Archive for November, 2008

November 30th, 2008

Alltop is the Internet’s Magazine Rack

Not long ago, Guy Kawasaki helped start a site called Alltop. Alltop is an aggregator that groups collections of websites into topics such as environment, photography, science, Muslim, celebrity gossip, military, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, the organization displays the most current headlines from dozens of sites and blogs.

It’s good to remember that Alltop sites are starting points—they are not destinations. They’re trying to enhance your online reading by both displaying stories from the sites that you’re already visiting and helping you discover sites that you didn’t know existed.

The bottom line is this — if you’re looking for a great site that aggregates a number of other sites into one convenient “magazine rack,” then check out Alltop. It’s a great idea and it’s catching on with everyone.

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November 28th, 2008

How to Market to a Growing Segment: The Simplifiers

Dr. John Quelch is the Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and is known worldwide for his research on global marketing, global branding and marketing communications. His blog, called Marketing Know: How is read by marketers interested in staying on top of the latest and greatest trends in marketing.

In a recent posting, Dr. Quelch highlighted a fast-growing segment of the American population — the Simplifiers. Simplifiers are well-off people who value quality over quantity and who do not buy proportionately more goods as their net worth increases. They reflect a new sensibility in American consumerism — that is, that “more” is not necessarily “better.”

In other words, they value quality over quantity.

Here is a summary from Dr. Quelch’s posting:

“The Simplifiers have four characteristics:

  • First, they perceive that they have more stuff than they need. Sure, they may collect something specific like porcelain figurines as a hobby, but they are the opposite of the pack rats who fill their attics and basements with “you-never-know-when-you-might-need-it” stuff.
  • Second, they want to collect experiences, not possessions. And they give experiences rather than goods as gifts to friends and relatives. Experiences may seem ephemeral. They cannot be inventoried except in the form of “Kodak” moments; but they do not tie you down, require no maintenance, and permit variety-seeking instincts to be quickly satisfied. Dining out, foreign travel, and learning a new sport will prove more resilient than expected in the face of recession.
  • Third, their stuff embarrasses them. Their Range Rovers no longer tell the world that they are sophisticated town and country socialites. There are simply too many of them on the road to offer much social status. Worse, they now signal the irresponsible selection of a gas-guzzler.
  • Fourth, they have wealth that is so assured that it no longer requires conspicuous display. They lease their cars, rent other people’s holiday homes, and would happily outsource other aspects of their lifestyles. They reject the marketer’s continual pressure to spend more money on possessions rather than on education, health care, and other social goods.”

In a nutshell, Simplifiers are a segment of the population we should all keep our eyes on, whether we’re at a Fortune 500 company or a small Mom-and-Pop hardware store. This year’s economic melt-down is having an effect on the psyche of the American consumer just like 9/11 had an effect on the psyche of the American citizen.

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November 25th, 2008

Marketing Tips from The Geek Squad

Inc. Magazine is a terrific magazine if you’re interested in growing your business. Every issue is packed with great tips on how to increase sales and revenue at small- to mid-sized companies.

In the October, 2008 issue, they had a short piece on Robert Stephens, the founder of Geek Squad, a tech-support company that was acquired by Best Buy in 2002.  Linda Stewart, the CEO and Founder of Epoch posed the following question for Robert:

Q: I want to generate buzz about my executive search firm among potential clients. What is the best way to boost word-of-mouth marketing? –Linda Stewart, CEO and Founder, Epoch, Boston

Robert’s Answer is worth read because it’s packed with great ideas, especially if you want to stand out from the crowd:

A: Word of mouth starts with your company’s name and how you describe it. What’s the first thing that emerges in any culture or tribe?  It’s language.  Your company’s reputation spreads through language.  So you should really force yourself to distill exactly what your company does.  How many times have you been at a cocktail party and met someone who can’t tell you what his or her business does?


