Alert Blog Reviews

The Marketing Executives Networking Group is a group of 2000 marketing executives (10 points if you already guessed that ) at the VP level and higher. Recently, the group’s leadership asked members to name their favorite blogs by non-MENG members—and guess who was part of the top 20? Oh, I guess the title kind of gave it away, didn’t it? That’s right, Marketing Pilgrim . Seth Godin’s blog took top honors, with 59% of execs naming that as a favorite. Mashable was second with 38%. Tied for third were Chris Brogan’s Community and Social Media and Guy Kawasaki’s How to Change the World (30% each). One in five named Tom Peters’ blog , tied with Duct Tape Marketing to round out the top five (with six blogs ). The rest of the top twenty: Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim Avinash Kaushik’s Occam’s Razor Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba’s Church of the Customer Brian Solis’s PR 2.0 David Armano’s Logic + Emotion David Meerman Scott’s Web Ink Now Denise Lee Yohn’s Brand as Business Bites Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy John Moore’s Brand Autopsy Joseph Jaffe’s Jaffe Juice Mack Collier’s The Viral Garden Shelly Palmer’s MediaBytes Steve Hall’s AdRANTs Valeria Maltoni’s Conversation Agent What do you think? Are there any you’re surprised to see there? What do you think is missing?

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Marketing Pilgrim One of Top 20 Most Read Marketing Blogs

No, it’s not the latest fad diet: Marketing Pilgrim. Marketing news, folks. How many of us have stared at the thousands of spam messages and wondered, “Why on earth do they keep sending this crap out? It can’t possibly be effective . . . can it?” Unfortunately, incredibly, in some industries, the answer is yes. As MediaPost reports, a small study showed that even recipients without weight issues opened and purchased from spam weight loss emails, as published in the Southern Medical Journal this month. Though the sample size was only 200 (and probably not representative—students at a single New York commuter college), the findings are startling: 18% of those without weight issues opened the spam emails and 5% actually purchased. Of those who identified themselves as having weight issues, 40% opened the spam and 18% purchased. MediaPost clarifies that these numbers aren’t necessarily great on their own: “The study does note that the purchasing behavior is at a lesser level than a six-country survey for any health or pharmaceutical product.” However, the fact that even those outside the target audience opened and bought from a spam email is pretty significant. MediaPost also notes that the emails appeal to a “captive, maybe even desperate audience” (and if you’ve ever really battled your weight, you know that feeling), so these findings probably won’t apply across the board. And given that one out of twenty non-target audience members also purchased, suddenly I’ve lost hope that those dozen daily Viagra ads will go away. What do you think? Is the study skewed? Or is spam really that effective (for some products)?

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Spam Works for Weight Loss

Image by luc legay via Flickr How we interact with others can either cause joy, pain or leave no impression at all. What impression are you leaving behind you on Twitter and other social networks ? Pain is caused on Twitter when… - Spam and hacking occurs and we feel our safety and privacy is compromised. - An opinion we make is “flamed” by others or they fail to get what we are saying - We use Twitter to be negative about others. Think about high profile cases this year where it has been a case of “tweet in haste, repent at leisure” (or not leisure, in a world where reaction is global and swift!) To avoid causing the pain on Twitter: - Review your account often and report any spam appropriately - Make your posts meaningful and value laden - Don’t spam others, ratio your tweets about your biz with conversations and helping out others - Don’t get involved in an argument - Treat others as you wish to be treated yourself Joy of Twitter… Twitter can be a joy. It is a way to reach out to people, to build new relationships online, and to gain valuable feedback. Some tips to help keep your use of Twitter Joyful are: - Tweet about what you are interested in rather than what you think you should be tweeting about - Be mindful in your tweeting. Tweet from the heart. - Treat Twitter as one of your social media and other marketing activities and don’t get sucked in to feeling you have to be there every single minute – have some fun!! - Connect with other like minded people and use the @reply and RT to start great conversations - Reach out to connect and grow your relationship with your most regular twitter contacts The anonymity of neutrality… Sometimes on Twitter I think it is easy to get sucked into posting “for the sake of it” and this is where neutrality can sneak in. Think value, think connection, think first. And have a joyful time connecting using Twitter. © 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips . The Joy of Tweeting

