Most Important Questions for Business – Marketing Part 2
Published February 4, 2011 | 
How Should You Market Your Product or Service?
Stick to a Spiel or Brand Lingo
It is very interesting for some brands that seem to be keenly dialed in to a particular customer base or niche including the niche’s history, any special interests and desire that the marketing endeavors strike more of creating a festive carnival atmosphere.
How: Planned events built around niche market themes, and they are branded with your product or service. You can also run contests asking event photographs to be used to create a collage you can then use on your brand label and invites. It actually reinforces your message and your vision.
Cost: A few thousand bucks, depending on the extravagance of the events.
Connect With Customers by Making Them Stars
In reality this is a less expensive variation on MicroBilt’s strategy of “make-a-video,” with a smidgen of social-networking flavor tossed in the mix. Gifted or not, people generally desire to reveal or share their art, stories, many times including even their hopes and dreams. Provide them a market channel in exchange for trying out your product or service.
How: When skin care companies launch new fragrances, just before Valentine’s Day, put out the call for love stories to be posted on your Website. You should receive hundreds of submissions. Then each contributing writer receives samples of the perfume and then you get their contact information.
Cost: Minimal costs beyond the free products or service.
Tweet (Use Twitter)
Okay, so unless you’ve been on a different planet until recently you’ve heard about Twitter, that intriguing, surprisingly addictive social-networking technology that makes possible the swap of torrents of rigorously truncated messages (140 characters maximum limit) in the midst of millions of Twitter users. You may well have heard that it’s a really big waste of time, and in numerous respects, that’s accurate. You have to also understand is that it’s also true that Twitter can, and has proven to be a powerful marketing tool.
Twitter Video: Discover What’s New in the Twitter World!
Published September 15, 2010 | Team Altman Awesome Twitter Video!
Many of us feel that Twitter is the best way to find out what’s new in your world, for anything from football to film to generosity and charity, people the world over are using Twitter to learn what’s new about whatever they might find interesting, and are curious about.
Now you know already that Twitter has always been about getting a whole lot in a little. The limitation of 140 characters drives succinctness and lets you rapidly find out and share what’s happening. Yet, we’ve continued to learn something since Twitter first started, and that is life doesn’t always fit into 140 characters or less.
Twitter is introducing a new, re-engineered Twitter.com that provides an easier, faster, and richer experience.
When you visit the site, you’ll see the familiar timeline, but underneath each Tweet are a handful of information including more in-depth context, and even embedded media. So, you just simply click on an individual Tweet and a detailed pane slides out on the right and reveals this content.
Discover What’s New in Your Twitter World!
Google Buzz! Changing the Game!
Published February 16, 2010 | 
Google’s launch of Google Buzz (a service for sharing thoughts, multimedia, and your social media feeds with your friends utilizing Gmail as the conduit) really caught most people by surprise, simply because they weren’t expecting the potential game changer that Google Buzz is, but it didn’t take everyone long to take notice, especially after the Google Buzz posts and comments were averaging over 160,000 per hour nearly right after launching.
It was evident from beginning this was no average launch of an “oh by the way, if you have time check it out,” kind of application, and no one could have predicted it would become so popular, so fast.
Why has it grown so fast? And more importantly, what does the release of Google Buzz mean to the social media world, especially Twitter and Facebook?
Speculating as to what Google might do if it wanted to make things interesting for developers it might offer ad revenue sharing for the creation of Google Buzz apps, and start building its very own app store, specifically for the crazy mobile market. Gmail advertising is already extremely will developed, and next time you sign on to Buzz, notice that Google ads are already being placed, and by offering the ability to monetize apps with the Google Buzz structure would almost immediately pull development resources that currently are focused on Twitter, Facebook, and other mobile platforms (i.e. Android, iPhone, etc.).
The name of the game now is momentum for everyone from users to developers, to businesses both big and small that now have to keep a close eye to what is taking place on Google Buzz, especially in anticipation of methods to drive traffic, or a viral event that takes off with a life of its own, and finally to keep up with additional features that might be released in the future.
The social media landscape continues to quickly evolve, but with the release of Google Buzz it has been permanently altered, and anyone with more than just a passing interest in social media should ignore what is taking place at their own peril, which would be a huge mistake, since we are looking a real game-changer in Google Buzz.
Google Buzz Has Completely Changed the Game: Here’s How!
Twitter News Alert! Twitter to Raise $100 Million in New Funding!
Published September 24, 2009 | 
That’s right! $100 Million in funding based on a recent valuation of $1 Billion for the wildly popular micro-blogging platform, in spite of the fact Twitter has yet to implement a revenue model, although potential revenue streams are being developed as part of a model under work.
WSJ – Breaking News: Twitter to Raise $100 Million from Insight, T. Rowe Price, and Other Investors
Mashable – WOW: Twitter to Raise $100 Million in New Funding
Twitter Continues to Build Top Management Team!
Published September 2, 2009 | 
Twitter has been actively working on building a top-line management team of very experienced professionals at building large scalable operations, probably the most critical component for Entrepreneurs to address as part of their business growth strategies, and most recently Twitter has recruited Dick Costello, former Google exec and the cofounder and CEO of RSS service Feedburner, to be Twitter’s new chief operating officer. Keep in mind that Twitter’s Evan Williams was previously at Google for several months after Google’s Blogger acquisition, and Costello is also an early investor in Twitter. Costello, who sold Feedburner to Google for approximately $100 million should be able to help Twitter as it continues to grow its capacity and infrastructure to be able to handle the demands that have plagued them as of lately.
This news is significant because the management team is such a critical component of the formula for developing and maintaining a highly successful business or organization.
Oh, RSS Is Definitely Dead Now: Feedburner CEO Dick Costolo to Become Twitter COO