Blogs are great, but trade magazines are still important.
If you're an entrepreneur or small business, read these:
1. The entrepreneur's essentials: Inc. and Fast Company
2. The trade magazine for your industry: DM News, PR Week, Plumbing News, or whatever you do
3. The trade magazine for your client's industry: You need to know how they talk and what they think about. Learn the jargon and acronyms. Pay attention to the ads to learn how other companies get their attention. (This is why I read Nation's Restaurant News.)
4. If you work with huge companies, read Harvard Business Review. Not a word will apply to your small business, but you'll better understand your clients' world.
Check out SmartBrief.com for a great selection of email newsletters from every industry imaginable.
I was thrilled to be a part of SmartBrief’s panel discussion last week, “How to Create a Viral Marketing Success,” featuring Stacey Kane of California Tortilla, Brendan Hart of National Geographic, and Stephanie Miller of Return Path — and moderated by Guy Kawasaki.
We covered a bunch of topics, including how California Tortilla reaches 100,000 fans a month on basically no marketing budget, how National Geographic is incorporating the work of its fans into its magazine, and how email and social media can work together.
You can see the live video here, as well as a live write-up on our GasPedal blog.
Photo from Association Bisnow (along with a great write-up here).
[Here's a recent post I did for the SmartBlog on Social Media. You can follow the blog here or subscribe to the newsletter here.]
Paul McCartney was right: Money can’t buy you love. It just doesn’t work — at least not anymore in an era where we’re getting better at ignoring the marketers obsessed with interrupting us. Smart marketers, however, are finding that it’s much more profitable to put money into the quality of their products and the experiences they offer in order to earn the respect and recommendation of their customers.
Why it doesn’t work:
It’s not scalable. The problem with advertising is that you pay for each impression, regardless of how successful you are. Each investment in the happiness of your fans, however, makes earning new ones a little easier.
It’s not genuine. For enough, you might buy a little attention; but no amount of advertising can establish true love — the kind that makes fans line up for your new products, drag their friends in to see you, or defend you from the naysayers.
It was never for sale to begin with. Social media has opened a window to a process that has been going on for a long time — people have always and will continue to exclusively love companies that treat them with respect and offer extraordinary experiences.
[Here's a recent post I did for the SmartBlog on Social Media. You can follow the blog here or subscribe to the newsletter here.]
With the economy still sputtering, now is the time to build your army of fans and start some momentum for when the things turn around. While everyone is focused on pulling back and waiting out the storm, you’ve got a huge opportunity to go out and earn a bunch of new talkers.
What to remember:
WOM works regardless of the economy. In boom or bust, people will continue to tell their friends about fantastic products and experiences.
Leadership’s focus is on cost-effectiveness. While your executives are focused on cutting expenses, now is the perfect time to sell them on the inexpensive, effective, and fun word-of-mouth stuff you’ve always wanted to try.
Free advertising will always beat someone who’s paying for it. If you can get really good at word of mouth now, while everything is down, you’ll be unstoppable once the economy picks up again and your customer acquisition costs are a fraction of that of your competitors.
[Here's a recent post I did for the SmartBlog on Social Media. You can follow the blog here or subscribe to the newsletter here.]
Make it simple for fans and influencers to talk about your stuff and your site with lots of things to share, forward, and use offline right on your website. Without these things, you’re at the very least frustrating your fans and, at most, killing potential word of mouth.
What to do:
Give images to share. Create a special page or area of your site for logos, banners, badges, and pictures that people can use when blogging or talking about you.
Offer text to copy. Write up blurbs of text for different lengths that people can use to describe your company, your products, your events, and anything else you hope they’ll talk about.
Make it easy to print. If someone’s trying to print your site, they’re probably about to share it. Make a clean print style sheet by removing unnecessary images and content.
Hosted by the Chicago American Marketing Association, Brands@Work will be a daylong forum focusing on branding thought leadership. Bonin Bough — Pepsi’s Director of Global Social Media — and I will be speaking on a panel discussing social media and its affect on branding.
In addition to our panel’s emphasis on dialogue at work, other speakers’ “at work” themes include:
- Simplicity
- Experience
- Revitalization
- Innovation
- Strategy
- Leadership
Key Details:
- Where: Chicago, IL
- When: Thursday, June 18, 8 AM – 4:30 PM
- Cost: $399 for members, $549 for nonmembers
- Register: Click here
Toyota: Social media and crisis management
Clorox: Using gaming strategies to grow community
BlogWell: How Big Brands Use Social Media