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The Joy of Tweeting

Bing is eyeing the biggest Internet market in the world—China. Still in beta in China, “Bee-ying” was launched back in June without the marketing push and fanfare enjoyed in the US. Reuters emailed questions to Microsoft today, and MSFT responded that they are “committed to the China market and the search market in China is the most important strategic market for Microsoft.” China is a lucrative market that still remains untapped by most Western companies—especially in the search arena. As we reconfirmed just recently, Google is still a distant second in China to home-grown Baidu. Baidu reports their marketshare at 75%+ and Google’s a dismal 17%. Reuters reports from Analysys International that Google’s share is more like 30%, and Baidu’s at 63.9%. Either way, that’s nothing compared to Google’s dominance nearly everywhere else in the world. Whether its inadequate localization or just the home field headstart Baidu has, Google is struggling—and now Bing hopes to step in and succeed where Google has faltered. It’s little wonder that Google and Microsoft are salivating over this difficult market. With 350 million Internet users and a search market valued at 2B yuan ($293M) China is home to the world’s largest Internet market by users at more than 350 million. Of course, to compete in China means to bow to the Chinese government’s censorship requirements, a practice rife with controversy. Meanwhile, as Search Engine Land points out , Google is working on getting in with mobile companies with Mandarin voice search, the Google-friendly iPhone and the Google-based Android mobile OS. While there are already Windows-based mobile devices, Bing probably still has a long way to go to compete there. (Remember, too, that the mobile Internet is a far greater proportion of Internet usage in China than it is in the US.) What do you think? What would it take for Bing to succeed in China?

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Bing/”Bee-ying” Eyeing China

It is often pointed out that the disconnect from those in the social media trenches to those in the C-level corner offices is significant and often damaging to the marketing efforts of many companies. While it can be fun to generalize and then make those at the top of the marketing food chain the culprits in the “Great Social Media Under-utilization Caper” it is starting to become much less accurate. One way to see that CMO’s are taking a real interest in social media and user generated media as part of their overall marketing efforts is to see the results of a recent study done by the CMO Club. That’s right. CMO’s hang out in a club while you slave away at your community building efforts. It’s all cigars and mahogany furniture around the fireplace for the CMO set. Just kidding. In fact, The CMO Club and Bazaarvoice surveyed 133 active CMO’s to get their real world take on social media. Here’s how the respondents were broken out Of these, 42% focus on business-to-consumer marketing, 41% focus on business-to-business marketing, and 17% market to both consumers and businesses. Leading participating industries include software/hardware (17%), finance/insurance (9%), travel/hospitality (9%), media/publishing (9%), consumer goods (8%), and retail (7.5%), among others. Annual revenues ranged from $6 to $50 million (25%), $51 to $999 million (42%), and over $1 billion (23%). So what did they find? This chart is pretty telling as they attack the three letters that keep most CMO’s up at night: ROI. ROI is certainly the Holy Grail of the C-suite with regard to every facet of marketing. What makes it difficult for social media is that there are not real clearly defined measurements or metrics that create a line to what is termed social commerce. Whether you are a C-level marketer or a day-to-day social media practitioner what are your thoughts on measurement in the social media space? What do you use for tools where are you having success and where are you having trouble? Feel free to download a white paper synopsis of some of the findings of the survey. Maybe the more that C-level marketers and the ‘rank and file’ of marketing work together there can be more advancement in this emerging field. Is that a reality at your work or is that just a fantasy?

