Outdated marketing methods – the dinosaurs still walk among us

It’s my birthday today. I am exhausted as usual. I’ve been in the office for 40 minutes and already my blood pressure is up. The decisions that are made here are based solely on speculation and outdated ideas. One bad decision after the other and a completely reactive environment. Every suggestion I make is shot down, it almost seems deliberate, like no matter what, go against the employee. More wasted money, more sub-par results.

Without going into too much detail, we are working on a project that is potentially really cool, however my enthusiasm has already been squashed because the way we are going about things is wrong, and I am tired of being ignored. The only reason I would make any suggestions now is to have the “I told you so” opportunity at the end.

I could write a novel on the wrong way to go about things. Whether you are marketing your own business or marketing someone elses, the steps that are necessary to succeed are the same.

1. Know your audience

2. Know your content

3. Know what works and what doesn’t

4. Know when to pull the trigger and when to pull the plug

Today I watch a fairly nice budget slowly get chipped away,  you could do a hell of a lot with $60,000. Let me give you an example. If you are promoting an event that is recurring, say it’s an annual event.  You should set up your marketing methods so that it builds on what you did last year. If you pay attention at all,  you should know that 85% of search marketing is reputation. A site reputation is no different than a persons reputation. To make it simple, reputation is based on age, history, and what people are saying about you. Simple enough right?

So, using those 3 pieces of reputation, which would you ithink would be the best idea?

a. Create a solid website that can be modified to fit the event each year. Build links to it, get reputation through social networking, let the site age, use it to showcase the event AFTER it happened so that the site generates traffic through out the year untl the date of the next event year? Oh yeah, and HOST THE SITE???

or would you think it was a good idea to:

b. Build the main (money site) as a profile page on a social networking site, then promote that website with paid search, viral marketing etc.  I guess you wouldn’t care that since you don’t own the site, you cannot control the uptime, you cannot harvest the email addresses or contact information directly to your database or email list. The paid search you are doing is actually promoting the network that is hosting the page, not the website, so any links that are built are actually pointed at the social network site that is hosting the page, thereby increasing the reputation of that social network (which is already the top 5 website on the internet). I don’t really need to continue here right? It’s obvious why this is an incredibly stupid idea, right? Apparently not.

There is a reason that Carl Icahn says that all CEO’s are morons.  Personally, I am totally OK admitting when I don’t know something, and if I don’t know something, I will defer to someone who does. Never assume you are the smartest guy in the room and there is no room for hunches in marketing. The beauty of marketing is that there is no shortage of stats, plans, metrics and methods that show exactly what you need to do.

Regardless of whether or not you want to be involved in the marketing of your business, you owe it to yourself to at least know what questions to ask.

1. What are you going to do to make people want to come to my site?
2. What are you going to do to get people to stay?
3. What are you doing to make them want to come back?
4. Is there a call to action on every page of the site?
5. What methods are you using to capture visitor information? Just because they aren’t interested now doesn’t mean they wont be in the future.
6. Are you taking advantage of social marketing methods? Do you understand them?
7. Are you paying attention to usability?
8. Are you leaving room to explore new avenues as they become available? Do you keep up with changing technology and trends?

Obviously, there are more but this gives you some idea. Internet marketing is interesting and fun. The ability to be able to modify campaigns at any time, stop on a dime and change directions, tweak and fine tune. There is no reason to fail.

Writing this rant gave me the idea to write up a list of questions to ask a potential search marketing company. I can give you 10 questions that will immediately tell you if the person is full of it or out of touch. I will try to get that up in the next couple days or so.

Twitter as a marketing tool? Is it right for you?

So you finally signed up for Twitter because everything you read says that Twitter is the new gold mine, you have to use it. Now you have a twitter account, can you condense your stories, memories, or pearls of wisdom down to 140 characters? Honestly I wish most people I meet were able to do that.

Twitter ettiquette says that you should follow people who follow you. With that in mind, the reasonable things to do would be to run out and start following people with the expectation that they are going to return the favor. Maybe they will, but in most cases – if they do, who really cares? Just because someone is following you does not mean that you are on their radar.

I am still having a really hard time coming to terms that Twitter is an effective marketing tool for ‘everyone’. I can see in certain circumstances where a direct line to someones ear would be a good thing, but you need to be realistic about yourself. Are you interesting? Do people tend to ask questions when you tell a story or do they just glaze over?

If you listen to the internet marketing gurus like Perry Belcher, you can create a million dollar empire overnight with a Twitter account and an internet connection at Starbucks. What Perry doesn’t make a big of is that he has a list of millions of people, so when he sends out an email telling people to follow him on Twitter, they will. They would probably cut their thumbs off if he said it was going to be an ‘over night cash machine’. I’m rambling.

