Barack Obama - The Web User's Next President

Need proof that the Internet is an effective marketing tool worth pursuing? Look no futher than Barack Obama's quest to become the next President of the United States.

A quick visit to his website demonstrates how well he has leveraged the Internet to promote his ideas during this campaign. He's a partial list of Internet tools he's using during his campaign:

• his own website


• Email newsletter


• YouTube Channel


• Facebook profile


• MySpace Page


• Flickr photos


• Mobile updates


• Twitter


• Digg


• LinkedIn


• A whole bunch more

He has leveraged the tools that people already used to get his message out in an impactful way. In the process he makes people talk about him. His web savvy audience has also just created a site called YouBama that allows users to upload their support videos to a site. The videos are then voted up and down alla digg style.

If you can use the Internet to market a product as important as a presidential candidtate, certainly you could find a way to use it to promote your business.

iStorez - The End of Retail Email Newsletters?

Erick Schonfeld has a post on TechCrunch about Internet startup iStorez. From what I can tell, the website takes all the html email newsletters that retailers send out to their subscriber base and puts them all in one place for people to browse online. The thought is to eliminate the massive amounts of email some people get in their inbox by aggregating the information in one web portal.

You can search for products by tag or by brand.

My question is how they are going to gather this information and legally republish it? (Kind of like how I stole the iStorez logo to use in this post). I mean retailers should be happy that someone has decided to give more circulation to their offers, but I don't think everyone will see it that way. Will the site just subscribe to every retail email newsletter known to man and have someone on their team dedicated to reposting them to the website?

Obviously iStorez won't stop retailers from using email newsletters, a marketing strategy that has proven effective, because the site wouldn't exist if their wasn't any email newsletters available to poach. It will be interesting to see if this concept catches on and what affect it will have on retail email marketing.

Another Note on Spam

If you send out mass emails to a list, you need permission. Most people are pretty good at asking people before they send out information. But there’s another big part to permission, and that’s the ability to opt-out.

People sign up to receive emails because they are looking for information at a certain point in time. Sometimes there comes a point when they no longer want that information anymore. If the people receiving your messages can’t opt out of your communication when that point comes, you risk angering that list.

The source of this little rant comes from the University of Regina. I signed up to be put on an email list to receive an email a few times a week when new job opportunities came through the employment office at the University. Well, that was a few years ago now and I have a job so I don’t really need those emails anymore. Frankly, they’re a little annoying. I emailed the address that sends these updates a few times to ask to be removed from the list but I still keep getting emails from them.

It doesn’t pay to have people on your list that don’t want your information. Instead of creating fans, you end up creating enemies without intending to. If you use email to communicate with your customers, it’s crucial to have an opt-out link at the bottom of all your correspondence. If people feel locked in, you’ll never get them to sign up for something again and they probably won’t buy anything from you in the near future.

What Would a #1 Google Ranking Mean to Your Business?

I don’t think any business would turn down a #1 ranking for their top keyword in Google, but have you ever thought about exactly what that would do for your business?

There’s all sorts of statistics out there talking about Google users, and how almost no one ever gets by the first page of search results. But ask yourself what a #1 Google ranking could do for your business.

People would find you instead of your competitors. More people would see your website. You would reach the people that were actually interested in buying what you sell.

What else can you think of? I don’t have the answer for you, only a few ideas. How great would it be to be the first in line to access the people looking for information that you provide? What are you doing to get there?

Don't Spam!

It's amazing to me how many businesses have a marketing strategy that just shoves promotional material down the throats of potential customers. Let me explain.

The other day my wife and I were at a movie. When we came out there was a team of three or four people putting flyers under the windshield wipers of the cars in the movie theatre parking lot. You could see person after person approaching their car, grabbing the flyer, and throwing it on the ground. Some people glanced at it, but most just threw it out.

Spam is a word that we think of when we're talking about unsolicited emails, but it also applies in a number of other situations. Putting flyers on vehicles is a form of spam. Calling me at home to see if I want to apply for a line of credit is spam. Generic messages in Facebook groups are spam. Doorhangers are spam. Posting unrelated comments on blogs is spam.

Businesses have to remember that the delivery is just as important as the message. There are proper channels to go through if you want your message to be received by your target audience. Don't just load a bunch of marketing material into a shotgun and let it fly.

Your customers are smarter than that.

Seth Godin on Curiosity

Nic from mondaymorning9am.tv put together this video of Seth Godin talking about Curiosity. You can subscribe to Nic's videos on his website, I did.

As usual, I found this post at Seth's blog. If you aren't reading it yet, you should.

On Using Online Video for Small Business

Online Videos can be used to help small businesses in basically four ways:

1. Online videos are an effective way to bring your website and entire web presence to life
2. Online videos are useful to help boost the search engine rankings for our client's websites.
3. Producing online videos can go a long way to positioning your business as an authority in the industry
4. You can use online videos virally to drive traffic to your website

Blogs and RSS Feeds for Small Business

A few thoughts on using blogs and RSS feeds for small business:

Blogs and RSS Feeds can be valuable promotional tools for small business. Sean Stefan of LRS Consulting (http://www.lrsconsulting.ca) offers this quick and simple explanation of small business blogging, and distributing it using Feedburner.com.

