Archive for July, 2009
Cast Spells on Twitter with Harry Potter
Jul 25th
In order to create buzz around the new Harry Potter movie, Warner Brothers created the site http://harrypottertweet.com
To take advantage of twitter magic you need to log on to the site using your Twitter login and password. There you have list of spells and other magical elements of the Harry Potter universe. Once you choose a spell your potion is prepared and is up to you to whom of your Twitter followers to send it. They will then receive your link which leads to an animation based on your the spell you chose. Upon clicking on the link the user will think that his Twitter page got enchanted, but actually what he will be seeing will be a clone of his page on a different URL.
The recepient will also be invited to watch the new Harry Potter trailer or send a spell to some of their Twitter followers .
In a nutshell, this is a great and simple example of a campaign that combines buzz marketing and social media.
Why anybody – an individual or a company – should use social media?
Jul 23rd
For a long time brand advertising relied almost solely on broadcasting messages to consumers and no actual communication with these consumers – a.k.a. one way communication. Today this traditional model does not work anymore. Now more and more people ask, talk, look for advices and reviews, give feedback and buy… online. And the best part is that you, as a brand or marketer, can talk with (not to, but with) them . This is the new era of advertising – the social media era.
People talk about your brand! No matter if you are happy with it or not, no matter if you are a big brand such as Apple, Starbucks or Sony, or if you are a small brand such as the coffee shop round the corner. Even the people you work with talk about your brand, and there are companies, such as Intel, which have already considered this: Intel Social Media Guidelines.
Social media works and is important today , because it gives a human aspect and authenticity to your brand. More and more are people trusting their human nature to be engaged in and be influenced by a person-to-person communication rather than to engage on a one-way broadcasted message from an unknown source. This is why brands that act on their customers’ behalf get 44% more brand advocates. And if you are not present in the online conversation and do not consider actions based on this communication – you lose opportunities and be sure that your competitors will exploit them.
So… what can you do with social media?
Many tools exist for endless possibilities.
(and these are just very few of them)
These possibilities can be – to create a community, to promote and inform, to get to know more about your customers, to improve your product or service, to deal with complaints, to give support; all of which providing you with a long-term customer relationship!
And what is even more important – all of this is coming to mobile NOW! Via smartphones, notebooks, and God knows what other type of e-mobile devices, people can share their experience, ask, talk, look for advice and reviews online even as they are in your store and are about to buy!
Today people search with Google, but tomorrow people may start searching with Facebook or with any other social network where their friends are!
What is this blog about, after all?
Jul 22nd
If you are reading this, there is a high possibility that you came here while looking for – a way to make money online, free digital product downloads, tips or internet marketing and advertising or something similar to that.
No matter the reason, you should know that in order to “make it” (whatever that “it” is) you either should be/become a good marketer or hire one to develop a marketing strategy or plan for you and your business goals.
Being or becoming a good marketer is impossible to happen fast. There is no quick scheme to learn that and anybody who says or sells you an opposite idea, is wrong.
I write about social media, because I want to give you an insight on cost-effective solutions that work. And am exposing stupid digital products in order to convince you that these can not be a solution. So in general I tell you what can be working for you and what can not be working for you. I am saying this, because most of you are rather attracted to the “EXPOSED” posts. Don’t be – there is no point in using them. I expose these products, because only by trying them yourself you’d realize that they are not worth it.
So, if you want to succeed, I really hope that you give social media and marketing a chance. Even John Chow said (in the video from the latter post) that he managed to succeed, because he had used to work as an Internet Marketing specialist before.
Coming up a little bit later today or tomorrow morning is a post about – why anybody – a company or an individual – should use social media.
For those people that are interested in what i am talking about, here are some older posts on social media and “new era” advertising : )
Shustir.com – the big revolution of small businesses
Mission Statement or something like that
Why was Susan Boyle such a viral success
Sony launches Resistance 2018 – play on Twitter
Tvnima – the 3D future of presentations
Will 2009 the ultimate social year
How has the Internet influenced us to become influencers
Social Media and success online
EXPOSED: Mass Article Control
Jul 22nd
03. August 09 UPDATE: Download links have been updated, guys, enjoy ;)
UPDATE: Download page has been moved. People who are still interested in the software, can drop me a line.
