Marketing is no longer a position that you fill at a company.  Marketing is not a television commercial or a radio advertisement.  Marketing is not a piece of collateral you send off to reporters, bloggers, or journalists.  Marketing is everything you do and every interaction you are involved in.

Every time you have a business meeting with employees, investors, etc. that is marketing.  Every time you talk to someone at a bar about your company or service, that is marketing.  Every presentation you give and every online and offline conversation you participate in is marketing.  I used to work at a marketing agency a while ago that presented monthly reports to clients.  At the end of the report the last page would say “thank you.”  What kind of marketing is that?  Why not let the company know about any news, announcements, updates, or new products/service that you have?

This is crucial to remember, especially for a startup.  Everyone at a startup company is marketing, everyone!  Startups build their brand and their image based upon the initial interactions that take place between users (press, etc.) and the employees (although they are usually the founders).  Most people identify with a company because of the founders/creators.  You are the marketing and PR department!

Thanks for reading

Did you enjoy the post?please subscribe to my RSS feed!

I find it fascinating that marketing folks still spam pitch me (and other bloggers). I mean we’re talking about people with fancy titles like “VP of Marketing” or “Director of Marketing” who go online, copy and paste their pitch and then hit send. Now, how exactly did you get to be in charge of your marketing department when you still don’t understand that spam does not equal marketing. I’m usually quiet about this sort of thing because there are plenty of other bloggers out there who ream pr and marketing professionals for spamming them, but it seems to me, that the only way to teach these guys is to call them out. So here it goes…

[Read more →]

Did you enjoy the post?please subscribe to my RSS feed!

Recently on linkedin, I asked folks, “How Much Say Should a Company Have in Regulating Internal Social Media Usage?” I received many responses and I have shared some of them below. But think about that question for a moment. How should a company regulate internal social media usage? If a company finds out that someone is spending a lot of time on twitter, is it wise to reprimand the person, OR, to make him the social media ambassador for the company? Should a company just block all sites like wordpress, youtube, twitter, etc? or would this just make matters worse? The questions can go on and on and on. Here are a few of the responses…

[Read more →]

Did you enjoy the post?please subscribe to my RSS feed!

Is free really the new economy? Chris Anderson seems to think so - “we are entering an era when free will be seen as the norm, not an anomaly.” The assumption that free means we don’t pay for anything is not entirely accurate. You see, we are still paying, but just with a different currency. If you live in the United States and travel abroad to Europe, you are not getting everything for free because you’re paying with Euros. The currency has simply been converted.

Such is the case with what Chris Anderson calls “freeconomics.” Instead of paying with money, we are now going to paying with attention, which is more valuable than money in my opinion. Is Google really giving away Gmail? Not quite. They are not “giving” away anything, they are investing. They are spending money to get your attention, and they have it. The same goes for Yahoo with their free unlimited e-mail storage space. Are they paying for it? You bet they are. Are we paying for it? Well that depends on whether or not Yahoo! got your attention when they made their grand “free” announcement.

It may seem that companies are giving things away for free, but ask yourself this, each time a company offers to give you something for “free” is the company getting your attention? What would happen if every company started giving things away? You want a new computer? Here you go. You want an Ipod? Here you go. Do you think these companies will continue to grow and profit? Absolutely not.

There are two currencies now, attention and money. In order for companies to continue to grow and become successful, they need to find a balance between the two.

So the question is, how are you going to get your customers attention?

Did you enjoy the post?please subscribe to my RSS feed!

There was a time, years ago, when marketers believed that targeting the masses was the most effective strategy. Large brand name companies spent millions of dollars to spam the world, and it worked. A company would advertise to millions and millions of people in hopes that a small fraction of them would eventually purchase their product, and guess what, they did. Marketers then used the revenue to reinvest profits in more and more advertisement, and guess what? it worked again.

Seth Godin calls this the T.V. Industrial Complex, and it’s dead.

Welcome to 2008, the age of new marketing. The age where the consumers now have all the power and the consumers tells the marketers what they want. The problem is the marketers aren’t always listening. Consumers have youtube, blogs, and other social media platforms from which they can scream out their distress or satisfaction. Remember Dell Hell?

It used to be that the marketers would tell consumers what to buy, and consumers would listen. Why? because there was no youtube, blogs weren’t popular, and many other social media sites didn’t exist. Consumers didn’t have a voice, the viral spread of ideas wasn’t easy, and so spam marketing was effective. This is how it used to be:

Now that every consumer has a megaphone, the marketers should be listening to us. Many companies just don’t get it, they keep spamming the consumers in hopes of targeting that small group of people that gets funneled out from the top. Well guess what? We are ignoring you. We are talking amongst ourselves now, discussing features and benefits, coming up with ideas for future releases of your product, and comparing you to your competitors. We have blogs and social media sites that we now turn to for advice and information. So how are you going to market to us now? How are you going to convince me that your product or service is better than everyone else’s? The answer is you won’t and you can’t. You don’t have the power anymore. So who does? The group of influencer’s, does; the people that camp out in front of best buy to get that first copy of the Xbox 360, the people who turn up for the Mac World keynote address, the people that are the first to buy and try every product that comes out. This is now the target audience. These are the people who are we are turning to for advice these are the people who we turn to when we want to know how something works or what the problems are.

So what is the new marketing? The new marketing is getting the group of influencer’s to do what they do best, influence the masses. This is a smaller group of people, the people who post reviews on their blogs, the people who create youtube videos, the people who post in the forums and lead discussions. These are the new marketers.

This is the new marketing, welcome!

Did you enjoy the post?please subscribe to my RSS feed!