Marketing Tom - Internet Marketing

Lessons in Marketing From Sky

Today, I received a letter from Sky TV asking me whether I would be interested in upgrading to Sky HD. They also kindly informed me that though I may have a HD-ready TV, that didn't mean that I would get high definition channels. The cost for this enhancement of my TV viewing - a  one-off cost of £49, when you take out a HD pack of £9.75 EXTRA a month and stay with Sky TV for another year. This comes after I have just given in to their tempting offer of half price Sky Sports and Movies for 6 months!

Though I won't be giving in to temptation this time, I do like the way that Sky markets to its customers. Invariably customers will be given a very tempting, initial offer of half price Sky Movies and Sports, with a free Sky+ box, for the first 6 months. If you don't wish to take up the offer, you may well get a call or direct mail with an offer at some point in the future.

What  Sky do effectively is to try to move people along the Sky TV customer lifecycle. They never seem to tire of trying to get you to buy into more of their products and services. And, in the main, the products and services are very good and very competitive. It would be so easy for them to sit back on their laurels and generate income off their subscriptions each month. However, they are constantly on the look out for products that may interest their target audience, be it Broadband, phone, or even TV's. Some of these latter products you may not even consider unless you have gone further down the funnel and probably begun to 'trust the company'.

I like the way they market to their customers.

It makes me think of the number of people (clients sometimes) I have met who are more than happy to keep delivering the same products, to the same types of people. These are the sort of traits you find from those who don't challenge themselves:

• More often than not they have their staple bag of products and services which their clients will buy.They don't consider what else they could be offering their clients.
• In some cases they think locally. But if you've succeeded locally, there's a bloody good chance that you could sell your products and services further afield, even internationally. 
• More than likely their clients are not fully aware of the full range of products and services the company can offer. I remember someone telling me that the worst thing a customer could ever say to you is, "I didn't know you did that".
• The company fails to spot new opportunities. These are often in abundance and can be found by checking out your competitors, reading about your industry, visiting conferences and speaking to your customers.
• It takes its eye off the customer life cycle. Your customer may have bought a camera off you but have you tried to sell them accessories, training, new lenses, etc?

I like to think that I try to practice what I preach. I do look at the products that I offer clients and try and work out how I could offer them new, quality products and services in the future. If someone comes on the eMarketing Award, they will be invited to come on a Social Media or Business Blogging workshop. If they have don't have the time or inclination to develop a digital marketing strategy, I can offer them consultancy. 

The key is not to stand still. Be aware of what is happening around you, what your competitors are doing and offer superior products or services. Sky does it and it has developed a very successful business model.

Follow The Tour De France Online

It's July 3rd and tomorrow the biggest cycling (read sporting) event of the year kicks off, the Tour de France. You will be able to follow the Tour on ITV with both live cycling and highlights (mainly the latter I believe) and on digital you can catch live cycling on Eurosport.

However, in this digital world we like to be able to get our information from the Internet and to this end Wired magazine has come up with a fairly good list of where you can get your Tour de France fixes for the next few weeks. The web page is actually a Wiki so expect it to change as the days go by - hopefully getting better and better!

With regards video, here are their recommendations: 

The most comprehensive lists of links can be found at the Cyclingfans and Steephill.tv websites. The folks there post many video streaming options, and the list is updated several times a day. 

We'd also recommend keeping the Eurosport France video page and the France2.tv page bookmarked. The feeds are popular, so they tend to work only intermittently, but the French networks are usually more reliable than those from Italy or Germany.

They also have a few links from where you can get streaming live video of the Tour de France.

If you fancy just listening to the races, whilst you carry on with your work, try out the live audio that can be found on eurosport.yahoo.com.

Aside from the obvious websites like letour.fr or Eurosport, you can find websites like Cyclingnews.com, Pez Cycling News and Bicycle.net which have dedicated and comprehensive Tour coverage with live reports, news, videos and rider interviews.