I dropped out of art school, and when I formed Geek Squad, I asked myself, “What if a creative person went into a boring business?”  Without spending any money on marketing, we were able to get people talking about Geek Squad by tapping into themes and archetypes people already understood. We embraced the fact that we were geeks, and we dressed all of our employees like 1960s NASA technicians, since NASA is a symbol of problem solving, teamwork, and impossible tasks.  Our goal was to implant a memory of us in people’s brains.  And it worked.  In our early years, we found that more than 90 percent of people found us through word of mouth.


If you can’t do creative things with your company’s visual appeal, you can take advantage of some of the newer tools for building buzz, like blogs and podcasts, both of which are particularly suited for business-to-business companies.  All businesses are good at something.  The better companies realize this.  They adopt a strong point of view and work to convey it in a fun or interesting way.  The key is to focus on promoting the foundational principles, the raison d’être, of your company.  It’s the one thing your competitors cannot copy.


I don’t put much stock into overt word-of-mouth marketing campaigns, like paying someone to make a viral video.  Paid word of mouth is an oxymoron; it’s just paid advertising.  Instead, the key to getting people to talk about your company is to find some way to express your individual relevance in the business world. In other words, why should people care?


Of course, my views come from not having any money when I built Geek Squad.  If I had had money when I started out, I never would have learned that advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable. I would have paid someone else to come up with the logo and the design behind Geek Squad, and the idea behind my company would not have been the same.  Geek Squad would not have been original or authentic.  Today, the world of blogs and YouTube has made being authentic and original all that much more important.

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November 24th, 2008

Seth Godin and The New York Times

The New York Times is arguably the best newspaper in the world, second only to The Wall Street Journal. But The Times is no different than any other newspaper in that they’re all having trouble adjusting to the world of new media.

Seth Godin has written an excellent post on The Times and the issues it faces. The entire post is worth a read. Here are some highlights for those who want the key points:

“Page by page, section by section, the influence of the New York Times is fading away. Great people on an important mission, but their footprint is shrinking and the company is losing stock value and cash and power and the ability to have the impact that they might.

When you think about your business, realize that it is a combination of assets and constraints. The Times understood both, but suddenly, the constraints changed. Now, it’s possible for a single individual with a Typepad account to reach more people than almost any newspaper in the country can. Loosen one constraint and the game changes. That leaves you with the assets, for a while anyway.

The people I know at the Times are smart, driven, honest and on a mission to do great work. The people didn’t fail the system, the system failed them.

Do the people running the Times know more about running a newspaper or building ideas that spread profitably online? How about the people running your organization? Odds are, they’re great at yesterday’s business.

I guess it’s about the difference between:

  • senior management playing defense, supporting and protecting the status quo and avoiding offending the elders upstairs vs.
  • using existing momentum and clout to build assets for the next business.”

Well said, Mr. Godin.

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November 20th, 2008

Is Terrorism the Biggest Threat to American Business? No, Labor Unions Are.

Let’s start by saying that we’re not comparing labor unions to terrorists. And we’re not making light of the fact that people have died defending our nation from terrorism. But when it comes to the threats American businesses will face over the next few years, you could argue that Osama Bin Laden is less of a threat than big labor.

As a marketing professional, you’re always looking for ways to drive new prospects to your business. But if you drive prospects into a failed business model, no matter how hard you work, it’ll be a waste of your time.

Take a look at the Big Three Automakers. The CEOs from these companies each flew on their respective corporate jets (cost = about $1,000 per hour, even when it’s sitting on the runway) to go to Washington to ask for a bail out. Not only has that created a PR disaster for their companies, it’s also a sign that the CEOs are simply out-of-touch with the challenges most Americans now face.

But that’s only part of the story. The real issue is that American car manufacturers can’t compete with foreign car manufacturers. Why? Because for decades labor unions have forced the U.S. auto industry into contracts that inflate their costs. Do you know that every car built by the Ford, GM or Chrysler is about $300 more expensive than foreign cars because of their labor contracts?

That means if Toyota builds a car for $19,900  and one of the Big 3 builds the exact same car, they have to sell it for $20,200 because of the built-in labor costs. That’s a flawed business model. Who has an extra $300 to blow in today’s economy? It’s difficult for any amount of brand loyalty to overcome that price differential.

