» Marketing

I am really starting to look forward to Thursdays now, just for the opportunity to post these discussions and then follow it. I really am learning alot and the resources are fascinating. If you missed any of these informative discussions, be sure to check back to the prior weeks:

• Week #1 : Brands and Branding: What is it?
• Week #2 : Keyword Research

These weekly topical discussion are really a great resource and I am enjoying the information that is being shared. 

Each Thursday we will post a topic related to us as merchants and the the COMMUNITY…YOU GUYS will come in on the comments and post. You can post your comments on the subject, links to articles or posts to other blogs on the topic, you can post links to YouTube videos or Podcast episodes. I do not care what you post as long as it furthers the education of the community, it qualifies. But of course this will ONLY work if you participate. I want to see if the community would participate to make it great. Come on guys, lets each one, teach one!!!

Topic this week?

Marketing Channels: Which one is the BEST for WHAT and WHY? 

Is it eBay? Or maybe Amazon? Even Craigslist? How bout them Comparative Shopping Engines (CSE’s), or even Etsy, Bonanzle, etc. OH dayam this is time for the showdown! Let’s go for the gusto…LMAO

OK, I need your input now so lets start posting to the thread topical information on Brands and Branding.

Brent Leary and myself got into a great discussion about how some pretend to have influence simply because they have a few followers.

Listen to this episode of B.S. Walks NOW!
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Show Notes:

1:20 Outlook for 2010 in Business is optimistic
2:10 National Retail eCommerce numbers beat expectations
3:52 Amazon Kindle e-book sales crush it
5:20 The Apple iPad reviews
8:27 Lessons from Conan O’Brian from Tonight Show
12:00 The Appearance of influence with social media
15:03 The @Wiseman23 Twitter threat 
17:23 Tit-for-Tatter-Twitterers
18:00 Measuring Influence
18:00 Brian Clark (Copybloger.com)
18:39 Guy Kawasaki on Twitter
18:50 Oprah Winfrey on Twitter
19:07 Bill Gates on Twitter
19:30 Chris Brogan/Liz Strauss/Gary Vaynerchuk
23:30 Man vs. Wild
25:10 Levar Burton

Brent recently blogged on this topic with a post called Please Stop Automatically Equating Number of Twitter Followers With Real Influence

So can Twitter make you appear to look influential in a short amount of time? Apparently so, because people will give you the time of day if you have thousands of followers. Can you automate the process of appearing influential on Twitter? Absolutely – I’ve seen people’s followership rise quickly.. people I’ve never heard of before (regular non celeb types), even when they weren’t tweeting all that much…mostly through using some kind of service.

— Brent Leary

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Are you building a business or do you just have a job as you grow old? Are you creating an enterprise or just going through the motions? Can you make it through the challenges, should you just QUIT or be exceptional?

Seth says average is for LOSERS…wow! Seth joined AuctionBytes to talk about his book, "The Dip: A little book that teaches you when to quit (and when to stick)." Seth gives some examples of eBay sellers who go beyond selling commodity products at commodity prices and get through the dip to become "exceptional."

—Ina Steiner (AuctionBytes writer)   

You really should listen or re-listen to this AuctionBytes interview from May 2007 today. You should absolutely listen, take notes and take action. One of the best interviews Ina ever did and this one alone changed my business!

Listen to the Interview NOW!
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Hey guys, in 2010 the efforts of ColderICE.com really is shifting and expanding. The ability to grasp some of the best minds and education is a constant obsession for me. Over the last year of doing this blog I have had the opportunity to come in contact with some AMAZING people. True thought leaders in disciplines that are critical for our small business success. One of those people is Charles Lumpkin and he has been gracious enough to provide me with some KILLER ecommerce SEO content for you guys.

Charles is an ecommerce SEO expert who deals with online marketing for enterprise and small business application. Charles has run thousands of online marketing campaigns and launched hundreds of web sites. These experiences give him a pretty good feel about which strategies deliver the best results quickly and efficiently.

Lumpkin is a huge believer in testing and market research. he likes to get into the market and understand it’s unique opportunities and weaknesses with as little time, money and effort as possible.

This is the first of several guest posts by Charles Lumpkin of CharlesLumkin.com

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Charles Lumpkin

Charles Lumpkin + Partners
http://www.CharlesLumpkin.com

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What is the nonsense of the economy of free? Well it is not that complicated it is the ability to make sales and income using FREE stuff. There are books and goodwill evangelist that are trying to convince businesses and business owners that marketing with free stuff is a good "new" idea?

How in the world is this such a new idea? Hell, that has been around at least since the phone book. You want to see the marketing of free work in the real world? Just go to a Sam’s Club on a Saturday afternoon, you get free taste samples on every aisle. Must we always state and attempt to explain the obvious to the ignorant? LMAO

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eCommerce Ad Platform Earns Click Quality Accreditation From ImServices Group, Certifying Compliance With IAB Click Guidelines

SAN JOSE, Calif., – December 17, 2009 – Today eBay AdCommerce (www.adcommerce.com) announced the successful completion of click measurement accreditation by ImServices Group, indicating eBay’s full compliance with the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s (IAB) Click Measurement Guidelines. The IAB guidelines provide a rigorous methodology to help companies define and measure valid clicks and eliminate fraudulent ones. eBay AdCommerce is among a small group of industry leaders that are first to achieve this distinction, demonstrating a clear focus on transparency and accuracy for its advertisers.

“eBay is dedicated to ensuring that we deliver the highest quality traffic to our advertising partners and that AdCommerce advertisers are not charged for invalid or fraudulent clicks,” said Alexis Van De Wyer, director of advertising for eBay. “This accreditation of AdCommerce demonstrates eBay’s commitment to adhering to IAB industry standard ad measurement practices, and to offering a robust, transparent and reliable ad platform to eBay advertisers.”

