From the category archives:

Marketing 2.0

We’re in the “Customer Understanding” Business

February 8, 2010

Lately I’ve been struck by how we marketers may be losing our way, overlooking our core mission. Preoccupied with wrenching changes in how we launch products, retool the marketing mix, and engage influencers and stakeholders, it’s easy to overlook our core mission: understanding customers. How we apply what we understand about customers is what drives [...]

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What’s the ROI on Social?

January 19, 2010

During today’s presentation to the Seattle Social Media Club, Sean O’Driscoll, community builder and influencer marketing expert, revealed how he answers the inevitable questions about the ROI on social media and influencer marketing programs.
He held up a phone and rhetorically asked, “How do you measure the ROI on your telephones?” Translation: it’s the conversations [...]

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Conflict Looms: Your Organization’s Social Media Voice vs. The Power of Personal Brands

November 17, 2009

Social media experts like Shiv Singh recommend that you designate one or more people to serve as your organization’s social media voice.

The challenge with this recommendation is that such people are in short supply and high demand. If you’re lucky enough to employ people with authentic SIM voices, you’re vulnerable to poaching if you can’t motivate them to stay with your organization.

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Building a Great Community Online

November 13, 2009

One of the best examples of a thriving online community is I Love Typography. Almost 50,000 people subscribe to its RSS feeds. There are many voices: multiple authors and lots of people who care enough to respond. It feels vibrant and live. People share experiences and point to great examples of typography in use.

But what makes this such a vibrant community? What lessons can we take away from this example and apply elsewhere?

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Learning from Parisian Shop Windows

November 13, 2009

I love strolling and window shopping in Paris. There’s a special mystique that window dressers in Paris employ that brand teams and marketers everywhere would do well to emulate.
Shop windows in Paris do a wonderful job of conveying the idea of what’s being sold — of conveying the brand essence, helping you envision how you [...]

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Women: The World’s Biggest Untapped Market

November 10, 2009

How will your business address the enormous business opportunity that lies within the so-called “female economy?” Did you know that (according to the HBR, 9/09):

Women now drive the world economy.

As a market, women represent a bigger opportunity than China and India combined — more than twice as big.

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FTC Clarifies Disclosure Guidelines for Bloggers

October 8, 2009

In a conversation sponsored by Fast Company, FTC assistant director Richard Cleland clarified that bloggers won’t be fined $11,000 for a first offense. It’s more likely to take multiple infractions and a refusal to comply with prior warnings before the FTC levies any financial penalties on bloggers who fail to disclose that they have received cash or payment in kind from an advertiser.

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Your Endorsements Must Be Transparent

October 5, 2009

Today the FTC published new guidelines requiring advertisers and marketers to be transparent when using endorsements as a marketing tactic. In a new twist the revised guidelines also apply to the people who act as the endorser.
Who Is Affected
The revised FTC guidelines apply to:

celebrities who endorse products or brands;
bloggers or word-of-mouth brand ambassadors who receive [...]

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“Brands in Public”: A Forum for Conversations

September 25, 2009

I love the idea of conversational marketing, and applaud the innovators who are trying to figure out more scalable ways to put it into action. A tweet today from Jeremiah Owyang led me to an interesting new offering from marketing pundit Seth Godin, one that puts brands in a social media context.

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List Marketing, Next Generation

September 24, 2009

I learned about a start-up that wants to reinvent list marketing: the practice of renting/selling and buying lists of names for the purposes of demand generation. MarketFish plans to compete directly against the highly fragmented world of list brokers, list managers and database providers. They want to offer accountability, predictability and lots of efficiencies and thereby disrupt this notoriously inefficient and time-consuming process — “the dark side” of demand gen.

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