Have you heard about Greg Verdino’s new book, microMARKETING? The insights found inside are quite intriguing especially if you are:  1) trying to market your products and services in a cost-effective manner—and in today’s economy who isn’t? 2) enhancing your marketing, communications or customer service by implementing social media as part of your business culture; and 3) working to build one-on-one relationships with your customers and prospects. 

Given that these are things Serengeti helps our clients with, I was excited to get a peak into Greg’s thoughts on how harnessing social media and thinking and acting small is absolutely a proven and successful mindset.

While micromarketing is not a new concept (it’s been around since the late 80s), social media and social technology certainly enhance the “micro-ness” of how organizations can, and should, connect with their customers, clients, stakeholders, etc. today. With this mindset, Greg explores micromarketing for a new age through three key trends: 

• Microcultures;
• Microcontent; and
• Micromavens.

Think Small 

Repeat after me: microcultures, microcontent, micromavens. All are the very opposite of MASS. Marketers are taught, practice and hedge their marketing budgets on mass. You know exactly what I mean… How many people can we get into that lead pipeline? How many names can we buy for our direct mail or email marketing campaign? How many thousands of people surfed our website this month? The more, the better, the happier the sales and marketing management team will be! Right? 

Wrong. 

Unfortunately, there are situations where mass marketing just doesn’t work—and is quite expensive to boot! All of those names you cram into your lead generation machine, well they typically aren’t qualified and require a lot of nurturing (Read: coercion). What does this mean for your business? Flipping that lead funnel might just work better for you…less in, more out. 

Act Small

Wouldn’t it be much, much better to have people willingly lining up to knock on your door because they want to buy your product or service or donate to your cause? And how great would it be to have people out there evangelizing your brands to their entire network because they feel so strongly connected to them? After all, who doesn’t want BIG results?

So then, how can you start acting small?  You’re first priority is going to definitely include changing your marketing mindset. This can be a challenge, especially when marketers count on mass! Second, you’ll need to shift your thinking by asking “How can we… 

1. Resonate with masses of communicators;
2. Tap into pass-along power and peer-to-peer potential of the network effect;
3. Deliver mutual value through two-way interactions;
4. Make a commitment to engage people directly in real time;
5. Build meaningful relationships;
6. Earn attention; and
7. Have success through lots and lots of small things?”

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus… and he is bringing you customers and revenue!  

From large (Ford, Best Buy and Samsung) to small (author J.C. Hutchins and makeup artist Lauren Luke), Greg dives into how companies and professionals have used micromarketing to connect with their customers and grow their business by thinking and acting small. And Greg’s promise to help you become a micromarketer is as solid as the worksheet (40 Questions!) at the end of the book. 

What are you waiting for? It is a small world after all. 

[Disclosure: Greg Verdino is a friend, but I purchased this book and read it with only the scrutiny a traditional marketer turned micromarketer and Client Services Director could. Great job Greg!]

Image: Greg’s Website

One of the biggest misnomers in social media, and attempting to market to communities in social media, is that it’s entirely free. This notion comes from the “free” price tag that goes along with signing up for accounts on sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. It doesn’t cost you one cent from your bank account to open a basic account on these sites.

There are costs involved when you are considering entering into the social media space; the kind of costs that you don’t immediately pull out of your wallet to pay for. Since these costs are not immediate, the illusion that marketing efforts in social media cost less becomes even greater for companies looking for cheaper solutions to reaching their audiences.

Your Employees’ Time is Valuable

What a lot of companies neglect to figure into the larger picture is how much it costs them in time and resources of employees, tools and equipment. While it may be free to sign up for the account, the real cost comes with your employees maintaining those accounts and keeping them active in the social communities. Just creating the profiles and leaving them there doesn’t mean you are automatically going to gain a foothold in a social media community.

It takes time and serious effort to engage and truly interact with a community, and in order to do that  you first have to figure out which communities you need to be active in. That takes a lot of resources to start with, doing the due diligence of intense research. From there you formulate your strategy, again another tax on your employees’ time. Then its figuring out just how much of their time needs to be spent engaging and interacting with the community.

While Tools Can Be Free, They Could End Up Costing You In The End

From a tools perspective you need to both monitor and measure. While some tools might be free, such as Google Analytics and Google Alerts, there still is a cost of your employees’ time. Also, the free tools do have a limit of scope and you might find out later that its costing you much more by not having invested in the more expensive tools.

Monitoring tools like Radian6, Meltwater and TrackUR can give you better insight into monitoring your brand and related terms, but at a cost. Measuring tools like ClearSaleing and CoreMetrics can help you gauge how your efforts are affecting your bottom line in finer detail than most free tools.

