If these people were blogs, you'd want to be THAT guy.

Blogging. This phenomenon is for sure here to stay and we have advanced past the time of calling blogs just a trend. They are now essential tools in building brand awareness. Blogs provide opportunities to speak directly to audiences engaged in the brand already. Speaking to audiences in their own terms is one of the best ways to explain what your brand is all about.

So what’s the point of blogging?

Visiting a website can tell you lots about a brand. But not everything. And not a lot of the things you really want to know. If you want to KNOW the brand, the voices behind it and the issues that are important to it, a blog is where it’s at. You might find the beginning threads of what you want to know on an official website but digging deeper into a brand requires reading more.

Do us a favor: Just Keep it Simple

If you are blogging for your brand, you don’t want people to have to dig TOO deep. (Or else they probably won’t do any digging at all and move on to the next brand, next blog and not remember yours). It is important to also find ways to keep your old blogs memorable too. Remember that unbelievably awesome blog you wrote a month ago? Well there are a lot of ways to keep that work relevant and entice readers to check it out again. It also has to be easy to read. Establishing your blog and engaging people in what you have to say isn’t always easy though. If it was easy, then brand awareness would be simple and we would all know EVERYTHNG about ALL the brands we use and want.

Write TO your audience, not AT them…

In order for people to follow your blog, they have to have that basic interest in what you’re talking about. You have to know your audience too. Who is actually reading this stuff? Well, you have to know in order to write to them. Some of the best bloggers out there will tell you that branding is all about how you speak to your readers. Having a conversation with your reader is the best way to keep them engaged but also to keep YOU memorable. There are a lot of great articles out there, to help us figure out how to talk to potential clients.

Blogging allows you to literally write your own definition of what your brand represents. By showing people what you are interested in and what’s important to you, you build a personal relationship with them. Successful branding is not easy. This we know. But what we also know is how to create that brand dialogue and it starts with building a relationship.

Companies are benefiting from their Apps in big ways. Here are some important Do’s and Don’ts when deciding to launch an iPhone App…

1. Don’t launch an App for the sake of launching an App.

You want to keep up with your competitors right? Well with the popularity of iPhone Apps at an all time high, some companies are launching Apps with no clear direction. You might say to yourself…”Our competitors have an App so we must have an App… Right now!”  Nope, you would be wrong.  Sure, you definitely want to consider having one but that doesn’t mean you should produce Apps with zero relevancy to your target audience or business in general. Take your time and make it better than your competitor’s.

2. Do think it through.

Don’t jump on the bandwagon just yet. Consider your options and consider your potential users. Ask yourself what kind of App will ….

a) help my target audience.

b) make my business more accessible to my target audience.

c) successfully integrate my business in a beneficial way into my target audiences’ lives.

3. Don’t be afraid to ask your target audience what they think.

It’s not a bad idea to ask your users directly what they want. Pitch an App idea to your current clients and ask them if this is something they would like or find beneficial to their lives. Ask them what they would find useful in an App or what they would find entertaining. After all, they are the ones using it.

4.  Do make it fun!

Phones do so much more than just make calls these days. They do basically anything. They make our lives easier, more practical and bring us more news and entertainment at the touch of a screen. The App should be this way too. A very popular App right now called foursquare is changing the way companies interact with their clients.  With this App, users can “check in” at a particular place, whether that be their favorite pizza place, Starbucks or grocery store and earn rewards and statuses. It’s fun, useful, practical and easy to integrate into daily use.

Making a mobile App work for you is important. It’s highly individualized for every business but can be highly effective when utilized to its fullest potential!

If yes, then call us. If not, then you are just probably finding ways to keep your job and we recommend you to read the 6 tips below and then tell us how they worked for you.

