Marketing

ANTICIPATION: Before the product is released, the true fans are buzzing and speculating and waiting in line. The anticipation is self-reinforcing, a placebo effect of desire. UTILITY: The album is good, the software is useful, the book changes things. It works better than we hoped. Exceeding expectations pays significant dividends. REMARK: It's purple. Remarkable. Worth talking about. The word spreads. Ten people tell ten people and suddenly, it's abuzz. Not because of PR or hype, but because the remarkability is built right into the product or service itself. And more people enjoy things that are getting buzzed about. TRIBE: The core group, the true fans, are even more connected then before. The organization has helped them organize, the product creates a culture, commitments are made, conversations persist, a culture is built. To use something that makes us feel as though we belong is magic indeed. [repeat] If this sounds like Apple, Bob Dylan, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Dead, gun collectors or Shake Shack, it's not an accident. It's definitely not an accident.

What's permanent? What's temporary? Perceptions of time frame the way we work together. I was debating project and service management standards the other day. (Yep, I lead a sad life.) To be honest, it wasn’t much of a debate. We all agreed on the big stuff – that projects and services overlap; that we all need to work together to deliver value; that people and skills matter more than standards and controls.   A lot of motherhood and apple pie really. Boring. Throughout the debate, I felt we were missing something. There was a big divergence in our underlying mindsets; we just weren’t getting at it. Afterwards, I realised this was due to the framing of the debate.Everything was being framed in terms of the permanent organisation. People assumed that their organisation would last forever. Service management helped it deliver and continuously improve its products.   Project management helped it introduce new products and create step changes in its capabilities.  But the organisation itself was inviolate, an essential part of the bedrock. I’m now wondering how real that organisation is. OK, there are big companies that seem to have lasted just about forever; government bodies and agencies that have been with us for as long as I can remember. And I guess the standards-bearers are mostly servicing such organisations. But most of the organisations I’m working with are much more temporary than that. Groups of people come together to execute a campaign, then disband. Groups of companies form a joint venture that eventually either fails or morphs into a new company. Startups develop a new product then get acquired. Even if the organisation is sustained through multiple campaigns or ventures or products, it lives in a pretty fluid state. It restructures itself regularly. People get moved around. It exists through a series of temporary incarnations that form, take the organisation to the next level, then disband and reform. The idea of permanent standards that are equally relevant through each of these forms seems pretty questionable. So why weren’t we questioning it? I’m also wondering if this isn’t part of the barrier between IT and Marketing in most organisations. IT people seem to embrace the concept of a perfect organisational ideal – define the standards, then try to move your organisation towards this ideal.   Hence their talk of maturity models. Not only is the ideal defined, but you have a series of well-defined stages to pass through as you try to achieve it. Marketing, on the other hand, lives in a flux of the temporary – a series of campaigns and events and launches and suchlike. You rarely hear people talking in terms of some imagined organisational end state. Standards are very much framed from the former perspective. They’re about defining the ideal, not embracing a constant flux.   That’s why our debate was boring – by focusing on standards, we’d been pushed into a common mindset from the beginning. For an organisation, however, this mindset has consequences beyond boredom (although boredom can be a pretty big barrier to communication in itself). For example: We lose sight of immediate priorities and needs. When we’re focused on the ideal, we concentrate on the activities that will take us towards that ideal.   Yet these may not be what our customers are asking for, or what our co-workers and other stakeholders need. We need to maintain a balance between servicing such immediate needs and improving for the future. We lose sight of context. It’s easy to read most standards as defining the perfect state for every situation. Life’s more complex than that.   Standards need to be adapted to organisational context. We’ve all seen stupid mandates that have been promulgated because “the standard says to do it that way”. We build an inflexible mindset. If there’s a single ideal state to aim for, and a well defined series of stages to go through in order to get there, then where’s the room for flexibil

