Most of the apps on my iPhone were downloaded by my kids, so I don’t often use them (unless a meeting is really unproductive …).  There are, however, more and more business apps being released that have real value to corporate marketing efforts.  One of our clients’ greatest challenges is continuously producing fresh content for their Web site, intranets, blogs and other social media efforts.  Although more of them are starting to take advantage of the corporate blogging services we (and others) offer, the search for fresh content is constantly on.  

In the social media space, video has become an effective, engaging, and low cost form of content (read my blog on video blogging here).  One app that makes the creation and deployment of video content easy is iVideo. If you have a 3GS iPhone, you have video built in.  If you have a 3G iPhone, the iVideo app will turn it into video camera. The truly cool and powerful function in iVideo (whichever phone you use) is its ability to share video content with numerous social networking sites at the click of a button. Any video you shoot, be it at a trade show or product demo, can be immediately uploaded to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and other sites. All you need to do is click the share button, pick the social network of your choice, and in a matter of minutes your content is before a global audience.

The grand cost of iVideo Camera in the iPhone app store –  I picked it up for $0.99 (it’s not a typo). You can read more about it here:  http://itunes.apple.com/ca/app/ivideocamera-record-video/id332166209?mt=8

Huh? How can that be? Well, according to the book What Would Google Do?, in a “google universe” most information is both public and transparent. That means you can save a lot of anxious moments down the road (not to mention revenues) by knowing your worst customers and finding out what they have to say. Imagine a world where customers could not pan your products or services with a few clicks of the mouse. A world where bad product and service reviews could not be easily tracked or discovered. In that world, negative news would spread slowly and stealthily by word of mouth and, by the time you found out about it, it could be too late (and infinitely more expensive) to fix.

What’s the lesson here? Leverage the Web and social media tools to get as much feedback from your customers as possible. Give your worst customers the opportunity to speak up quickly and easily so you can fix their grievances in the same fashion. Here is author Jeff Jarvis’s description of a restaurant run according to Googlethink. Once you read it, ask yourself how it applies to your business. What can you do to find your worst customers/best friends?

“What would a restaurant run according to Googlethink look like—other than being decorated in garish primary colors with a neon sign, big balls for seats, and Fruit Loops and M&Ms on every table?

Imagine instead a restaurant—any restaurant—run on openness and data. Say we pick up the menu and see exactly how many people had ordered each dish. Would that influence our choice? It would help us discover the restaurant’s true specialties (the reason people come here must be the crab cakes) and perhaps make new discoveries (the 400 people who ordered the Hawaiian pizza last month can’t all be wrong??? Can they?).

If a restaurateur were true to Googlethink, she would hunger for more data. Why not survey diners at the end of the meal? That sounds frightening—what if they hate the calamari?—but there’s little to fear. If the squid is bad and the chef can hear her customers say so, she’ll 86 it off the menu and make something better. Everybody wins. She’ll also impress customers with her eagerness to hear their opinions. This beats wandering around the tables, randomly asking how things are (as a diner, I find it awkward and ungracious to complain; it’s like carping about Grandmother’s cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving). Why not just ask the question and give everyone the means to answer? Your worst diner could be your best friend.”

By all appearances that is exactly what happened.  Scott Brown’s upset, come from behind, win in the Massachusetts Senate race now represents the 41st vote in the Senate, breaking the Democrats filibuster-proof majority in Washington.  In another word passage of President Obama’s healthcare reform legislation is now very much in doubt.

When you dig a little (which we did) you’ll find not only that a Canadian orchestrate the victory but he utilized social media tools to pull off what some referred to as one of the biggest political upset in recent memory.   Whether you support or oppose healthcare reform in the US, the lesson is that social media marketing, properly leveraged, can significantly affect the outcome of a political race or, for that matter, the success of you company

For a good article on this check today’s National Post here or go to - http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=2493174

In WWGD, Jeff Jarvis addresses a number of principles (he refers to them as laws) that have enabled Google to become so dominant so fast.  His first law is: “Give the people control and we will use it; don’t and you will lose us”. He speaks of it primarily in the context of the media business - where the fence between journalists, editors and the readers/consumers was tall and inviolable until the advent of the Internet and the rise of the Blog (not the “Borg”).

