Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

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How To Generate Buzz

December 20th, 2011

In today’s media-savvy world, one of the most important things you can do to increase your opportunities is to generate buzz. There are a number of activities you can undertake to increase your public perception and generate the kind of buzz that has the potential to expose you and your brand to new revenue opportunities. I say, “has the potential” because the unfortunate reality of this method is that there are no guarantees that generating buzz will generate business. But the other realities are that 1) there is more chance that increased buzz will present you with chances to generate business and 2) you can do a lot of this work yourself so at least your activities don’t have to be expensive.

All of your activities will relate around media — specifically you’ll be dealing with both public media (newspaper, radio, TV news shows, etc.) and private media (blogs and social media sites). Interestingly, the two have a symbiotic relationship — public media will increase your blog readership and your blogging will entice public media to cover you.

Creating the actual blog is easy. Just go to www.wordpress.com and register for a free account. Then contact an administrator to build your initial site and host it for you. You could do that yourself but since you most likely have no idea what you’re doing, I suggest you find someone to help you. You want to look for someone who is knowledgeable, responsive, and inexpensive.

Setting the blog up is the easy part. What’s harder is having something worthwhile to say day after day and week after week. There’s not much I can do to help you with this except to suggest that you’ll grow into it over time as you experiment with what works and what doesn’t and as you begin to find your own unique voice. Things I can tell you from experience is that consistency is critical, shorter posts (two pages max) are better than complicated, multi-part documents, and a personal view or revelation is better received than a pure business-like essay. Most important, be sure to write about things that both interest and help your audience instead of posting updates about what you or your company has been up to lately.

I’m too impatient to wait for readers to find my blog on their own, and I’m neither popular enough nor presumptuous enough to believe people care about what I write enough to search me down, so I chose to send my blog out to an ever-growing list of readers. This adds some expense and effort but I believe it’s well worth it in reader volume. Still, most bloggers just post their data and hope the rest of the world beats a path to their literary mousetrap. I know many bloggers think my technique is akin to spamming but it works for me.

Because my entire strategy is built around getting people to read my blog (and then hire me to speak at their conferences and then hire my firm to build their brands), I use the other social media sites (specifically LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook) to generate traffic to my blog. For that reason, I accept almost every single person who invites me to join their SM rosters and I post to those sites with the goal of generating interest in who I am and what I write about.

To make life a little easier, I use www.ping.fm to send my messages to all three sites simultaneously. To make my Twitter management as painless as possible, I use TweetDeck to segregate both my followers and those I follow so I can continue to accept and “refollow” anyone who wants to follow me while having immediate access to the tweets of those I care most about. And I’ve ended any concern about whom I accept on Facebook by accepting the fact that I use the site for business, not as a personal communication device.

Once you’ve established your blog — both technically and as part of your weekly To-do list — the next activity is to create podcasts and post the videos on YouTube. An oft-repeated statistic is that YouTube is currently the world’s second most visited search engine (after its parent, Google) and soon its volume of searches will outpace Google itself. Because different people consume information in different ways, these video posts can be simple re-reads of your written posts or new content that takes advantage of the video format (you can show examples of your points, for example, or do magic tricks or hand puppets or whatever else you think will add interest).

These activities may seem overwhelming, but they’re really not. They just require a little bit of knowledge, a commitment of time to both learn the techniques and create the content, and the discipline to do them time after time, week after week. But after a couple of months of activity, you’ll have enough critical mass of content established online to undertake stage two — pursuing public media.

Here’s where you’re going to reach out to various reporters and other bloggers to get them to write about you and direct people to your online persona. The easiest way to do this is to simply call them. Consider your public relations outreach to be a daily part of your new business cold-calling activities and set aside the time to establish relationships with reporters and bloggers. Once they know who you are and what you do, they’ll be much more likely to want to include you in their stories and come to you for information.

Here are a few rules to keep in mind when dealing with reporters:

1.    Never lie to them. Even in today’s shifting journalistic environment when standards are dropping faster than a hooker’s panties, most journalists still live and die by their reputations. The worst thing that can happen to a reporter (other than being fired) is for their editor to have to print a retraction because they got something wrong. If you don’t know an answer, either say so or change the subject. Don’t make it up.

