Category: Marketing Trends/News

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,

If you’re in the marketing world, you’ve probably heard people say “I want this to go viral” or even “I’m going to make a viral video.”

The problem with that is that none of us can control what takes off in the public imagination, or even in the imaginations of enough of a cult that something goes viral within a niche.

Sometimes, the deliberate efforts of creators are successful. I am guessing the “Will It Blend?” ad series was designed very carefully to be passed around a lot. But other times, all the careful design in the world still results in only a few thousand pass-alongs. I’d say the vast majority of projects designed to go viral achieve very little traction—because the market recognizes when it’s being manipulated, and most attempts at deliberate “virality” contain a strong, obvious commercial element

And yet, the ones that really do go viral often don’t try to make any money. I am quite sure that Susan Boyle never dreamed that her video audition for “Britain’s Got Talent” would be seen by more than 86 million people (the combined view stats for just the first two out of 1,460,000 results for a Google search on “susan boyle britains got talent”). I just watched it again, and am still amazed by not only the power of her singing, but the contrast with her frumpy appearance and clueless personality. How could you not fall in love with that video?

Thinking about this today as I look over the comments for two recent blog entries: My 10-year reflection on 9/11 and the lost opportunity for peace, posted September 11, and a guest post by a conservative Christian friend, Steve Jennings, reflecting on his friendship with me—an unabashed progressive—despite our huge political differences, posted September 15.

I had some hopes in writing the 9/11 piece that it might go viral: posted on the tenth anniversary when everyone was once again talking about the attacks, talking about the better world that could have been created had we been blessed with visionary leadership instead of the small-minded vengeance of George W. Bush and his cronies. I tweeted the link a few times, a few other people picked it up, and response was very positive—but very limited. It did not bring me new audiences, though was reasonably popular among my existing readers. It has so far earned four comments and a bunch of retweets. and it somehow managed not to draw even a single attack from the right-wing lunatic fringe.

Steve’s post, which I didn’t promote as heavily, drew a number of retweets (which are, oddly, not showing up on the blog page), though only one comment. Again, uniformly positive, though not big numbers.

Steve’s post was not tied to a particular day and will be timely for many years; it may yet build more comments over time. The 9/11 article, other than from those reading here, is not likely to draw much attention now that almost a week has gone by.

Of course, I never had any dream that my 9/11 post would get as big as Susan Boyle, or even as big as “United Breaks Guitars” (10 million+ views). I’d have been thrilled if a couple of thousand people read it and a few dozen commented, because I’m just trying to get my ideas into the world, and I’m not using sound, video, or even pictures to do it. I still believe in the power of words.

If you find that either of those posts (or this one, for that matter) inspires you to say something, I hope you’ll share it on the comment page, Like it on Facebook, etc. Meanwhile, I’ll keep sharing my ideas, and hoping they make a difference in at least a few people’s lives.

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By Posted on Posted in General Commentary, Marketing Trends/News Tagged with , , ,

Master marketer Seth Godin used his own ignorance of/lack of interest in Lady Gaga to make the very valid point that marketers should go after their unique audience and not worry about those who don’t choose to opt in.

But then he says,

I’m virtually certain that Lady (do her friends call her that?) doesn’t read my stuff, so we’re even.

Seth, Lady Gaga is a very savvy marketer. It would not shock me at all if she knows your stuff and dips in regularly for great ideas (as I do). 🙂

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Marketing Trends/News Tagged with , ,

Friday, I got a press release from the American Booksellers Association, crowing that a lawsuit against New York State’s “sales tax fairness” law–which states that any company using affiliates based in New York has a “nexus” in the state, and thus is subject to sales tax–had been dismissed on most counts.

The question of sales tax fairness has been a bone of contention between mail-order/online and physical stores for more than a decade (I wrote a piece about this ten years ago, in fact). Brick-and-mortar retailers claim that mail-order and (more recently) online merchants have an unfair price advantage because they don’t have to charge and remit sales tax. The remote merchants claim they aren’t actually doing business in the state, and that shipping charges shift the inequality back out. However, sales tax is usually a lot more than shipping, especially for small items like books and CDs.

As a very tiny online merchant who sells info products online and through the mail, my issue is a bit different. I do see it as unfair that we onliners don’t have to collect sales tax. However, it would be a crushing burden to have to collect and remit taxes in the hundreds of jurisdictions where our customers live—California alone has a different tax structure for almost every community, involving state, county, and local taxes in varying amounts. And what happens with international sales? Such a requirement would force hundreds, perhaps thousands of merchants to close or drastically reconfigure their businesses.

