positive disruption by: Tom Martin | New Orleans based Social Media | B2B Digital Prospecting | Digital Strategy Agency

Getting Noticed on the Net

I really like Slideshare.net. Great little concept and now they let you post presentations and limit who can see those presentations -- still for free. Very cool.

On their home page they show "featured" slide shows. I've always wondered how they decide what goes there as I've often viewed those shows and found the quality to vary greatly.

So I tried a test. I uploaded an old talk -- Flip Your Customer the BiRD which has a highly provocative title slide. I wondered if the provocative slide might get me noticed.

Bingo!

There I am -- first one in the "Featured Section" -- will be interesting to see how many folks view it and if it drives any traffic to this blog. Stay tuned.

Flip your customer the BiRD

I uploaded an old presentation I wrote about 5 years ago. Still seemed worthy. Enjoy.

From: brandmarken, 1 minute ago

| View | Upload your own

People buy brands but all people don't buy the same brands for the same reasons. So successful marketers need to flip the customer the BiRD (Brand Relationship Driver) in all marketing materials if they hope to be successful.

SlideShare Link

Gas Station Marketing

Ever stop in to a gas station to get gas and air/water for your car? I know I have. I can kill two birds with one stone. Well, now there is sort of an air pump on steroids. The company, Gilbarco Veeder Root is pushing their Applause Media System.

The system allows you to do things like order items from inside the convenience store -- something i've always wanted the ability to do as well as look up and print directions using Google maps. Just imagine if these gas stations advertised these pumps. How many wives would make their husbands gas up there?

Seriously, if a particular brans like say Shell was to retrofit all stations with these pumps, they could create a material difference in a usually commodity market. Can't wait this these little beauties come to my hometown!

Great Reminder Service

I really love when someone creates something truly useful. I've often wanted some kind of reminder service that can automatically remind me of important events and offer me gift ideas, etc. But this is especially nice in a world dominated by email, Jack Cards puts a personal touch into birthdays, anniversaries and other significant events. Very nice.

Facebook is Pimping Its Users

Facebook's new Beacon Service is little more than Facebook's Founder Mark Zuckerberg pimping his users for his own personal gain. The service description says "When a user performs the action, they will be alerted that your         website is sending a story to their profile and have a chance to opt out." but in truth, the "alert" is small and fleeting... a mere 20 seconds to notice something happening on your screen in the lower left hand corner. With all the distractions of banner ads in today's web -- hardly any surprise folks are missing it. And the fact that you have to opt-out on a per site basis versus having a simple check box on your Facebook profile page seems an obvious oversight designed to drive revenue at the expense of Facebook's users.

A shame that a guy with a real vision would stoop to such levels. I mean, at least call girls get a piece of the action. I can only hope that the Facebook nation rises up or Facebook at leasts cuts them in on a piece of the action.

       

Research's Role in Advertising

Involved in a rather interesting conversation right now with a client over target audience definition and how that definition will effect or could effect the tracking research the client intends to launch both before and after our campaign.

The gist of the conversation is that our firm is recommending a very refined, highly targeted audience to both buy media against and develop creative for. The research firm is worried that they won't be able to field the research cost efficiently due to low incidence level of the target population, and thus is it (targeting such a finite target) really worth it? Setting aside the cost of the studies is equal to about 20% of the total media buy for a moment, which warrants an entirely new post, I find myself thinking about the basis of the argument -- namely that if we can't cost-efficiently track the results via research, then the campaign isn't worthy of the effort.   

In a world where the goal is to "post good research results" after a campaign, which is quite often the case, what are we really achieving? This particular campaign involves social marketing and a very, very small budget, hence the highly defined target. I worry that in an ROI mad world we marketers, in an effort to show results, are simply manufacturing those results by creating ads and campaigns that will "test well" but may or may not actually cause changes in the marketplace or in the case of social marketing -- the world. A shame really. We seem to live in a world where companies are more concerned with showing that they spoke to lots of people versus focusing on speaking to fewer folks that will actually listen even if the net effect (total number of converts) might actually be the same. How I'd much rather make the metric "reduction in sales of (offending product)" which would allow us to move beyond reported thoughts and actions to really understand if we're making folks want to stop buying this particular product. And would allow us to focus on laser targeting versus screaming at as many folks as possible and hoping a bunch actually listen.

Don't get me wrong, I love research and it has a role. But when the campaign and more importantly the target audience is picked based on its "researchability," I think we're beginning to focus more on the trees than the forest. 

Claiming Technorati

Technorati Profile

Just posting to claim my blog at Technorati.

The Power of Trust

Seems consumers aren't buying WalMart's new ad campaign or claim that it saves families $2,500 a year.

It makes me wonder if this has anything to do with WalMart's recent spat of not so flattering publicity and consumers beginning to understand the "costs" of low prices.

Seems there was a time when WalMart could do no wrong but of late, a more enlightened and caring consumer has begun to question their support of WalMart leading to a second month of declines in same  stores sales growth.

A little Advertising Humor

Found this

over at Brand dna. I dare say there isn't a creative in the world that won't love this. Not sure who is behind it but production values are great though they probably go a couple of jokes too long.

Enjoy.
 

Playing with new toys

Read about a new microblogging tool --Tumblr.

Opened an account with them at tommartin.tumblr.com and posted something. Going to play with it but at first glance, not quite sure how it differs from a macroblog or whatever they call this blog. I guess maybe it is easier to post multimedia or maybe it is all just packaging. We'll see.