So when you are hearing all the hype about Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and how these wonderful “Free” tools are helping companies reach new people every day, stop and take a step back away from the hype. Ask yourself, “How many man hours did it take that team to attain that success with the social media site?”  and  “How much time went into research and planning?”. Ask yourself, “How are they measuring success?”. Then ask yourself the final question, “Is it really free?”.

Yesterday, Arrington’s TechCrunch announced it was posting internal documents from Twitter sent to the online publication via an online hacker. TechCrunch has stated while they do not intend to publish the highly sensitive or “embarrassing” documents, they “are going to publish some of the other information that is relevant to Twitter’s business, particularly product notes and financial projections,” noted Arrington in a blog post yesterday.

What TechCrunch is doing is not just unethical, it’s illegal. Knowingly purchasing* stolen property and using it for profit is criminal and I truly hope they are prosecuted.

Online publications such as TechCrunch need to be held accountable for the information they choose to disseminate. Let’s not confuse this with muckraking or whistle blowing; this is gawking at stolen property to generate ad revenue and incoming links for search purposes.

What’s more bewildering is Arrington’s weak attempt to defend his decision to publish the content. Astonishingly, the primary image used in the post reads “Ethics 101. ” Arrington writes, “I feel bad for Twitter and I wish this had never happened. But it did happen and the documents are out there and they are going to be published somewhere on the Internet.”

Translation: If some scummy publication is going to publish this scoop, might as well be us!

Arrington then attempts to justify the decision by citing instances in which WSJ and Gawker posted a Yahoo Internal Memo and Sarah Palin’s email info respectively. In Arrington’s world, it’s not a crime if two or more people commit it. This argument is so ridiculous that I can’t possibly imagine Michael Arrington actually believes what he wrote. This begs the question: Did Arrington write this post in self defense or merely to further fuel discussion? I would guess the latter.

It’s important to prosecute so as to protect the private, proprietary information of individuals and corporations. In my opinion, it’s no worse than breaking into a home, stealing a bank account statement, and publishing it online under the guise of public interest.

*note: TechCrunch has not confirmed they purchased the material, but it is extremely likely that the hacker sold the material for profit.

One of the biggest complaints about social media, or rather reasons companies give for not getting involved in it, that I hear time and time again is that they are afraid of what people will say about them, and fear they have no control over that. Unfortunately for these companies what they don’t realize is that this is going on whether they are involved in social media or not. The problem really isn’t that there is something bad being said about them. The real problem is that they (the companies) aren’t listening to what’s being said.

Right now I’m on vacation in Key West. I say that not to make anyone jealous, but more to give a background to this post. See I booked my hotel based on the establishment’s response to some “negative” reviews on a Social Media site called TripAdvisor. I’m staying at the Palms Hotel on White Street here in Key West. I was looking for a quaint hotel, closer to the heart of Key West, but not amidst the busy happenings of Duval Street. I searched through reviews of a lot of hotels and B&B’s when I came across the listing for the Palms, I noticed a few negative reviews. But I also saw the owners, actively engaged in responding to those reviews. [View Entire Article]

Over the past few years, when working with clients to improve their pay-per-click campaigns, one of my first pieces of advice was to opt out of the Content Network.

From 2005 to 2007, it seemed the Content Network was just a black hole.   By default, a percentage of your spend was spent in the Content Network. 

Where did that money go?  Some of the traffic showed up in Web reports such as ‘Google Content Syndicated’ or ‘Google Ad Services.’  But, much of the traffic had no referrer information nor any keyword information.

And, if you did create a separate campaign for the Content Network, the traffic almost always proved to be lower quality than search traffic.

Google realized this.  And, back around 2007 … gave you the option to set bids differently for the Content Network than for search.

But, the problem remained. Where was this traffic coming from?  With no referrer nor keyword data, it was impossible to know.

Google realized this was a huge problem to search marketers.  So, while many search marketers were not paying attention … Google listened and made some changes, and the Content Network got good.

Some things you may not know about Google’s Content Network, 2009.

1) Reach – The Content Network reaches 76% of internet users across both mass media and niche media sites.

2) Placement Options – No more is the Content Network the black hole of search marketing.  You can choose where (type of site or specific site) you want your campaign to run.

3) Exclusions – Even better, if a site in the Content Network is not driving quality traffic, you can exclude it from the campaign.

4) Demographics – When you set up a campaign, you can include only the age and gender that you want to target.