“eBay is dedicated to ensuring that we deliver the highest quality traffic to our advertising partners and that AdCommerce advertisers are not charged for invalid or fraudulent clicks,” 

—Alexis Van De Wyer, director of advertising for eBay

AdCommerce is an advertising tool for eBay sellers designed to increase visibility of their products among eBay’s millions of online shoppers. Through AdCommerce, sellers can purchase pay-per-click ads on eBay.com and other AdCommerce partners to get in front of a huge audience of buyers – at the exact moment they are looking to buy.

“We applaud eBay for being among the first to adopt the IAB’s Click Measurement Guidelines,” said Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO of the IAB. “We are confident that many other organizations in our membership will adopt these Guidelines as one of the most important ways to assure marketers that the clicks they pay for are real.”

These two presentations are focusing on social media and its possible uses for businesses. The first one is conceptual while the second on is factual with data rich content. 

While not new, shiny or a hot topic any more, email marketing is still one of the BEST ways to interact with your customer base and to engage them in your sales funnel.  

Amazingly the principles of "good" marketing ideas are almost timeless. Yes, this presentation below was given more than 4 years ago. It includes 101 ideas for internet marketing and about 95% are STILL RELEVENT! Just goes to show how timeless solid information can be.

The latest eDigitalResearch eRetail Benchmark Study reveals that traditional retailers are now consistently outperforming their pure play and traditional catalogue rivals online, using multi channel technology and customer service expertise to their advantage.

  Now in its 10^th year, the index surveyed 46 of retail’s top performing websites, using eDigitalResearch’s unique eMysteryShopper tool to evaluate each site based on the entire customer journey, from first impressions to shopping basket, purchase, delivery and supporting communications.

However, when it comes to functionality, most traditional retailers can still learn a thing or two from their pure play counterparts.  Amazon, in particular, was applauded for its ‘Google style’ predictive text keyword search, quick and easy transaction process and product reviews while ASOS’s  (Asos.com) information, images and catwalk video’s scored well.  Both Amazon and ASOS made it into the top ten overall performers.

Ten years ago the ‘pure play’ ecommerce operators ruled when it came to selling online.  However, slowly but surely, multi channel retailers have chipped away at their advantage,"

While ‘bricks and mortar’ retailers have always held the customer service advantage, they are now gaining commercial advantage too, investing in technology and integration across multiple purchasing channels.  If they continue to embrace new media channels while delivering a traditional ethos of exceeding customer expectations then multi channel retailers stand a good chance of running their pure play counterparts out of the market.

–  eDigitalResearch’s Head of Research Derek Eccleston.

To the above conclusion, I say…bullsh*t, but that is just my opinion. However I do see the space getting very crowded in the next 2 years. Retailers will NOT be satisfied with just selling their stuff and splitting fees and customer base with sales platforms like eBay and Amazon.

Ultimately these retailers WILL compete directly. Who will win the battle? That is a fight I will watch very close.

There are people who will tell you that it is possible to create a viral campaign that will
certainly be a hit, and there are agencies specializing in taking money and making promises.
But I’ve noticed that when organizations (and their agencies) set out to go viral, the vast
majority of their campaigns fail.

It is virtually impossible to create a Web marketing program that is guaranteed to go viral; it requires a huge amount of luck and timing. That’s an important point to remember as you work on viral marketing ideas, because it’s unlike the old-rules, numbers-based marketing
techniques you’re probably used to. Consider a direct mail campaign: You could always count on a direct mail piece to generate a known number of responses, say 2 percent. So if you needed to have 100 people respond, you sent out 5,000 mailers. Easy, right?

Viral marketing is much different. You just can’t count on numbers in the same way. Many efforts fail miserably, and there are countless Web sites, e-books, and videos that only their creators’ mothers and bosses have seen. However, tomorrow those same marketers might get lucky and get a million people to view their content, driving tens of thousands of people’s interest in their products and services.

However, this importance of timing and luck shouldn’t discourage you from using viral
marketing techniques; you just need to learn how to turn the odds in your favor.

This is an except from David Meerman Scott I just need to say I agree 1000%

Hard to believe that just 15 years ago AOL ruled the world of the internet huh? Nope, there was no rumors of this Google thingy and Yahoo was just a bunch of links. However AOL was the place where you went to market to users, on AOL internet marketing ruled.

You wanted to get your brand on the internet, then you simply HAD to have a www.AOL.com/MyWidget address back in the day. You wanted to tap into the gigantic user base of AOL registrants? You would create an app using their proprietary platform…sound familiar?

Want more similarity? OK…My Mom, who is now over 70 years old now, got her first taste of computing by using AOL. For her, AOL was the INTERNET. She would say. "I saw thus-and-so on the internet", not understanding that what she was in was the AOL universe. She would NEVER click a link that brought up the standard warning message "You are about to be taken off of AOL to an unknown link" that would stop her dead in her browsing tracks.

Fast forward to 2009 and I am seeing the same thing. My family and friends who are FAR from technophiles are now using Facebook and for them, that "IS" the internet. This is their walled protective environment, but this time around the prison has a few windows to see out by linking to good stuff.

But what I find, by looking at their profiles, is that for the most part, they stay pretty much in the walled red zone. Almost NONE of them have links to stories outside of the safe domain of Facebook. The are simply not net savvy and Facebook is about the only place they desire to explore.

So John, what are you saying? …. Nothing, just contemplating the similarity….for now (stay tuned).