Category: Web Marketing

New ways to create and measure sites so they improve their ability to bring your best customers closer and attact other individuals just like them

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Guerilla (and gorilla!) marketing at its finest

How much must a truly stellar promotion of a new business cost? If you’re a small, scrappy start-up willing to take a few risks, the answer is not much.

Steve Fretzin and a few enterprising friends realized that their Chicago networking events were suffering from a lack of publicity. There was no calendar of Chicago-area events specifically for those seeking business networking.

Instead of cursing the darkness, they lit a candle. They created NetworkingMonkey.com.

Then they realized something else. NetworkingMonkey needed publicity even more than their events.

So Fretzin and company found a sharp PR firm and embarked on an aggressive publicity campaign. He told me, “We wanted to make a statement to the city. So we hired 10 actors and sent them into the streets.”

They didn’t leave unarmed. The came packing fruit.

“We had them dressed up in gorilla suits, and we gave them crates and crates of bananas — each with a card that had our value statement and web address. We gave away 7,000 bananas.”

If you have trouble imagining what that must have looked like, click on the video below. The event was well-documented, thanks to their PR partners, who wisely planned the event to coincide with a local television newscast’s “Dance-off Friday.”

The value of this prime time television (and subsequent YouTube) exposure is hard to measure. But since the buy-in wasn’t much more than the purchase of a medium-sized plantation’s worth of bananas, I’d say the ROI of this clever publicity ploy was definitely huge.

The Take-away:

You don’t need a hefty promotional budget if you choose the right partners and use you imagination.

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Context matters with online B-to-B ads

Testing in the online world has never become easier or more affordable. It’s therefore no surprise that many assumptions about online ads are being reconsidered. Today, Enquirio and Google announced the validation of one such tenet. It had been assumed, through common sense and improved response rates, that an ad displayed in the context of similar subject matter will do better than one with no relationship to content.

What do we mean by contextual ad placement? The premise is that if I’m an executive who influences a decision to purchase construction equipment, and I see an ad as I review a construction industry portal site, I am more likely to recall the message — and the brand — than if I saw the same ad on an unrelated site.

In research by Enquirio and commissioned by Google, this assumption was validated. The research methodology included randomized test subjects, given tasks related to the content of the sites they were reviewing. Some sites contained ads that were relevant, others contained the same ads but had no connection to those ads’ subject matter.

Results were gathered in the form of questionnaire answers and aggregate eye scan heat maps of the sites being reviewed.

Two key take-aways:

  • Through contextually relevant business-to-business (B-to-B) ads, purchasers are 52% more likely to associate your message with your brand
  • With contextually relevant B-to-B ads, it is 28% more likely that your brand “will make the cut” and be shortlisted.

The Enquirio site has the whitepaper available for download.

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Watching Bezos: The future of books can be traced in acquisitions

Yesterday fellow blogger Ron Shevlin published an open letter to Jeff Bezos, proposing that Amazon should start giving away Kindles. He proposed that giving away their ebook device would be offset by the incremental ebooks they’d then sell, in a similar way to giving away razors as a way to sell high-margin blades.

I’m of the opinion that, unlink razors, ebooks are too much of a niche product to take off in any scalable way. It was author and blogger Nick Hornby who helped me see the light, when he pointed out that an ebook is a high-tech solution solving problems for a largely low-tech market segment.

Social Networks for Book Lovers

Instead, I think the future of publishing — regardless of whether the ink is real or virtual — will be better advanced through social networks designed for those passionate about books. Notably, I’ve been tracking Goodreads, and the 18-month-old Shelfari.

Jeff Bezos has been watching as well. Today we learn that Amazon just acquired Shelfari, three weeks after acquiring another competitor in the space, AbeBooks.

It’s a shrewd move for Amazon to shift more marketing dollars toward online social networks. If only for this reason: As true book lovers become more of a rarity, the urge for them to congregate will grow.

Long before the day when book lovers warm to a digital book, they will welcome a digital way to connect with other readers.

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Wish you had a map to the social media landscape? Here you go

This post, describing what the social media ecosystem looks like today, offers some excellent insights. Kudos to Fred Cavassa … brought to my attention by way of Jennifer Van Grove‘s “favorited Flickr” images, by way of her FriendFeed. Got that? If you’re unsure, Fred’s map may help:

Social Media Landscape

In Fred’s post, he defines these social media categories as follows:

  • Publication tools with blogs ( Typepad, Blogger, etc.), wikis ( Wikipedia, Wikia, Wetpaint, etc.) and citizen journalism portals ( Digg, Newsvine, etc.)
  • Sharing tools for videos ( YouTube, etc.), pictures ( FlickR, etc.), links ( del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia, etc.), music ( Last.fm, iLike, etc.), slideshows ( Slideshare), products reviews ( Crowdstorm, Stylehive, etc.) or products feedbacks ( Feedback 2.0, GetSatisfaction, etc.)
  • Discussions tools like forums ( PHPbb, vBulletin, Phorum, etc.), video forums ( Seesmic), instant messaging ( Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, Meebo, etc.) and VoIP ( Skype, Google Talk, etc.)
  • Social networks ( Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Orkut, etc.), niche social networks ( LinkedIn, Boompa, etc.) and tools for creating social networks ( Ning)
  • Micropublication tools ( Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Plurk, Adocu, etc.) and alike ( twitxr, tweetpeek)
    Social aggregation tools like lifestream ( FriendFeed, Socializr, Socialthing!, lifestrea.ms, Profilactic, etc.)
  • Platforms for livecast hosting ( Justin.tv, BlogTV, Yahoo! Live, UStream, etc.) and there mobile equivalent ( Qik, Flixwagon, Kyte, LiveCastr, etc.)
  • Virtual worlds ( Second Life, Entropia Universe, There, etc.), 3D chats ( Habbo, IMVU, etc.) and teens dedicated virtual universes ( Stardoll, Club Penguin, etc.)
  • Social gaming platforms ( ImInLikeWithYou, Doof, etc.), casual gaming portals ( Pogo, Cafe, Kongregate, etc.) and social networks enabeled games ( Three Rings, SGN)
  • MMO ( Neopets, Gaia Online, Kart Rider, Drift City, Maple Story) and MMORPG ( World of Warcraft, Age of Conan, etc.)

It’s a huge social media world. If you haven’t already, start exploring!

NOTE: The last days of my summer vacation are near an end. My friends will be able to view photos and accounts on my Facebook profile once I get home!

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Google and Radiohead: Two great tastes that taste great together

Google, it appears, has gotten into the music video business. They recently worked with Radiohead to create a video in support of the, HO USE OF_C ARDS. Watch the video, featuring the scanned face of Thom York:

What is so impressive is no cameras or lights were used. They instead collected information about the shapes and relative distances of objects (mostly York’s face) using laser scanning technology. The video was then created entirely through visualizations of this data.

Now explore that vast amounts of data that this laser face-scanning scanning technology yields. It’s amazing.

HOU SE OF_C ARDS video - data exploration