2.    Ever notice how reporters tend to quote the same people over and over? Every wonder how you can become one of those people? Make yourself available to the reporter when they want to write about you and when they don’t. Your goal is not to generate lines in the paper or minutes on air but to build a relationship with the reporters so they come to think of you as the expert in your specific field. That way, they’ll use you as a research source and will be much more likely to think of you when they need a quote or an example.

3.    Take them to lunch. These are the four magic words of PR as far as I’m concerned and a great way to establish a relationship that’ll pay off many times over. And, by the way, don’t only take working reporters to lunch. Because their world is so volatile, reporters live in a very unstable environment right now. If they are unlucky enough to be laid off, they find it an added indignity to be dropped by all of the fair-weather friends who used them when they had a public outlet but no longer see any value in the relationship. Remember that many reporters will be back in the public reporting sector sooner or later. They will certainly remember those who were supportive when things were tough. They’ll also remember who stiffed them. Who would you rather be?

Your bottom line should be to generate as much interest in you and your activities as possible. While there are no direct metrics to extrapolate how many blog readers or magazine articles it takes to generate additional income, a good rule of thumb is the more the merrier. Work hard to make your professional persona ubiquitous and it will pay off in perception and interest.

The other day the CEO of one our largest clients was sitting in my conference room discussing a project he wanted us to do for him. While he was talking, his phone rang and he glanced at the screen. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but it’s one of my board members. Pardon me while I take this.” During the conversation, he mentioned to the board member that he was in my office talking to me about the new project. “Oh, you know Bruce?” he asked the person on the phone. “Do you know him from when he presented at our board meeting?” He listened. “Oh, you know him from his blog.”

Here’s the beauty part: My client and I were just talking about us starting a robust social media program for him and now he saw the direct benefit of what we do. I was no longer a vendor selling a service but an expert who clearly practices what he preaches. I don’t yet know what the financial result of the project will be and there’s no reason to believe that we wouldn’t have gotten the project without the unplanned interaction but it certainly helped sell my point of view.

These sorts of things happen to me all the time. With a little work, they can happen to you, too.

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I Have No Idea What I’m Doing

September 6th, 2011

When I started my business my father called my action “the confidence of ignorance.” I didn’t really know what I didn’t know so I held my nose and jumped right in. And with some long hours, perseverance, the hard work of lots of great people, and some good luck it turned out pretty well. Yet almost thirty years later it’s finally dawned on me that my dad was right – I often have no idea what I’m doing.

Do you?

Social media has become a critical part of our agency’s branding and marketing. I’m promoting my ad agency, my speaking, and my books on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and whatever new technology has emerged since I wrote this post. But I have no idea what I’m doing.

I blog about branding and marketing and my own personal opinion about what’s going on in those worlds. I post it all online and send it out to my mailing list and try to promote it on all the social media sites that’ll have me. But I have no idea what I’m doing.

I travel around the world speaking at conferences and corporate meetings and attend acting classes and speaking workshops to try to make my platform skills better. Even with all the time spent and experienced gained, I still have no idea what I’m doing.

I’m starting to shoot videos and produce podcasts about branding and marketing and post them on YouTube. I’m taking videos of speeches I’ve given and learning how to edit them in Apple’s Final Cut and sending them out online and on CDs.  But I have no idea what I’m doing.

I wrote a couple books on branding and produced them with traditional publishers. Then I self-published the latest book and we distributed it ourselves. Finally, I wrote a novel called The Mouth of the South and didn’t even self-publish it, just uploaded it to Amazon as a Kindle book. But I have no idea what I’m doing.

We’re creating a new website, trying to make it as interactive, mobile-friendly and user-friendly as possible and all at the same time. But I have no idea what I’m doing.

When people ask me if they should promote themselves or their companies on Facebook, Google+ or LinkedIn; if they should blog, tweet, email or send handwritten letters; if they should shoot videos, record podcasts, write books, or speak at conferences; if they should offer discounts on couponing sites, or run ads on TV, radio, newspapers or billboards, my answer is a resounding “yes.” When they tell me they don’t know how to do it, I say, “don’t worry, I have no idea what I’m doing either.”