If you think about it, it also applies to many other industries.  Henry Ford’s old adage that “people can have a car in any colour they want as long as it’s black”, which held sway for decades, is no longer.  Companies that give their customers choice (read control) engender their audience’s trust and this translates into increased revenues and profits (see Google and Craigslist).

How can you apply this to your business? Engage your customers in the areas that are most important to them: product development and customer service.  For powerful examples, see - My Starbucks Idea and  Dell Idea Storm.  My favorite Starbucks idea: coffee ice cubes - brilliant!

Please share your experiences and post any questions you may about how to apply this to your business.

Side note:  Jeff Jarvis first came to prominence due a critical blog post of an experience he had with Dell and which ultimately led Dell to pay attention to blogs and to begin engaging their customers.  Check one of the posts here - http://www.buzzmachine.com/2005/08/17/dear-mr-dell/

A good number of our clients have been rolling out social media initiatives over the last year or are in the process of doing so.  These initiatives include blogs, podcasts and social networking.

We also hear regularly from clients who are considering initiatives but are still unsure about the effectiveness and staying power of this particular marketing channel.  One of the most frequent questions we hear:  Is this social media thing for real and should be deploying our resources to leverage it?  To answer this question I will direct you to some stats that were sent to us by a friend of ours, who herself is a savvy marketer. Check it out here: http://socialnomics.net/2009/08/11/statistics-show-social-media-is-bigger-than-you-think/

The Canadian Bar Association has issued new guidelines on Web & Social Media Marketing.  These were created in response to an influx of questions from lawyers looking to ensure their marketing initiatives were onside with existing regulations.

Read Robert Todd’s article in the Law Times, where AR Communications’  Michael Rabinovici is quoted here, or go to http://www.lawtimesnews.com/200910195631/Headline-News/CBA-offers-tips-on-legal-Tweeting.

As entertaining as some marketing communications are, what it all comes down to is whether or not they compel the reader, viewer, or listener to take action.

People take action as a way of meeting their most basic emotional needs. People decide with their feelings and then rationalize their decisions with the facts. If you can match your offer with their needs, you’ll get better results. For example:

People want to belong – Show them that other people, just like them, have taken the same action that you’re asking them to take. Use testimonials, case studies, or stories.

People want to escape pain – Put them in touch with the pain that will continue and worsen if they fail to take action.

People want to experience pleasure – Paint a colourful picture of the benefits and positive feelings waiting for them once they take action.

People want to feel financially secure – Offer a financial incentive to act now, such as a time-limited discount or bonus offer.

Depending on your product or service, you may also want to align your message with people’s needs for fame and fortune, increased wealth, or health and happiness. The inducement will differ with each offer you present, but the result should always be the same: Measurable response with every communication.

Invitations to Hawaii solicited…

Following AR Communications Inc.’s successful presentation for Toronto’s Legal Marketing Association, Michael Rabinovici, our Senior VP, Strategic Initiatives, was invited to Banff to speak about social media. Due to prior commitments to several critical stakeholders (i.e. his children), he was required to travel to California instead. But did that deter our intrepid international spokesperson? Of course not. On a sunny morning in San Diego, Michael hooked up to a live feed and delivered his Banff social media presentation using some of the very technology he touts. Next stop? Hawaii. At least in our dreams. Invitations received will be gratefully accepted…

Click here to listen or download an audio of the presentation to  GlobaLaw

“Blog fade” is an expression used to describe the fading enthusiasm for a blog; posts become less and less frequent until the blog is finally left sitting idle collecting pixel dust.

It’s happened to the best of us. We start out of the gate with a plan to blog twice a week, weekly, bi-weekly or even monthly. The blog was so easy to set up, we launch right in.

And it’s precisely because blogging is so immediate and accessible that we sometimes push it back in favour of more pressing tasks like, oh, I don’t know, taking care of clients! We figure we can always jump in there and put up a blog post; we’ll get to it later.

