Marketing isn’t so hard. You just need to inspire people. Way to go Discovery Channel. I’m downloading some of your shows now…
Archive for the 'Marketing' Category
Kevin Kelly at Technium has a great brilliant post that every creator, artist and marketer should read. His general thesis is this: Rather than try and create that one mega-popular hit that millions of people will love, you should try and grow a club of “1,000 true fans”. A “true fan” is someone that loves what you create so much that they buy everything you sell, follow your blog, travel to see your shows, subscribe to your mailing list and buy the super hi-def remixed re-released box set. Kevin’s theory is that any singular creator can make a great living with just 1,000 true fans.
Seth Goodin has been pushing a similar marketing plan for years: focus on creating amazing products and fostering radically dedicated fans (through a pursuit of excellence, customer service, feedback and communication). The Internet, of course, now makes this all possible.
The great news for the marketer is that the “1,000 True Fans” marketing plan is very do-able (and measurable). Its very intimidating to stare at a product and wonder how you are going to get 5 million people to buy it. But 1,000 people? That’s doable. And measurable in a few dozen a week. You just need to put the right tools in place to be able to track who is a true fan and to keep them happy.
The Facebook freak out continue,s but hidden in the midst of it is a shining example how great PR and how to run a company right. Nate Weiner got his blog post to the cover of Digg.com with the story of Facebook’s new ads invading his privacy on the gaming webiste Kongregate. He lamented the lack of control given him over his personal data and explains in the post how to block Facebook ads using a Firefox extension.
But the real news is in the first comment. The CEO of Kongregate was the FIRST POST, apologizing to Nate and explaining how his company was going to fix the problem. The comments that followed contained many a impressed shout-out and thank you to Kongregate for a fast and fair response.
This is how to treat users and get customers to love you. Well done Kongregate.
Techcrunch is reporting on the soon-to-be-released advertising additions to FaceBook: namely, their Project Beacon which will allow third-party stores such as Amazon.com or Orbitz to publish stories to your FaceBook Newsfeed whenever you purchase something (like a book or plane ticket). For example: Someone might purchase FixTunes and then a message would appear on the news feeds of all their friends: “Daniel just purchased FixTunes. Click here to see it”.
This is great news for advertisers and e-commerce sites. The news feed already serves as an excellent tool for virally spreading information (look at how fast the Stephen Colbert group formed), and knowing that your friend purchased a product is about as good an endorsement or review there is. We would definitely be excited to integrate this into FixTunes.
That said, from a user/consumer perspective, I’m not sure how this will play out. I am already starting to feel like my Facebook News Feed is starting to resemble my email inbox - full of spam. Not spam in the viagra-nigerian-dictator form, but spam in the form of somewhat useful information that I technically asked for but don’t have time to care about. I’m already overloaded by notes on all my friends changing relationships, adding pictures, getting hungry, joining groups and so on. What they bought may just be too much. Could this be the beginning of the end of Facebook?
One of the big stories of the last two days: Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine, got fed up with the amount of unwanted, irrelevant and targeted PR (spam) press-releases he was getting he compiled a list of 300 or so PR people whose addresses he had blocked. He then published the list of blocked emails on his blog.
Insanity quickly followed. Three comments were quickly posted on his post fighting over the rightness or wrongness of 1) Sending spam 2) Emails sent to purchased mailing lists aren’t spam or 3) Is it ok to “out” all those people and publish their emails. A lot of people are upset / angry / embarassed / happy / scared / crazy. Its all very funny. Check out this catfight. Chris’ response to the aftermath is here.
Lesson learned: never ever send out a mass email unless you are absolutely positive that every single recipient will be thrilled to receive and read it. No exceptions.