As the Internet continues to grow every year, people are learning of the potential benefits that they can gain from tapping into its phenomenal power. This is especially in terms of reaching new customers and clients for business through marketing on the Internet. There are various ways in which people can market their products or services on the Internet with some being proven to be more effective than others. Currently one of the most effective methods of online marketing is through the use of email. Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that uses email as a media for communicating commercial information either to current or to potential clients. Email marketing can therefore be done as a means of building your business-customer relationship so as to encouraged customer loyalty or as a way of trying to attract new customers to purchase a good or a service immediately. Alternatively it can also be achieved by simply adding and advertisement on email messages that have been sent by other companies to their clients. What makes this method of marketing quite efficient is the fact that since the message gets to the clients inbox, the chances of them reading it and therefore taking action are very high compared to other untargeted forms of marketing. Some of the advantages of email marketing over other forms of business marketing include: * It is lower cost – when you use email you can potentially cut down your marketing costs by up to 50% since you don’t have to spend on costs such as paper, printing and distribution. * It has a global reach – unlike other marketing campaigns for which a global marketing effort would simply not be viable, with email marketing all you need to do is click the send button and you could get your message to people on every corner of the world. You can therefore reach more people and get a better chance of improving your market share. * It is highly personalized – with email, you can personalize the message you send to every person you target. For example, you can start by greeting them by their name. This helps to create a bond with clients that is necessary if they trust you enough to do business with you. * Results can easily be measured – since email marketing is a form of online marketing, it is very easy to use certain tools to measure the click through rate and the conversion rate which can help you know whether or not your email marketing campaign is successful. You can therefore use different strategies and see which one works best in terms of boosting your returns.

A tutorial on how to use Facebook’s Power Editor If you are a regular advertiser on Facebook you really ought to be using Power Editor to create your ads rather than the standard self serve ad tool interface. Facebook’s own help pages explain why. There are a number of advantages such as placements and custom audiences that you can only access via this tool. Power Editor is easy to set up since it’s a Chrome Extension. It’s not the most user friendly tool imaginable but there are plenty of online help articles and videos to help you. There’s also a helpful Power Editor guide to download here. Facebook Offers I first wrote a simple guide to Facebook Offers last September. Since then the fees have gone up dramatically, so many will be asking what can we do to reduce costs and improve effectiveness? One answer is to create your offer via Power Editor. Not only will this let you set your own budget, but it will also: Give you a choice of bid types Let you control your Placement (the standard route would create 3 different ads, with Power Editor you can choose, for instance, to just have newsfeed, or just have mobile newsfeed ads) Let you select a target audience Enables you to insert a tracking pixel to your website to track conversions Here’s how it works: First begin the process of creating an Offer via the usual route on your newsfeed: When you add the image be aware of the size issues. Offers images are 300 pixels wide by 300 pixels tall on desktop and 800 pixels wide by 400 pixels tall on mobile. This means that if you create just one offer to be used across both mobile and desktop the image will end up being cropped on one of the other. Another good reason to use Power Editor. Facebook will email you a draft of how the ad will look. Do you this and adjust as necessary. Now be sure to select “Promote later using another Facebook Advert tool” Choose your budget (you can over rule this later in Power Editor) and hit Create Offer. The offer will now show up as a Scheduled Post as below: Now head over to Power Editor and create an ad. Select the ad type “For a Facebook Page using a Page post” and your previously created Offer will appear as an option. Now select your target audience, select your pricing and the other options and you are ready to go. Don’t forget to upload from Power Editor Once you’ve finished with Power Editor you then need to upload your ads to Facebook. Do this by clicking Upload in the top right hand corner. How long will this last? No sooner had I completed this post than news started filtering through that Facebook is making yet more changes to the Offers mechanic. Sometimes reports of changes are little tests, sometimes the start of a full roll out. For now I’m still being able to use Power Editor so if you want to give it a go – get on with it now! Let us know how you get on!

