Online Marketing for Marketers

There are a couple extremely important components you need to have in place to achieve Web marketing success. Without them, your chance for failure is great. Make the jump over to this post to watch this video to learn what they are.
Read more

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

With the volatility in the economy these days, marketers are being held more accountable for the dollars being spent online. Quality has replaced quantity, and getting your arms around the ROI from each campaign is a much more pressing issue. Fortunately, given a proper strategy, marketers can obtain the tools needed to help them spend wiser.

Developing a campaign tracking strategy is a common challenge for organizations. However, this strategy is fundamental to the success of your campaign analysis. A campaign that is tagged improperly will yield incomplete data which negates a marketer’s ability to track ROI and often leaves marketers with unanswered questions about their campaigns. Educated guesses need to be replaced with data-driven decisions as it pertains to what works and what doesn’t as you embark down the path of campaign optimization. Read more

The worldwide excitement and energy generated from the election last week turned a lot of marketers moods (53% if we line up with the popluar vote) into ones of optimism.  For others, concern and caution.  But for all, we wrestle with the economic uncertainties which I believe mirror the duplicitous nature of Online Marketing pudits as we try to determine what will happen to the industry over the next 6 months. So, in all the readings of late, interviews done at the past 5 marketing conferences and general conversations had with fellow marketing peers, I have been able to finally gather my thoughts, review my notes and decide on my top 5 priorities for 2009.  My hope is this helps others with their clouds of confusion. 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

Every small business has some initiatives in place to garner new business. The smart ones are constantly on the look out for new business. One of the reasons many small businesses fumble in their marketing is simply because they are watching the small picture. They approach each initiative as an isolated instance, whereas they should try to coordinate the entire effort. 

Here are a few fumbles you might recognize and a suggestion for recovery: 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

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

I was asked recently, “What Are the Common Attributes of a Good Campaign?” It’s not an unreasonable question, but as a digital and experiential marketer, my first inclination is to ask, “Why a campaign?”

Campaigns are, by definition, short-term in nature, but brands are not. Neither are the relationships brands wish to foster with consumers. The best brands foster the best relationships–ones based on lasting emotional and practical bonds that yield long-term value for both consumers and brands. Read more