The Direct Marketing Voice » 2009

Archives for February 2009

Integrate Twitter & LinkedIn into a Real Estate Marketing Plan

February 25th, 2009 | by Luis Paez

As we enter a new era of real estate marketing, many Realtors and other professionals are relying on a new set of tools to keep in contact with their clients and sphere of influence (SOI). Perhaps two of the more popular social media tools being used in business today are Twitter and LinkedIn. In tomorrow’s Managing the Marketing Mix webinar, these among others will be covered by Eric Cosway and Freddie Baird. For the purposes of today’s post, however, I wanted to highlight how to integrate these social media tools into your current Just Listed, Just Sold, or other customer-centric direct mail postcard campaigns.

Below is a mockup, using a sample Just Listed postcard, on how you can drive people to your personal profile pages on these, or any other, social networks.

Integrate Twitter and LinkedIn social media on your postcard

This really isn’t that much different than listing your company’s website (which you may do already on Just Listed or Just Sold cards). The graphic icons are there just for impact, but you can just as easily mention links to your profile in the message body that you include on your postcard. In any event, what you are really doing here is tying together the different marketing tools at your disposal, inviting your clients and prospects to interact with you in any way they’d like. It both makes effective use of your marketing dollar, and caters to the preferences of your clients.

Reaches the New Generation

There are various studies out now that highlight the demographics of those who use social media tools such as LinkedIn and Twitter, and all of them point to the fact that these tools are primarily used by Gen X/Y age brackets. Since these demographics are already on various social networks, it’s easy for them to connect with you and your company on one of these networks, thereby providing another interaction point in addition to telephone, email & direct mail.

Differentiation Point

The Gen X/Y demographic has grown up seeing very slick marketing approaches on every kind of media that is out there and is generally very media savvy. By including mention of the new tools, you can ensure that your message and image is “a step ahead” of the competition. Plus, its a great talking point the next time you call up a client on the phone and say: “Save the postcard, and you can connect to me online!”

The Direct Marketing Voice Links: 2-25-2009

February 25th, 2009 | by admin

Selecting a firm to help with SEO

I get alot of requests from friends to help them with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is not my main area of expertise, but I do have to know a fair amount about it for my job. One of the main questions that I get from people about SEO is “how can I get my site ranked in the top 10 on Google?”

TheMarketingSpot: All your Marketing is Connected

eMarketer: Searching for New Customers in the Recession?

It makes sense when you think about it. As tough times force many customers to buy less—and to be pickier about what they do buy—search is becoming ever more important to marketers.

ManageSmarter: How to Recruit and Retain More High-Producing Sales Leaders

As a sales leader, have you ever felt you were at war in your business?

Selecting a Firm to Help With SEO

February 25th, 2009 | by Robert "Dude" Spellings, Jr.

I get a lot of requests from friends to help them with SEO (Search Engine Optimization). SEO is not my main area of expertise, but I do have to know a fair amount about it for my job.

One of the main questions that I get from people about SEO is “how can I get my site ranked in the top 10 on Google?” If you know anything about SEO and/or Google, you know the futility of such a question for anyone without significant resources. Small companies that compete in non-niche markets are forced to compete with giant corporations that have the resources to dedicate an entire staff to SEO. The typical large corporation has anywhere from one to ten full-time employees focusing on SEO; working every day to figure out how to get their company ranked number one for a dozen search terms, so competing with them can be very difficult to say the least… but not impossible, which is the beauty of the Internet, but I digress.

To make it even more difficult for small businesses, there are a whole lot of charlatans in the SEO business. These guys promise the world and deliver very little. There are tons of businesses taking people’s money for essentially doing nothing productive. Among the handful of these companies I’ve seen, they all seems to have a few things in common, so before you hire someone to help with SEO, please look at my checklist:

Google is still the big kid on the block. If any SEO firm tells you that Google no longer owns the largest share of the market and is therefore not important to target for high rankings, that is a sure sign that the company just wants your money. There are a lot of different ways to measure market share, but any way you slice it, Google still has a more-than-significant share of the market. In fact, over the last 10 months (March 2008 to Jan 2009), Google’s market share has grown from 77% to 81%, so they show no signs of losing market share any time soon. Astonishingly, I have seen several SEO firms try to persuade prospective clients that Google is falling out of favor and that focusing on Yahoo! and MSN is the preferred tactic. I suspect the reason that they do this is because it is notoriously difficult to game Google’s system, and these guys know it. As a matter of fact, Google is known to completely de-list (ban) sites that try to game their system, and they are used to dealing with it and good at catching people who try it. As far as I am concerned, Google is really the only game in town when it comes to search, so if an SEO firm you are paying won’t guarantee getting your sites ranked with Google, then what are you paying for? The other 19% of the market that Google doesn’t have? How much is that really worth?
Submitting Your Site to Search Engines. Another thing that bogus SEO firms will tout is how many search engines they will submit your site to. Many of them will tell you that they will submit your site to “over 100″ search engines. As I pointed out above, Google is really the only game in town, so who cares if your site is submitted to 100 search engines that no one uses? In fact, of the 19% market share that Google doesn’t have, Yahoo!/MSN/AOL account for almost all of that, which means that the 96 other search engines that your site will be submitted to, all have less than 1% of the market combined. So, no matter what the SEO firm tells you, submitting your site to 100 search engines is pretty much worthless.
Editing Your Meta Tags. Many suspect SEO firms will also tell you that they will “optimize your site” by editing the invisible meta tags on your website (or adding meta tags if you don’t have them). This is also virtually worthless because Google pretty much ignores meta tags and focuses on the actual content of your web pages. Long ago, in the early days of the Internet, pages had unseen tags in the HTML called “Meta Tags” that were used to hold geeky information that was used only by programmers and search engines. A few of the meta tags held information, like the search terms that you wanted people to be able to find your pages under, and a short description of the page that was indexed and stored by primitive search engines, which they would then use as the basis of their searches. This is why Google revolutionized search: They do not use these meta tags at all because they realized that this system was far too easy to rig, which people did all the time. That’s why, about a decade ago, when you searched for a popular term like “CSI Miami”, many search engines would return hundreds and hundreds of results for pornography. The pornographers quickly realized that all they needed to do in order to get their pages ranked highly was to fill their meta tags with popular search terms and bogus page descriptions. Google circumvented this problem by actually looking on the content of the page to create their index and determine search terms that apply. This is why editing the meta tags on your site doesn’t really do anything.
It’s all About Quality Links To Your Site. In addition to improving search as I described above, Google also created a system of ranking that rewards sites for having more links that point to the site. Google’s theory is that a link to a site is essentially like a “vote” in favor of that site, so the more “votes” for that site, the better ranking it gets from Google. Google rationalizes that the site for any topic that has the most links pointing to it, must be the accepted definitive authority on that topic, so it is ranked at the top. Google further refined this tactic by giving weight to each of the inbound links, so that one link from Wikipedia is far more valuable for ranking than 100 links from small unknown sites. This refinement prevents people from gaming the system by simply cranking out 10,000 dummy websites that serve no purpose other than creating links to a single site in an effort to improve the ranking. This is why I say that it is about “quality” links to your site. Some SEO firms I’ve seen will create a small network of sites that they call a “business directory” or something similar. These sites are really nothing more than a database of all their clients (and perhaps others) that is used to create a small network of web pages that link to one another in an effort to trick Google’s system into thinking that your site is really popular because so many sites link to it. Sometimes these SEO firms will even create several copies of these little networks to try and boost the number of links pointing to their customer’s sites. This is especially a bad tactic because Google actually lowers your ranking (or possibly bans your site altogether) for such behavior. Google cross-references its database to find sites with near-duplicate data. If it finds near-duplicates, then it lowers the weight of those links, or maybe even disregards them or assigns negative value to them (no one really knows because it’s a trade secret closely guarded by Google, but observers have seen the end results and have reported how they think it works). Anyway, the bottom line is that your chances of tricking Google with some scheme to manufacture links to your site will very likely either not work, or even worse, backfire. You are much better off starting a blog and joining some forums on the topic that relates to your site, then post as often as you can with relevant and meaningful content that links back to your site. Like anything worthwhile, its takes time and effort to build up a portfolio of quality links to your site. There are no shortcuts.