I’m not smart enough to figure out SEO and SEM. I don’t have enough time to respond to all the tweets I receive. I don’t like Facebook enough to really want to dive into it. I think I only use about 11% of the capabilities of Final Cut. And not one of my books has become a bestseller regardless of how much time, effort, and money I’ve spent on them.

Why not? Could it be because I have no idea what I’m doing?

My marathon times aren’t dropping, my harmonica playing’s not getting much better, and the TV show I’m trying to create isn’t rushing itself into production. You already know the reasons why. It’s because I have no idea what I’m doing.

Are you starting to see a pattern here? Have you gotten the message? As much as I’d love to use this page to brag about all the brilliant things I’m trying to accomplish I have no idea what I’m doing.

Do you?

I think that my feeling is the true zeitgeist of what’s going on today in the world of online marketing, new entrepreneurship, and personal development. Of course we can listen to the experts pontificate about whatever it is they know about, but just like the tip of the metaphorical iceberg, what they know and talk about is just a small portion of what’s really out there.

What I have in common with those experts is that they don’t have any idea what they’re doing anymore than I do.

They just do it anyway. And so do I. And, truth be told, so should you.

The key, as Nike taught us, is to “Just Do It.” Microsoft has built an enormous company around the notion of implementing first and perfecting later. Or as my dad also used to say, “There’s never time to do it right but there’s always time to do it over.”

So blog, post, tweet, self-publish, promote, and sell, to your heart’s content. And don’t worry if you don’t quite know what you’re doing. Why not? Because I have no idea what I’m doing, either.

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Dying To Be In Facebook

August 30th, 2011

Has anyone else noticed the recent rash of Millennials hurting themselves or dying preventable deaths falling off of waterfalls, mountains, and bridges?

A 26-year old from San Ramon “…hiked with three other people to the peak of Half Dome. She fell 600 feet to her death Sunday while trying to descend a landmark rock formation.”

Here’s one from the Northwest:

“An Oregon woman was in a Portland hospital Wednesday after falling 50 feet from a wilderness cliff, breaking her leg in two places and surviving more than three days on wild berries, caterpillars, and creek water.”

Here’s one that happened in Yosemite a couple weeks back:

“A young man lost his footing, slipping close to the edge of a waterfall. A female companion frantically grabbed for him but stumbled. Another hiker followed and the three were swept over the powerful 317-foot Vernal Falls. Authorities at Yosemite National Park are still searching for two of the bodies.”

Yosemite alone has recorded 17 deaths in an unusually fatal year. “While five visitors have died…from natural causes, the others were accidental and often preventable,” officials interviewed by CNN said.

Authorities are desperately searching for answers to explain the recent rash of deaths. In other words, what the hell is going on?

The common factors between many of these recent accidents are the age of the victims and that several of them were venturing into spots they didn’t belong so they could take photographs.

People falling off of mountains while taking pictures isn’t new, of course. The most famous may have been Beauregard Jackson Pickett Burnside who fell to his death while snapping Rosalind Russell in the 1958 movie version of the Broadway musical Mame. But today’s death count is unprecedented.

Why the sudden need for these pictures of daring-do?

To post on Facebook, I’m sure. Today’s Millennial generation doesn’t merit an experience for the value of the experience itself; rather they value the documentation and distribution of those experiences on social media sites such as Facebook. In other words, an activity is not real unless someone else sees you do it.

Millennials have lost the ability to determine what should be private about their lives in general. Larry Constantine put it this way on his blog anaLOG: “…If I stand on a soapbox in a public square, the default assumption is that everything I say or do is grist for the mill…If I lean over to you on a panel while covering the microphone…the default assumption is that the aside is a private exchange.

(Now) there is a generation coming up that does not understand these distinctions… Couples fighting on Facebook and people throwing tantrums on Twitter are all symptoms that we are losing a crucial distinction between public and private domains…” So are people falling off mountains while taking photos.

