Marketing time versus marking time

Are you twiddling your thumbs waiting for the current economic malaise to pass, or getting proactive about marketing your company?

While many small business owners maintain a love-hate relationship with marketing (they love it when it works, but they hate doing it), the Internet, new technology, and common sense have conspired to offer some ideas that can rev up your revenues.

Operating on the premise that people gravitate to other people they know and like, it’s now possible to get known and liked at the click of a mouse. At the same time, some tried and true “high touch, low tech” avenues can complement technology-centric efforts to create a well-rounded marketing program.

Following are five ways to gear up your marketing efforts:

1. Go back to school. Promote yourself to your alma mater, both through its communications vehicles and one-on-one to alumni. There’s a bond that exists between people who attended the same college or high school—even if there’s never been a face-to-face meeting.

Research what communications vehicles the school uses to stay in touch with alumni. For example, the University of Denver publishes a quarterly magazine that addresses topics of current general interest and details the comings-and-goings of alumni.

Research the editorial calendar of such a publication; it may be possible to get featured in an upcoming article. Minimally, send in information about current professional/personal status for inclusion in the alum section.

Also reach out to individuals. Contact those sparking your curiosity or interest who have been profiled/included in school publications. Or, use the Internet to locate alums, and email them about your product or service. (It may be a good idea to ask for their advice rather than conduct a blatant pitch—at least initially. See “Ask, don’t tell” below.)

2. Go on a date. Social networking via Facebook, Linked-In, MySpace, Youtube and other Internet-based sites is all the rage. Primary uses are sharing information, promoting ideas, products and services, and matchmaking—both professional and personal.

It’s easy enough to check out social networking sites. Just go to their URL and follow the registration directions. To get where you want to go, you may have to shell out some money, but it’s typically a small amount.

Think of these avenues as door-openers, and don’t pigeonhole yourself because of the site’s primary focus. For example, some people on a personal networking site are simultaneously pushing their professional credentials and abilities—obviously figuring that there may be a good business as well as personal match.

Given the relatively low barriers to entry, register for several social networking services and see what, if anything, comes back to you. If nothing else, it’s cheap research.

3. Present new ideas to old clients. First, list out both present and former clients. Then do some research on their industries, trends, and company specific track records. Use results to get creative and proactive with selling your products and services to them. One way to proceed is to think of problem/solution sets. Identify a major problem or challenge that a current or former client has, and offer a compelling solution featuring your company’s offerings.

For example, a software reseller with a shiny new supply chain management application can research past and present clients to determine how this tool can solve a vexing problem they may be having presently.

4. Ask, don’t tell—or sell. When prospecting, consider asking questions or enlisting advice in lieu of trying to sell somebody on something. For example, if you’re a manufacturer wanting to sell homebuilders on a novel invention for kitchens, canvass prospects to get their feedback about value, efficacy and the best way to proceed—versus an overly enthusiastic or hard-sell pitch.

5. Get personal. We’re all flooded with emails, direct mails and other distracting communiqués. Unless something speaks to us very personally, it’s likely to get ignored or tossed. Getting personal involves providing something of value to the recipient in a way that showcases that value.

If you really want to snag that prospect, don’t send a coffee mug with your company’s name on it. Send a good bottle of wine, a spicy salsa, a container of high-end chocolates with the name of their company and recipient, possibly a historical photo tied to their company, and even a short story. This all can be done en masse with variable data printing, a digital process that enables printing thousands of labels or other items with true personalization—affordably and quickly.

This type of item demonstrates class, caring and your ability to focus on the recipient—not yourself. In today’s ubiquitous selling environment, this type of low-key, high-impact sales pitch can pay many dividends.

By getting proactive and personal, small businesses can open up a variety of new marketing opportunities that take advantage both of high tech and high touch approaches.

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MARK LUSKY is a principal of Lusky Enterprises, Inc., a marketing communications company.

When Google is the front door, the side door, the hidden key under the mat, the cash register, the finder of everything we ever lost, and everything we wished we’d lost, what comes next? When everyone is a newspaper, a magazine, a TV station, a radio station, a conference, a curator, an educator, a business owner, a shopkeeper, what do we have? When you and I are the creators, the consumers, and the collaborators of this media, what does this mean to us?Social media business strategy and more - chrisbrogan.com, Nov 2008

You should read the whole article.