In summary, be very careful before hiring a firm to help you with SEO. Many of them are only hoping to take advantage of uninformed people and are not actually providing much value. Many of them may indeed get your site ranked high on Yahoo!, MSN, or AOL, which may be of value to you. But their services should be discounted accordingly if they are not going to help you get ranked with the search engine that 80% of people are using. As is always a good practice, caveat emptor.

The Direct Marketing Voice Links: 2-24-2009

February 24th, 2009 | by admin

The Direct Marketing Voice: Do Not Obey: The Confusing Construct of Fair Use

What makes it okay for artists like Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp and Sherrie Levine to appropriate images from pop culture to produce art under the protection of fair use while Shepard Fairey cannot? What makes it okay for the media to do the same? (Side note: When Sherrie Levine appropriated Walker Evans’ photographs, she didn’t even change them. She simply re-photographed them and presented them as her own.)

AdAge: HP CMO: ‘Democratize Print Publishing’

Declaring his company’s intent to “democratize print publishing,” Hewlett-Packard’s CMO heavily hyped the new MagCloud.com site to the Interactive Advertising Bureau conference in Orlando, Fla. In a keynote that promoted several of HP’s recently launched offerings, Michael Mendenhall appeared to put special emphasis on the game-changing potential of MagCloud. The site enables anyone to produce a full-color, ad-supported print magazine and make it available — via on-demand printing and an e-commerce system — to anyone else.

‘Document Wastage’ costing UK business an estimated £2 billion a year

New Pitney Bowes study finds poor printing practice by companies is hitting costs at a time when they need to watch the bottom line. In the report, Pitney Bowes points out that, typically, colour printing run through a centralised facility can be done at a tenth of the cost of the output from a desktop device. By utilising print management software, implementing controls, monitoring output and reorganising document production equipment to run this activity though a centralised facility, companies could cut overall costs in this area by 10% to 30%.

Do Not Obey: The Confusing Construct of Fair Use

February 23rd, 2009 | by Cynthia Fedor

Compare: Mannie Garcias photograph of Obama vs. Shepard Faireys Hope poster.

Manny Garcia/Associated Press

The recent ongoing controversy of Shepard Fairey’s Obama “Hope” poster is raising many concerns over what constitutes fair use and how the doctrine should be interpreted. For those of you not following (wake up and smell today’s culture), there is a heated debate in progress over the source image used to create the now famous poster that became the unofficial face of Obama’s 2008 electoral campaign. The Associated Press is suing the street artist over copyright infringement, claiming that the image of Obama on Fairey’s poster is based on a photograph taken by AP-contracted photographer Manny Garcia. Fairey acknowledges the source but argues that he only referenced the photograph and transformed it enough to where it now has a totally different message and meaning.

Arguably, the portion of the copyright law that describes fair use doesn’t really concretely define it – it is subject to interpretation. Marketers, advertisers, lawyers and artists have their own, and differing, opinions on this specific case. Milton Glaser, the artist recognized for his creation of the iconic “I (heart) NY” logo, states in a recent PRINT Magazine article:

The process of looking back at the past is very accepted in our business-the difference is when you take something without adding anything to the conversation. We celebrate influence in the arts, we think it’s important and essential. But imitation we have some ambivalence about, especially because it involves property rights. It probably has something to do with the nature of capitalism.

He continues, sharing his opinion as it relates to the Obama “Hope” poster debate:

For myself – this is subjective – I find the relationship between Fairey’s work and his sources discomforting. Nothing substantial has been added.

Personally, I think he’s wrong. Shepard Fairey turned an ordinary and uninspiring news photograph of Obama into an image that ignites emotions within the hearts of its viewers – for some, a symbol of hope and change.

Of course, we will all probably have different opinions and reactions to the photograph, poster and to the debate itself. The questions regarding fair use that are surfacing now have been debated in the past and will continue to arise in the future. There is no, nor will there ever be, a definite answer.

Am I wrong? Do you have an answer?