Customized Multi-channel Marketing - hosted by L2Blogging on the Blog - and Other Emerging Media
Published by Britt in the early evening on July 13th, 2006 in Alternative Marketing, RSS, Blogging, Mobile Messaging, SMS, PodCasting.
I received a message last week from the Norcal BMA about a Roundtable titled Want New Ways to Generate Leads? Take a Look at Emerging Media with speaker Elyse Tager. The idea of adding today’s emerging media—RSS, Blogging, Podcasting, and wireless messaging— to our already robust system of personalized direct-mail and web-landing pages to generate leads is extremely compelling. So it isn’t much of a surprise that the title of the Roundtable was enough incentive to drag myself out of bed at 7am and endure the one hour commute from San Leandro to Palo Alto.
RSS (define)
Web-content generators are now jumping on the bandwagon to offer content in this format. I found that the challenge with ads is that it’s as successful as you define your target - and you are somewhat at the mercy of the demographics from aggregators.
PODCASTING (define)
This media could be a great addition to our system for reaching people on the go. The down-side to Pod casting might be that some people are visual learners, and it might be hard to retain information delivered through sound. On the other hand, it might be a good source of entertainment.
BLOGS (define)
I was surprised to discover that my hand was the only hand raised when it came to blogging within a company. What I like about blogs is that one can share information without having to be commercial. Despite the fact that there are people on the blogoshpere who use blogs for sales, the real value from blogging is that it can offer an individual/company more credibility. Although our PR company had discouraged the use of blogs, L2 wanted to share information about the company from a real-life perspective with the intent to create a dialogue. The blog has helped us encourage challenges using real-life feedback, rather than casually dismiss opinions through the use of formal marketing jargon and carefully crafted content.
WIRELESS (define)
Asia seems to be an early adopter of this medium. Although it seems that we haven’t touched wireless on a national level, different media reach different targets. With that idea in mind, it might also be useful to add this media to our offering in the future as well.
Do you have any other media types that I’ve missed or overlooked? Want to elaborate more on some of the listed media types? Disagree? Don’t hesitate to post your comments!
RSS is an awesome "opt-in" technology. If you want to, you can publish multiple feeds and let your readers self-target but, if that's problematic, services like SimpleFeed and Pheedo provide tools and technology to make it simpler. Increasing numbers of people are using RSS without even realizing it. I was at a seminar earlier this year where RSS was actually explained as being more similar to SMTP (define) because it is a transfer technology that can then be opened and read using a variety of clients. Microsoft will be incorporating an RSS reader into Outlook; the FireFox browser already organizes RSS feeds and lets you manage them as "live bookmarks". It's probable that we will see RSS client applications on every internet-enabled devide in the near future.
For those wishing to learn more about Podcasting with an eye to making a foray into this medium, I heartily recommend the book "Podcasting Solutions". There are some great overview and planning segments as well as free software. What's not to love about that?
Blogs. Bloggers LOVE talking about their blogs. Visit Technorati to search blogs for particular subjects - including blogging.
Or ask us.
Mostly, though, your blog should be fun and entertaining. Blogging is about being yourself.
There are some efforts beginning in the wireless (mobile messaging) arena. The SugarMama program from Virgin Mobile is one such. With the growing popularity of cell phones and especially the trend among the under-30s to treat them as an appendage and major tool, mobile messaging is set to take off. It's just going to take a few wins in this arena to blaze the way.
God knows one of my roommates is a mobile messaging marketer's dream. I think she can text message faster than I can think, and she certainly engages in the activity with more frequency.
And I just got a text message saying that it's time for me to go to lunch. How about that?
One of the text applications that folks are talking about for doing targeted advertising is that "going to lunch" message. Between 11 and 11:30 local or so, you get a text from a local restaurant with "show this and get something". Even I, with my near-legendary sales resistance, would find that compelling.
I also attended the BMA breakfast with Brittany. One thing I find lacking in these nascent medias is any type of demographic information on the users. This is not surprising, to be honest. Each of these new forms of expression (blogs, podcasts, RSS, IM) are still defining themsleves. But if anyone has any leads on good market research, please let me know.
Personally, I think it may still be too early for many advertisers to jump on the bandwagon, at least any advertiser that wants to target effectively. After all, why were all of these formats created? To get away from advertisers, of course.
Well, blogging and podcasting don't lend themselves to direct advertising as much as they do to marcom and brand building.
Check out both Target and Purina for some things that they are doing with these channels. Target offers deals via mobile messaging. Purina does podcasts. I've heard that both have RSS advertising feeds but was unable to find those on their websites in a quick scan.
You might check Forrester for research. They were one of the presenters at the talk on RSS that I attended a while back and had user figures that I do not recall at the moment.
One of the nice things about blogs, podcasts, SMS messaging and RSS is that they are relatively inexpensive compared to traditional mass media marketing. If we hadn't insisted on hosting our own blog at our own domain, we could have started up within 15 minutes and paid anywhere from $15 a month down to nothing depending on the service we signed up with.
Blogs, RSS and podcasts are all entirely opt-in and SMS messaging can be targeted in a way that traditional print advertising can't touch (with the exception of digitally printed direct mail).
So it really depends on what you are trying to do with your efforts. These new channels are still being refined and it's a wild and wooly world out there but, at this price point, judicious experimentation is very appealing.
Thanks for commenting.