Back on the “exposed” topic :)
Here is a very promising, at least from the sales text, and potentially very useful tool – Mass Article Control.
Mass Article Control basicly consists of two software tools – Mass Article Creator and Mass Article Submitter. These names pretty much explain what the product is about.
“Mass produce thousands of high quality articles from just 1 main seed article – within 30 seconds – at a push of a button… AND THEN.. submit them to the top major article directories automatically!”
Is not this a dream?
I have not had the time yet to personally test it, but here is the feedback from people who already used it:
John Chow reveals his blog business model
Jul 14th
Today i stumbled upon a video recording of John Chow speaking at the Vancouver Business, Marketing and Entrepreneur meetup. It is almost a month old, but if you have not seen it – you really need to check it out.
Almost an hour long, the video gives you an insight of best practices on the web now that work. The topic is How John Chow Makes $ 40,000 a Month From His Blog.
People who visit his blog know that he offers a free ebook on how to make money blogging, which is pretty thorough and extensive, but here in this video he reveals even more about his practices and business.
I have said it before, and will say it again – if you are looking for a quick and easy to understand make money formula – just go to John Chow’s blog and opt in for his ebook. I should now add to this – …and watch the video ;)
My Blog Business Model from John Chow on Vimeo.
And HERE is his original post
Free Buzz Monitoring Tools
Jul 13th
Online reputation monitoring has become an inseparable part of (successful) Marketing today. There are many costly tools (such as Radian6 and Scoutlabs), not to mention greedy agencies and consultants, which offer you this service, but here are 10 free online tools to help you begin monitoring your e-reputation.
A very simple and intuitive tool that tells you what people are saying about you or your brand in a form of movable widgets. Addictomatic shows you results from Twitter, Friendfeed, Bing News, Google blog search, Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Twingly, etc. You do not even need to register on the site! In order to access your searches, you can just bookmark the URL of your search result and get back to it whenever you need.
This RSS feed, in competition with Netvibes, is very popular in the States. Bloglines can be used to start monitoring the sources you are interested in. And since recently, Bloglines is accessible via iPhone.
This is a free service by Nielsen Buzzmetrics. Blogpulse allows you to easily search a brand’s name being mentioned in the blogosphere. It also allows you to have access to influence-statistics of numerous US blogs. Further, the trend section offers you graphs of the most talked about subjects on the blogosphere.
This one is less known than the previous. This tool specializes in monitoring forums. Boardtracker is currently following more than 66 million topics on more than 37,000 forums. English speaking forums are the most monitored.
This is a service that monitors comments left on blogs, Digg, Flickr, etc. After sign-up, Commentful sends you a notification for every new comment.
The less known relative to Twitter also has its own search engine. Friendfeed’s search engine is more interesting than Twitter’s. You can call this herecy, but not only does it retrieve text, but also generated content such as photos and videos posted by users.
Google Alerts is an essential program for anyone who follows a brand or companies’ occurances and mentions on the Internet. It is simple and easy to use, and most of the time relevant. This tool has evolved a lot over the years, and you now have the option for transforming the alerts you set into RSS feeds – one very interesting option since dealing with mailboxes filled over capacity.
This is not a monitoring tool in the classic sense, it is rather a tool that takes notes on your visibility on social networks. You can have your Google Blog Posts score, Twitter score, Flickr score, Youtube, Myspace, etc, on the same page. This tool can be very useful to measure the impact of your actions across the social networks.
This one is above all a search engine that specializes in the indexing of blogs, using the “fresh links” concept to identify hot topics. It also offers a search module for Myspace, and this makes it the only tool of these that does so.
As it is suggested, Keotag allows you to search content tags. Once you have picked a tag, Keotag lets you choose the sites you want to it search for you. Of course, the classics among the choices are: Google, Twitter, Technorati, Reddit, Digg and others. After search, all the filtered results are posted on the same page.