1. Don’t Spend Your Entire Marketing Budget. Costs saving initiatives have been more popular than ever before. If you can manage to not spend your entire marketing budget you will be rewarded. Showing savings is always a good thing these days, and who cares if you hurt your lead generation volume and quality or stall your brand building efforts. What is more important though is to get a tap on your back from your boss for finishing the year strong. Nobody will hunt you down if you don’t continue your efforts to capitalize on the upturn of the economy we will see in 2010, right?
2. Keep Reducing Headcounts. Everyone had been letting people go and most have successfully managed to survive this economic crisis based on these decisions. These types of initiatives are effective and opportune to let go of low performing employees. You can always hire top performers later in the year; although you may not have enough budget. Remember you saved so much money by not spending your entire marketing budget that your boss will probably decide that you could do a great job with a smaller budget in 2010.
3. New Market Segments are Not Worthwhile. Although, trends such as the high broadband Internet penetration, the surge of web 2.0 tools and the social media boom are making it easier and easier to reach out to smaller segments in very cost effective manners, many people would argue that is not enough. Segments based on race, language, gender, age or sexual preferences are not big enough yet to allocate enough resources. No one cares that one of every five young adults today (ages 18 – 34) are Hispanic, which are ONLY about 50 million people. And nobody believes in Forrester estimates that Hispanic disposable income as a group will grow to $1.4 trillion by 2013 from $951 billion in 2008.
4. Search Engine Optimization is Overrated. People justify SEO investment with arguments such as that more than 1 billion people worldwide, ages 15 years and older are Internet users or that more than 74% of the US population uses the Internet. Also that organic search drives 75%+ of all search traffic. What value does all that have? How many people really use the Internet to purchase or influence product purchases? Not many really, the penetration of ecommerce, on product categories such as computer electronics and media (books, music and videos) is ONLY 25%. There are still lots of people that you can reach out to without using the Internet, so why bother reaching out to these demographics, right?
5. Email Marketing is From the Past. Email marketing started in the mid and late 1990’s, which is a long time ago in Internet history. It boomed in the early part of this decade, but as of a couple of years ago many argue it is being replaced by social media marketing and other new media channels. Companies used to BLAST emails because it was easy and cheap, but CAN-SPAM laws, anti-spam software and other tools are allowing people to hide from email marketing messages. Let’s look at some stats again to support this argument. Email open rates are above 30% in many industries and click rates get up to 6% or higher. So if you are a small or medium size business and you have an opted-in list of prospects and customers of let’s say 10,000 emails, you are directly reaching ONLY 3,000 people and building strong relationship via your content or offers with ONLY 600 people… EVERY TIME YOU SEND EMAIL CAMPAIGNS.
6. Social Media is a Fad, Let Your Competitors Go There First. Much has been said about the reach of social media, the engagement capabilities it adds to the mix, that is taking Word-of-Mouth marketing to the next level and that is incredibly more cost effective than other tools. But, it is so new that many marketers feel threatened or not knowledgeable enough to jump into it, so they are waiting for others in the industry to lead the path to figure out how to use it. Let your competitors work with “social media” marketing firms and create some success first before you join. Why take any risks? We still need to survive 2010, right?

We like to share ideas, thoughts, best practices or whatever we feel like writing about in lists of 6. But, you can add to it…so, If you are going to take one risk, make it sharing your thought and believes with others. Feel free to comment, tweet, share or do whatever you want to do with this.

Jose Guerra
Principal

#1 Sell your expertise more than your products
This one is crucial. Demonstrating that you actually know what you are talking about will boost your credibility amongst consumers of your products or services.

#2 Person to person marketing is key
The internet is now ruled by your everyday techno-savvy users. They are privy to a multitude of information. Mass forms of advertising and marketing have evolved their filters. Reaching out to them on a one-on-one basis will move them closer in a personal relationship with your brand than that really expensive advertising atomic bomb. You may be thinking that this would take a lot of time, and you would be correct. I am not saying that this should be your only tactic, but try doing something personal for your potential customers and see for yourself. It just works!

#3 Direct customer service
This one goes along the lines of number 2, but expands it into actually gathering feedback from your clients using the mass number of venues in which they gather online. Always keeping a pulse on your brand and reaching out to your consumers when they give both positive and negative feedback will demonstrate that you care about the experience you provide to them.

#4 Maximize your  footprint
Participate, then participate a little more. Enough said!

#5 Get all your employees involved
Some companies cringe at this one, but getting your employees involved in your online endeavors not only increases your resources and reach to consumers online, but it will also help to portray the culture of your company. In many cases this is a good thing. However, if you are a company that is not exactly sure what kind of culture you are (we’ve seen it) then you may want to gain insight into that first (we can help here).

#6 Keep up with the trends
Last but by no means least, make sure you keep up with the trends online. Knowing what users are into will give you an advantage in reaching them.

The main gist here is get personal. Developing a personal relationship with the current and potential consumers of your products or services will give you a selling advantage over your competition.

Tell us what you think by commenting on this post. You may also view the corner6labs website at www.cornersix.com. Until next time.

(No corner6labs clients included)

1. Twitter To Go: One Houston Coffee Shop Makes its Mark. Today, he credits Twitter with almost doubling his clientele and with opening his eyes to a whole new way to build Community.
2. Real Estate Consultant & Realtor Danilo Bogdanovic. This small business relied solely on word-of-mouth and personal referrals until three years ago, when it first diversified into the world of social media and quickly found cost-effective marketing success online.
3. myFICO: Online Customer Community Drives Accomplishment of Support, Marketing, and Sales Goals. As a company operating within a heavily regulated industry, FICO is limited in the information it can provide to customers.
4. 5 stories in one. Kogi BBQ, Marsh Cafe, Kogi BBQ, Duke of York’s Cinema, Wiggly Wigglers and Howies
5. Lion Brand Yarn Drives Measurable ROI with Social Media: Lion Brand Yarn was not sure if its customer demographic would be likely to engage in social media but was willing to experiment with.
6. Pink Cake Box is a specialty cake shop in northern New Jersey with 10 employees. They opened for business in 2005.
7. UNLEASH 2009, the Mediasite User Conference: Energizing Users On-site and Online. A campaign to increase conference attendance that resulted in a 15% increase in conference attendees
8. Sweetriot, a small business out of New York City has gotten a lot of buzz over the past several years for their mouth-watering, fair trade dark chocolate. CEO Sarah Endline explains in the short video above (click on the image) on how she engages in the social media space.

