Marketing

We had a power outage in parts of Boulder County yesterday, and the Boulder Daily Camera covered it in a news story (if a bit late, since the Sunday crew apparently hasn’t been trained in web publishing). The very first user comment about the story appears to be from a sly marketer for a company that makes backup generators:

“Disasters, Hurricanes, Tornados, Wind Storms. We’ve all seen the after-effects, entire communities without power. I’ve read that on average 3.5 million people lose their power in the US each week! We just bought a generator from [company name removed] that now will ensure our family has the power needed when faced with these unexpected outages. With back-up power, our home now stays well lighted, secure, keeping our food cold and fresh and our air conditioning working. Our generator will also keep our sump pump working to protected the basement from flooding.”

Good grief. The wording is so obviously from the company’s marketing department. (No, I haven’t confirmed that. But it seems obvious, and at least one other commenter came to the same conclusion.) Traditional marketers are struggling with how to engage in online conversations and get a grasp on “social marketing.” This is so clearly NOT the way to do that. (They’d have done better by being honest about it. The wording above is embarrassing.)

While the advice on this website most often is restricted to online tips, here’s one to help the print edition of your newspaper. You’ll accomplish it with an online program.

Here’s what you do: Set up an affiliate program that other website owners and bloggers can sign up for, where they market your print subscriptions on their sites in exchange for a decent commission when a sale is made. They’ll post ready-made banner ads on their sites, and you’ll gain some new print subscribers.

Now affiliate programs have been around for a long time, but you don’t often see them offered by newspaper websites. I’m not sure why that is, but they’re useful tools for bringing in new print subscribers at low cost. Continued

Today’s tip is, perhaps, a bit bizarre. But don’t dismiss it out of hand! There’s some serious logic to why newspapers and local news organizations might want to open up coffee shops. Seriously.

Credit for this idea goes to Greg Harmon, a media consultant with Belden Associates. He’s pushing the idea to some of his newspaper clients that they should turn some unused space in their buildings into Internet cafes open to the public, as a way to connect with readers more directly and openly. Harmon explains: Continued

I’m getting requests to include more marketing advice on this site, and I’m happy to oblige. Here’s a marketing technique that people in traditional marketing and traditional media often overlook: Establish and work on having a relationship with your audience. Ask them to talk about themselves, and stop talking so much about you.

Let’s face it, it’s human nature for most folks to want to talk about themselves. Journalists may be in the business of talking mostly about what they know, but the opportunity with the Internet is to get the audience talking too. So to build and grow the modern audience, you need to give them — at every reasonable opportunity — the ability to talk about themselves, share what they think, and ask you questions. Continued

Let’s talk a bit about e-mail lists. Probably you’re already collecting e-mail addresses: Folks sign up for your newsletters or news alerts, or simply sign up for accounts on your site that are necessary for contributing content or posting a comment.

Alas, you’re limited in what you can do with those lists. You of course send them what they’ve requested (newsletters, alerts, or maybe personalized news reports). But you have to be really careful about anything else you send those users, for fear of being accused of spamming them. Continued

Lately I’ve been studying Internet marketing techniques, and there’s lots from that world that is relevant to news websites. One of the most powerful concepts in Internet marketing (well, all marketing, actually) is “social proof.” That simply means that you’ll get more people to buy something — or read something — if they know that lots of other people have bought or read it.

If you’ve got something to sell, a powerful statement to make to your potential audience of buyers is: “Wow! In the latest 24 hours we’ve sold 1,321 Widget 2.0’s!” Continued

Don’t you get tired of big corporations that are just friggin’ clueless when it comes to the Internet and marketing? I’m going to pile on along with Matthew Ingram, who comments on a boneheaded move by Hasbro and Mattel to clamp down on the Scrabulous application for Facebook.

The story is that the toy companies want Scrabulous — which is one of the top 10 most popular external applications on Facebook and was created by independent developers — to be removed by Facebook. While the companies are within their rights to demand that, they are profoundly stupid if they follow up on this.

This is another in a long line of instances where a dinosaur-thinking corporation thinks it needs to clamp down because someone is damaging their trademark, when actually the Scrabulous application is helping them sell more Scrabble games!

Ingram has the best suggestion: If the toy companies (which share the rights to Scrabble) are concerned, they should buy Scrabulous from the developers and hire those guys to keep it running. Shutting it down would be a collosally bad move.

Perhaps Hasbro and Mattel will come to their senses. As it currently stands, they look like D,O,T,I,S,I. (That shouldn’t be too hard to unscramble.)

(One last thought: It’s possible, I suppose, that Hasbro and Mattel are more calculating that I’m giving them credit for. The publicity machine ramps up, then they “save the day” by purchasing Scrabulous rather than shutting it down. They look like good guys after all. .. I think that’s unlikely, though; in that scenario they still look clueless and nasty for the short term.)