior, if possible, is probably your best bet. But if you are working with a highly targeted niche, and seeking their opinion for an online product, the invitation-only survey is the way to go. But highly target niche consumers are often busy or easy distracted, and will likely need an incentive to participate. So what is the ideal incentive to offer these folks? Well, we cannot answer—because it really depends upon the research objective, the audience, product, survey design, and so on. But we can say this much—a five dollar Starbucks Card works for Marketing Blurb. We were offered this incentive and answered the survey in a heartbeat. I will not disclose the survey sponsor, but I will say those seeking our opinion are welcome to try this approach in the future.