I need a vacation... but not at ebay!

Marketing 101. Don't make your logo look like someone else's logo. I'm doing some research for an impending vacation, and I was really confused as to why Guatemala wanted me to shop on ebay. Turns out, this is their logo!

They should tell their designer they want their money back.

What's in your email signature and.. does anyone care?

I just read a poorly written blog entry about email signatures. Despite his writing being boring and disorganized, the writer started an interesting discussion about email signatures. He says that lower food chain types have longer signatures (inverse relationship) while more important people evidently don't have to tell the world who they are. I'm not sure about that, but I haven't put much thought into signatures. I wonder if people do notice them and if they do change recipient's perceptions of the sender. Do people actually feel uplifted by the inspirational quotes sigs often contain? Do they actually get messaged* by the marketing slogans? I don't think anyone's done any research into this. It's worth thinking about.

I don't have a signature but after reading it, I'm going to get me one and add this blog address. I'll let you know if I see any results.

*in my 2nd year of MBA school, I have been granted the right to make up new words and use old words in new and interesting ways.

Just what I always needed

How to translate hip hop music:


Pop Culture Translator

Great marketing too - it's by a college. Of course, I have critiques of how they could have made it a little more effective marketing-wise, but it's cute and fun nonetheless.

Giving to the community....

In the tag cloud of my thoughts, online community and giving to the community have recently had very bold, very large fonts. (Ok that reference just goes to show you... I am SOOO geeky).

As a result, I found this article very engaging: Consider the Small Things. The author, writing for the online marketing trade site ClickZ, has some really great ideas.

Basically, he goes one step further than the ideas I put forth in this work of my MBA academic prowess, completed in December of 06: The Case for Social Media. In my paper, I suggest that marketers get involved in the online experience, make wiki entries, play Second Life (don't just slap advertisements there), post to blogs, things like that. They should do all this with their brand in mind - not overtly selling, but just keeping in mind that they are representing the brand. They can do this in tandem with overtly sponsoring some online activities/sites/etc.

Chad thinks that we can one up that - by really giving to the communities - not just our two cents - but GIFTS.

Some of the most active blogs and forums relevant to your brand and products may be run as a hobby by a single or group of passionate consumers....

While these sites may accommodate advertising, consider something different, such as sponsoring a user prize-giveaway contest. How about asking site operators what features they would like added, then provide those services to keep the site humming along. A rounding issue for your marketing budget could go a long way for an online community.

Go read the article, it's short, you can do it. This is good stuff - and you can really take his ideas and run with them. Run! Go! and let me know how it goes!

PS: Lots of corporations make a big deal out of sponsoring community (real space community) causes and events. If you can sponsor a community event around your brand... well... isn't that just all the more effective?

Ethics, Connections, and Power to the People

I just spent 3 days in an MBA seminar designed to teach us things we should know in our future careers but weren't important to appear in the regular class curriculum. Guess what one of those classes was? No come on, don't read ahead. Guess. You got it, right up there with "Executive Wellness" - we had a fluffy seminar on business ethics.

You get a B!

It quickly became clear that many of my classmates don't spend a lot of time either thinking about or pondering ethics. This may be because they don't encounter ethically challenging issues very often. Or, it may be that their religion gives them a code to live by. Whatever it is, the time we had clearly wasn't enough - as one classmate shouted out the spine chilling proclamation, "well if it's legal, then it must be ethical." That's pretty par for the course in business today. Well actually - it's more like "it's ethical if you don't get caught and you can rationalize it to the people that need to know what you're up to." "Legal" is just a technicality.

Ok, watch this. Now I'm going to connect this to Web 2.0. No really, I can do it. Hang tight!

In a world where horrific ethical breaches barely make your stock price waver (HP) and you can clearly get away with a lot for a long time and get very rich doing so (WorldComm, Enron), and just about everyCorp is under investigation for accounting creativity of some sort or another... it PAYS not to get too connected to people. It pays to only see the numbers. Creativity in the books means someone is getting more while someone is getting less. As long as you can keep it "us" and "them" and you don't see the people you're screwing around as people with lives and their own financial pressures (I'm seeing those Enron people walking to their cars holding their boxes of possessions), then well, you can do whatever you want to to "maximize shareholder value." But it's the connections that really are the rub.

