A Vision of Students Today - A must see video for anyone targeting students in their campaigns

This is a great snapshot of the modern undergraduate classroom in college/university. Even though the video tries to blame technology to a certain degree, I think it’s ironic how its “technology” that to a large extent, has facilitated the distribution of this video via the web in order to better promote the core underlying message, which I understand as: Society has CHANGED, it’s time for TRADITIONAL beliefs and systems to adapt to this new DIGITAL society.

Implications for marketers in the public sector:

• Students are not reading your textbook pamphlets and brochures
• Students don’t have time to watch TV during regular hours
• Most “leisure time” at home is spent on the web
• If you think students are in the library, think again.
• Mobile is THE NEXT BIG THING in terms of getting your message across
• Online Social Networks are HUGE (just don’t abuse them using traditional push-advertising)
• Students are smarter than you think, don’t tell them what to do, join into their conversation instead.

What are your thoughts?

Excellent explanations of both “wikis” and “social bookmarking”…

Once again, YouTube member leelefever has created wonderful illustrated explanations of popular Web 2.0 concepts/applications. His new videos explain “wikis” (above) and “social bookmarking” (below). Enjoy!

For additional visual explanations of social media, just click on “web 2.0 videos” in my tag cloud.

Quick Case Study : U.S. Secretary Mike Leavitt’s Blog

Whenever I am asked to give an example of a successful senior government executive blog, I tell people about Mike Leavitt, who is currently Secretary of Health and Human Services in the U.S. Federal Government. What makes it so different from other government blogs? Sec. Leavitt’s Blog is real. He takes the time to post at least once a week, albeit usually it’s from planes and hotel rooms. Sometimes he misses a post, sometimes he doesn’t answer comments, but you you know what, rather than just ignoring the issue, he’s honest about it and writes about how busy he is. Even though we all inherently know this already, him being open and honest about it adds a GREAT DEAL to the “real conversation” factor. His readers feel a true conversational relationship. He’s even written a post evaluating his blog by summarizing feedback he has received over the last few months and what he’s going to do to improve. Thanks to his willingness to experiment with social media, he has opened a door for regular citizens to talk with him one on one. Compare this with trying to arrange a personal meeting with someone of his stature in the “physical” world…

Why should he even bother you may ask? Is it not just more work? Well, my answer to you is that if you have that kind of stance and you work for the government (where service/program delivery based on citizen needs should be your prime concern), you are in the wrong job. That’s my two cents for the day…

MySpace finally opening floodgates to 3rd party apps…good but not good enough.

MySpace chief executive officer Chris DeWolfe announced on Wednesday that MySpace would be opening its API to third party developers, a direct response to Facebook’s API plans. “Within the next week or two, we’re going to be developing a catalog of widgets that are on MySpace that will make it really easy to categorize and find those widgets,” DeWolfe said. “The second thing we’re doing is that we are opening up a platform within the next couple of months to all developers. You heard it here first.” -PC Magazine Article

Personally, although I think it’s great that MySpace is finally opening it’s doors, I can’t help but feel that it’s a desperate attempt in fear of losing additional market share to the far superior Facebook. I never got what the big deal about MySpace was relative to other social media networks. The design is horrible, it’s cluttered with SPAM, and above all, it just looks so “amateur”. My only logical explanation for the masses that still use MySpace, is that they are used to using it and don’t want to switch unless their entire networks switch. Nonetheless, it will be interesting to see what kind of widgets start to appear. Will successful Facebook widgets (that made millions) simply be copied onto MySpace? I wonder what the the “code” copyright implications are in that case?

How we organize information on the web

Another great visual explanation of how our methods of organizing digital information have revolutionized the web.

10-tips on how to develop an effective Website Marketing Strategy

Rather than using a “one-size fits all ” web marketing strategy template, I often stun my clients by asking lots of questions. Questions like, Who is your target audience? What do you want them to do on your site? What are they currently doing? Are they finding what they came for? If not, why not. Are you measuring any sort of conversion goals? This is the point where I am usually interrupted as they start to ramble on about how they wish they had met me sooner. Little do they know those are just a few of the absolutely essential questions, all of which can easily be measured.

