Marketing

By now, unless you just don't watch TV, use a cell phone, or read anything online (er... what're you doing here? Welcome to the interwebs!), you've doubtless seen/heard/read about Verizon Wireless' ads going after AT&T's wireless 3g coverage ("There's a map for that." ads) and AT&T's response ads featuring Luke Wilson.  Just in case you're in the 0.009% of the population who apparently has not seen them, here are examples of each:

So why am I showing you these ads again? Because I want to tell you the difference between showing and telling by showing you the difference.

Just as your company wants to provide the highest level of service to your customers, search engines wish to do the same. As a result, while exact methods are internally kept secrets, it still has become evident that the basis for high search engine rankings has shifted to the actual value and amount of relevant content on a website. Basically, this means that the search engines have recognized that when people search for an item on their websites, that the results should actually reflect exactly what the visitor is looking for.

This means that websites that have accurate, relevant, and frequently updated information on the desired topic on their website are surging to the top of the results pages, ad less and less people are utilizing the now obvious pay per click links (Initially, the public thought the pay per click results at the top were relevant, but they are self educated enough to where the novelty and value of pay per click has deteriorated the value of investing in this type of marketing.)

Just read this excellent post over on techdirt (http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080318/004136567.shtml) about how advertising is content and content is advertising. It helped me finally realize what has been bugging me for a while about most of the "product placement" going into TV shows of late (I'm looking at you The Biggest Loser - and you Destination Truth). If you need to place your product in a show, just make a show about the product.

This is my presentation from the August 20 Greenville Social Media Club meeting.  The article is pretty close to a straight transcript of the presentation in the video.

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All of us here today are here because of our involvement in the world of online social media. Twitter, Facebook, Friendfeed, etc. - the point is that we're here because we've been connected somehow by modern technology. However, not everyone out there has, or is even willing to jump on the social media bandwagon.

There are lots of reasons for this - misunderstanding of the technology, genuine lack of interest, fear of change is a big one, lack of time, information overload - or any number of other reasons. And the fact that there are so many reasons why someone may not join us online should give us some hint that there are a lot of people out there who haven't joined us.

So there are two questions. First, why would we want to reach and communicate with those people who have chosen (in many cases) not to communicate with us and second, once we know why, how do we reach them?

Why do you want reach these people? According to a Forrester Research report released last month, just under 1/3 of adults in the US now visit social networks online regularly That's over 55 million people. But that means more than 2/3 of adults in the US still do not visit online social networks regularly.

If you're in business, you don't want to miss out on 2/3 of your potential customer base.