Congratulations David Plouffe (Campaign Manager for Barack Obama’s Presidential Election Campaign)…

Your campaign was quite slick.  You utilized technology, you utilized manpower, you have created a new template for Presidential elections.  All future election campaigns will be held to a new standard and level of utilizing technology…long gone is the old way of campaigning.

Between the Obama Girl, Facebook ads, and an iPhone application, you took advantage of the Internet as a communication tool and you captured a generation and communicated with them at their level.  And yes, I know Obama Girl was not part of your campgain strategy, or was she?

People-Press.org provides the following statistics…

The internet is living up to its potential as a major source for news about the presidential campaign. Nearly a quarter of Americans (24%) say they regularly learn something about the campaign from the internet, almost double the percentage from a comparable point in the 2004 campaign (13%).

Moreover, the internet has now become a leading source of campaign news for young people and the role of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook is a notable part of the story. Fully 42% of those ages 18 to 29 say they regularly learn about the campaign from the internet, the highest percentage for any news source. In January 2004, just 20% of young people said they routinely got campaign news from the internet.

Once again, congratulations…see you on Facebook.

An added FYI - I just setup our Wordpress > Twitter plugin and it works great.  Easy too.  Took < 3 minutes.

You can see it work here:

http://twitter.com/arifgan

Social Networking can be a pain.  I mean, you have a blog, you have a twitter account, Facebook, LinkedIn, and a myriad of other accounts.  There are tools out there to allow you to aggregate all of the data but what about syndication?

Well, that is the brilliance of RSS.  Here’s a quick video about RSS feeds and what they are:

Here are 2 tools that will help you tie your social networks together:

1. Wordpress just announced a LinkedIn plugin.  Now, you can link up your Wordpress blog to LinkedIn so anything you post on your Wordpress blog will automatically be syndicated to LinkedIn.

Here is a quick video:

There are also a few others tools out there to keep you connected.

2. Here is a tool for connecting Wordpress to twitter…as you post on your blog, this little plugin can automatically create a tinyurl and post it to your twitter feed. Which can then be broadcast via text messaging, etc.

Click here for a twitter plugin for wordpress with tinyurl API support.  It sounds tough to install, but it’s easy

Thanks to OpenSocial…Social Networks are merging together…but it’s also another way for Google to track you down.

Seriously, who actually buys products from an anonymous spam email?

Authorities Shut Down Spam Ring

The Federal Trade Commission won a preliminary legal victory against what it called one of the largest spam gangs on the Internet, persuading a federal court in Chicago on Tuesday to freeze the group’s assets and order the spam network to shut down.

The group, which used several names but was known among spam-fighting organizations as HerbalKing, sent billions of unsolicited messages to Internet users over the last 20 months, promoting replica watches and a variety of pharmaceuticals, including weight-loss drugs and herbal pills that supposedly enhanced the male anatomy, according to the commission.

“This is pretty major. At one point these guys delivered up to one-third of all spam,” said Richard Cox, chief information officer at SpamHaus, a nonprofit antispam research group.

The investigation provides a clear window into the business of modern spam, which by some estimates accounts for 90 percent of all e-mail sent over the Internet.

To pepper Internet users with its solicitations, the HerbalKing group used a botnet, a global network of computers infected with malicious software, often without the knowledge of their owners.

The security firm Marshal Software, which assisted the F.T.C. with the investigation, estimated in court documents that the group’s Mega-D botnet — named after one of its pill products — was made up of 35,000 computers and could send 10 billion e-mail messages a day. In January, the botnet was the leading source of spam on the Internet, the firm estimated.

F.T.C. investigators also said they monitored the group’s finances closely and that it cleared $400,000 in Visa charges in one month alone.

The commission has brought more than 100 cases against spammers and spyware vendors over the past decade. But officials and investigators said this spam operation was perhaps the most extensive they had ever encountered, with ties to Australia, New Zealand, India, China and the United States.

“They were sending extraordinary amounts of spam,” said Jon Leibowitz, an F.T.C. commissioner. “We are hoping at some level that this will help make a small dent in the amount of spam coming into consumers’ in-boxes.”