So what would be fair? Here are a couple of ideas.

1. Tax all purchases in the merchant’s home jurisdiction. On the plus side, merchants are already set up to collect and pay these taxes; all we’d have to do is change our order forms to collect tax on all product purchases. On the minus side, this would skew revenues. Amazon’s hometown of Seattle or eBay’s of San Jose would benefit enormously, while small municipalities (or those who don’t happen to have a mail-sales megagiant in their borders) are left out in the cold. Probably not the best solution.

2. Collect sales tax in a national pool at the same fixed rate for all localities, use software to automatically allocate it by purchase amount and purchaser’s zip code, and distribute it, less a small administrative fee (perhaps 1 percent of all the tax collected).

3. Provide free software to every merchant that would determine and automatically debit the proper tax without adding administrative burdens.

Both 2 and 3 potentially could be cheated by a skilled hacker, which makes me nervous.

4. Eliminate the sales tax entirely for both physical and virtual businesses, and replace the revenues with income tax or some other mechanism. In today’s political climate? I think this would be a non-starter.

In short, I don’t think we have the answer yet. But I agree with the ABA that the current system of a free ride for the virtuals and a big squeeze on the physicals is not equitable (and has probably contributed to the sad demise of so many downtown storefronts)

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, Marketing Trends/News, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

I just read a “sleeper” article that may be one of the most important trend pieces of the year. If you have any interest in future trends in marketing, demographics, consumer culture, advertising, or where our society might be headed in a few years, go and read “Is Starbucks the Most Dangerous Competitor to Facebook?” by Jay Baer and Clinton Bonner. Appropriately enough, I found this article via a Tweet, from Olivier Blanchard, a/k/a @TheBrandBuilder.

The article posits that Starbucks is working to reposition itself as an in-store information portal, with all sorts of goodies available to those who go to the stores and log on to its network—and that ads on this network could become the premier place to reach certain consumers, as well as the favored online community that could displace Facebook in our affections…

I’m not sure it’s going to unfold exactly as they see it, but I suspect pieces of it will play out that way. That’s a future that leaves me with more than a little discomfort. It’s like a vertical and horizontal integration of the mind similar to, say, General Motors’ vertical and horizontal integration of the car market starting at least in the 1930s. I don’t like to see so much energy concentrated in one company, whether it’s GM, Google, or Starbucks.

Of course, competitors can arise. But it won’t be easy.

What do you think?

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, Uncategorized Tagged with ,

A between-issues special edition of Shel Horowitz’s Clean and Green Marketing Newsletter.

Contents:
1. A Concentrated Dose of Marcia Yudkin, Marketing Genius
2. Tobri: A New Social Network from Ken McArthur
3. Communication is a Lot More Than Words: Sharon Sayler’s New Book
4. PS – Say hi at Boston Greenfest

Marcia Yudkin is proof that you can be an introvert and still be a very successful marketer. She’s also one of the most ethical people I know.

Join Marcia and me on a Special Interview Just for My Readers: “Top Ten Must-Know Principles
of Marketing Psychology.” You will NOT want to miss this one! This coming Monday, August 23, Noon Eastern/9 a.m. Pacific.

Click here to register. I’ll send a replay link if you can’t be on the live call—but if you can, I suggest calling in.

She and I go back a long time. In the 1980s, when she had recently left a teaching position at Smith College to go out on her own as a freelance writer and editor, and my business was still a typing and editing service, she used to freelance for me. And I knew any editing project I gave her would be done beautifully, turned in ahead of deadline, and add to my standing with my clients. I also knew any article with her byline in a local magazine was going to be a compelling read. Then she moved to Boston and I lost track of her for a few years.

In the 1990s, both she and I independently turned our attention to marketing, and we independently discovered the Internet. I rediscovered her back in the days when I still used an AOL account, so that puts it in 1994 or 1995. By then, I believe she’d already released at least a few of her great books, like Six Steps to Free Publicity and Persuading on Paper. And had begun to build a reputation as a marketer’s marketer: someone who could see through what you were actually saying to what you were trying to say, and show you how to say it a whole lot better—without hype or exaggeration. Then she moved back to the area and our paths would cross again. A couple of years ago, I invited her to join with another friend and me in a Mastermind group, and since then, I’ve benefited enormously from her critiques and suggestions on my own projects.

