IF marketing & advertising

We’re trying very hard to get work done today, but it’s not to often that we see snow like this in Central Texas!

Some shots from the Georgetown Blizzard of ‘10…

Having only read 50 pages of Linchpin so far, all I can say is: “brilliant.” But for the sake of the review, here goes:

Seth doesn’t write abstractly about his ideas. Instead his writing is like a conversion in which he is talking directly to you, but he doesn’t demand anything in return. He piques your curiosity with seemingly simple ideas which could have profound impacts.

The most obvious example is the title. He never made a point to define what a linchpin was, but he uses it throughout the book to make a point. Essentially, a linchpin is an innocuous and fairly ubiquitous item that can be purchased at any hardware store very cheaply. However, it’s critical to a wagon – it holds the wheel to the cart. Then entire wagon could not function without the linchpin.

I have only read a small part of the book thus far, because I actually had to put it down for a while. There are so many ideas I almost felt overwhelmed…like reading a month’s worth of his blog postings in a single sitting.

Through it he quotes Hugh MacLeod; by far my favorite cartoonist in the business card medium. And my favorite section: Will You Still Be Loved? In which he says, “It’s entirely possible that once you choose to become indispensable, you will no longer be loved.” Which really struck a chord with me until he wrote, “But (and I know it’s a big hurt but) either those people will come around, or they never loved you in the first place, did they?”

Now I’m wondering, can a company become a Linchpin, instead of just a person? Can we collectively fill that space and hold everything together for another company? And if we do, how will we know?

Writer and design consultant, Natalia Ilyin has an interesting post contemplating how industries fail. More correctly, she has posted a response to another piece by science writer, Michael Nielsen looking at the future of science and industry—but it’s interesting nonetheless. The discussions question how industry leaders in troubled business models (like record labels and newspapers) could miss potential threats and development opportunities.

From Nielsen’s post:
“The first explanation is essentially that the people in charge of the failing industries are stupid. How else could it be, the argument goes, that those enormous companies, with all that money and expertise, failed to see that services like iTunes and Last.fm are the wave of the future? …The second common explanation for the failure of an entire industry is that the people in charge are malevolent. In that explanation, evil record company and newspaper executives have been screwing over their customers for years, simply to preserve a status quo that they personally find comfortable.”

Ilyin goes on to argue that while “it’s true that stupidity and malevolence do sometimes play a role in the disruption of industries… even smart and good organizations can fail in the face of disruptive change.”

This is the part that jumps out to us in marketing and advertising today.Social media is potentially the most disruptive change to our industry since  email. Watching so many companies and agencies (ourselves included) pushing to adopt the brightest and shiniest new technologies, we have to ask if the social media craze will fundamentally change the way people advertise. Our answer is yes. And no.

Yes it will change the media we use, or at least add to them. At times, it will also change the message. We will have to adapt to use these new media in completely different ways than we’ve used any medium before. But the end goal remains the same. Building relationships. And while social media does threaten the ways we’ve traditionally tried to build those relationships, it replaces them with ways that are potentially much more powerful and more effective than anything we’ve ever seen.

For the past few months, IF marketing & advertising has been running our own social media experiment. We’re diligently tracking our results and logging our time, so watch this space for a detailed Social Media Marketing report soon. Until then, check us out on your favorite networking sites.

Twitter offers numerous methods of measuring the popularity and effectiveness of their accounts. Both Twitter and independent websites offer programs and tools allow users to gather and analyze a variety of data, including metrics for individual posts or topics, account growth, traffic and more. 

The variety of data available is important. Simply tracking your number of Followers does not provide conclusive information about your audience, and it does not indicate the overall success or failure of your messaging. 

We use a number of tools to gather metrics about our Twitter account. Here are a few useful applications: 

According to “How to Gather and Use Twitter Metrics” on wikiHow, the tools below perform the following functions: 

• The Follower count indicates the number of people you are following and the people who are following you. You can calculate the number of “retweets” – the number of posts that Followers shared with their Followers, and you can create custom links to measure the traffic of specific URLs. 
• Twitterholic measures the growth of an account over time. It also compares Twitter accounts based on region, revealing the most popular accounts for a certain geographical area. 
• Google Analytics, used for many other websites, also provides a tool for Twitter. This measures the traffic of the account, including the number of visitors per month and visits per follower. 
• Twitalyzer is an independent website that measures a Twitter account in five ways: influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity and clout. 