If you want interactive maps, then head over to the Google Earth blog where you can check out the roads the riders will be travelling along. For those who are a little more keen:

MapMyRide.com also has interactive maps of the Tour de France that anyone can download and ride. MapMyRide is also running a contest that lets you measure your own performance on your local roads against the actual stages the pros are riding each day in France. 

Want to know what is happening to your favourite riders and teams throughout the day, then head over to Twitter: 

• Lance Armstrong of Team Astana: @lancearmstrong 
• Levi Leipheimer of Team Astana: @Levi_Leipheimer 
• Cadel Evans of Silence-Lotto: @cadelofficial 
• Dave Zabriskie of Team Garmin-Slipstream: @dzabriskie 
• Christian Vande Velde of Team Garmin-Slipstream: @ChristianVDV 
• George Hincapie of Team Columbia-High Road: @ghincapie 
• Johan Bruyneel, Manager of Team Astana: @JohanBruyneel 
• Team Garmin-Slipstream's official feed: @TeamSlipstream 
• Team Astana's official feed: @TeamAstana

And finally if you fancy a flutter, why not try these out: 

If you're the wagering type, you can bet on stage winners or overall winners in each category (GC, KOM, Points and young rider) on most major sports betting sites. Stick to the reputable ones like Sportbet and Pinnaclesports.com.

If I come across more I will try and update this page. I hope you enjoy Le Tour 2009!

Marketing Tom Goes Digital

I have been playing around with (using?) a number of definitions related to the work I do for some years now. 

I started off using the term Internet Marketing a few years ago as that seemed to be the buzz word of the time. Then, when I started delivering the eMarketing Award, I began to use eMarketing.This word was used quite heavily by CIM and by the guy who wrote the book, Dave Chaffey but honestly, it doesn't seem to have stuck.

 

However, I have decided to follow some of the big names in the Internet Marketing arena (including Nick) and go full out and 'digitise' (or digitize for all you from the States) every page of this site. Digital Marketing is a term that, though not new, is become much more commonplace these days - on blogs, Twitter, newspaper, magazines and other outlets.

Marketing Tom will become a Digital Marketing Company which offers digital marketing solutions and the training arm will offer digital marketing qualifications. 

Over the next week the full reason for this change will become apparent and will probably make full sense to people. Sorry to be so cryptic!

Anatomy Of A Facebook Page

I've been using Facebook Pages now for around 3 weeks and must say that I am starting to get the hang of it. Hang of it? Well, what I mean to say is that I am getting into the habit of using it. Like many Social Media tools, there is no real rocket science behind how to use it but you do need to master the art of feeding it. And, on this score, I think I am getting the hang off it. 

Let's compare how Facebook Pages fronts up to blogging and Twitter, my two preferred Social Media outlets.

Blogging, in my experience, usually involves the writing of articles of varying length associated with business topics of interest - at this moment its social media. Articles generally take between half an hour to an hour to write and may involve research on various websites. It often involves the uploading of associated images and the linking of text. If the blog is the cornerstone, or hub, of your Social Media activity, then you will have to be careful of its content and will probably write articles around core business themes.

Twitter, as you will probably know, only allows you to write 140-character entries. Generally speaking these are thoughts and observations on things you have seen on the web and often on Twitter. Some people write about one subject, others about many different areas that interest them (I tweeted last night about Andy Murray winning but earlier I tweeted about the search engine Bing). As its only text you have to create hypertext links to external articles, images or videos and many of Twitter's 3rd party applications give Twitter added 'zing' - applications like Tweetdeck and Twitpic, for example.

Facebook is different, though you could say it is trying to grab the attention of those using Twitter and blogs and to try to win them over. For businesses Facebook Pages offer an opportunity to speak to their target audience in their own back yard, using a platform that they're very familiar with. Companies have cottoned on to the fact that many of their target audience, especially the 20-40 year olds, have an account on Facebook and understand wall posts, indented comments, likes and the tabs which give the Facebook experience more appeal. That is why they are migrating in droves to Facebook. But some of them, with their huge followings or 'fans' still think in terms of broadcast media and haven't yet got what Social Media is all about!