And now, as if that weren’t bad enough, the Government might pass a law that will take away American’s right to vote for or against labor unions with a secret ballot. Huh? Isn’t a right to privacy part of what it means to be an American? Not if you’re a supporter of labor unions. If they have their way, when you’re asked to vote for or against labor unions, they’ll be able to look over your shoulder and see how you voted.

What? This is outrageous. And it’s completely un-American. Worse still, it’ll give big labor so much power that it’ll further cripple our ability to compete with foreign products and/or services.

If you’re a marketer, it’s your job to drive prospects to your business. But if that business has its hands tied by inflated labor contracts, then no matter how many prospects you drive to your business, your efforts won’t succeed. For proof of this, just ask GM, Ford and Chrysler.

You may not agree with everything we’ve said here, but we’re sure you’ll agree this — no matter what your point-of-view, you should contact your Senator or Congressman today to let them know where you stand on the Card Check Program that big labor is supporting.

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November 18th, 2008

Five Tips on Using LinkedIn to Grow Your Business

Linda Lindsey has been in the marketing and advertising arena for more than 18 years, and recently served as a Senior Marketing Manager for Ricoh U.S.  She is also President-elect for the Business Marketing Association, Atlanta Chapter.

Linda has taken a deep dive into the social media world and wrote the following article for The 60 Second Marketer. Some of the information is so hot, we wanted to get it out to our growing community as quickly as possible.

Here’s Linda’s guest posting, hot off the press:

LinkedIn is the “Six Degrees of Separation” for the business world.  Its claim to fame is the “Triangle of Trust” networking principle:  People are more likely to do business from a referral by someone they know and trust. This is powerful stuff in today’s fast, buy-on-the-fly, e-commerce driven society.

Unfortunately, LinkedIn has the “now what?” effect.  Well-intentioned users sign up for an account, build their profile, network to a few people and then become lost, unsure of how to maximize the LinkedIn resources.  Here are 5 things you can do today to start using LinkedIn as a way to generate revenue:

1. Be the Face of Your Brand
LinkedIn announced new functionality for companies to create a profile for their company to provide basic information including your website, company description, industry, number of employees and more.  Check out your company profile or add it by visiting www.linkedin.com/companies.

There is a also great way to connect with customers and prospects through an individual in your company.  If you represent a small company, start a LinkedIn account for the owner.  Larger organizations should choose a representative that best represents their customer and prospect base.  For example, a technology company should use their CIO, a consumer company might choose their CMO, and a manufacturer should promote the president or COO.  Choose a spokesperson based on who can offer the best conversations about your brand.

Once you’ve chosen your spokesperson, build your profile with your specific company in mind, not the personal resume of your spokesperson except if your spokesperson’s professional experience is relevant in nature to their current role or gives clout to the spokesperson.

In the “Summary” section list a description of your company’s products and services and complete the “Specialties” section with keywords that encompass your company’s product, service, or value.

2. Think of LinkedIn as a part of your Loyalty Marketing Strategy
Loyalty Marketing is an approach to marketing in which a company focuses on growing and retaining existing customers through incentives. If you think of LinkedIn as a way to enhance your current customer relationships you can begin and maintain a dialog with people who are engaged in your products, services, or brand.

The first step in LinkedIn loyalty marketing is to start a Group.  In the group section you can give an overview of your company, start dialogs with your customers, share news and updates and begin to build a database of brand advocates.  Offer various incentives that best target your audience such as receiving first notification of any company news, new products or services, or upcoming promotions – you can even offer special deals or incentives only for LinkedIn Group members.  You can use your LinkedIn Group to advertise upcoming events, collect pre-show or post-event feedback, and conduct polls of focus groups to gather customer intelligence.

3. Use Offline Marketing Tactics to Drive Your Customers and Prospects to Join Your LinkedIn Group
Update all current marketing efforts with a tagline encouraging customers and prospects to join your LinkedIn Group: direct mail, email campaigns, employee email signatures, business cards, and, of course, provide a link on your website to the LinkedIn Group. LinkedIn is a great way to generate traffic to your website and support your search engine optimization efforts.  Be sure to ask your company employees to add your website to their personal LinkedIn page – this provides quality, relevant links which organically helps bump you up in search engine rankings.

