Online Marketing for Marketers

Social networks are all the rage and many of my posts at OnlineMarketerBlog recommend social tools for businesses. However, there are potential pitfalls to consider before you facilitate interaction between customers and your business.

Here are 21 things your business should consider before starting a social network:

Internal (Your Business Capabilities)

1. Can you invest the necessary resources to run a social network properly? Can you afford the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars it takes to properly create and staff this resource?

2. What is the role of marketing, sales, IT, customer service, advertising, HR, etc.? Social networks often delve into all of these departments and more. Make sure all of your teams are engaged, enthused, and prepared. Read more

In the past, I’ve explored how the state of today’s Social Media tools may be turning off some Social Networkers. I suggested that the future of Social Media cannot be assessed based on today’s immature tools but must be viewed in the context of the concepts and tools that will revolutionize personal communication in the years to come.

So what might the future look like? It certainly won’t be the jumble of independent, overlapping, and unreliable tools that we have today. Let’s imagine a Social Media future and then consider how we might take actions now that will better prepare us for this future. Read more

I’ve been following The Marketing Technology Blog by Douglas Karr, and I’m in awe of him and his natural blogging ability. He blogs on his topic daily, sometimes more, and produces really well thought out posts. As a result, he has built a strong following on his blog that is rivaled by very few. And he’s done it in record time!

I decided to reach out to Doug Karr and interview him on a podcast to bring you some key learnings on how to build the audience for your blog. Enjoy …

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The ‘Get a Mac’ ad features two men standing side by side in front of a seamless, gray/white background. “Hello, I’m a Mac,” says the young guy on the right. “And I’m a PC,” says the guy on the left (sporting dorky glasses, business casual khakis, and a jacket / tie).

This well known, highly successful ad campaign from Apple promoting their Mac computers against Microsoft’s PC is closing in on its’ third year. Apple has attempted to cement the perceived wide gulf between the PC/Mac in terms of ease of setup, use and operating system stability and security - see Vista vs Mac OS spot. Or see the South Park version here.  Read more

The day after our historic election in NYC, I had a lunch meeting to discuss a marketing conference I was pulling together with an old association partner and the subject of “what do we call this conference” came up. Phrases like Emerging Media, Digital Marketing and of course my favorite, “New Media.” was tossed around. I stopped mid-sentence and said, “New Media…. what the heck is that? What does that really mean?” and my counterpart shrugged as if to say, yeah I don’t know either.  Read more

YouTube is growing at an outstanding rate - 13 hours of video being uploaded every minute. Facebook membership has soared past 100 million members and to put that into perspective the Wall Street Journal has a printed circulation of just 2 million. Yet many marketers are just waiting on the sidelines trying to figure out how to get into the game. Read more

We all mistakes everyday but if you’re a marketer your mistake can cost a company thousands or even millions of dollars.  It’s not easy to be a marketer and that’s because managing and building relationships is not an easy thing to do, especially for a large corporation.  As a marketer (or social media consultant) it’s easy to make a lot of assumptions that inevitably lead you down the path of an unsuccessful marketing campaign.  So what are some of the most common mistakes that marketers make? Read more

Last week I talked about some of the new changes Google is phasing into their web analytics platform. This week I wanted to introduce yet another enhancement that the folks from upon high in Mountain View bring to us - Event Tracking. With Event Tracking Google is really stepping out into the more advanced or enterprise level reporting realm.

The idea behind Event Tracking is that now you can track discrete user actions beyond and deeper than at the page level. For instance, now you can track user interactions with Web 2.0 style content such as AJAX, Adobe Flash / Air, Microsoft Silverlight, and many social networking applications. Read more

Before starting on this let me take a moment to talk about how I define Social Search Optimization (SSO…another acronym…I know). In my world SSO is the process of taking your Social Marketing programs and optimizing them so that they can rank in the Search engines.  The goal in my mind is to have as many page 1 listings as possible in which you control the experience.  The first question that I usually get when discussing this is “How does social and SEO go together?”  So let me explain… Read more

Legendary rock band AC/DC just released, “Black Ice” their first new album in over eight years. Black Ice was released on October 8^th and rocketed to the top of the charts selling nearly 800,000 earning it the distinction of being the year’s best-selling rock debut.

Black Ice marks the band’s second stint at #1 (1981’s For Those About to Rock … We Salute You reached the peak several weeks after its initial release), and the first chart-topping debut of the band’s more than 30-year-career. Read more