As part of a broader marketing communications strategy, well-written blog posts will improve your search engine rankings, attract traffic to your website, and reinforce your credibility as an expert. You may also use them to get a conversation going with your clients, prospects, team, employees, vendors, suppliers or other stakeholders.

When you don’t post regularly, you’re losing out on all of those benefits. But not only that – you’re also sending a subtle message that you’re not around anymore. People surfing the Web are hungry for information. They want more and they want it now. As brilliant as it was, the post you wrote last month is ancient history.

Have you ever heard the expression, “How you do anything is how you do everything?” When people look through your blog and don’t see any recent updates, they may start to wonder if you’ll “fade away” in other areas of your business as well.

Over the last few years, the Internet has created a profound transformation in the world of marketing. I’m not talking about Google, Technorati, YouTube, FaceBook or even the industry’s latest darling – Twitter. I’m referring to something much more fundamental, and far more precious to marketers: the diminished attention span of our prospects and customers.

Here’s the thesis. Just five years ago, Web surfers still enjoyed engaging in extensive online research before making their purchasing decisions. Now, those days are gone. Most of us feel so overwhelmed by the vast amount of information we have access to, and the ever-increasing directions it comes from, that we’ve basically stopped processing that data. This is information overload at its zenith. Customers and prospects have so little time to make informed purchasing decisions that they are simply opting out of making any decisions at all.

For marketers, this creates one heck of an objection to overcome. If our prospects feel uncomfortable making intelligent decisions, it’s high time we introduced a new way to engage them in the decision-making process. We call it the “Easy Button”, and our experience with it is showing some incredible results in practice. More on this in my next post.
Welcome to the Attention Age.

Podcasts (Web- and mp3-based audios) are becoming an ever more effective tool in the marketer’s arsenal.  There are a number of reasons for this phenomenon:

• A significant percentage of consumers prefer to consume audio as opposed to written information.

• Podcasts are more flexible - in other words, you can’t read a case study or a product info sheet in the car or while you’re going for a run.  I mean, you could try, but it is really not recommended.

• Podcasts cater to our multi-tasking lifestyles. I can pick up e-mail and listen to a podcast in the background and retain a surprising amount of information.

We have been using podcasts as marketing tools for our clients for the last 12 months, and now recommend that they become standard tools for both product and service marketing. The easier you make it for your prospective customers to give you their attention, the greater the chances they will make the transition from a prospect to a customer.

Speaking of “attention”, in the next few blog posts I will address a paradigm shift that is taking place in the marketing world in general and on the Web in particular. We began to notice this trend from our work with clients and speaking with some of the leading experts in the field.  Appreciating this seismic shift will forever change how you look at marketing.  Stay tuned.

The most important success factor when deploying online marketing tactics is to make sure they’re optimized to meet your business objectives. To do that, you need to employ industry best practices. It was in search of these best practices that we recently went to California to complete one of the online world’s leading certification programs, put on by the renowned team at Marketing Experiments (www.marketingexperiments.com).

Guess what? We passed! That means we’re now certified to help you increase the conversions related to the full range of your Web tactics and translate that into measurable response (whether you’re trying to fill your prospecting pipeline, expand your online lists, or make sales).

To get a flavour of the depth of research available through Marketing Experiments, and the leading brands they work with, we suggest you visit their site at www.marketingexperiments.com. We know budgets are tight right now, but you’d be surprised at how cost-effective these tactics are. Consider this: the New York Times used the Marketing Experiments methodology to increase sale conversion by 1,052%. Seriously.

Last week I participated in a panel discussion on social media.  The event was put on by the Legal Marketing Association.

The audience was made up of law firm business developers and marketers.  I was really impressed with the level of knowledge in the room and the willingness to consider trying new approaches in a profession that is not know for its innovations.  I was also amazed by evolution of the Internet as a medium since the time I was practicing law, which is not that long ago.  Then, most marketing was done via print and email, and Facebook was not even a gleam in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.

For a podcast of the event please go to the Newswire Web site, courtesy of Parker Mason.  Click here to listen or go to http://podcast.newswire.ca/media/lma20081127.mp3.