4. Advertise on LinkedIn
LinkedIn also offers text-based advertising opportunities called “DirectAds” that run for 30 days a pop.  You can target your ad based on two of the following seven criteria: Company Size, Job Function, Industry, Seniority, Gender, Age, or Geography.  Ads start at $25 and guarantee a certain number of impressions (the number of times an ad is shown), but do not guarantee any results (or click-thrus) on your ad. LinkedIn offers a dashboard to track the ad activity including impressions, clickthrus and a calculation of your clickthru rate (CTR). Depending on your product or service, this can be a great way to reach your audience especially if you couple the offer with an incentive such as a free white paper, coupon or other value-add.

5. Get Connected to LinkedIn
LinkedIn is getting ready to launch some really cool functionality for B2B marketing.  Sign up for the RSS feed on the LinkedIn blog http://blog.linkedin.com/ so you can get this news first and be first to market.  This RSS feed only sends out an email if there is new content.  They promise, “No new content, no email for you.”

One final note: Your company may already have a profile on LinkedIn with content generated by LinkedIn.  This profile is populated by public data provided by Capital IQ, a sister company to BusinessWeek, and may include public information such as your company description, industry, type of company, headquarter address, size, founding date, and website. The differentiator for the LinkedIn company profile is that it uses its own member data to create new information about your company based on the people who have listed your company name in their profiles as current or former employees.  LinkedIn uses this information to determine the average age, gender, and title of employees at your company.  Of course it is skewed, but they make no apologies for the data. However, you can add or change information on these pages, but you must have a valid company email to do so.  In the FAQs, do a search for “Adding or Changing Company Profile Page.” Coming soon is the functionality to post jobs, recruitment videos, information about products and services, company images and more.

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November 18th, 2008

When The 60 Second Marketer Speaks, Steve Jobs Listens.

Many of our most avid readers will recall a blog posting we had several months ago called “Why Steve Jobs is Both a Genius and a Knucklehead.” In it, we pointed out that any brand that has its entire success wrapped up in one person (i.e. Steve Jobs) is setting itself up for failure.

What happens if the that person gets hit by a bus? Or takes an extended leave of absence? Or decides to become a monk? If anything like that were to happen, the entire company (in this case Apple) would tank.

Well, it’s pretty clear that Steve Jobs not only read our blog post, but he had it framed for his office wall and circulated it to his staff. How do we know this? Because the cover of this week’s edition of Fortune magazine states that Steve Jobs is doing exactly what we suggested to him — that is, to start sharing the spotlight with other people at Apple. We said sharing the spotlight would be good for the company, good for the shareholders and good for America.

Do we really believe Steve Jobs read our blog post, had it framed and circulated it to his staff? Well, no, not really. But we do believe that he’s finally realized that he needed to put his ego aside and start promoting the other geniuses at Apple, too.

It hurts us to say this, but Microsoft has done a fabulous job transferring the image of its brand from Gates to Balmer. Sure, Gates is still seen as the brand icon, but we all know that Balmer has been running the company for years. Hats off to Microsoft for knocking it out of the park on that initiative.

With that in mind, we’re happy to report that Steve Jobs and Apple have started to promote other people within the company. That’s good for Apple and good for America since it means we’ll have more fun, innovative, new products to look forward to in the future.

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November 17th, 2008

60 Second Marketer Community Responds to “State Farm” Post

We know we’re doing our job when we stir things up among the marketing community. After all, part of our desire for The 60 Second Marketer is to create a community of marketing professionals who share ideas, thoughts, comments and innovations with each other.

Our post last week entitled “Three Lessons You Can Learn from State Farm’s Less-Than-Stellar Ad Campaign” generated several interesting responses.