Marcia’s weekly Marketing Minute and occasional Name Tales (product and company naming stories) have been brightening my e-mail box all the way back to 1998. She was one of the first people with a folder in my Marketing Geniuses file, where I keep many of her back issues. And she’s one of a very few newsletter publishers who continue to provide value to me many years after I subscribed. (My typical tenure as a subscriber is somewhere between six months and two years).

The point I’m making is that Marcia is someone well worth paying attention to. As a trend watcher, a copywriter, a marketing consultant, and one of the world’s leading experts on choosing great product and company names, Marcia has a tremendous reservoir of wisdom behind her shy, reclusive outer shell.

Marcia just spent some serious time organizing the best of her Marketing Minute how-tos and think pieces into a series of five books and 10 audios called the Marketing Insight Guides: a book and two audios each on…

  • Book 1: Persuading People to Buy: Insights on Marketing Psychology That
    Pay Off for Your Company, Professional Practice, or Nonprofit Organization
  • Book 2: Meatier Marketing Copy: Insights on Copywriting That Generates
    Leads and Sparks Sales
  • Book 3: Strategic Marketing: Insights on Setting Smart Directions for
    Your Business
  • Book 4: Publicity Tactics: Insights on Creating Lucrative Media Buzz
  • Book 5: The Marketing Attitude: Insights That Help You Build a Worthy
    Business

    • The books average about 75 articles each, and each 2-CD pair averages 95. In other words, there are a bunch on the audio that you won’t find in the books. So you don’t feel overwhelmed, she’ll be delivering them once a month for five months.

    And even though I read all of these in the original as she wrote them, I intend to spend some serious time with them again, now that they’ve been thematically organized. That will be time very well spent!

    And Marcia asked me if I’d be one of only 12 affiliates selected to pre-announce this collection, ahead of her remaining affiliates. She’s also giving special pricing right now. Through the end of August, you can grab this treasure trove of marketing wisdom for just $99; the final price will be $199, so this is definitely a deal. It works out to about 21 cents an article. I dare you to find so much value anywhere else for 21 cents! Yes, this is an affiliate link.

    2. Tobri: A New Social Network from Ken McArthur

    Ken McArthur has a new beta social media site for making great connections. And because he’s Ken McArthur of JV Alert, author of a great book on impact, and he has a history of pulling together incredible people who need to know each other (and helping them consummate amazing partnership deals)—I’ve signed up because I know it’ll be good. Even though I can’t really keep up with the social media I’m already involved with; for Ken, I’ll make an exception. Check out the video and connect with
    me there. I’d love to have you in my network!

    https://shelhorowitz.com/go/tobri (This is an affiliate link.)

    It doesn’t cost a cent and there are some amazing people in there. Lots of buzz on this one!

    3. Communication is a Lot More Than Words: Sharon Sayler’s New Book

    You’ve probably heard that in face-to-face communication, the words only account for about 7 percent of the message received. Body language, tone of voice, facial expressions and the like account for the lion’s share. (This is why it’s so easy to have misunderstandings online; you don’t have all those nonverbal cues so it’s very easy to misinterpret the real message.)

    The good news is that my friend Sharon Sayler has an excellent roadmap for you, so you can navigate the unsaid meanings and get to the heart of things—making friends and making deals along the way. And the better news: she’ll give you a free chapter plus a special report, How to Avoid the 3 Biggest Body Language Mistakes – in Under 10 Minutes. (This is not an affiliate link.) The book is called What Your Body Says, and I found it full of great insights. If you actually buy the book, you get ten nice bonuses from some of the most respected people in self-help, including a whole year’s access to Sharon’s private membership site.

    4. P.S. Say Hi at Boston Greenfest

    If you’re attending Boston Greenfest on Friday (August 20), I’m speaking from 1-1:25 on “Communicate the Value in Your Values.” Come say hi while I’m signing books afterward, and get your very own autographed copy.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Trends/News, privacy, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

    Computer guru Tim O’Reilly makes a half-hearted attempt to justify (or at least explain) Facebook’s latest privacy grab. But I find the San Francisco Chronicle’s Bill of Rights for social media users (which O’Reilly quotes at length) much more compelling:

    Users have the right to:

    1. Honesty: Tell the truth. Don’t make our information public against our will and call it “giving users more control.” Call things what they are.

    2. Accountability: Keep your word. Honor the deals you make and the expectations they create. If a network asks users to log in, users expect that it’s private. Don’t get us to populate your network based on one expectation of privacy, and then change the rules once we’ve connected with 600 friends.