But that’s only half the answer. The other common denominator is that today’s victims are members of the Trophy Generation where everybody wins, nobody is a loser, and there are no negative consequences. Why not ignore warning signs and railings or hike up mountainous trails in flip-flops if all the danger has always been sanitized out of your life? Millennials often haven’t learned that life is not like a video game where you can go down in flames and then just hit the reset button. There are no do-overs in the analog world — physics simply wins. That’s why it’s not called the “theory of gravity” — it’s the law.

I hate to be too mercurial about such an unhappy and preventable state of affairs but there’s an important seismic shift occurring here. If young consumers are risking their lives to share the evidence of their exploits then surely this behavior will manifest itself in other areas of their lives, including their purchasing tendencies. This should be a wake-up call to marketers, especially older, less tech-savvy ones, who pooh-pooh online marketing and communities. Companies must create opportunities for their Millennial customers to interact online and share their product-centric experiences. For example, cruise lines must provide online posting sites; hotels and destinations need to allow their customers to show and tell both their upcoming plans and their experiences; and banks and restaurants alike need to post and link photos and recaps from their networking opportunities. In fact, businesses in all verticals must find opportunities for their Millennial customers to express themselves and communicate with their cohorts. After all, while Millennial customers may be less brand loyal than their older peers, they’re just dying to be in Facebook.

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Seven Steps for Successful Tweeting.

June 27th, 2011

Ryan Dunn's Facebook post

Jackass star Ryan Dunn was killed when he crashed his Porsche 911 GT3 early Monday morning. A few hours before the 3 a.m. accident, Dunn had posted a photo on Twitter in which he is seen drinking with friends. Hours later, movie critic Roger Ebert tweeted: “Friends don’t let jackasses drink and drive.” By Tuesday, Ebert apologized on his blog, “I was probably too quick to tweet. That was unseemly.”

Dunn's car after the accident

Unseemly?? Now that’s an understatement.

In the meantime, the tweet prompted an outpouring of criticism against Ebert on Facebook and Twitter, so much of it profane that Facebook removed Ebert’s page.

Ebert might have felt marginally contrite about his insensitive tweet, but certainly not about Facebook cutting his ties with his followers. “Facebook! My page is harmless and an asset to you,” he wrote. “Why did you remove it in response to anonymous jerks? Makes you look bad.”

Roger Ebert

Facebook promptly returned Ebert’s page with a quick statement: “The page was removed in error. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Heidi Montag, The Hills starlet obsessed with plastic surgery, lost her favorite surgeon, Frank Ryan, in a fatal car accident.

“He lived up in Malibu on a tiny street and he was texting while driving and he accidentally went over the cliff,” the surgeon’s ex-girlfriend told People Magazine. More specifically, he was tweeting. Below a picture of his dog, he wrote, “Border collie jill (sic) surveying the view from atop the sand dune.”

And don’t even get me started about Anthony Weiner, the married US congressman who lost his seat because he was caught sexting with a Las Vegas blackjack dealer and then lied about it. Without even commenting on the banality of his texts, didn’t he know that the Internet is forever? (Obviously not, the question was rhetorical.)

Has the world gone insane? People are dying to tweet and tweeting about people dying. Politicians are posting public messages that they wouldn’t dare to whisper out loud. And then a whole online keiretsu of statements are released about the tweets and the comments.

Look, we all know texting and driving is a really bad idea. Recent studies show that it’s even more dangerous than drinking and driving. But that study wouldn’t have helped Ebert, Ryan or Weiner. They weren’t DWI (driving while intoxicated); they were TWS (texting while stupid). And as comedian Ron White says, “You can’t fix stupid.”

Common sense tells us that when you’re in a hole and you want to get out, the first thing to do is stop digging. But the better thing is not to fall in the hole in the first place.

Maybe it’s time for some marketing lines to come to the rescue. Want to know what to do when you’re on fire? “Stop, drop, and roll.” How about when you approach a busy intersection? “Stop, look, and listen.”

Those lines work. After all, how often do you read about flaming pedestrians being hit by speeding cars?

So why don’t we take a page from elementary school safety campaigns and  and adopt The Seven Steps for Successful tweeting? “Think. Write. STOP. Edit. Decide. STOP. Post.”

If people would just pause for a moment to think about what they’re posting, texting, and tweeting – or where and when they’re doing it – maybe they’d think twice before endangering themselves, their brands, and all the people around them.

