Marketing Pilgrim

Homogenized messages have no soul. Take a moment to internalize that and then we’ll move on. That thought comes to you from John Rich, the newly crowned winner of Celebrity Apprentice and Gary Busey who cannot be described with mere words.

The two of them sat down together to talk social media marketing with Top View and as silly as it may sound, they make some great points. As Rich explains, the power of social media is that it has the ability to create a personal connection with another person, a person you may never actually meet. You may not have the pleasure of sharing “cig-ars” with Busey, but you can converse with him on Twitter.

When it comes to finding information about items they’d like to purchase, 69% of the respondents in Yahoo’s new study said they trusted the internet. They study is called “The Long and Winding Road: Gamesmanship of Shopping” and it’s the lead up to a webinair they’ll be delivering later this week.
The concept they’re after here is that thanks to the internet, consumers have the ability to do a lot more research before a purchase than they could in the past. They’re using search engines and online content to explore their purchase options and getting recommendations from friends through social media. Because of this, buyers are less impulsive, which isn’t necessarily the best news for marketers.

One thing that does spur a buyer on to faster action is the deal.

One common activity when a person or an organization is trying to do something important but aren’t quite sure how to get there is to try a little bit of everything to see what works.

Well, while the idea seems OK the reality is that trying too much at once can water down results of some otherwise strong options. It looks like the SMB market may be experiencing some of this as they try to acquire more customers via online channels.

eMarketer reports from a survey conducted by Bredin Business Information that SMB’s are increasing their efforts across the board to find that elusive customer

When I was a kid I used to have this little red telescope that I got for Christmas one year. I remember setting it up on the roof of our storage shed and looking up at the moon with my dad. It wasn’t much of a telescope, but it was good enough too see some craters, and for an 8 year old kid that was pretty cool. Since then I have always liked the moon. Even to this day I find myself staring up at the night sky tracing its edge.

In order to promote their new Groupon Now service, Groupon is offering a number of dollar deals for folks in the Chicago area. $1 for $10 meal at Manny’s Coffee Shop and Deli, $1 for $18 at Baba Pizza and Pasta, or perhaps you’d like to pay $1 for beers at Grace Street Tap.

The promotion is running today only, but if it’s successful, it’s likely Groupon will repeat it when they open Now in other cities. It’s also assumed that Groupon is picking up the tab for the discount, but that’s not for sure.

Groupon Now is a variation on the daily deal site that preys on hungry, bored people who don’t want to plan ahead. It’s heavily mobile-dependent, using your current location to offer you deals in your area.

We spend a lot of time around here discussing the concept of whether or not social media marketing is worth the effort. We’ve seen reports that show that website traffic from social media networks is pretty low and I’m about to show it to you again. But this time, I’ll take it a step further thanks to the folks at SeeWhy.

SeeWhy studied a sampling of 60,000 ecommerce transactions across a variety of sites in February 2011. The first thing they did was chart where the traffic came from, but not all of the traffic. Since running an online store is about selling things, they looked at only the people who actually loaded items into their shopping cart. Here’s what they got: