As an homage to the insightful book, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, I’m going to attempt to write a summary in haiku (Japanese poetry style consisting of three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables respectively) that summarizes the essence of mastering a changing environment. All right, here it goes:
Talk to certain “Few”
Make sure they find Stickiness
Listen for changes
What do you think? Do you have any haikus you’d like to share? Haiku Battle!
This post is mostly aimed at those “pure” social media experts, who claim that anything short of investing totally in social media is a backward and doomed approach. There’s been a bit of backlash against social media experts, and this is close to that spirit, but also hopefully constructive. My primary point is that social media is useless – unless integrated into a larger context and a larger media mix. Considering all the current hype about these new online tools, here are some stats you may find interesting:
I detail these points to give some perspective to the massive hype surrounding Twitter and Facebook. Yes, they are emerging tools for engaging with an audience, customers and contacts – but they do not yet have truly widespread reach. This may change in the coming years, but for now, the only marketing campaign that can come close to reaching 100% of your desired market or audience is an integrated campaign. It’s too bad that the main news media fails to put new social media platforms in a greater light.
This being said, you should think about cautiously adding social media to your current marketing mix, but just as it balances out against investments in print, radio, television, direct mail, and online ads. I would love to hear the term “integrated marketing” used more in common dialogue, which would mean more people are reading about integrated marketing and thinking about their strategy from the get-go. Maybe that will take time, or maybe we just have to make sure that conversation happens – at every event. If you’re unfamiliar with IMC, check out these two books: Kellogg on Integrated Marketing and IMC: Putting it all together.
How the stats were calculated:
2 to 3% of the world’s population was pulled from xyberlog
80% of US Citizens are not on Facebook: Facebook reports 175 million active users. Of those, more than 70% are outside the U.S., implying that less than 30% are inside the U.S. If we take 30% of 175 million, we have 52.5 million active U.S. Facebook users. Wikipedia has a figure of 306 million U.S. residents. Excluding the very young and very old, I estimate we can exclude about 15% of that total, leaving us with 260 million people. 52.5 million divided by 260 million people is about 20%. Only 20% of the U.S. Population uses Facebook (admittedly rough estimate).
70% of the U.S. population is reachable via Direct Mail- Taking a major consumer list provider’s public stats, about 210 million consumer mailing addresses are available. See the above wikipedia figure to determine percentage.
70% of the U.S. population is reachable via the most popular television shows. Nielsen reports 23.7 million viewers for American Idol.
73% of U.S. consumers ages 12+ heard one or more network radio commercials in the course of a week. Arbitron press release. Also, interestingly, if you advertised on all major stations in just the top 10 radio markets (metro areas), you’d reach 25.7% of all Americans.
The QuantumDigital marketing team is sharing a book by David Meerman Scott called The New Rules of Marketing and PR, and generally find it to be a good read. As part of a new book tour, David promotes his newest book, World Wide Rave, by filming this short spoof of his experience interacting with agencies who “just don’t get it”.
Recently, my home was burglarized and after the grief of losing several computer and electronic possessions, I started to think about how I would prevent this from happening in the future. Immediately, I bought a basic alarm protection package – but the more that I read about the subject, the more I am realizing that my neighbors are really the best type of protection. Even some co-workers who live in Round Rock, and consider it the safest city in the U.S., had to bear a rash of robberies conducted during broad daylight, and could stand some neighborhood co-operation.
I found a neighborhood website that referenced a checklist issued by the local police department on what to do to form a “blockwatch” or “neighborhood watch” and here are the first 3 steps:
Reading those initial steps seem easy enough and at the very least will give neighbors more awareness of who you are and the existence of a neighborhood group. The thing that struck me as very “old world” was handing out flyers door to door. It would take 1/10th the time to just use a postcard and the MapMail product. Just draw out your neighborhood boundaries on a Google map and send a simple announcement card, completely online.
If you want to get a little more advanced, or just wanted to commiserate with homeowners about all the renters in your neighborhood, you could even set up a simple demographic filter like the one below, so you only contact homeowners.
After the first few meetings, you’ll likely have enough email addresses that you can just create a small email list to contact the active neighbors. But there may be a need to do new mailings every few months just to involve those new to the neighborhood or whose interest level changes. Anyway, knowing your neighbors is valuable not just in terms of security, but also in creating a sense of community for yourself and for your family. (Wow, can you tell I’m about to be a new dad? 
)
Walking in our production area, I noticed one of our customers is printing business cards – not with their company’s name – but rather with their blog referenced on it. I thought this was rather odd, but after some searching, I found that many veteran bloggers find it a must to have their own blogging business cards. Elizabeth, on table4five.net, noted that many of the bloggers she ran into at the BlogHer conference were asking about where to create business cards, and she recommended a company that had a static tag cloud built into the template.
Even though it’s very “Web 2.0“, I disagree with including a tag cloud on business cards, because as time passes your writing may turn to new topics, or tags. In this case, I believe it’s a static set of tags that’s on the card template, so this will date the business card fairly quickly. A better way would be to list the major contact points that are likely never to change: 1) Your website URL 2) Your Blog URL (if different) 3) Phone/Address (if you’re traditional, like me). Other things like profile id’s from Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. can be referenced on the card, if you’d like, but make sure it’s done in a way that doesn’t clutter the design. As a side note, depending on your audience, making reference to the new social networks may be an important message to include on a business card.
Taking a liberty like Erica O’Grady did during a recent AMA presentation, I’ve mocked up a sample blogger business card and put a famous blogger on it. (Guy Kawasaki - if you’re reading this, let me know what you think about the red floral design)…