Not only can businesses use these tools to measure data about their own account, but the public can use these tools to check the credibility of accounts they follow. Giving the public access to these measurements helps make Twitter a more effective communications tool. It allows the community to identify influential and significant users, detect spammers, and determine the actual popularity of accounts, including their own. 

All of these tools will help Twitter gain credibility among businesses, as they can attain a variety of measurable data to measure the success of their accounts. 

These instruments also support the notion that Twitter is a valuable social network, and might be more of a permanent marketing staple than many experts initially believed.

Social news site Digg is launching Digg Ads in an attempt to break away from static banners and apply a more interactive approach to their advertising in order to become profitable in 2009.  

Digg Ads will allow users to vote whether they like an ad or not, the same way they structure the news content of their site, and the voting determines the success of the ad.  If an ad is highly regarded among users, or “Dugg,” then the price per click of the ad goes down for the advertiser.  If the ad is not well received, it is buried and priced out of the system.   

Kevin Rose, co-founder of Digg, stated in an interview with Ad Age that “people are already doing this on Digg with all kinds of commercial content. There are tons of examples, like the recent Intel ‘Rock Stars’ TV ad that got more than 1,500 Diggs. I think our audience is OK with the idea of advertising when it’s relevant or useful or interesting.”

Over the past six months, YouTube has seen a shift in the number of viewers watching long-form content, such half-hour network TV shows, to a category of video that didn’t really exist before YouTube.  It’s called “midtail” content. 

Midtail is in a category somewhere between studio-produced and user-generated video and it is becoming more and more popular.  According to Advertising Age and video analytics firm TubeMogul, “the top 100 midtail producers, including names such as College Humor, have racked up more than 2 billion views during the past six months on YouTube, growing nearly 5% a month on average.  Meanwhile, the full-length hour-long and half-hour TV shows on YouTube, 3,215 episodes in all, have accumulated 19.5 million views.” 

Since most of the valuable rights to major TV shows are under contract with Hulu for the next two years, YouTube has turned to midtail content because, according to Advertising Age, “it supplies the biggest pool of brand-safe ad impressions, fertile ground for YouTube’s overlays and banners, and malleable content for brand integrations it can peddle to Madison Avenue.” 

“The closest thing as made-for-YouTube is this midtail; it’s more snack-size — you’re watching at work when you have less time,” said TubeMogul CEO Brett Wilson. “As audiences grow, this will be more profitable for YouTube than selling ESPN’s content.”

Mixi, Gree, DeNa, 51, Tudou, Xiaonei, Jia Jia Cheng – will these be the future competitors of Facebook and MySpace? Can they succeed in China and Japan when faced with the different cultures and incumbent social networking websites?

http://bit.ly/2bINk4

Our co-founder and business development guru, Tony Boselli, was just mentioned in an article for his philanthropic work.

As retailers and marketers look for cost-effective and results-oriented marketing strategies during the current recession, e-mail has emerged as a viable tool that is becoming the “rock star” of direct marketing.

According to Shop.org, “the number of companies focused on retention has nearly doubled in the past year — experts say few cuts are being made to e-mail budgets, while areas including paid search, affiliate marketing and social marketing are coming under scrutiny.”  While it is becoming more popular because of its cost-effectiveness and ability to reach targeted audiences through demographic segmentation while providing reliable tracking, e-mail is by no means a new tactic.

In the fall of 2008, Koloa Landing at Poipu Beach enlisted IF marketing & advertising to create an email campaign to increase awareness and drive fresh leads for their luxury resort and residences on one of Kauai’s most famous beaches. The developers had already exhausted their “friends & family” list and their existing marketing programs were averaging around 20 leads per month.

We sent three emails over a 6 week period: one to their list of prospects, one to ours and one promoting a special event for high-end buyers in the Napa Valley. When the dust finally settled, we generated more than 350 leads during one of the toughest markets in recent history for a luxury home product starting in the $900s.  Replies and information requests poured in, the callback list quickly filled with fresh prospects, and the newly energized sales team went to work converting leads to sales.