I do like Facebook Pages.

I do like the idea of having my thoughts posted on a 'Wall' and have people comment on them. The neat thing about the Wall is that you can post articles which are slightly longer in length than on Twitter. I must admit that items I post on to the wall of Marketing Tom's Facebook Page are all related to Internet Marketing and are designed to offer short snippets of information with a link to the main source. Facebook makes it easy for you to quickly post on to the Wall. The information is selected for both clients and students of Marketing Tom Media.

By simply adding a link to a video, webpage, slideshare or even an image, it will upload the information directly to the Wall as a sort of caption and allow me to comment on it. This is great if you come across news articles or videos and want to include an image from the source and let people know what you think about it. This latter element adds to the richness of the experience.

With the 'new' design of Facebook Pages I also like the ability to add all manner of information that I believe will be of interest to my clients. As you can see below clients are able to view Digital Marketing videos (YouTube), the latest blog articles from Marketing Tom (Notes), they can leave testimonials (Reviews) and even get involved in a forum (Discussions). I must say that I do like the fact that I can find interesting videos, add them to my Facebook Page and people can comment or display that they like it within 'my channel'. It also allows me to cut out the noise and display content of relevance to my target audience.

I must admit that it is early days and some areas - Reviews and Discussions - are lacking in content. However, as a business owner I need to be aware that I have to not just add content on a regular basis to but also I need to work out ways that people will start to engage with the page. Like much Social Media part of the problem is trying to work out how to kick-start your community. 

Over time I am sure that I will add 1 or 2 new tools but for the time being I am pretty happy with using the Wall, adding videos and lettting Facebook stream my blog articles. I don't see any of these tools (blogging, Twitter, Facebook pages) replacing the other but simply complementing them and, depending on the context, I will be able to select the correct tool.

Oh and one final thing, please sign up to the Marketing Tom Facebook Page today!

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Great Advice From Great Leaders

Fortune magazine dropped through the letterbox this morning and with it some more very good articles, like a review of how Welshman Howard Stringer is getting on with reviving Sony; how the Marriott is getting a makeup and a profile of Toyota's New Man at the Wheel. However, the the articles that caught my eye were on the subject of the Best Advice I Ever Got, including an interview with Bill Gates and his dad, Bill Gates Sr. 

Here's some advice that Bill received from his dad

Well, my dad and my mom were great at encouraging me as a kid to do things that I wasn't good at, to go out for a lot of different sports like swimming, football, soccer, and I didn't know why. At the time I thought it was kind of pointless, but it ended up really exposing me to leadership opportunities and showing me that I wasn't good at a lot of things, instead of sticking to things that I was comfortable with. It was fantastic, and now some of those activities I cherish. They had to stick to it because I pushed back a lot, but it was fantastic advice.

And here's what advice was given to Larry Page of Google: 

In graduate school at Stanford University, I had about ten different ideas of things I wanted to do, and one of them was to look at the link structure of the web. My advisor, Terry Winograd, picked that one out and said, "Well, that one seems like a really good idea." So I give him credit for that.

Mark Hurd, CEO of Hewlett Packard has this to say:

Nine years after starting at NCR, I moved to a head-office job in Dayton in 1988. An NCR executive was giving a presentation; he had great slides and an even better delivery. The CEO, Chuck Exley, listened to the entire presentation in his typically gracious, courteous manner. At the conclusion, he nodded and said something brief but profound: "Good story, but it's hard to look smart with bad numbers." And as I reflected on it, the presenter, articulate as he was, as good as his slides were, simply had bad numbers.