    3. Control: Let us decide what to do with our data. Get our permission before you make any changes that make our information less private. We should not have data cross-transmitted to other services without our knowledge. We should always be asked to opt in before a change, rather than being told we have the right to opt out after a change is unilaterally imposed.

    4. Transparency: We deserve to know what information is being disclosed and to whom. When there has been a glitch or a leak that involves our information, make sure we know about it.

    5. Freedom of movement: If we want to leave your network, let us. If we want to take our data with us, let us do that, too. This will encourage competition through innovation and service, instead of hostage-taking. If we want to delete our data, let us. It’s our data.

    6. Simple settings: If we want to change something, let us. Use intuitive, standard language. Put settings in logical places. Give us a “maximize privacy settings” button, a and a “delete my account” button.

    7. Be treated as a community, not a data set: We join communities because we like them, not “like” them. Advertise to your community if you want. But don’t sell our data out from under us.

    [This last sentence is O’Reilly’s and not the Chronicle’s] Everyone is right to hold Facebook’s feet to the fire as long as they fail to meet those guidelines.

    Yes, the Chronicle Bill of Rights seems like common sense ethics to me. The problem is that I am not convinced Facebook’s latest privacy grab is even close to meeting these guidelines. Zuckerberg and others can continue to push the frontiers, but they should do it in ways that respect their members.

    Personally, I go into the online world with the expectation that there is no privacy. And therefore the specific changes don’t bother me over-much. But as someone who writes about ethics, I have a problem with obtaining consent for one restricted set of behaviors and then wildly expanding it while requiring opt-out (and difficult opt-out at that) rather than opt-in. It’s nothing more than an electronic form of bait-and-switch–something I find unethical and in fact argue against in my latest book on business ethics, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson).

    Yet in the video included in the blog, O’Reilly makes a compelling case that Facebook’s privacy failures and the resultant pushback are essential to pushing the frontier, and that a lot of the innovations that seemed to threaten privacy were actually welcomed once people got used to them. O’Reilly says he’s more worried about Apple than Facebook. I, however, worry more about Google (which he also mentions in the video), which owns an extreme amount of personal data and has a very cavalier attitude toward copyrighted material

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    By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News

    By Angelique Rewers

    Site sees 513% growth in 55+ user bracket
    Number of college and high school users drops 20%

    Using Facebook to reach your target audience? If so, be aware that the popular social media site’s demographics are changing rapidly and significantly.

    An analysis of data from Facebook’s Social Ad platform conducted by iStrategyLabs reveals that the site’s users are getting much older in a short period of time. The study found:

    * A staggering increase in the 55+ age group from 950,000 to 5.9 million in just the last six months
    * A 70.8% increase in the number of total U.S. users over the last six months (71,901,400 total)
    * That 54.6% of users are female
    * That 16.5% fewer high schoolers and 21.7% fewer college students are using the site (iStrategyLabs reports this could be due in part to the fact that younger users are being alienated by their parents joining the service)
    * That the majority of users (28.2%) fall into the 35 to 54 age group

    Examined another way, between January and July 2009, the overall number of users…

    * Ages 18 to 24 has grown only 4.8%
    * Ages 25 to 34 has grown 60.8%
    * Ages 35 to 54 has grown 190.2%
    * Age 55 and older has grown 513.7%

    What’s this mean for you?

    First, the number of Facebook users overall continues to grow, making this popular social media site an increasingly important communications channel. Even if your organization is not on Facebook, you can guarantee that at least a fraction of your target audience is.

    Second, if this data is correct — and it may not be as Facebook doesn’t guarantee the data it provides to advertisers is 100% accurate — then Facebook is not a young site anymore. With such significant changes happening at an increasingly rapid pace, it’s critical that you continue to monitor trends and adjust your advertising and communication strategy accordingly.

    You can see a complete breakdown of iStrategyLabs’ data here.

    Reprinted from The Corporate Communicator, a free e-zine dedicated to helping professionals communicate more effectively with employees, customers and the media. To get the latest industry news, research and best practices at your fingertips, register for a FREE subscription at www.thecorporatecommunicator.net.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People Tagged with , , , ,

    Readers of my various books will know I’m a fan of alternative locally-based currencies. Here’s a twist: A shopping center in Reno is sending street teams out all over Reno to spot acts of kindness, and reward them with “Karma Cards,” redeemable at the shopping center.