I had a random thought the other day, “What would I recommend to someone developing a website if I met them on an elevator and had 20 seconds to talk?” Out of this thought the following 10 items manifested themselves, which you can use as a high-level checklist when developing your strategy:

1. Determine your overall high-level marketing objectives (e.g. increase market share, increase membership, attain higher revenues)
2. Perform a needs analysis (e.g. survey your existing audience online, conduct interviews, etc…)
3. Segment your target market (e.g youth) and choose between specific target audiences (e.g. socially active, male hockey players, aged 18-25) based on your marketing research.
4. Come up with clear “calls to action” and website conversion goals that are based on your marketing objectives
5. Foster a fluid experience (i.e. smart interactivity) as opposed to static web pages
6. Develop an effective search engine marketing strategy (this encompasses search engine optimization)
7. Develop an effective social media optimization strategy
8. Consistently measure “quality” as opposed to “quantity” of traffic
   
9. Don’t just let the web stats sit on your desk! Use your web metric analysis to continually improve the performance of your website (where “performance” is based on you predetermined measurable objectives)
10. Don’t get left behind! Continually scan the macro environment, look for emerging trends, technologies, laws/regulations and economic forecasts that could affect your online marketing campaign.

There you have it, that’s my thought for the day…

Online advertising expected to take-up 18% of marketing budgets within 5 years.

Reaslitic or too optimistic? What do you think? Should we expect the same in Canada?

“NEW YORK — After years of interactive advertising being dominated by search and display advertising and e-mail programs, new outlets and more sophisticated marketers portend more diverse spending in years to come, according to a new study.

Forrester Research, like nearly all ad-spending forecasts, projects marketers will shift budgets online at a quick pace in the next five years. By 2012, it expects the market will hit $61.3 billion, up from $18.4 billion in 2007. In five years, Forrester expects interactive spending to account for 18% of marketing budgets.

Forrester sees much higher spending growth in newer areas. It expects buying in the “emerging channels” category (in-game advertising, social networks, mobile) to grow from $1 billion to $10.6 billion in 2012, when it will make up 17% of all spending. Online video is set to grow from $471 million in 2007 to $7.2 billion in 2012, accounting for 12% of online marketing spending.” - Brian Morrissey , Brandweek

You can read the full article here…

It’s kind of hard to believe, especially when my province (Ontario) just spent 6 million dollars on completely ineffective 30-second commercial spots for the provincial elections/referendum. When will the government learn to stop letting ad agencies decide which marketing communications activities they should be engaging in? Until the ad agency compensation structure is changed, every ad agency will convince you that you need a TV spot. I mean common! $6 million! for what? Just imagine what that kind of budget could have accomplished if it was put towards a social media strategy.

I am bold enough to say that for 1/100th of that budget given to me personally, I could have given Elections Ontario a significantly better result. Oh well, at least we can celebrate “Family Day” now…

Online content sharing - far from tipping point…

Once in a while, I still mange to across people that think the web is just a bunch of web sites like it was in the 90’s. When I show them effective use of a blog, RSS feed, or social media network of some sort, they gaze in disbelief and wonder where they’ve been the last few years. While these kind of occurrences rarely happen with people I interact with on a daily basis. It’s hard to be unbiased in my line of work and very easy to make false assumptions about what is prevalent out in society - what has and has not been fully adopted in terms of things we preach. This is why I rely so much on statistical analysis and marketing research.

Rather than preaching all the benefits of social media, I often indulge clients with the most recent stats - hard numbers and best practices they can show senior management.

I came across this study the other day, which deals with the issue of social media/content sharing adoption on the Internet. I’m curious to know, where do you fit in? Read below…

“Avenue A/Razorfish, a digital agency owned by Microsoft, surveyed 475 U.S. Internet users across all demographics in July. The study targeted “connected consumers,” those that have broadband access and spend over $200 on e-commerce purchases per year (such consumers represent about half of the overall population).

The study found that some of the most recent advances in content sharing have uneven adoption. For example, just 17 percent said they had shared bookmarks through services like the Yahoo!-owned Delicious. Even more mainstream activities such as photo sharing didn’t resonate: 59 percent said they never used sites like Flickr. A majority had never uploaded a video. About 65 percent said they never used tag clouds.

More mature Web 2.0 technologies have higher adoption: 85 percent used “most e-mailed/most popular stories” links, 60 percent personalized their home pages and nearly the same amount subscribed to RSS feeds. Blogs are regular fare: 61 percent read them on at least a weekly basis.” Read the full article here…

So there you have it, RSS and Blogs have fully hit the mainstream, while tag clouds, video content sharing, and certain aspects of social bookmarking are still far from being widely used. It makes me wonder however, whether terminology can skew the results. For example, I have many friends who have no idea what an RSS feed is, but use them all the time without knowing it (on their Google homepage for example). Others may claim to have never used a blog and yet they write on their Facebook wall everyday. Naturally the same applies for tag clouds and helping to build folksonomies. Are we getting too lost in the terminology? Personally, I think that many people couldn’t care less about the widget name or social implications of the technology they are using; they just do it.