5) Reporting – This is my favorite.  The Keyword/Placement report will tell you not only the normal stats for each click including domain but also interesting information about each site. (Parked Domain, Error Page, etc.)

If you are one of the search marketers who opted out of the Content Network a few years ago, it is definitely time to give it a second chance.

So, who’s Stuart Slann, why does he need advice, and why from us?

Stuart is an Englishman who decided to cheat on his wife with a Scottish woman he met on Facebook.  Affairs of the heart are things that happen all of the time, the world over, so what’s special about this one?  Well, the ‘woman’ turned out to be 2 men that had met Stuart on holiday in Mexico several months earlier.

Back then, they’d got into an argument over their soccer teams, which ended with the 2 Liverpool-supporters throwing Manchester-United-supporting Stuart (sporting a broken ankle and rib from an earlier para- sailing incident) into the hotel pool.

Rather than letting this be the end of it, these 2 then decided upon a new way to get at Stuart, and ‘Emma’ was born.  Over the next few months, Stuart and Emma had several, increasingly intimate discussions.  This culminated in Stuart agreeing to drive 9 hours from his home in Sheffield to a remote location in Scotland outside of Aberdeen to consummate their relationship.

Upon arriving, they communicated by text, with Emma asking Stuart to take a video off himself performing a NSFW (not safe for work) act with a sex toy.  He complied and sent it to her, then waited for 3 hours for her to ‘get off work.’

At the appointed time, he received a phone call from ‘Emma’, which was where the ‘joke’ was revealed to him.   Surprisingly, he seemed to take it quite well…maybe because he realized that ultimately, he’d put himself in this position.  Sure, the 2 ‘gentlemen’ had played him, but he’d made the decision to cheat and drive 9 hours to meet someone he’d never met.

What’s happened to Stuart in the month since this happened?  Well, the 2 Liverpool fans released the tape of the phone call as a video, with the video of Stuart and the sex toy as the background.

As you may imagine, this has been picked up by quite a few news sources – from international newspapers, to blogs, to soccer sites.  Many talk about the cruelty of the prank, but all of them giving the facts, talk about what happened to Stuart, and link to the video.  A Google search for “Stuart Slann” returns 702,000 results.  I went through the first 100 to see what was out there… and not 1 was unrelated.  Everything was about tale of deceit and treachery (that applies to both parties).

Reputation management wise, Stuart has one heck of a job on his hands.  With hundreds / thousands of pages that talk about him, some on very respected news sites, and the video having over 500k views…what should he do?  Can he do anything that will get rid of all of this?

Well, honestly, not really.  He has 2 options at this point.  The first of those is to lie low, and just wait until the story dies down.  Some of those articles will fade from the search results; as some sites expire their stories, with some fading due as their postings become stale over time.  However, in all likelihood, there are probably still going to be quite a few that stick around for his name – for the next time a new employer wants to find out about him or a potential girlfriend wants to check him out (his wife left him after the story broke).  Sure, he can build up sites and profiles for his name to push them off the front page, or even further down.  But, it’s going to take time and effort.

Stuart’s second option is to embrace it, sell his story to the press, and make some short-term cash off his experience.  Everyone knows about it, his marriage is over, so why not get his side of the story out…(not that it would particularly alter the search results given that the story that’s out now is apparently fairly accurate)?

Personal reputation management is a concern that everyone should have. Anything that you do can and may be used against you by anyone.  It’s all well and good believing nothing can happen to you in a protected community, where only your approved friends can see what you’ve said or posted.  But, all it takes is one upset friend or a fake friend to take what you’ve done and put it elsewhere.  Suddenly, you’re ruined.  Your boss finds out what you said about him.  Your spouse finds out about the pictures of you and your co-worker at the company party, etc.

Everyone has done and said things that they don’t want others to know about.  But, in this instant, connected world; there’s more of a danger than ever before that the lid of your personal Pandora’s box will open up and everything gets out…never to be placed back in the box.

So, think before you share.  Think before you put it on the Web.  Think before you post that photo.

…and most definitely, think before you video yourself with a sex toy to send to a person you’ve never met…

As the financial crisis in this country and abroad begins to dip its shifty fingers into our wallets, I wondered what you were doing both personally and professionally to cut costs in this economic downturn?

Cutting out (or down on) Starbucks?

Walking or taking public transportation to work?

Cutting marketing budgets?

Cutting other budgets?

Is there anything you’ve changed?

Anything that you won’t change?

Maybe you plan to buy fewer gifts for the holidays?

Or skimp on eating out at restaurants?

Let’s help each other get through this time –  which I believe can only be adequately described as “sucky”.  Leave your pennywise answers in the comments.