And the Web 2.0 world allows us to bring those connections to bear in some important ways.

1. It's no longer just the companies that have a voice on the internet. We all do. The presses are in the hands of the people! If you screw me over, or I think you're doing something you shouldn't, I might blog about it. I might comment on someone else's blog about it. And then people will know. And we'll all talk about it. And the media will know... and then you'll be asked some hard questions... and then....

2. Because everyone has a voice, and they talk about what happened inside their companies, we can identify cues that something bad might be happening to us.

3. Because we all have a voice, companies hear us. The marketplace hears us.

Whether companies choose to connect with "us" or not, Web 2.0 has allowed "us" to connect with each other. And that's made us stronger. A blogger onslaught can have the strength of a financially mild yet immediate and VERY public class action suit. And that hurts companies where they feel it most.

Connections = power. Connections in business = good. Connections make it easier to get things done.

Tune in tomorrow, when I talk about Burning Man again.

Hi, I'm Bob and this is my best friend Nike Air

JupiterResearch just released a new report, "Social Networking Sites: Defining Advertising Opportunities in a Competitive Landscape." For those who have been paying attention over the last few years, nothing in it is a big surprise. However, the report does give quantitative credibility to those initiatives we (who do not live under rocks) have known to be true for some time.

The summary: if social networking is a party, it's about to be sponsored by marketing tools everywhere. They can smell money, and they are on it.

The old marketing idea of "making the brand your customer's friend," well, it just goes one step further in the social networking space... the brand can actually BE your friend. Just add Coke or Pepsi as your literal MySpace friend and there you go. You're in with the in crowd.

In addition to documenting the viability of this new venue, Jupiter found that, "30 percent of frequent social networkers trust their peers' opinions when making a major purchase decision, but only 10 percent trust an advertisement," something an Austin startup, BazaarVoice - also quantified about a year ago.

Nothing here is groundbreaking, but it does mean that social networking and the Web 2.0 way of thinking is gaining some real credibility. You can now officially sell it to your boss and budget-doler-outers.

Now, what I really look forward to is some really innovative campaigns/implementations.... come on... impress me!

Web 2.0, not just for techies anymore

I'm currently working on a marketing plan for a construction industry professional organization. The group is well known and respected, but they want to expand a bit, and freshen up their value proposition. All pretty standard stuff.

Going into this, I have to say, I had some preconceived notions. I thought these construction company owners were going to be "good 'ol boys" who barely used computers and made comments like "Oh the Internet, yah, my son showed it to me one time on his computer."

Boy was I wrong. The construction industry is very online, and very technically sophisticated. It's international 24x7 business with a Blackberry and a laptop on all the time.

The managers I'm working with live their lives online, as much as any technology workers I know. In fact, one of the members just said to me, "We need to do a survey of the blogs and forums on this topic... really get some insight on current perceptions and what’s valued. You know, that's the best way to find out what people really think, just see what they are blogging about...the language in these is more first hand and unfiltered compared with other published information."

I'm delighted to say, I stand corrected. This should be a very interesting project.

Quotable...and Readable...

"Marketing has really taken a backwards step. We’re still doing marketing the way we were doing it 50 years ago, and everything else has moved forward…. We’re still spending a lot of money broadcasting and creating a brand, but brand today is created by what you’re associated with…. I think marketing is remiss, in that it’s still relying on the old ways, and not experimenting with the new."

Marketing Guru Regis McKenna – in an Interview with PodTech.net

Translation: It's not effective for marketeers to "throw money at the problem" - we're going to have to use our noodles and come up with a way to get in with the in crowd...

Action: Well? You tell me. Here's what I pitched to work:

Technology Marketing 2.0: The Case for a Social Media Strategy