Feb28
I’ve been keen to address this headline that appeared in Mashable almost three months ago: “Tablet Readers Don’t Want Interactivity, Says Hearst President.” Naturally, my first reaction was (in imitation of my daughter’s use of New York emphasis), “Seriously???” I mean, can you imagine the entire demographic of iPad users not wanting interactivity?
Feb25
My previous mini-series on Search Engine Marketing got me thinking about some of the myths of other types of digital marketing, especially social media marketing. Some people think that social marketing is voodoo. Other think it’s a new broadcast medium. The truth is, it’s just the plain old hard work of maintaining a dialog with your community. I’ve written that digital marketing techniques like SEO and SEM take a roll-up-your-sleeves effort to make them effective; you don’t just throw money at keywords and wait for the sales come rolling in. This is especially true for social media marketing. There is no “if you build it they will come”; social media is a digital marketing channel, but it’s not just about delivering content. It’s about conversations. It’s about participating. The work is ongoing, and it’s work that pays off. No voodoo. It’s not even complex or high tech. The techniques of social media marketing revolve around creating and maintaining conversations. As a marketer, you need to find the voices within your company that your audience most wants to hear. And you need to make sure that those voices come across as professional, articulate, and in step with your company goals,...
Feb21
John Wanamaker (1838-1922), considered by some at the father of modern advertising, is often quoted in marketing circles: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” A hundred years later, we no longer have that problem. In the age of digital marketing, with exceptional tracking systems (that stretch the very definitions of privacy), it’s no longer a matter of not knowing, but of investing the effort to find out. Today, savvy online marketers are saying “no campaigns without metrics.” SEM is a perfect example of this principle in action—a principle that can also be applied to email and social marketing. When you drive traffic to a web or mobile site using SEM, the basics of managing pay-per-click include an analysis of the costs for each keyword, deciding what to bid on, and then monitoring click-through reports to check performance and to see if you get out-bid on your keywords (in which case you may need to increase your bid or lose that keyword). But the basic reports in Google and Bing are about how much traffic you receive for what you spent. They don’t tell you how individual keywords are...