Naaaaaaaah.

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The Instant On Generation

June 13th, 2011

I was a kid back in the dark ages of transistor radios. If a friend told me about a cool new song, I’d tune in to WQAM and wait until they played what I was waiting for. Usually it would take an hour or more if the song was hot. While I waited I’d get my cassette recorder plugged in and loaded so I could tape the song. Invariably, I’d miss the beginning and inadvertently record my mom calling me for dinner over one of the verses.

Sometimes I had a little allowance money burning a hole in my pocket and wanted to order something from the ads on the back of my comic books – sea monkeys, say, or X-ray specs. I’d get my mom to write a check, put it in an envelope and root around for a stamp. Then I’d drop it in the mailbox and wait the four to six weeks the small print warned me about. I’d religiously check the mailbox every day after school but that didn’t make the package arrive any sooner.

Things are different today. When my daughter gets a text message about a great new band she has to hear, an MP4 file of the actual song usually accompanies the SMS. If not, she can go to YouTube or the iTunes store, download the song to her phone and listen to it right away.

If my son wants to buy something, he can simply order it online and have it Fed-Ex’d to him in a day or two. And while he waits he can track his package as it wings its way across the country. No one over 45 actually cares where the package is until it arrives in their hot little hands but younger consumers need to know when it’s in Tulsa, when it’s in Memphis, and when it’s on the delivery truck.

Of course if it’s a book he wants, he can just one-click order it on Amazon and have it transmitted to a Kindle, iPad, or laptop in less than 60 seconds.

These buyers are labeled by a lot of names these days, – Generation X, Generation Y, Echo Boomers, Millennials – demographic titles based on when they were born. But I think it would be more accurate to name them psychographically, based on the trait they all share: their instant gratification addiction. My genius friend David calls them The Instant On Generation – the hordes of people who have grown up with the “what have you done for me next” demands of digital technology and don’t know how to function in an analog environment.

Unfortunately for them, world events are conspiring to make things very difficult for Instant-ons. Thanks to the combined effects of a burgeoning world population, expanded financial opportunity in the under-developed world and the democratization of technology, there are more people on airplanes, more people in restaurants, more people consuming natural and man made resources, and more people traveling around the world than ever before. And while Instant-ons are perfectly happy to zoom along in their digital environments, finding their friends on FourSquare, making reservations on OpenTable, and communicating with each other 24/7 across Facebook and Twitter, the sheer number of people expecting immediate service in the carbon universe is an unscalable mess that slows everything down.

Before you start pining for the good old days, remember that things weren’t that fast before. It’s just that there were far fewer people clamoring for service and those people were way more willing to wait their turn. But older consumers didn’t grow up with the instant reward and response of videos games. They didn’t grow up with the instant gratification of flash frozen prepared foods heated in a microwave. And they didn’t grow up with a 24/7 communication device glowing greedily in their pocket.

Tomorrow’s consumer did, and tomorrow’s marketer is going to have to figure out how to successfully service people who live the lyrics to the Queen song: “I want it all and I want it now.”

Talking about today’s sped up world, Steven Wright said, “If you put instant coffee in a microwave you almost go back in time.” Funny thing is I don’t smell coffee. I smell opportunity. Specifically, how to make Instant-ons happy? An improved customer experience is one way: think Disney World’s line management techniques or the TSA security experience at Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport. Here in Miami, wealthy wannabe American Instant-ons can even hire people to stand in line for them at immigration.

But all of these solutions are just Band-Aids. The true moneymakers will be the ones who figure out how to reconcile Instant-ons’ digital expectations with analog reality.

 

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The Revolution Might Be Televised. You May or May Not Notice.

April 12th, 2011

Some revolutions start with a bang. “The shot heard ‘round the world” is how Ralph Waldo Emerson waxed poetic about the opening salvos of the American Revolution at the battles of Lexington and Concord.

About 135 years later, “The shot heard ‘round the world” was used to describe the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria that plunged Europe into World War I.

