Obama = President 2.0? (updated)

I thought white men couldnt jump?

I just found this follow up article on my earlier post.

Obama = President 2.0?

here Is the next post in this series.

Enjoy

Marketing trends for 2009

Now this looks tasty

I could have called this post Marketing Tips for 2009 because, as you will see, they are very valuable. I have had a lot of input from people who answered my question on LinkedIn. Thanks to all of you.

The main point to keep in mind is the current difficult position of the financial market. Globally, companies and people are scared of going out of business or at least losing a lot of money. And one of the first market segments to feel the effect of that is marketing and advertising. Budgets will be cut and agencies will be challenged to provide better campaigns for lower prices. The following points will be important in the next couple of months.

Marketing trends 2008

Have you been naughty?

Since the holidays are coming the Christmas and year’s ends list are coming with this. So, here’s one of mine. There will be coming some more in the next few days, all concerning new media markething of course.

I was thinking of calling this post “markething hypes” but marketeers have been pushing these things so hard in the last year, that these have become trends.

The results you see below are part of my own experience but also the summary of the answers that I’ve got when I asked the LinkedIn users.

Obama = President 2.0?

Tools of the trade

This morning I read this article:

“Obama May Have to Ditch BlackBerry, But Could Be First Laptop Prez” on Switched.

Apparently, the next president of the United States was adicted to his Blackberry throughout his campaign. This way he kept up with his friends, family and campaign aids. As any professional knows, it is really easy to get addicted to this thing. But it’s a very good tool to communicate with those close to you on many different ways.

Now it seems he will have to give it up in the White House. There is a thing called “the Presidential Records Act” that states that every bit of communication the president sends out is kept on record and can be reviewed by the public. This means that even personal emails or text messages to his wife, kids or friends can be read by the public. Personally, I think this is a bit too much. If you are president, can’t you have a life of your own?

But rumor has it, that Obama will be the first head of state that will put a computer in the oval office.

Let’s hope this one does not get hacked.

The day the earth stood still?

Are you amazed too?

For all of  you that have a bit of an affinity with cult movies: this is one of them.
As many directors and companies do these days, this one will soon be released as a new version starring Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connely, John Cleese and Kathy Bates.

We all remember Keanu from his stunning acting performances doing “wow”, “woah” and “dude” very well in a dozen or so different movies. I’m not putting him down but I don’t see him doing any Shakespeare plays soon. I actually like the Matrix, Devil’s advocate and of course the amazing Bill & Ted movies.

Anyhow, this is not the point I’m trying to make. Of course a website is created to help launch the campaign around this movie: http://www.earthvitallist.com.
You see a nice globe turning, showing pictures here and there of things people think is vital to them. You can then vote for it and only the X most popular ones will be saved. (By who, when, why?) So the creators of the site ask you to put in what’s important enough for you to save in case the earth will eventually stand still. You make the list on your myspace, facebook or whatever social media you want and encourage your friends to vote and thus come to the movie-site.

Of course, from the viewpoint of the movie producers, who want people to pay to see the movie this is a good point. Making a website is relatively cheap. The target audience for a sci-fi cult movie remake is pretty similar to the web-audience. So numbers would be good…

Well, I don’t think so. I fail to see the incentive. I know that social networks thrive on non-incentivised promotion but I just don’t see the upside on publishing this (branded) content on your social network hangout. Sure you affiliate yourself with the movie but then what? Is this all that is neccesary to boost your visitor numbers and product awareness at the same time? I don’t know.

I wonder how much increase in awareness it would generate if you just do some affiliate marketing, send some mails and give away some prizes. The pricetag would be roughly the same if you handle production correctly. If the message is good, will the effect follow? Or is the medium in this case more important than the message?

This is my question to you:

Does the medium provail over the message in the modern age?

Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

Please comment!

Me

What's this picture doing here?

In the interest of making this blog a little more credible, I thought it was time to write something about myself. Not that I’m this interesting, on the contrary, but to increase awareness of my experience. This to build a foundation on which you (the reader) will accept my writings more easily.

At the moment I’m 31 and I’m a Web Specialist for a multinational company. I’ve not been with this company that long but I really like it here. My duties range from updating a number of websites to creating campaigns for some of the brands the company owns. But I started in a different area.

A year after I finished my masters in Communication- and MultimediaDesign I got a job as an account executive at an event- and community agency. Or as they like to call it experience and community agency. (What’s in a name…) As I was the only one to have any practical skill in designing sites, flyers, posters etc, I was quickly pushed in the position of multimedia designer. The problem was that a sister-agency was specialised in this, so only the event-driven design jobs were coming my way. General executive work was also in my job description. This meant putting forms in a database, sending packages and helping out at some events, sorry, experiences. Here it was that I first touched on the subject of email marketing. While the mailing campaigns we sent out were not that big, I got a lot of valuable input from the tech guys at the sister company. After two years I called it quits and moved on.

With a very brief stop at a Jamba-clone I ended up at a publisher, specialized in recruitement. This was a very good move for me. I was an e-marketeer and responsible for every piece of e-marketing communication b2c aswel as b2b. This was a unique situation as you are communicating your own message but sometimes also the client’s. Here I learned how to work with Optizen Messagent. This is a very good e-campaigning tool. You can set up very small mailings in this environment but also really complicated event-driven email (and text-message) campaigns. Here I got to experiment on my own to see how mailings are done and made better step by step. I worked together with the other brands of the company that had a database about 15 times bigger than mine and a whole lot more experience.

After a year another agency called me with a job offer. Foolishly I took it. And while they had a lot of talk I felt like I was just a replacement for someone that was going on holiday. When this holiday was over, I was not needed anymore so… You can guess the next step. Actually I really don’t mind now. I know that I didn’t fit in, they were all talk and no game, trying to make it big but really not up to speed.

As I said earlier, now I’m a Web Specialist, with a specialisation in email marketing and CMS systems. I work closer to home, have more responsibility, better pay and better hours.

I try to update my blog as much as possible with things that I’ve learnt, things I want to learn and things that are interesting. I hope you find these subjects as engaging as I’d like them to be.

Please comment if you like to know more.

Instant good karma for the holidays

While looking through my daily rss feeds I came across this message:
“Salvation Army tries text messages to raise funds”

It’s simple: you text “TSA” to a specific number and you automatically donate 5 dollar to the Salvation Army. Actually I was pleasantly surprised. This is a great markething action.
This lowers the bar for people to donate money.

Instead of the impuls buy, you now have the impuls give!
I love the idea of this. No more transferring money, or looking for change to give to (sometimes very pushy) panhandlers. Just a text message and you get instant good karma for the day.

Best action I’ve seen in a while!

Full article on: http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2008/11/021697.htm

The hitchhikers guide to practical email campaigning

In follow up of the last post I did: here are some usefull tips to keep in mind when designing an email campaign. On the content of the mails I will dedicate a new post, because I think this is extremely important. But for right now: just a few usefull pointers
I have devided the text into a couple of major chuncks:

email campaigning 101

I can see my mailbox from here

Since I see a lot of questions on LinkedIn and other professional sites about this, I thought it was time to do a small section on email marketing basics.

You can say mailing campaigns are the new version of doing direct mail campaigns through traditional mail. There are a number of differences though. I will not get into this in detail at this point but anyone can see cost, time to market, devellopment, testing and follow up as a few of the areas that are affected in a positive way.

I count three kinds of mailing campaigns in my book.