Bob Iger, President and CEO of Disney offers us a bit of Shakepseare:

My father wrote in my sixth-grade yearbook quoting Hamlet - Polonius to his son, Laertes: "To thine own self be true." I was 12 years old, but it had a powerful impression on me then, and I've often thought of it since.

Elon Musk, Founder and CEO of Spacex

"Don't panic." It's from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. You have to be wary of emotion clouding your decision-making process - and of making a decision that you'll later regret. You have to be as clearheaded as possible. Of course it's a fine line, because you don't want to be completely dispassionate

Peter G. Peterson, Co-founder and Senior Chairman, Blackstone Group 

When I was at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, I had Milton Friedman as a professor. He worshipped free markets and was also a powerful advocate of Adam Smith's concept of comparative advantage: Focus on those things you do better than others. That has been enormously helpful in defining our business strategies

Social Media Champions - Ginevra Kirkland

From today I am going to be starting a new section of the site called Social Media Champions. My plan is to interview people in the 'Social Media business' and find out what they do, what their favourite sites are, the Social Media tools they use, top tips for Social Media and much more.

I am pleased to say that the first person I have invited to answer these questions is Ginevra Kirkland, Community Manager for Six Apart which, in their words, "provides award-winning blogging software and services that change the way millions of individuals, organizations, and corporations connect and communicate around the world every day." The company provides the Movable Type social publishing platform, the TypePad premier hosted blogging service, Vox, a free blogging service. Founded in 2001, Six Apart is a global company with its headquarters in San Francisco.

According to Ginevra, "my take on Six Apart is that it's a family. I've been with the company in various capacities since 2004, and I really think it's the smartest crew of people I've ever had the good fortune to know, much less work with." 

I hope you enjoy the 'interview' - I think you will!

How has blogging changed over the years? 

Wow, blogging has really changed a lot over the years ­ I think mostly in how it¹s become ubiquitous to the point that it¹s almost invisible. Newspapers run their entire operations on blogging software. People who are leaving Facebook status updates are bloggers, really. Everyone wants to find a way to express themselves on the web.

What is your favourite blog? For business? For pleasure? 

I've got several depending on the mood I'm in, but I love reading my friends' and coworkers'blogs the most still. Having people I adore in different cities and countries means I can stay connected with them and their world no matter the time zone, and that's hugely important to me. 

My colleague Anil Dash's dashes.com was one of the first blogs I read, along with Alex Balk's now defunct The Minor Fall, The Major Lift (he's now at alexbalk.tumblr.com, theawl.com) and I still love their writing. There's the usual suspects, like Jezebel and Go Fug Yourself, and there's a few others that fall into specific interests I have: 

News blog: SF Appeal 

Photoblog: Sexpigeon 

Tumblog: Hello, I'm Rachel 

Cooking: 101 Cookbooks 

Politics: Fafblog 

Biking: Bikes and the city  

I also really love writing the featured blogs for Everything TypePad, cos I get to read such interesting stuff to find them. 

As far as business goes, Steve Rubel from Micropersuasion and Seth Godin both have the best business blogs, bar none. And I love reading Blogger Buzz and the Twitter blog ­ they always have such interesting things to say about the industry. Oh, and Gaping Void. And I have to stop before I list every blog on the internet!

I notice that Six Apart 'listen to the Twittersphere'. How does it go about doing this? 

Anil and I started listening to customer comments on Twitter about a year ago, and it¹s blossomed from there. Now our tech support team are involved to help answer support questions, and our media team and David Recordon also contribute. 

Basically, anyone can contribute to the public Twitter stream as long as it keeps with the spirit of @sixapart: being relevant, funny, and interesting to the folks who are kind enough to follow us. That¹s a tall order, but we really strive for it. We¹re a blogging company, so we want to lead by example as to how all of our social networky goodness can be be tied back to our blog as a home base for our online presence. 

From a business and marketing perspective, it¹s just the right thing to do in the new economy. People have said they want a company to hear them, to participate in the transaction. I blogged about this a bit here. I could go on and on about this one.