    Two extra things worth noting:

  • The retail complex is partnering with at least seven nonprofits
  • Anyone receiving the card not only gets store credit but is entered in a drawing for a $3000 grand prize

    • Sweet! The campaign is only six weeks long. Maybe it’ll be so successful, they’ll continue it.

    Thanks to Reno resident Jacqueline Church Simonds for sharing this.

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    By Posted on Posted in Ethics: General, Marketing Trends/News, Transparency vs. Secrecy, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , ,

    Perry Marshall has a really good article about online privacy concerns, the Google experience yay and nay, and Google’s first real competitor in general search–Bing. It’s getting a lot of comments, including this one from me. I discuss not only transparency vs. secrecy, but also the Google user experience, talk about the USP (Unique Selling Proposition) I think Google might operate under, and point out the business opportunity that grows out of our society’s lack of privacy.

    One point I didn’t make is that in dystopian-totalitarian novels like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, the very tools that provide information and entertainment also eliminate our privacy. While at least in the US, this information gathering has been used primarily for commerce rather than social control, the potential is very real.

    The rest of this post is what I posted to Perry’s site:

    You write, “Google has done a glorious job of doing what I encourage all my customers to do: Create offers that are so sensationally irresistible that you can’t help but use their search engine. They’ve beat all comers fair and square.”

    This is sooo true. If ever there was an example of a huge USP, it would be Google’s. I don’t know how they phrase it, but it may as well be “we let you actually FIND what you’re looking for…in nanoseconds.”

    And because they honor and deliver this USP, and because they were smart enough to make ads user-friendly, they have a vast revenue stream. But remember that search was there before ads, a couple of years before, in fact.

    As pointed out above, we haven’t had privacy for decades anyway.

    –>I feel the lack of privacy is actually an *opportunity* for entrepreneurs. Since we have no privacy anyway, why not run your business with a high degree of transparency and turn it into a marketing advantage? Why not do the right thing and be thoroughly ethical, and then demonstrate this to the world so they beat a path to your door? (This is something I advocate heavily in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First )

    Back to Google: my concern is not *privacy*, but *piracy.* Google’s respect for others’ copyrights is often in conflict with its desire to index the world’s knowledge. As someone who creates a lot of intellectual property (including eight books), it concerns me deeply that Google assumes the right to index first and ask permission later. I could definitely see circumstances where work created (say, for a high-paying corporate client) should not be placed in the public stream. Google claims to be and for the most part acts as a highly ethical company, but on the issue of intellectual property control, I disagree with their approach.

    Still, I’ve been an avid Google user, because it does deliver that USP, and that’s something I need.

    I wasn’t familiar with Bing prior to reading this article. Did a search for “shel horowitz” and saw very different results than Google. 1,100,000 hits versus about 23,400 on Google (a number that shifts daily between 14,000 and 54,000). Bing’s results heavily skewed toward big portal sites like Facebook (very first result) and Amazon Subsequent pages (I looked through page 3) include a lot of the blogosphere/podcast interviews I’ve done for others, and some of my major media hits. Only three of the top ten were my own sites. Google’s results skew heavily toward my own sites. I love the popup feature on Bing, and expect that Google will implement something similar; this may be Google’s first real competitor for generalized search. (For specialized search, I’ve often turned to Clusty, Ask, and portal-specific search tools.)

    By contrast, on Google, I have 7 of the 12 results on page 1. Google itself has positions 4 (Google book search) and 12, and my twitter and Facebook profiles, along with a book review on an outside blog that was published this week, fill out the page.

    GMail is still the best web-based e-mail client I’ve used, but that ain’t saying much. I vastly prefer download-based email such as Eudora. Surprisingly, my biggest gripe with GMail is that its search function is just plain horrible. Something you’d think they of all companies could have figured out better. My other gripe is that you can’t do much in the way of batch processing, and dealing with one e-mail at a time, especially over the web, for anything except delete is frustratingly slow.

    Shel Horowitz, ethical/effective marketing specialist
    https://shelhorowitz.com

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    By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News Tagged with , , ,

    Fascinating article on BNET about how Microsoft’s much-ballyhooed Bing search engine is no Google killer–because, as I’ve been saying for years (including in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First), branding is not about how much money you pour into the marketing, but about the superior service or product or experience you can deliver.

    Which is, after all, how Google achieved search dominance in the first place, as anyone who remembers searching with clunky tools of the mid-90s will attest.

    The article does have a solution for Microsoft, though: it identifies a core weakness of Google’s and gives Microsoft an exact recipe to exploit this vulnerability.

    I won’t spoil the surprise. Go read it.

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