Other revolutions don’t announce themselves with such fervor. Do you remember when you started using a cell phone, started emailing or first used Facebook? Those activities probably didn’t seem like such big deals then but one day you woke up and everyone was doing it. Unlike the introduction of Apple’s iPod, iPhone, and iPad, most technological advances seem to just kind of happen. One day you know a little bit about them and by the next week they’re ubiquitous. When you weren’t watching the world just seemed to change, causing enormous upheavals in various industries including journalism, advertising, education, and banking. As I’ve said before, “The future started yesterday.”

There’s an old wife’s tale about boiling frogs. Why any old wives would want to actually boil a frog is beyond me. But that’s not the point of this story so please bear with me.

The idea is that if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water it will jump out the very second it feels the heat. But if you start the frog off in a pot of cool water and then slowly turn the heat up, the frog will sit quietly until it’s parboiled.

Some revolutions are like that. They happen so quietly and so discreetly that you don’t even realize that they’ve occurred. They just become part of the air we breathe and the ground we walk on and we take them for granted as if they’ve always been there.

With that in mind, take a look at this Starbucks’ ad created by advertising wunderkind Dave Lubars, creative director at BBDO.Study it carefully and tell me what you find unusual. The letters in the headline are in different shades of brown but that’s not so odd. The descriptors Starbucks uses to identify their drinks (“Decaf,” “Syrup,” “Milk,” etc.) have been changed to romantic terms such as “Working. With you,” “Alone. Together,” “Table for Two,” but that’s not it either. And instead of just stamping the Starbucks trademark on the bottom of the ad the logo has been cleverly inserted by including it on a product shot, in this case a Starbucks cup with a frothy cappuccino in it. But that’s not it either.

What’s unique to this ad are the models, specifically the models’ sex. The model in the front is almost certainly male but the model in the back, in the red plaid shirt, could be a man or a woman. And all the details, from the watch to the bag, add to the ambiguity.

This is the first ad that I’ve seen from a major advertiser where the couple could be heterosexual or homosexual, depending on the viewer’s point of view. Do you want to see a man and a woman? Then there they are. Do you better identify with a gay couple? Then that’s who’s in the ad.

Most big companies only show gay couples in ads specifically aimed at gay audiences. The obvious thinking is that while the companies want to take advantage of the vast economy of gay consumers, they don’t want to risk offending other, less tolerant customers. But I’ve seen this ad in both Rolling Stone and The New York Times and while both have substantial gay readership, neither caters exclusively to that specific market.

Starbucks’ ad is really an amazing bit of sleight of hand – an ad chameleon that changes its orientation based on who is looking at it. I’m really looking forward to seeing the rest of Starbucks’ campaign – I’m curious to see if this piece is a one-off anomaly or the first shot quietly fired across the bow of the sexual orientation of traditional advertising.

I’ve read that Starbucks is also running this campaign on TV. I truly hope they’ve figured out a way to maintain their now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t androgynous approach. If they don’t, Gil Scott-Heron will be right after all. The revolution will not be televised.

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Learning From Longhand and Furlongs.

October 26th, 2010

My laptop broke so I’m writing this blog post longhand.

There was an afternoon once when I was at lunch and got inspired and thumb-typed an article on my phone but this the first time I’ve ever written a post with a pen and paper. Even that wasn’t so easy because while I’ve got sketchbooks stacked everywhere, I had to search for ruled stock to write on. Plus, without the convenience of backspacing and spell check I find writing is a much less fluid process. Not to mention how much slower handwriting is when compared to typing.

The other day, Jonathan Robertson, the CEO of TG Capital, told a great story. He said a guest was staying in one of their hotels on the fifth floor in room 555. He woke up in the morning and noticed the alarm clock on the bed said “5:55.” When the newspaper was delivered he saw that the date was May Fifth. Opening the paper to the sports section, he found a horse in that day’s fifth race named Take Five. So he dressed, had breakfast, went to the track, and bet five thousand, five hundred and fifty five dollars on Take Five in the fifth.

“How’d he do?” we asked.

“The horse came in fifth” he answered.

Exactly as we should have guessed.

But just like I assumed the horse would win the race, I assumed that writing this story by hand would have inspired some different thinking then when I bang it out on my laptop. Other than a lot of cross outs and a sore left hand, however, it was pretty much the same.