The ABC has announced Fairfax journalist Russell Skelton as the editor of its new fact check unit. Skelton is currently a contributing editor with The Age where he is responsible for special investigations and reporting assignments and coverage of indigenous and other national issues The public broadcaster moved to set up the fact checking unit after it received an extra $10 million in funding from the Government. Head of ABC Current Affairs Bruce Belsham announced the appointment in an email to staff this afternoon describing Skelton as a journalist with “a reputation for accuracy and integrity.” The announcement to staff: “I’m pleased to announce the appointment of a new and foundation Editor for the ABC Fact Check unit. “Russell Skelton has vast experience as both a media executive and writer. He is a highly regarded reporter and Contributing Editor to The Age newspaper and Fairfax Media. A former deputy editor, business editor, foreign editor and North Asia correspondent for The Age, Russell has worked in top positions at Fairfax and News Limited. He has been business editor of the Melbourne Herald. “Russell also worked for the ABC as Executive Producer for 7.30 Victoria. “He is the winner of numerous awards including a Walkley and the George Munster award for independent journalism. “The ABC News Division is delighted to attract to this position a journalist with Russell’s reputation for accuracy and integrity.” Nic Christensen The post Russell Skelton named editor of ABC fact checking unit appeared first on mUmBRELLA.

A big day for new Seven uberboss Tim Worner. Dr Mumbo’s spies tell him that Worner – along with sales boss Kurt Burnette and the network’s commercial chief Bruce McWilliam – were busily power lunching with media buyer Harold Mitchell. Unsurprisingly, they chose Sydney’s traditional venue for kings of media, Machiavelli. And of course, they sat in the corner table that used to belong to Kerry Packer. The post A Machiavelli coronation for Worner appeared first on mUmBRELLA.

John Heinsen The CEO and executive producer of  US content and consultancy Bunnygraph Entertainment, John Heinsen, was the feature guest for this week’s Mumbrella video Hangout. Heinsen is coming to Australia next month for events including the Amplify Festival and Mumbrella360. While at the conference, he will speak about multi-platform storytelling and putting his argument on cutting budgets for marketing and transferring it to production. Heinsen has overseen Oscar.com and Mobile App for the Academy Awards / Disney ABC Television Group for the last two years. He is currently in development as the Director of Digital Media for One Great Night On Earth, a 12 hour rock benefit concert event to be held in Melbourne in 2014. The post Hollywood veteran John Heinsen’s Hangout appeared first on mUmBRELLA.

New tech: Charge your phone in 30 seconds or less ht @scottevest

Southern Cross Austereo’s Mix 94.5 has retained its overall lead in Perth’s tight radio market, but has lost out in the breakfast and drivetime battles to DMG’s Nova 93.7FM according to ratings released today by Nielsen. Nova93.7FM’s Nathan, Nat & Shaun took the lead over Mix94.5FM’s ‘The Bunch’ who had a drop in audience share from 13.2 per cent to 11.5 per cent, while Nova’s team, took the lead with an 11.9 per cent audience share, despite a small drop from 12.4 per cent. Perth Monday to Sunday share – source: Nielson DMG-owned Nova93.7 also eclipsed Mix94.5FM in the drivetime ratings, as the audience share for Meshel, Tim and Marty’s show rose from 13.8 per cent to 15.2 per cent, while Mix’s ratings for ‘The Couch’ dropped from 13.9 per cent to 13.2 per cent. Executive producer Katie Dower joined Nova’s drivetime show in February from The Hamish and Andy show on the Today Network. In the breakfast battle, non-commercial station ABC720 still has the largest share of  the listeners – 12.6 per cent. Although Southern Cross Austereo’s Mix 94.5 has retained its overall lead in the Monday to Sunday ratings, its audience share has dropped from 13.8 per cent to 13.4 per cent. Nova 93.7FM’s weekly share increased from 11.9 per cent to 12.3 per cent, and 96FM made significant gains from 11.4 per cent to 12.7 per cent of the audience share Monday to Sunday. The post Radio ratings – Perth: Mix 94.5 stays on top but loses breakfast and drive time slot appeared first on mUmBRELLA.

Thank you for doing this... "@DaftPunk goes outside comfort zone for new album" via @SFGate