Here are some responses from two readers on the West Coast who love the campaign:

“I really disagree with your article. I was very attracted to this ad because the song is so catchy and I noticed a lot of posts saying that they cannot stop singing it. State Farm is bringing you the game and it is on Sunday and a lot of the products now get off what they are selling. Have you not noticed that?? It has become a hit commercial also and with good reason. Watch it again and it makes you feel happy and everyone I know has commented on that.” — April in California

“I am one of the writers of ‘Feelin’ Kinda Sunday’ that Frank Sinatra and Nancie Sinatra recorded many years ago and is now being used by State Farm for the NFL Football games on Sunday. I read what you wrote about the commercial and I had to give you my opinion. I thought it was so clever and so creative that they picked that title. It is the fun and happy spirit of Sunday the day that those games are being played and at the end of the commercial one of the players says “I’m So There” and then they talk about State Farm. Haven’t you noticed how the new commercials most of them now do something else other than push the commercial and sometimes after a commercial that has nothing to do with the product they just show the name of what they are selling and that is all? I realize that everyone has their opinions but I got the feeling that perhaps you were a bit out of touch with what is happening in the world of commercials. I know I am speaking for my other two co-writers when I say that we were very happy with both of the commercials.” — Annette, Los Angeles, California

What are your thoughts? What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of the State Farm campaign?

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November 17th, 2008

Has The 60 Second Marketer Gone Off Its Rocker? Perhaps.

Last week, The 60 Second Marketer posted a blog entry called “Is Toys R Us the Best Company Name Ever?” It created quite a stir among our loyal reader base. (We love it when that happens.)

One comment came in from Dr. Bob Becker who runs Becker MultiMedia. It was so thought-provoking, we decided to give it the attention it deserves and post it as a guest blog entry.

The essence of our Toys R Us post was that a great brand name has should do three things: 1) It should be clear, 2) It should be memorable, and 3) It should be distinctive.

Here’s what Bob wrote in response to our post:

“A name should be clear. But what does that mean? Clear about what? What you sell? Who you are? How you do business? Why you do business? Seems to me that you haven’t considered these questions. Your first principle is unclear!

A name should be memorable. How does something become memorable? Does a name make it memorable, or the experience one associates with the name? We meet many thousands of people in the course of a lifetime, and we remember the names of only a few. Why is that? Because of the names, or because of what we experienced with the people who went by those names?

A name should be different. From what? From other names? Isn’t that obvious? If Sherlock Holmes and James Bond had the same name, we would be confused. But how does Sherlock being different from James make Holmes or Bond better names? Is James Bond worse because it’s like James Cagney or Campion Bond? Obviously not. These things have nothing to do with a good name.

Is 60 Second Marketer a good name? Well, let’s see. It’s not clear, since most products offered by the 60 Second Marketer are not 60 seconds in length. I don’t know if it’s memorable. I have no trouble recalling it, so that’s a plus. Trouble is, I only recall it when I see it in my Inbox. It doesn’t come to mind when I am browsing books on Amazon or reading the Wall Street Journal. It’s not different, since there are 60 Second [fill in the blank] things all over the place, ever since Pooh-Bah Blanchard made people believe that management occurs in one minute.

I propose replacing your three principles of naming with just one principle: “a name should mean something.”

Examples?

  • Ralph Lauren means something. It’s the name of a designer.
  • Google means something. It’s the name of huge scale.
  • Marathon means something. It’s the energy you get from eating the candy.

There is nothing that these and other great names have in common, other than they mean something and stand for something.

By this measure, Toys r Us is not the best name, or even a great name. It is a name of a retailer that defines itself generically. The name says nothing special about the toys in the stores or how the toys are sold. A far better name in toy retailing is FAO Schwarz. For none of the reasons you cite.”

Bob brings up some great points. Anyone else want to chime in? What are some great brand names that don’t meet any of these criteria? How about Kodak? Or WalMart?

Share your thoughts.

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November 13th, 2008

McCain and Obama Leverage Social Media in 2008 Presidential Bid

Recently, Forrester Research conducted a study outlining how each Presidential candidate used Social Media during their 2008 campaigns. The chart below highlights the numbers from each candidate’s campaign. It offers great insight into how President-elect Obama leveraged the power of social media to win the election.

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