Marketing

Keith Bates, the software marketing legend, just published his latest free report on Word of Mouth Marketing , dubbing it as a primer for CEOs and CMOs who need to drive sales with more credible marketing.

In addition to defining Word of Mouth Marketing, providing case studies, listing various approaches, explaining the mechanics of WOM and doing a costs overview, Keith also summarizes key insights on Word of Mouth Marketing from key WOM authors and practitioners, ranging from Seth Godin to Regis McKenna.

Rok Hrastnik, New Word of Marketing Report - April 27, 2005

1. Ask your customers what they like best about your product or service. Ask them if they talk about you with other people and what they say. Use this information to craft good buzz stories and encourage your employees to work them into their every day conversations.
2. Create a local Blog and have people in your organization update it with interesting things going on in the area. Make sure it is clear that your organization is sponsoring the Blog.
3. Visit businesses within a short distance of yours. Let them know what you do and find out more about what they do. Invite them into your business to meet some of the staff.
4. Throw a dinner party (or lunch) for a group of people you would like to meet and could have a positive impact on your organization. Be sure to have some interesting buzz worthy stories to tell about your organization.
5. Email a reporter, writer or other media professional at least once a week and let them know you like their work and offer ideas you have for stories. Contact different people in different weeks, and try to develop a relationship with some of the people that could eventually write a story that would create buzz for your organization.
6. Surprise a current customer or client. The more often you pleasantly surprise your customers the more likely they will be to talk about you to other people. The more frequently you do this and the bigger the surprise the more buzz you will create.
7. Strive to be worth talking about. Review customer service, support, product quality, customer relationships and attention to detail. No matter how hard you try to create buzz, it will be short lived once people see a product or service that does not live up to all the hype.
8. Write an article and put it on your website that uses key words your target audience may search on. This article was written to get search engine results for Buzz Marketing Ideas because we noticed a fair amount of traffic coming to our site already with this keyword search, and we wanted the site to rank higher.

Ron McDaniel, Buzz Marketing Ideas - October 11, 2005

Catering the vanities of consumers has always been a tried and trued marketing technique – liquor, luxury goods, automobiles, . . . hell . . . even cigarettes (and airlines!). However, the web had been slow to adopt these techniques until the rise of "web 2.0" companies. A lot has been talked about regarding community contributed content as the bedrock of the web 2.0 ethos. Little, however, has been written about how web 2.0 companies leverages vanity marketing as the feedback loop that creates incentives for increasing community contributions.

So what do you do if you want to leverage vanity marketing for your own web 2.0 project? Off the top of my head ...

1) On your homepage prominently feature a few "top users"
2) Enable consumers to customize their presence to show off their tenure
3) Create reputation systems that give graphical prominence to top users
4) In a related point, create "casts" system for your user base
5) Create new functionality and services only for your highest "cast"
a. And a way for the lower cast members to taste these services temporary
6) Create functionalities for users to measure and compare their progress through the cast system
a. Clearly publish metrics with which they can see and act on to improve their standing in the community
7) Allow the maximum possible transparency for member to member communication and interaction
a. Which enables socialization of these vanity norms
8) Create a jargon/language system for your community
9) And lastly, don't be afraid of kicking out or refusing entry members who does not contribute positively to your network or does not fit your target segment (defined broadly)

Will Hsu, The Rise of Vanity Marketing - April 11, 2006

• Law #1: The Law of Leadership
• Law #2: The Law of the Category
• Law #3: The Law of the Mind
• Law #4: The Law of Perception
• Law #5: The Law of Focus
• Law #6: The Law of Exclusivity
• Law #7: The Law of the Ladder
• Law #8: The Law of Duality
• Law #9: The Law of the Opposite
• Law #10: The Law of Division
• Law #11: The Law of Perspective
• Law #12: The Law of Line Extension
• Law #13: The Law of Sacrifice
• Law #14: The Law of Attributes
• Law #15: The Law of Candor
• Law #16: The Law of Singularity
• Law #17: The Law of Unpredictability
• Law #18: The Law of Success
• Law #19: The Law of Failure
• Law #20: The Law of Hype
• Law #21: The Law of Acceleration
• Law #22: The Law of Resources

Eric Sink, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing - June 1, 2004

Note: I probably should put this item higher in the list.

Unless you're an online shop selling t-shirts, cameras -- you get the picture -- your web site is not your marketing strategy. Your web site is part of your marketing strategy. If you took orders over the phone, don't get rid of your phone banks. If you're successfully using direct mail, don't stop. Heck, if the Yellow Pages are working for you, continue to use them. The trick, and the hard part, is to find where your web site fits in your marketing program.

Here's a perfect example from an e-mail I received from a dear friend:

I have to tell you that I attended a board meeting today for the organization whose web site you checked out for me.

The board consists of really high end people who had flown in from all over the country! When push came to shove, they asked me what I thought about their ability to raise money by driving people to the web site.

I shared your response with them. Silence in the room. And then a couple of other board members acknowledged that it needed work, affirming that they had had the same impression but didn't have the expertise to say anything about it.

You can't put all your eggs in one electronic basket.

Vincent Flanders, The Biggest Web Design Mistakes of 2004

At the end of the day, my biggest complaint, far and above all the others, is this: after 12 years on the Internet and thousands of registrations and forms filled out, the advertising I am seeing still does not appear to reflect my tastes, interests, previous buying habits, professional background, academic background, or income level. They have yet to successfully target me. My conclusion is that the information is being gathered only to sit on a dusty hard drive somewhere, never to be used, while the stupid marketing people continue to try to hit bees with buckshot.

Shawn Struck- August 19, 2004

Web marketing people have somehow skipped a whole generation of marketing learning. CRM software was supposed to "do it all"; people didn't really have to know database marketing techniques or have any hands-on experience . The truth is, software is just a tool, and experience matters.

Jim Novo- March 2001

CEOs are demanding accountability and transparency. Why are marketing execs so concerned about ROI metrics? More than ever before, marketing is being held accountable for real results - such as revenue growth and market share. And apparently, it hasn't delivered. According to a recent survey by Spencer Stuart, the average tenure of a CMO in the leading brand companies is less than two years.

CMO Magazine, What's In Store For Marketing In 2005? - January 14, 2005

1. Pop-ups in front of your window - 95%
2. Loads slowly - 94%
3. Tries to trick you into clicking on it - 94%
4. Does not have a "close" button - 93%
5. Covers what you are trying to see - 93%
6. Doesn't say what it is for - 92%
7. Moves Content Around - 92%
8. Occupies most of the page - 90%
9. Blinks on and off - 87%
10. Floats across the screen - 79%
11. Automatically plays sound - 79%

Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox, The Most Hated Advertising Techniques - December 6, 2004

Remember when web site traffic was talked about in terms of 'hits'? You'd read about how many millions of hits Netscape got per month and other sites bragged about getting 30,000 hits a day. Eventually, we moved away from the term hit because everyone realized it was pretty meaningless.

Pageviews replaced hits as the primary traffic metric not just because they're more meaningful, but because it also determined how many ads could be served. Reach (number of unique visitors) is also important, of course. comScore/Media Metrix uses uniques as its primary metric, because mainstream advertisers want to reach a lot of people, not just the same people over and over.

But it's this pageviews part that I think needs to be more seriously questioned.

Evan Williams, New Word of Marketing Report - August 25, 2006