Spring brings the South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive, film and music festivals and conferences to Austin, Texas. This year, the events also spawned new interest in Twitter, the first microblog and originally an R&D project of Odeo. Tech celebrities at SXSW made heavy use of Twitter and created tremendous attention for it in their blogs and in the media. Winning the Web Award in the blog category increased the hype around it, though some users find the 140 character limitation difficult to work with.
Tag Archives | Marketing
Marketing is the way we tell our story so it’s relevant to real people in their real lives. Telling our story is more than branding and logos but how the price, the value proposition, the routes to market and all that tie together as part of a whole.
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.
CMOs: Align Yourself to the C-suite
Is Marketing considered a a Corporate Performance Contributor? From conversations I’m having around the Valley, I’ve come to realize that marketing and its relevancy to the C-Suite is (in cleaned up language) not-so-good. Marketing is no longer considered contributing to the corporate performance of a company; not in any strategic kind of way. It hurts [...]
RIM’s Blackberry Campaign Commentary
Blackberry’s been running a great campaign. It started with a banner ad. The banner asked you to share with Blackberry “why you loved it”. From there, you could read other stories of why people loved their blackberry. There are lots and lots of stories. And you can learn more about your Blackberry in the process. [...]
Digital Slices: Atomizing the Business of Segmentation
Segmentation has always been a key part of marketing. Sorting customers into appropriate segments allows business and marketing types to filter ideas, glean intelligence, set prices, and decide what to offer and what to toss.
Segmentation also allows successful companies to produce just the right thing to address the needs of different slices of the market.
Affinity!
Affinity! That illusive icon in the distance that every company wants to attain. When you have it, you’re golden. When you don’t, everything’s a struggle. It’s that tight grouping and bond a customer has with a company, a brand. And every company — small or big — can create it, keep it, grow it or [...]
Affinity is Different From Love
Affinity is described by Merriam-Webster as 1.) an attraction to or liking for something, and 2.) likeness based on relationship or causal connection.
Customers may like many different companies, but when it comes to affinity, there are few firms that make the grade. So what is it, this word affinity, and how is it different from love?
Separating “How” from “What:” An open letter to the tech industry
One of the advantages of working as a consultant is that you get to look at the big picture across corporations. You can see trends and common themes that might not be obvious to somebody working in a single company.
One of the themes that’s become very clear lately is our industry’s difficulty telling the difference between “how” and “what” when designing products.
Consumers to Corporations: Where’s My Experience?
With a print job deadline looming, I Googled on Kinko’s, figuring I’d get their number and call before I went over. Clicking again for more information, I was faced with the FedEx landing page. Suddenly, my services and solution were reduced to 8-point type–the most subsidiary of subsidiaries–and the services I wanted were nowhere to be found.
We think we know… but we don’t
Product Managers and Marketing people often think we know our customers and what they want from us. But let me challenge that thinking. If we knew more about our customers or even our prospects, we might change what we product in terms of experiences. Let me suggest this. When I google shoes, which I am [...]