1. Successful marketers will be more like Dale Carnegie by listening first. The 4 steps to social media success are 1] Listen 2] Interact 3] React 4] Sell
2. Consumers are looking to peers for recommendations on products, services, health issues, and more via social media. Only companies that produce products and services of great value will be part of these conversations; mediocrity will quickly be eliminated.
3. Social media’s ability to quickly disseminate information among friends and peers helps eliminate different people performing the same tasks (multiple individual redundancies), whether it’s researching the best vacation spot or smart phone. This is a huge benefit to consumers.
4. The old adage that you can only have two of these ‐‐ cheap, quick, or quality ‐‐ doesn’t hold true within social media. It’s possible to have all three.
5. Successful social media marketers will function more like entertainment companies, publishers, or party planners rather than as traditional advertisers.
6. The transparency and speed of information exchanged within social media mitigates casual schizophrenic behavior. Having a “work” personality and having a “party” personality will soon become extinct. People and companies will need to have one essence and be true to that essence.
7. Companies that produce great products and services rather than companies that simply rely on great messaging will be winners in a Socialnomic™ world. The social graph is the world’s largest and most powerful referral program.
8. Making multiple mistakes within social media is far better than doing nothing at all.
9. If you’re a large brand, you can rest assured that there are conversations, pages, and applications constantly being developed around your brand and by the community at large. The social community is “doing” social media even if your company chooses not to.
10. The overall achievement of individuals and companies will be largely dependent on their social media success.

Over the next few days and weeks I will take this report and share my thoughts on how these changes and possible scenarios affect small and medium businesses, how they can prepare to maximize the opportunities that these changes will bring. I will do my best to address B2B and B2C scenarios

Stay tuned! I will share them as I post them.

Below is the first one so you can get a glance at what I will be writing about.

From the IBM report: “Consumers are increasingly exercising control of how they view, interact with and filter advertising in a multichannel world, as they continue to shift their attention away from linear TV and adopt ad-skipping, ad-sharing and ad-rating tools. Our survey suggests personal PC time now rivals TV time, with 71 percent of respondents using the Internet more than two hours per day for personal use, versus just 48 percent spending equivalent time watching TV. Among the heaviest users, 19 percent spend six hours or more a day on the PC versus just 9 percent who watch a similar amount of TV.”

So, there are a three interesting thoughts and findings in the previous paragraph: First, people are spending more time online than in front of a TV, second, consumers have new tools to control how they interact with advertising on all channels, and heaviest users spend significant more time on the Internet versus on the TV. This means that TV advertising (perhaps with the exception of product placement) is slowly dying not only due to the penetration of the DVR and the penetration of the Internet, but also due to the sociographic characteristics of the Generation Y (those born from the mid 1970s to early 1990s).

People are watching TV more than ever before, but they do it in a different way. As of March 2009, 30.6 percent of households in Nielsen’s National People Meter Panel have a DVR, and the penetration of the DVR is expected to reach 40% by the end of 2010, which will only hurt the effectiveness of TV ads. In addition to this, radio advertising is also being blocked thanks to satellite radio. Mass broadband Internet penetration is a fact already and the Generation Y has been shaped by instant communication technologies and new media such as social networking websites, which may explain Generation Y’s reputation for being peer-oriented.

So, what does this mean for small and medium companies?

It means that the field is leveling in terms of marketing and branding. Larger firms will eventually not be able to sustain their brand awareness and reputation based only on gigantic marketing budgets. New media is much more affordable for a many reasons; amongst those is the nature of social media which I will cover in a later post in this series. What I want to highlight in this post is that small and medium firms have a window of opportunity to get ahead of their larger competitors in adopting new media. Because smaller firms are more nimble and agile, they should take this opportunity to embrace new media and familiarize themselves with it.

To get started I would recommend the same of what many are saying, so below are some links that I suggest reading before kicking it off. However, I would like to emphasize that new media and in particular social media is about honest marketing and is based on trust, so don’t apply the same old rules of traditional marketing which is based on “interruption”.

Exito.

http://www.li-bs.com/2009/10/social-media-best-practices-getting-started/

http://smartblogs.com/socialmedia/2009/05/05/andys-answers-3-baby-steps-to-get-your-company-started-in-social-media/

http://blog.helpfultechnology.com/2009/01/how-to-get-started-in-social-media/

http://www.clickz.com/3633845

http://www.technotheory.com/how-to-use-social-media-guide/