Marketing Pilgrim

Marketers are wading through the many opportunities that exist in the mobile space and every day brings new shiny objects. One that received a lot of attention out of the gate is the iAd ad network from Apple. With its high production value and the “site within a site without leaving the site” approach it got everyone’s attention.

As with all things new and shiny you often have to wait until the dust settles to see what is really going on. Mobile Marketer reports from the digiday conference in New York City that at least one ad agency player, Jami Lawrence, associate director of mobile marketing at Publicis Modem, New York, may have nailed what is really going on with the iAd platform for now.

eMarketer posted an interesting statement today that was drawn from a white paper called The Changing Mission of Marketing Data. It’s a pretty extensive report that looks at the shift from old fashioned mailing lists to the online availability of detailed, customer data. It pays particular attention to the amount of money that will be spent on offline vs online marketing in the near future. Those numbers, if you’re curious, go like this:

“By 2012, U.S. marketers will continue to dedicate a steady $7.8 billion to marketing data and associated services, even while the proportion of those budgets commanded by “digital” sources and applications will more than double to represent 10.8 percent of the mix—over $840 million in annual investment.”

Most advertising execs are quick to jump on the social media bandwagon when it comes to marketing a product to consumers, but when it comes to marketing themselves, not so much.

A recent study by RSW/US took a look at the business-to-business social media habits of a variety of ad agencies. As reported by Brandweek, 54% of the agencies polled said they never or rarely use social media when prospecting for new clients. Of those that did use social media for outreach, LinkedIn was the clear favorite getting 51% of the vote. Facebook polled at only 9% and Twitter less than that.

You could attend a conference that costs $2,000+ for registration and travel expenses.

Or….

You could spend $97 on registration and use the other $1,903 to cover the cost of your travel to….HAWAII!

On October 5th, I’ll be speaking at the The Hawaii Social Media Summit at the Ala Moana Hotel in Waikiki, Honolulu, Oahu. It’s the excuse you’ve been looking for to tell your boss you absolutely need to visit Hawaii AND the math above will help you justify the expense!

As for the conference, in addition to my presentation on Online Reputation Management, the event will cover:

• How to effectively integrate social media to help grow your business
• Best practices for gaining exposure, website traffic, and visibility with Social Media Marketing

Over at TopRank Online Marketing Blog, Lee Odden was kind enough to invite me to write a guest post on a topic near-and-dear to my heart: social media monitoring.

How could I refuse!

With everyone (and their mother) jumping into social media monitoring, I thought it would be best to help you get the most out of your efforts by implementing a solid foundation. I provide six critical steps, starting with:

1. Understand Your Goals

Just because you can monitor everything that’s being said about your brand online, doesn’t mean you should just jump in, without setting clear goals. That’s the monitoring equivalent of hanging out at an open bar–you’ll quickly get dizzy and will end up with a major headache!

In a nutshell, YouTube is running a limited trial with four partners to test their live streaming platform. If you want to get a look today is the day (see schedule below as ‘broadcasts begin at 11 am EST).

The offering is through a limited number of partners and it looks like YouTube wants to make this more widely available. The limited rollout is for obvious reasons (as in this thing might be buggy so keep it contained).

From the YouTube blog we read

This new platform integrates live streaming directly into YouTube channels; all broadcasters need is a webcam or external USB/FireWire camera. Included in the test is a “Live Comments” module which lets you engage with the broadcaster and the broader YouTube community. For the purpose of the trial, this offering will only be available today and tomorrow. Based on the results of this initial test, we’ll evaluate rolling out the platform more broadly to our partners worldwide.