Seth Godin's log has a concise definition marketing:
"Permission Marketing means delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who WANT to get them. The key word is want. Make it easy for people to sign up, but then give them exactly what you promise."
Combine this with the notion from Meatball Sundae
As we think about marketing our own brand one of the first considerations is your Google rank. A great tool called "How Many of Me" lets you know how many "you's" you are competing with. There are 10 Jeffrey Grill's and 10 Jeff Grills, a nice cut down from the 899,000 Jeffreys in the United States. Thankfully my last name isn't Smith.
Great piece on TechCrunch on how to avoid bad PR by monitoring Twitter messages using a tool called TweetScan. Michael Arrington points out how Comcast monitors blogs and Twitter in real time to avert any bad press. I'm TweetScan's newest subscriber.
Don't miss a study in this month's Harvard Business Review on the impact of online advertising on offline sales. To quote the study that was conducted by Comscore :
"A recent study we conducted for a retailer with more than $15 billion in annual revenues—the vast majority of which come from its physical stores—had notable results. Over a three-month period, U.S. sales increased by 40% online and by 50% off-line among people exposed to an online search- and display-ad holiday campaign promoting the entire company. Because its baseline sales volumes are greater in physical stores than on the internet, this retailer derived a great deal more revenue benefit off-line than the percentages suggest. Even in terms of raw increases, though, online ads had a bigger impact on off-line than on online sales in a majority of our studies."
Convincing statistics. I'd be curious to see how scalable the gains are or is the medium limited in achieving enough awareness to make a difference. Thank you to Fred Wilson for pointing out the study.
The music industry is about to change again. MySpace is cutting deals with all the major labels. They are going to be offering a streaming service that reflects the MP3 interest in posts on MySpace pages. I bet they allow individuals to program their own stations. That is one step away from kids doing their own mixes and mashups. Music is one step away from being co-created.
MailChimp, an outsourced email management service, has published a great study on email subject lines and open rates. I'd suggest that anyone that is sending email review the study for a complete list of what has worked and what definitely will not.
The best emails had open rates of 60%-87% while the worst were in the range of 1% to 14%. The #1 email subject line was "(company name) sales and marketing newsletter". Note of course that rates would not be nearly as high if the email was from a company that you didn't know.
The Worst..."Last MInute Gift"
After wasting several hours of my day reacting to an April Fools joke that our CEO took as real (a competitive annoucement) and taking an equal amount of time to regain my composure, I thought it would be more than appropriate to review some of the April Fools happenings around the web today.
Google takes the lead with some fun April fools jokes. Their home page has an April Fools joke built in right below the search box.
The link takes you to a fake micro-site called Virgle that is a takeoff on Richard Branson and the Virgin empire where they invite you sign on for a mission to mars. GMAIl not be be undone by their Google cousin is launching a new service today called Gmail Custom Time which lets you send any email you wrote to the past. Of course who can forget the original Google April Fools joke when they issued a Press Release promising internet connectivity through your plumbing via of course a self installation kit.
Tim Perry in today's Chief Marketer refers to the site Museum of Haoxes which has lists of fun, interesting and sometimes hoaxes gone wrong.
The idea of using April Fools to gain attention, put a smile on a customer's face and build the brand Good or bad, an April Fools campaign is a great way to demonstrate an engaging part of the brand if done in good taste. Since taste is in the eye of beholder ....good luck with that.