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The CMO Club Lets You In On Their Social Media Thinking

One of the problems that small businesses run into on a frequent basis is how to increase their monthly sales without stepping outside of their marketing budget.  This is due to the fact that most small businesses have either a very small marketing budget or no budget for marketing at all.  If you are in the situation where there is no money for advertising even though you desperately need to spread the word about your company you may want to consider using affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a win-win marketing tool since it is a great way to spread the word about your business and help show your customers that you care about them and reward them for their efforts. The way that affiliate marketing works is simple and much less complicated than the term may appear to be.  At its core affiliate marketing is simply the task of getting your customers to advertise for your company in whatever way they fit and rewarding them for each sale they make as a result of their efforts. Most of the time affiliate marketing is used online by spreading a link for your website around the web along with recommendations.  It is your affiliate’s job to speak about your business and promote your products, and in return each time that someone makes a purchase from your website using their link you agree to pay them a commission on the sale or offer them a discount or reward certificate.  This is turn will increase your sales and offer you new business that in turn may decide to be affiliates bringing in more long term business. The best part of offering an affiliate service outside of gaining new customers, is that since it works based on the word of mouth principle is the customers that you gain tend to be long lasting.  Since customers trust their friends opinions they will not only make one small purchase, but may in fact purchase several items or services in one go which will make them even more valuable to your company.

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Affiliate marketing: How to earn a lot without spending a lot

2009 cannot be over quick enough for the newspaper business. The year was full of bad news, followed by worse news, which in some cases, ended in business ending news. The prognosis for the future is not real rosy either so what can the reeling industry do? One thing is to erect pay walls but we’ve heard enough on that one. One thing that the industry can do is embrace social media and in particular, Twitter, to get the attention of the digitally inclined. The Bivings Report decided to do conduct an imperfect study of the use of Twitter by the newspaper industry. To their credit The Bivings Report themselves noted that the study was imperfect which shows some considerable integrity and makes their findings of greater interest to someone like myself. Their blog states: …..we decided to closely analyze 300 profiles from the top 100 newspapers in the country as a way of getting a sense, in aggregate, of how the media is utilizing Twitter. Among the things we look at in the study are whether newspapers link to their Twitter accounts from their website, how often and the manner in which the accounts are updated and whether newspapers are using their Twitter profiles to interact with readers or to simply promote their site content. While the study isn’t perfect, the results provide a compelling jumping-off point for additional thought and discussion. So the results are just that: thought provoking. Here is a sample. Only 62% of the newspapers included links to at least one of their accounts from their website – A head scratcher for sure. Why wouldn’t you promote your use of Twitter? 56% of newspapers maintained a directory of their Twitter accounts on their website – Another curious thing since most major newspapers can have several accounts for individual reporters etc. Wouldn’t it make sense to make it easy t find these people. The study noted that the LA Times does a nice job of this . The average account has 3,447 followers if you removed 4 statistical outliers who had over 100,000 followers. Include the outliers and the average jumps to over 17,000 per account. Gotta love statistics! The Twitter profiles of the newspapers send out an average of 11 tweets per day. Tweet frequency varies from 1.1 (The Boston Globe’s Big Picture, The Denver Post’s Woody Paige, and The Akron Beacon Journal) to 95.5 tweets/day (The Boston Herald). 51% of Twitter accounts were updated primarily through Twitter’s web interface. The findings also showed that the interactivity of the newspaper Twitter users was not very high but it also was not completely void. The fear of most is that the newspapers were simply automating tweets but that didn’t appear to be the case. So this certainly shows some areas of hope for newspapers since they seem to be adopting Twitter as a resource to reach potential readers. It also shows that there is a ways to go before the full impact of a service like Twitter may be felt in the newspaper industry. Do you follow any newspapers? Do you care to do so if you are not currently? What would be your expectation of a newspaper’s Twitter feed? Give us your opinions as quickly as possible so we can put the print edition of Marketing Pilgrim to bed. Oh that’s right, we don’t do that. Sorry.

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How Newspapers Use Twitter