My discovery was not in the words I wrote but in the result of the writing. I found that the whole process of creating these blog posts is technostic, or, technology agnostic. My brain doesn’t care how I record the information as long as I get it out of my head and onto paper. I can type, scribble, record or even capture my thoughts with whatever technology comes along next. As long as you read, enjoy, and ultimately find my words worth your time, I’m happy.

Come to think of it, the distribution of my messages is technostic as well. It doesn’t matter if I send you my blog post via e-mail, if you point your browser to http://www.TurkelTalks.com, if you click on the link in Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn or if someone forwards you the message. And it doesn’t matter if you read the post on your desktop, your laptop, your netbook, your smart phone, your iPad or if you print it out on paper. What matters is that you read it.

Perhaps we should obsess less over our tech and more over our text. After all, as Nicholas Negroponte wrote more than 15 years ago in his book Being Digital, “content is king.” He was right back then and he’s right today.

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The Death of the Business Card

October 19th, 2010

I’m sitting here in the mezzanine level of the Grand Ballroom in Collingswood, New Jersey, waiting for my turn to get up in front of the crowd and talk about Building Brand Value.

It’s interesting to be in the balcony of this restored Scottish Rite temple watching the proceedings. Between you and me, I feel a bit like the Phantom of the Opera, lurking in the shadows waiting to pounce.

The speaker before me is talking about social media. I was relieved he didn’t introduce himself as a social media “expert” because whenever I speak on that subject I open with, “anyone who says they’re a social media expert is lying to you.” That’s because the industry moves so fast and the technology changes so quickly that most of us can barely stay abreast of the particular areas of social media that interest us most, let alone understand the whole enchilada. Search Engine Optimization (SEO), for example, is just a small portion of the online marketing world but is so dynamic that it requires constant study and experimentation.

And now, as if social media and marketing technologies weren’t complicated enough, the explosion of smart phones has opened a whole new Pandora’s box. On the one hand, being able to reach consumers and potential consumers whenever you want and wherever they are is an incredible opportunity for marketers. On the other hand, the burgeoning mobile environment requires a whole new understanding and skill set.

Imagine my surprise when I met with my old friend Marcos the other day and asked him for his business card. “I don’t carry them anymore” he said. “Just text my name to 65047.” I did as he instructed. A few seconds later all his contact information arrived as an SMS message on my phone, ready to be copied into Outlook, friended on Facebook, and followed on Twitter.

“Now that you’re registered I can send you anything,” he went on enthusiastically, “updates, promotions, special deals and coupons. And because it’s all opt-in people can cancel whenever they want so there’s never any spam. My company has just two employees but we’re using the most sophisticated mobile marketing out there.”

The minute I got back to my office I went online, looked up the company and signed up for my own mobile account. Now, when I speak at conferences or meet people at networking events, I tell them to text “Turkel” (my keyword) to 65047. They get back an instant message from me with my contact information and their cell phone number automatically goes into my database where I can let them know where I’m speaking, announce my new blog post or tell them anything I think they’ll find valuable.

Best of all, it’s an easy and inexpensive way to add mobile marketing to your promotions arsenal with almost no barrier to entry. If you’re in the cruise line, airline or hotel business you can expand your yield management programs by sending special offers to your customers at the very last minute. If you’re in the restaurant business, you can offer specials – two for one, say, or a free glass of wine – at the exact moment when you have empty seats. If you run a CVB, you can issue travel deals when you see your stakeholders’ RevPAR dropping. Bloggers can announce their latest post in real time. Bakeries can let people know when the muffins are fresh out of the oven. Heck, you can use the technology to tell your softball team when you’re practicing or tell your friends when you’re going to the beach. The opportunities are endless; those are just the first few I came up with. Talk about yield management – now you can reach your customers right on their phones with time-stamped promotions.

All you need to do is click here and visit the Momares.com site. The trial is free, the process is simple and after just a few minutes you’ll be a mobile marketer too. If you type in the promo code TURKEL, Marcos will add an additional 50 messages to your account for free. And if you send me an e-mail with your new keyword, I’ll text you back and be your first customer.

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Knowledge is power. Really?

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Posted in Uncategorized | 21 Comments »


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