I don’t know enough about Twitter to tell you how to use it effectively for business, which is actually a good thing. Because even without knowing much about it, I do know how to get followers and I will share it with you. Here it is. Tweet. I have set up my content hub to automatically post to Twitter whenever I make a blog post. I haven’t been posting about Twitter, I haven’t really even posted anything that interesting, but every time I do post, my Twitter account is notified and a link to my post is sent out. Every time I do this, I pick up 5 followers almost immediately.

My last couple posts have been about affiliate marketing and about my love affair with SENuke, nothing special. It’s clear that the Twittersphere is full of marketers who are searching for keywords and automatically following the author. What does this mean? Nothing. They are following me in hopes that I will return the favor and follow them, and I do, but they aren’t reading what I am writing. They are just taking a gamble that I am going to read what they are Tweeting about and that I will visit their site and buy their product, and I won’t. I don’t read other peoples tweets and in most cases people don’t read mine. Essentially what you have is a giant room filled with people, all talking at once, to no one. Occasionally there will be someone interesting but in general I find that the only people I actually pay attention to are people who I have actively gone looking for. Courtney Love is a good example, her Twitter account is like watching a car crash in slow motion. Its interesting in a really morbid way.

Twitter, to me, is the obvious electronic culmination of our innate narcissism. We are our own biggest fans. But Twitter is also necessary. Twitter is the beginning of true real time search, the new breed of search engines are pulling data in real time and using it to determine search importance. Spammers are already figuring out how to game it like we used to game lycos in the late 90′s. Twitter is a place that you need to be, even if you don’t know why. Again, rambling.

So now you’re sitting in front of your Twitter acccount, feeling obliged to write something but don’t know what to Tweet about. Let me give you a few very basic pointers to get you on your way. And as simple as these seem, people are charging for this information.

1. Customize your profile. Make sure you at the very least add a picture of yourself. Fill out your profile, be compelling, be interesting. Don’t be overly salesy

2. Don’t pollute your tweets with a bunch of garbage, if you do happen to make a Tweet thats interesting, people will see the rest of your tweets about your cat and they won’t follow you. Keep in mind that the people who do actually read what other people are tweeting about are following hundreds, maybe thousands of people, they don’t have time to sift through garbage.

3. Check out some of the applications like Tweetdeck for following your favorite people

4. Make sure that you include keywords in your tweets that pertain to your business. Those are going to be what put your Tweets up on people radar.

5. Make sure before you follow someone that is following you that you check out their follow vs followers, if they are following 50,000 people and have 100 followers, it’s a spammer.

6. If the profile of the person following you has a picture of a girl in a bikini – block them, it’s spam. Think about it.

7. Do not try to sell you services in 140 characters. EVER. Twitter is about news and opinions, don’t even try to recommend your own product anonymously – it won’t work. Use Twitter to show you are an intelligent, insightful person, that cares about improving the lives of other people.

8. Be funny. Legitimately. If you’re not funny then don’t try to be, but if you are witty, try to include it in your posts.

9. Be relevant. A good way to attract followers is to Tweet about things that are in the news RIGHT NOW.

10. Be open and honest. The one thing I do like about Twitter is that it mimics life and the thought process really well. Remember that first impressions mean everything. When you meet someone you can usually tell if you like them in a 140 characters or less right? It’s the same online.

10.5 ( I really want a clean 10 things list but this just popped into my head) don’t have someone else Tweet for you. It’s OK to have someone represent your business, but not you.

I hope you got something out of this post. I actually didn’t write it for you, I really wrote it to get more followers on Twitter. I think I mentioned the keywords that I wanted enough times. This should be good for another 5 or 10 followers who are never going to read what I have to say, and I plan to return the favor.

Despite The Hype, Twitter Isn’t A Mainstream Social Marketing Tool

As intelligent, informed and chatty as I am, it’s rare that I back up my grand sweeping statements with actual facts and figures. It’s not that I don’t know where to go get those statistics, it’s really just a case of me being lazy and having a bad short term memory.

I am always happy (but rarely surprised) when someone comes along and verifies my claims, but does it in a detailed and cogent way. This is a great article to add weight to my opinion that Twitter is not what everyone thinks it is, and is more a tool for the ultimate narcissist who thinks other people really care what they have to say.

Everyone writes, very few read. Present company included.

Original article here: Despite The Hype, Twitter Isn’t A Mainstream Social Marketing Tool.