Marketing Pilgrim

We love our Twitter, Facebook and email for marketing, but nothing beats face time with a potential consumer – just ask the Fuller Brush Man. But before you start knocking on doors, download this new, free ebook from GoToMeeting. It’s called ‘The Best of Both Worlds: How to Effectively Leverage Social Media Relationships with Real-Time Collaboration Tools” and though the title is way too long, it’s packed with practical suggestions and inspiration to help you get face-to-face with your customers.

The ebook outlines ways for marketers to ramp up their social media marketing efforts through the use of Webinars and online conferences. If you’re like me, you probably associates those words with corporate training sessions but after reading the report, I saw the possibilities for creative marketing. Let’s start with the basics of any campaign.

Just over two years ago the folks over at Ontolo–Ben Wills and Garrett French– set out on the impossible quest to design a link building service that would bring forth the most relevant and valuable link prospects for link building campaigns.

They began work on a toolset to automate as much of the Link Prospecting and Link Qualification work as possible by crawling and analyzing thousands of link prospects against over 100 different valuation metrics.A tool that eliminates at least half of your link building work and doubles the time you can spend on link outreach. A tool that, In effect, gets you twice as many links each week without your having to work a single minute more.

Local marketing has always been a very traditional space. Newspapers, local magazines, yellow pages of some variety, direct mail, ValPak etc etc. Because of this traditional approach the local marketing segment has been a little slower to adopt the online space. However, if the numbers reported by a BIA/Kelsey study are correct that shift is taking place and ready to take root over the next few years.

The chart below shows the ‘recovery’ of local ad spend but the important number to note is that when the numbers fell off the table from 2008 to 2009 only traditional media took the hit.

Moving forward traditional marketing will still be the dominant vehicle but its percentage of the overall ad spend for the local marketer will be decreasing for the foreseeable future while online/interactive sees increases in overall percentage of ad spend.

Considering that today we should learn whether all the hubbub around TechCrunch and its alleged purchase by Aol. is true, here is a snapshot of the merger and acquisition activity thus far in 2010. As you can see Google is playing this game real hard. The following chart from CBInsights is courtesy of cnet.

Google is following the lead of one of the most successful tech companies of all time, Cisco. Cisco has been smart enough over the years to understand that if they wanted a technology or the talent around a technology they would use their deep pockets to purchase those assets rather than develop them themselves. They have done this over 140 times since 1993. By constantly infusing new ideas and new ways of thinking a company can stay relevant more readily. Google seems to be working the same system to stay ahead of a rapidly changing competitive landscape in the online space.

Every day we talk about the large number of people who are using not just social media but other Web 2.0 applications to manage and promote their business. Online project management sites, web mail, Google docs, and online chat are all becoming part of the working norm but not everyone is comfortable with where we’re headed. According to a new report commissioned by McAfee, more than 50% of the over 1,000 decision-makers surveyed said that Web 2.0 was a dark and scary place.

You could put their fear off to technophobic paranoia, but more than 6 out of 10 have already felt the burn of a security breach with losses averaging around $2 million.

Companies’ top four perceived threats from employee use of Web 2.0 are malicious software (35 percent), viruses (15 percent), overexposure of information (11 percent) and spyware (10 percent).

Sometimes, Hollywood admen don’t tell the truth. I know, you’re shocked, but that’s not to say they’re lying to us. It’s more a case of believing their own press.

Vincent Bruzzese, president of the worldwide motion picture group told TheWrap;

“In this business we spin ourselves into perceptions that aren’t real. They echo through the hallways of this industry, but the facts don’t support the claims.”

One of the claims in question is whether Twitter is an effective strategy for promoting movies. People in the know have stated that “The Blind Side” and “The Karate Kid” both had big box office numbers because of a positive run on Twitter, aka The Twitter Effect.

However, research by Ipsos OTX MediaCT says otherwise.