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Posts Tagged ‘New Marketing’

It’s interesting that those in the social media industry believe everything that’s occurring with respect to social media is new. As I look back to direct marketing, database marketing, networking and advertising – I don’t believe our goals for businesses were different at all. There are a lot of doom and gloom stories about how every business must adapt or they’re going to fail. I don’t believe that’s true.

While I agree that the mediums have changed (and improved), businesses are still trying to achieve what they always have. The goals for business have never been different, it’s the mediums and the expectations of consumers that have changed.

If I were to write a manifesto for business, it would probably have these ten goals:

1. My business will be available where prospects and customers are looking for us.
2. My business will be available when prospects and customers need us.
3. My business will respond when prospects and customers make a request.
4. My business will set realistic expectations for prospects and customers.
5. My business will deliver what customers expected.
6. My business will deliver when we said we would.
7. My business will admit when we made a mistake.
8. My business will fix our mistakes.
9. My business will be honest with you.
10. My business will effectively communicate progress along the way.

In return for being open, honest, accountable and available, businesses hope that prospects and customers will return the favor – communicating how well they performed. This isn’t just good marketing or new marketing, this is good business. These have always been the goals of the businesses I’ve worked with.

As you review these goals, there’s nothing mentioned about new media, experiential marketing, social media, search, search engine optimization, twitter, Facebook, email or any other marketing medium. Those mediums’ existence make it much easier to achieve the business goals – but it doesn’t require that every business adopt them.

Your company may find that good old fashioned cold calling does the trick. Remember – it’s still true that the majority of the business world has not adopted social media, and many are successful, growing and even flourishing businesses. Take Apple for example… I don’t see Apple being open, transparent or overwhelmingly engaged in social media – but they’re doing quite well, aren’t they?

My point isn’t to discourage companies from adopting and utilizing social media. Quite the opposite. If your business wants to adopt the goals of the above manifesto, I have no doubt that social media will accelerate your business given the proper resources and the right strategy. If those goals are not the goals of your company, social media may not be a fit.

Think before you leap! The water is cold and deep.

This post was written by Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.

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Doug mentioned in a recent post how tight integrations and automation are going to be key for email marketers. We work with Real Estate agents and that’s exactly what they are demanding. A couple things you should know about real estate:

• Real Estate agents aren’t technologists and don’t have an IT department to call up when they need help. They’re entrepreneurs, quickly adopt technologies, and always measure the impact. They’re often very sophisticated marketers – because their income depends on it.
• Real Estate agents work with margins. Every expense made on a new marketing vendor or technology is money out of their profit margin on a home sold. As a result, they’re extremely cautious about the tools they adopt, how simple they are to use, and the impact they make on the sale.

As a result, they’ve driven us to develop around the clock. We now automatically push a “Listing of the day” to our real estate customer’s Facebook wall and Twitter stream. This is one of their own listings and is linked back to a virtual tour that we host for our customer. When we developed the feature, we were unsure of how receptive friends would be to seeing a real estate listing on their wall.

Turns out, very receptive! Many of our agents get comments almost everyday. They are not from the same group of people and sometimes are not the type of comment the buyer might want to hear (like “needing to be cleaned”) but for a real estate agent presence of mind is very important and having an ongoing conversation about their listing keeps them on top.

Our real estate marketing service is now integrated with Twitter, YouTube (we dynamically generate videos from the listing images), and Real Estate Listing Syndication services. The results have been fantastic – our clients have seen about a 25% increase in the number of page views on virtual tours, inbound text and toll free inquiries. This response surprised me somewhat and illustrated very clearly how integrating social media into your marketing efforts (even in a very brick and mortar business) can have a tremendous impact on your brand.

Here’s one of the automated YouTube Real Estate videos:

The best part of this is that the customer is able to do all of it – WordPress, Mobile, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube – all with a single click of the mouse. They don’t have to login to each application independently each time – they can enable the account integration once and then publish automatically. We’ve put together a video that demonstrates the functionality.

This post was written by Adam Small

Adam is the CEO of Connective Mobile, a mobile marketing company that offers mobile marketing solutions and integration. Connective Mobile works with clients in the restaurant/retail, real estate and conferences/events industries.

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If you've been a long time subscriber of The Marketing Technology blog... First: Thank-You! Second: If you're subscribing via RSS, could you be so kind as to update your RSS feed to http://marketingtechblog.com/rss? and any bookmarks to http://marketingtechblog.com?

If you’ve been a long-time reader of my blog, you’ve probably noticed some changes of recent. I’ve been soliciting the assistance of new bloggers and transforming the blog from my blog to our blog. Today was a huge step forward with that strategy – you’ll now see that The Marketing Technology Blog has a new theme!

The stunning design was developed by one of our very own, Jon Arnold President of Tuitive Group. He did a beautiful job of capturing the essence of the blog. You’ll also notice that the Author’s page is new – listing each of our bloggers as well as a link to their bio page that provides more information about their expertise and business.

I’ll still be the primary blogger at the Blog but you’ll see each of our other bloggers posting 2 or 3 times a month. The goal is to provide our readers with a well-rounded selection of practical marketing advice. Whether you’re a developer working on CSS issues or a CMO trying to decide the next analytics package to invest in – we’ll continue to provide useful information.

There are other Marketing blogs out there (I follow all of them!)… some are for making money online, some are for keeping up with marketing news, others are to sell conference and whitepaper information. Most are very niche or news oriented. Our goal is to be the goto blog for marketers to improve their marketing efforts and obtain a better return on investment for their efforts. We don’t want a day to go by where you don’t leave with additional information to run your business or do your job better! Period.

About our Photographer

Throughout the site, you’ll find stunning photos of our bloggers, provided by Indianapolis photographer Paul D’Andrea from PDA Photography. Paul set up an entire photo shoot with us and Andrew Ball provided us access to a private museum within AT&T. You’ll see that all of our photos have communication equipment behind us – very cool theme!

Lorraine and Jon weren’t able to make the group photo.

What’s Next?

Much more to come! We’ll have a collective Events calendar (as well as our own events!), will be working closely to supply premium content to Smaller Indiana’s Marketing page, and I’m confident our own conferences and workshops will be coming soon!

If you have requests – please click the feedback tab and let us know what you’d like to see or hear more of. As well, we’ve got a nice robust contact form in place where you can contact each of our bloggers individually! The form was built using Formspring, of course!

Masters of Business Online

Indianapolis, IN October 21st

I've been involved with the Masters of Business Online for the last 2 events and it's been a fantastic event. The conference provides an array of speakers that will enhance every segment of your online marketing. You'll walk away with at least one tidbit that will give you a huge return on the small investment for this event!

When: Wednesday, October 21, from 8:30am - 4:30pm

Where: Ritz Charles 12156 N Meridian Street Carmel, IN 46032 (map)

Breakfast and lunch will be provided. Register with this link before September 23rd to get the early bird pricing and a $20 Marketing Technology Blog discount. For more information, see the 2009 MBO website.

PS: I stole this format from Jon Arnold at Tuitive without his okay yesterday! Sorry Jon!