The commission asked the federal district court in Chicago to freeze the gang’s finances, arguing that its members were using unfair and deceptive advertising practices and violating the Can-Spam Act of 2003. That federal law provides civil and criminal penalties for spammers who falsify information in e-mail messages and fail to offer ways for consumers to refuse further messages.

The government is also pursuing criminal charges against the group. F.B.I. investigators in Chicago and St. Louis have executed search warrants against members of the spam gang, the commission said.

Jody Michael Smith, 29, of McKinney, Tex., was involved in the group’s finances, according to the F.T.C. Reached at his home, Mr. Smith said: “I don’t even know who these people are who I have been tied to,” and referred all inquiries to his Dallas lawyer, John R. Teakell. Mr. Teakell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

United States officials are also working with New Zealand authorities in the case against Lance Thomas Atkinson, 26, a native of New Zealand who now resides in Australia. Mr. Atkinson has a history in the spam business. In 2005, the F.T.C. obtained a $2.2 million judgment against him and a business partner for running a similar operation selling herbal pills online.

In conjunction with the investigation in the United States, the Department of Internal Affairs in New Zealand asked a court on Tuesday to impose a fine of 200,000 New Zealand dollars, or $121,000, on Mr. Atkinson, his brother Shane Atkinson and a business partner for violating the country’s own spam laws.

The activities of the HerbalKing group, like those of other criminal groups online, were remarkably international in scope. The group was shipping drugs like Propecia, Lipitor, Celebrex and Zoloft out of India. The F.T.C. also said the group based its Web sites in China, processed credit cards from the former Soviet republic of Georgia and Cyprus, and transferred funds among members using ePassporte, an electronic money network.

As part of its investigation, the commission purchased the “herbal” pills from the group and asked the Food and Drug Administration to test them. That agency found that the pills contained sildenafil, the active ingredient in Viagra, which can be risky for some people with heart conditions.

Antispam researchers lauded the crackdown and said it would send a strong message to other spammers. But they were not confident that spam volumes would decrease.

“This will send some real shock waves through the spamming industry, but even if these guys were running a substantial botnet of compromised computers, there are always spammers looking to take their place,” said Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at Sophos, a spam-fighting security firm. “It wouldn’t be a surprise if people don’t notice any difference in their in-box tomorrow morning.”

Great interface for seeing what’s up with the election…and don’t miss the button at the top called, “Create your scenario”.  You can view past electoral voting by State, change States from Red/Blue to see what would happen if…

Seriously…I can’t go on facebook and not see an Obama ad.  I couldn’t even read an article about McCain and not catch a glimpse of Obama on the sideline in a banner advertisement.

Between that and then Obama announcing his running mate over text messaging, I don’t even think the question of who is better utliizing technology is a fair question.  Obama is going after the tech friendly crowd and his Campaign Manager (David Plouffe) is doing a great job of it.

Check out this cool iPhone app…talk about grass roots marketing!

It’s almost like a virus that gets into your email client and spams all of your contacts…this little application makes you hound your friends and family by battleground states.  Is this the new “sign in the yard”?

We all remember back in the day, having a walkman…a personal music player.  “Walkman” was created by Sony, they had the market and grew into the DiscMan, so what happened to Sony?  Anyway, this post is about Microsoft and Apple.

Everyone is talking about the new iPod Nano introduced today…it’s just a few more bells and whistles aimed at making you shell out your hard earned cash yet once again (The announcement wasn’t big enough obviously - Apple shares fell 4%).  Seriously, Apple…can you not do a hardware update for a while so that we feel like our iPod’s and Macbooks are not out of date the minute we buy them?

I’m in the market for a new iPhone…but when will the new ones come out?  When will they introduce the 32 GB model?  Rumors stated that due to the cost of Memory, we wouldn’t see a 32 GB iPhone until late 2009…but here we go with an iPod nano with 32 GB of memory…I figure it’s 4 x 8 GB chips, but who knows…maybe they’ll figure out how to fit that into an iPhone.

Steve…give us a break!

Microsoft (Zune) vs. Apple (iPod) in the portable music player market.