Promote Your Small Business Using Social Networks

A note on promoting small business using social networks:

Social networking and communities can have a big impact on your business. LRS Consulting (http://www.lrsconsulting.ca/ and http://www.reginabusinessblog.com)/ provides this analogy: People are always looking for answers online. So if you want to be known as the authority in your industry, you need to be the one providing those answers to your prospective customers. In order to do that, you need to go where your customers are and more and more we're finding that that means places like Google, YouTube, and Facebook.

Search Engine Optimization for Small Businesses

Quick chat about search engine optimization in this video for the LRS Consulting website re-design:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an important aspect of small business internet marketing. LRS Consulting (http://www.lrsconsulting.ca) incorporates SEO strategies into all the projects we handle implementing their LRS Small Business Internet Marketing System.

Email Marketing - Our Services vs. Outlook

This video was shot as part of a series of videos that will be included in our LRS Consulting website re-design. The video description we wrote for YouTube is below, but it's only two minutes so why not just watch it instead?

Email marketing for small businesses is often done using a personal tool like Microsoft Outlook. At LRS Consulting (http://www.lrsconsulting.ca) we use Infusion CRM software with all of our clients to ensure maximum deliverability, no data entry, and tangible results through click through and open rate reports. You'll know exactly who opened your emails and who clicked on your links. Make sure you check out our Regina Business Blog (http://www.reginabusinessblog.com) for our small business marketing tips.

Cancelling Advertising as a Promotional Idea

Grokdotcom brings us this article about a tactic Amazon ran in February 2003. They cancelled their advertising and used the money to provide free shipping to their customers. That got people talking.

Could you do something remarkable like this for your business to get people talking?

Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook

Here's a great eBook that I had a chance to read before Christmas. As the title of this post suggests, its called Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook by Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo. (On a side note, Julie apparently has family in Saskatchewan...haven't figured out if it's any of the Szabo's I know or not.)

This eBook has tremendous value. There's 104 pages of content, but that's only a tip of the iceberg. Within the eBook Darren and Julie link to hundreds of places on the web that allow you to squeeze even more value from this little gem.

The biggest takeaway I got from reading Getting to First Base was actually exploring one of the campaigns the authors' company Capulet Communications did for Get Elastic. The model of the videos they did gave me some great ideas to use with our clients. You can watch the videos they did here.

This eBook couldn't have came to me at a better time. We have been working with clients to help them use social media to promote their businesses (as well as our own). We had all the tools, we were just missing a few links to bring it all together. So a big thank you to Darren and Julie for putting this information together.

You can watch the trailor below for more information about what the eBook is all about. It's for sale at http://www.socialmediaready.com/ for $29 or if you're a blogger you can send an email to ebook@capulet.com and they might just send you a free copy to review and blog about. That's how I got my copy. Thanks for the great information guys!

P.S. You should visit their website if only to see how a sales page should be set up. I hope the long-tail sales copy is dieing out. More people should use a short description with a video to sell things online.

Is Search Engine Optimization Dead?

No, search engine optimization is not dead. But we do need to evaluate its role in Internet marketing.

Doing the right things to make sure the search engines notice your website, your blog, your videos, etc. is still important. This involves using your keywords in the right spots such as tags and descriptions. Having said that, the most important part of SEO is the content itself.

You should go to Seth Godin's blog and download his free e-book right now called Money for Nothing (And your clicks for free).

The biggest takeaways from this e-book are the three U's: Useful, Updated, and Unique.

All the search traffic in the world is worthless if you don't have useful, updated, and unique content. If you concentrate on making your content useful, updated, and unique the traffic will eventually come your way. I'm banking on it.

The Purple Cow Christmas

I'm back from Christmas holidays and ready to get back at it. My wonderful wife got me a couple books from my business hero Seth Godin to read. I read his book "All Marketers Are Liars" a while back and wanted to read the rest of his stuff but never got around to it. Katlyn made me get around to it and I'm glad she did.

The first book I read was Seth Godin's Purple Cow. He talks about how most businesses make the mistake of trying (consciously or subconsciously) to be normal to attract the masses. But in the process, those businesses become so vanilla that they aren't attractive to anyone. This book pushes you to be remarkable for a sliver of your target market. If you're truly remarkable for these people, your ideas will spread.

I don't do this book justice. The ideas are so simple, but so incredible at the same time - you need to pick up a copy.

I'm about halfway through Small is the New Big also by Seth Godin. This book is not your typical business book. It contains excerpts from Seth's blog and books, with each one ranging from as short as one paragraph to as long as a few pages. Each entry contains valuable information that makes you think differently about marketing and business in general. It's worth a read.

The thing I love about Seth's ideas are that he never just accepts things the way they are. He always asks why something is the way it is and uses common(?) sense to challenge the status quo. If you don't subscribe to his blog, you should. If you haven't read any of his books, I suggest you do. His blog is currently listed as the 15th most popular blog on Technorati. The numbers don't lie, he has some good ideas.