What Social Media tools do you use within the business?

We use Twitter and Facebook primarily, but definitely have a lookout in all sorts of channels. I use Icerocket to find blog posts about certain topics, and like to answer questions on LinkedIn when I can.

Have you got any great blogging stories?

I think Sweetney with Mamapop has a great story, as does Heather Armstrong with Dooce. I could write chapters about both of them, but as a female in the tech world, it¹s really inspiring to see women taking such a strong role in the creation of how we see blogging and the vision for the future. Connecting to other people is really what being a human is all about, and helping people to do that is incredibly rewarding.

Can any business use Social Media?

As long as they have someone who "gets it" at the helm, then, absolutely. The fear of using social media to market to customers is still strong with a lot of companies, but as long as you have someone competent at the controls, whose DNA implicitly understands how to talk to people, you can make it work. 

Don't be afraid of mistakes. Be afraid of stagnation, if you must be afraid of something. But really, it's not that scary. I've been a bartender, though, which I think lends me a good perspective on people and how to interact with them. I think your ideal community manager is someone who has what one of our bloggers calls "the service heart".  

Any people in Social Media you think we should be following? 

Mmm - most folks you should be following you probably already are! I enjoy Gary Vee a lot, because he's so positive. And David Armano for his way of putting social media to use for the betterment of all of us, and his great insight.

Barack Obama used Six Apart's Movable Type for his campaign. How did his team use it effectively? 
He won, didn't he? ;) [ask a silly question!]

For a business starting to use Social media, what tips would you give them? 
Be positive, but don't back down from a challenge. Be aware that people are already talking about your brand - social media is a way to listen and respond. I'd rather know about a challenge, problem, complaint, or compliment than to NOT know. 

If you're looking to succeed in social media, don't just hire a kid with a lot of friends on Facebook. That "get it" part I referred to earlier? A lot of companies make the mistake of not doing their research and just hiring someone who knows a lot of buzzwords. Does your community manager have passion, a positive attitude, and a driving motivation to make others happy? (the service heart again.) That's both unteachable and essential. The technology and product and whatever else can be learned. 

As a company, you may make mistakes, but as long as you have a great product and learn from those mishaps, you're going to be awesome.

Clay Shirky On Twitter, Facebook and Repressive Regimes

I am off to a conference for the next couple of days and so blogging will be light. However, I thought I'd post an interesting interview that Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Eveerybody, did over at TED.com. Here's the TED overview:

While news from Iran streams to the world, Clay Shirky shows how Facebook, Twitter and TXTs help citizens in repressive regimes to report on real news, bypassing censors (however briefly). The end of top-down control of news is changing the nature of politics.

What Is Going On With Google Local Results?

Have you signed up with Google Local Business Center and claimed your business listing yet? If not, you may want to take some time out and do it. Simply sign in to your Google account (you will need one) and add your business details. It's something I recommend that all of my clients do.

But what happens if your Google Local listing gets hijacked, spammed or disappears?

This is exactly what appears to have happened with one of my clients. My client is a 4 star hotel based in Wales. Some months back we noticed that when you typed in its keywords into Google instead of having the name of the hotel listed under Google Local (similar to above), an affiliate site appeared - using the hotel's name, offering reviews and even a picture (taken by the hotel). All links from this listing took you to the affiliate's site.

Kerching! A nice little percentage goes to the affiliate.

In order to remedy this problem we listed the hotel, followed Google's verification process and started appearing in the Google Local Business results. I thought this problem had disappeared until I took another look earlier today. This time Booking.com (i'm pretty sure) appeared where my client's listing should appear and instead of a link to the client site, a link to the affiliate site had taken its place. And for some reason the telephone number was a mobile one, with the hotel number appearing underneath it.

Who is responsible for this? Is it the affiliate site? Or is it a 3rd party which receives a commission from the affiliate site? This is a bit like what you see with Amazon or eBay.

