Online Marketing is like knitting

In real life, would you put your business behind the mountain, in the middle of nowhere?

Imagine how many customers would you get if your marketing were only tips and hints in the narrow mountain paths. After getting the consumers interested you would arrange them a challenge: “Solve this problem and you get the next clue to find my store!”

This is probably how you’re doing your marketing online right now.

Conversational marketing is a platform business. Domains are dead. Content lives inside social medias, in the conversations among people. Articles don’t live in nytimes.com, they live inside Facebook or Twitter. Videos live in Youtube, photos in Flickr. There isn’t much point in using logic of advertising in online world. Banners, campaign sites and what else, eh? In many cases you can’t even buy the stuff online or  if there’s an online store, it’s hidden inside massive site and no one will find it. That’s how Finnish cosmetics company Lumene did. After playing hide and seek for some time they thought that cosmetics doesn’t sell online and the webstore is now closed.

Marketing online is like knitting. You knit your platform stitch by stitch.

Making knitted wool pants takes time, but it’s rewarding. Whatever you do online, do it continuously plus link and tag the content together. Take part in the conversation. Do remarkable and interesting things – together with your consumers. After a while you’ll find out that you have your own communication platform, driven by Google. That’s your own earned media and it’s much more effective than the traditional one.

Advertising Mammoths suffer from Ice Age

The field of marketing is full of hungry and cold feeling advertising mammoths. Ice age of advertising industry is getting worse and mammoths are fearing extinction. Big, fat and slow clients already died out. Nowadays there’s only left the rapid ones, not as easy to catch. Also those new age predators have come to the same territory to hunt. It seems like they can read the thoughts of the clients, they catch them like hell. Mammoths are screwed, what to do?

“The definition of insanity is doing the same things over and over again and expecting different result”, some wise Mammoth ones said. Now is the time to look into mirror and do some radical changes:

• Change the old logic: Stop spamming, go back seat and let the customers drive. You’re already lacking control and that´s ok.
• Change the style: Start behaving instead of claming. Be real, good and honest.
• Change the marketing, management, processes, etc. from deadlines to online. Be fast, be agile.
• Change the mass mediums to word of mouth. Put marketing into a product, tell people a product story.
• Change your business model. Be a valuable partner instead of untrusted subcontractor.

I like mammoths, hopefully this time the strongest save themselves.

The Economy of Good and Honest

Thanks to my best friend Internet for changing the world. People, business and the whole economy are getting more and more human and many of us are now focusing on doing good. Rapid communication and people to people (many to many) delivered messages in social medias have made an enormous change in mass opinions; how we should live, think and work. World is getting more tolerant, ethical, green and sustainable.

This has also an opposite side. If you’re not into the movement of good, if you’re a big fan of Sauron, dude/tte you’re scrued. We have a Judge that’s seeing everything and has an ultimate memory. It’s called Google. Being untruthful and lying yourself better doesn’t get you far, you get caught.

People are having conversations about you, liked it or not, negative word of mouth is much stronger than positive one. This means, that you and your business is always under estimation. The only way to succeed for a long term is doing good. That means check your values, check what you do, what you sell. If you’re not sure they are good enough, now it’s the time to make them better. It’s all about conversations. Share what you digg and fan, but also try to make the wrong right. Then we are making the world a better place.

Peace and honey people.

P.S.

Here’s a good post: How Good Business is Usually Better Business.

Real Madrid and Barcelona the gurus of marketing

Some may say that La Liga teams Real Madrid and FC Barcelona went mad this summers transfer markets. Alone Los Blancos spent over 240M€ to get better players than they had last year to make sure that they get the results which their fans so badly want. Their top transfers were Cristiano Ronaldo 90M€ (from ManU) and Kaka 67M€ (from AC Milan). Barcelonas answer was recruiting Zlatan. Catalans paid 60M€ (Internazionale) to get the Swede to the Nou Camp.

I say La Liga and these teams aren’t mad, they are just getting it.

It’s so much more valuable to get the best and the most intresting players to your team than give your money to the media companies and advertising agencys. Despite the becoming results of La Liga, these two great teams and of course La Liga are already big winners. They get the spent money back much sooner as you may think.

Just think about these players media value:

Cristiano Ronaldo:

• Over 18 millions Google hits.
• Four million Facebook fans.
• Most viewed video in Youtube, about 20 million views.

and what about Zlatan:

• Some 6 million Google hits.
• “Only” 350.000 Facebook fans.
• Most viewed video in Youtube, about 20 million views.

In my point of view the Real Madrid is the biggest winner. For instance they sold 500.000 club shirts in sixty days after signing these fellows, that´s 90 euros in every 13,5 seconds and all together that is 45 million euros. Plus the growth of brand and media value, sponsor and media deals, season ticket sales, etc. I think mr. Florentino Perez made and amazing business move.

My ABC of WOM

I try to do this as simple as I can.

As our world and communication are getting more complex you have to keep your messages as clear as possible.

Here’s my ABC for word of mouth marketeers:

• Amazing word of mouth starts with a great topic.
• Be remarkable, do only purple cows.
• Conversation x Connectivity x Humanity = New Economy

But remember, when you join the conversation don’t do it like advertisers do.

(Thanks John Moore and Hugh Mcleod for this picture.)