Ars Technica assistant editor Jacqui Cheng wakes us up to the fact that many Americans may be on the Internet, but they’re not surfing with the style we use in Silicon Valley. That smacking sound you just heard? It’s the entire Googleplex smacking their lips at the growth opportunity. Jacqui’s key sentence is this: “There’s [...]
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It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Community!
Last Friday, I went to a party in Atherton and met two CEOs who used the word “community” as their secret sauce.
Influencer Marketing Matters
A Rubicon Sparkler at the beginning of the season saw CEO Nilofer Merchant presenting a discussion on influencer marketing with Nick Hayes, co-author of Influencer Marketing: Who Really Influences Your Customers.
Don’t Throw Your Influencers Under the Bus Just Yet
One thing the marketing industry and the tech industry have in common is that they’re both periodically swept by fad ideas (call them memes if you want to sound hip) that enchant everyone to the point of obsession. That obsession then produces a backlash that causes everyone to swing the other way and completely dismiss the original idea. We’re going through one of those cycles right now with the idea of influencer marketing. As usual, the reality is somewhere in between the hype and the backlash–influencer marketing is not the be-all that some people made it out to be, but it’s not bunk either.
Winning Business Models: Innovation vs. Invention
Invention is the classic way to build a successful company. However, invention is much harder for a mature company or a mature technology. Business model innovation is an attractive option in many cases as a way to differentiate an offer, improve profitability or both. Below are five emerging business models.
Whole Foods And Trust
Whole Foods learned the wrong lesson from its misuse of online forums.
Facebook enables Brand Affinity To Take place
Facebook now will give advertisers the ability to create their own profile pages on its system that will let users identify themselves as fans of a product. Let’s users (and the advocates amongst those users) show their beliefs, feelings, perhaps even needs. And with it, brand owners would choose to place their advertising dollars here as compared to the other companies.
Marry Sony? I think not.
Sony loves me. It’s true. They recently found my email address and invited me to become a Sony Brand Ambassador. You can imagine how thrilled I was.
Standing Apart: How a Blender Creates Affinity
The central goal of online marketing isn’t awareness, it’s engagement. And the five key tools to produce engagement are affinity, personality, community, co-creation, and advocacy. Engagement at the broadest level is getting the customer involved with your company, with your products and often, with your people. You want your customers to get to know your organization, its values and services. When customers like what they see and experience, the relationship deepens and it leads to affinity. Thus what was once a distant relationship becomes personal. Another way to same thing perhaps is to say that “Personality replaces traditional brand marketing”
The Nature of Things: Web Marketing
For each era, there are new rules. In the web world today, marketing online has new rules. Marketing is no longer about awareness online, but about creating an experience for the consumer or customer.
I propose the new marketing goal with online marketing is about engagement. Personal engagement. Connection from user to company. Customers like what you help them do. Your offerings are appealing and designed around and with them. Customers are delighted because they can exchange usages with one another and therefore find more ways to use your gadget. Joy of engagement brings them back again and again.