I'm sure that I have read somewhere that should nobody have 'claimed ownership' of the business listing it can default to an affiliate. Not sure if this is true or not.

Whatever the reason I find it quite poor that Google should have allowed this to happen. Surely if the business is located at an address and has verified this with Google, then that business and not an affiliate should be displayed. Something tells me that this is probably widespread across the whole of the hotel industry and affiliates are probably taking advantage of hotels' lack of knowledge of Google Local Business Centre and, in this case, some flaw in Google's system which lets affiliates or their partners 'hijack' listings.

What's Trending In Social Media and Digital Marketing?

Here's a quick rundown on what's trending today, 22nd June:

The Mercury News is talking about how Unrest in Iran raises the profile of Twitter 

Over on CNET Wireless they are talking about T-Mobile announces second Google phone

TechCrunch has an article on When it comes to search trends Google is lagging behind Bing

Mashable is running a piece on hacking Twitter and the sinister issues this could throw up: A primer for hacking Twitter

Under the headline Get Carter? The media didn't, the Guardian talks about how Lord Carter is angry at people for criticising hi sDigital Britain report without even reading it.

Techtree talks about a Facebook click fraud fix coming today

The Telegraph's Music section talks about how the Top 40 Chart compilations will include free music listening

And here's another interesting article on Mashable: #IranElection Crisis: A Social Media Timeline

Social Media and the British Press (well, the Daily Mail)

I was actually doing a Google search earlier this week to check out who my local MEP is - it is Glenys Kinnock. I just wanted to know whether she had stepped down (apparently she doesn't till next month) and who the new person was. Foolishly, I clicked on a link to a Daily Mail article on the Windbags to moneybags: The Kinnocks are back to lord it over us in Britain - after picking up £12m in pay and perks. The figure by the way is calculated by working out what they have made (the two of them) in Europe for the past 15 years. It is a figure which is probably no different to any other European minister of similar standing and probably a lot less than UKIP and Tory MEP's. 

Having been helped by Lady Kinnock recently, in a dispute I have with an Italian company, I thought I should stick up for her and right a comment on the rag. Needless to say that my comment has not been published but many, who have vented their vitriol, have. I thought I would include a screenshot of some of the comments. Notice how the only person who offers a little bit of reason gets rated down to minus 31. If you take a look at the article, you will find only one comment has been rated in the red colour. There are 52 comments and they are all very much of the 'Kinnock-hating' ilk. How many people like myself have tried to add reason and been silenced?

I think it's great that newspapers are able to get news out very quickly and that people are able to respond very quickly with their opinion. However, a part of me worries that allowing only posts or comments that suit an editor will mean that social media can be used to offer a very unbalanced, and often incorrect view, of the reality. What happens if newspapers on the opposite side of the political spectrum approach social media (I include ratings within this) in a fairer way -something tells me that this will probably be the case. And we must remember that very often a person's choice as to which news story they read is governed by its position on Google organic for a certain search term and not by the purchase of a newspaper at a stand.

There is a silver lining to this story and it happened last week. The Daily Mail decided to run a poll, as only it could, inviting people to answer the following question:

Should the NHS allow gipsies to jump the queue?

However, a mixture of Twitter ReTweets asking people to vote 'Yes' (I did) and some emails from psychologists inviting their fraternity to vote likewise, forced the daily Mail to pull the ludicrous poll - don't they know you don't do that in Social Media! Some people reckon that the number of people who voted 'Yes' hit around 96%!  

This is quite interesting and shows two contrasting sides to the Daily Mail's social media approach. The first is completely controlled and toes the party line - very few people who disagree with the paper get a look in; the second, which is obviously automated is less likely to be controlled and can be skewed if the paper riles certain groups. 

Here's a new poll I just saw on the site:

Should we give up more power to the EU?

Interestingly the poll says that 51% think this should be the case - for the Daily Mail!! Go on, have your say today and make the Daily Mail look more balanced.

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