I'm in Las Vegas for the first time in many years, and I am struck by the sheer opulence of the various hotels. I admit that I don't know what causes gamblers to choose their venues, but it seems as though each hotel is in competition to look bigger, better, and fancier than the next. It's classic "look at me" marketing. Until the Web came along, most companies didn't know there was any other kind of marketing.
Yesterday I had the great pleasure of addressing 100 marketers from the Pittsburgh chapter of the American Marketing Association.
As I began to speak, I found that the PowerPoint file was corrupted on the conference's laptop. And so was the copy on their flash drive. I was faced with doing my presentation with no slides. That experience was enough to put me in a mind to talk about fear today.
No, not the fear of public speaking, although that is a common fear. I want to talk about fear and marketing.
You could be forgiven if, after listening to the excerpts of my interview on Beet.TV, you thought that my favorite television programs are infomercials. But I was trying to make a point. Infomercials, and other direct TV campaigns, have a lot to teach us about video for the Web.
I wrote a few days ago about privacy policies and got several people asking, "So who has a good privacy policy? Well, lots of companies have good privacy policies, but I think what people really want to know is "Who has made their privacy policy a marketing asset?" That narrows the field considerably.
Sometimes I ask marketers about what processes they use and it's a good test to see who works in a big company and who works in a small one.
Big company types either lament that their processes are hopelessly outdated or they list off exactly what they do with their chests puffed out in pride. Small company marketers roll their eyes and say that they don't need any processes and that "procedures" just weigh them down when they are trying to get work done. I think the word "procedure" is part of the problem.
I am behind reading my blogs and just caught up today with a great post from last week on grokdotcom that demonstrates how hard it is to get action-oriented information from customer surveys. Follow the link above to read the post—I'll wait right here.
Scary, isn't it? When you think about how many questions you've asked customers and how little information you might be getting back.
I'm back from vacation and I am overwhelmed at how many blog posts I must read every day—you really notice it when you try to read two weeks' worth of them at once. So, for the next few days, you might see me commenting on stuff written a while back.
The other day, I wrote about how small businesses must specialize to succeed on the Web. Today, I read Seth Godin say it a lot better than I did. I haven't read The Dip yet, although I have read all of Seth's other books. But what he is saying makes a lot of sense.
Most of you know that I do a lot of teaching and speaking on the subject of search marketing, and that my approach is not what people expect. Yes, I know all the dials to turn and levers to pull. I can talk about robots.txt and Max CPC and latent semantic indexing and blah blah blah. But, honestly, it's not what most people need to know. The problem I sometimes find is that when you tell people what they need to know, they think it's not what they need.
For all those who keep waiting for Internet marketing to replace TV, there was an interesting story in eMarketer today that shows how insurance companies are using both TV and search as a one-two punch. eMarketer reported the results of several research firms and adds its own (correct) conclusions.
iEntry 10th Anniversary
RSS
Newsletter
Advertising
