Back in March, I wrote a post for Ad Age entitled, QR Codes: Game Changing Technology of Passing Fancy. Last week, the fine folks over at the TACVB Conference gave me an hour to expand on my thoughts about QR Codes in Marketing. Below is a slidecast (slides and audio sync’d) of the presenstation. The …
If there is one thing that binds all marketers together, it’s lack of enough marketing budget to properly fund all of your marketing efforts to create an optimum marketing mix. This is especially true for brands and destinations engaged in international marketing. Over the last few years I’ve experimented with combining brands and social media …
As promised in my #LastWord contest announcement post on Monday, today I’m bringing you another in my iPhone Video series. If you missed my previous posts, you can read about my iPhone video tools, my thoughts on using an iPhone vs the Flip for video blogging, any my 8 simple secrets to better iPhone video …
Do yourself a favor and stop reading this post for 30 seconds, drop over to your Twitter, Facebook or Google+ stream and take a peek at what you see. I’m guessing that you like most folks you’re going to see a lot of one thing: content. Content being shared in the form of links, photos, …
A DM in my stream this morning asked if I knew of any posts that specifically talk about why you shoud NOT use a QR code on a webiste. I couldn’t find any quickly, so allow me to create one for you. I’ve been doing a lot of QR Code Campaign experiments over the last …
So last week I asked you to look at a picture and then tell me What’s Missing From Your Blogger Outreach Strategy? So many of you responded, none correctly (at least as to what I thought was missing) so I wanted to share what I thought was missing from these two blogger outreach campaigns. But …
We’re gearing up for our first New Orleans, workshop. For some time now friends and associates have been asking when we’ll create a special social media marketing workshop specifically for small business owners and marketers in small companies. A workshop that is designed to give them the necessary information and insight into exactly how to …
Last week I had the honor of chatting with the Social Media Club of Dallas about the role of mobile in the future of marketing. I promised I’d upload the deck and the sync’d audio of my talk for folks to share… and here it is. Mobile Marketing | Mobile Content Creation View more …
This is a reprint of a post I originally wrote for Ad Age back in 2008. And while at the time I wrote it as the President of an ad agency, as I sit here now the owner of a Social Media Marketing agency, I realize, it’s just as valid now as it was then. …
In my opinion, QR codes are anything but a shiny object. What do you think? Continue reading article on AdAge.com >>
...Is there a right way to network in social media? I don’t know if there is only one right way, but I’m pretty sure there is at least one wrong way. Let me explain. Over the last week or so I’ve been following a little dust up over in a LinkedIn group I joined. It …
What drives the bottom line more… gross tonnage (impressions) or fewer, highly targeted impacts? For most of my career I was taught that impressions were the golden goose. But a few years ago, back in 2008, something really interesting happened on my personal blog Positive Disruption. Here is a reprint of what I wrote. Read …
If you’re spending time in the social media space strictly for the joy of conversation, you can skip the rest of this post. BUT if you’re spending time on social networks with the goal of building a tribe of Social Agents that you can activate to grow your business, help a cause you care deeply …
Is Big Lens the new Instagram or just the coolest iPhone photo app released to date? The photo above — I just took that using my iPhone and then retouching (on the iPhone) with Big Lens. I changed my depth of field, isolated the Converse Digital business card and then applied a photo filter to …
Is your social media program fully integrated with your traditional marketing program, or are you just bolting on “Follow me on Twitter/Facebook” to your ads and fooling yourself?The Integration QuestionIf you’re running a truly integrated program, congrats. You’re among the elite. Like the Marines, you’re part of the few, the proud, the enlightened. But for …
Hiding Some Sort of ‘Proprietary’ Trade Secret? You’re a Fool Do you have a proprietary approach to strategic planning, media planning, brand development or anything else at your agency? Or maybe you have a trademarked, super top-secret-can-only-show-you-during-our-new-business-pitch-meeting process that is proven to make bland brands grow? If you do, you’re not alone. I too remember …
I’m sensing a seismic shift in our business. No longer will marketing strictly be about finding target audiences and telling clients how to speak to those audiences using traditional primary and secondary research. Instead, our job will be to act as curators of communities of like-minded people. They will become like our friends or like …
As a 20-year vet of the advertising business and someone who successfully built a social media practice within a traditional ad agency, I often get emails, calls and DM’s from client side marketing folks that are trying to figure out of there agency really gets social media.
...It’s in vogue these days to make fun of how far behind ad agencies are in the understanding and adoption of social media. On Twitter, in blog posts and in the hallways at all the cool social-media conferences, the social-media agencies/consultants love to sell against the big, old, traditional ad agency. But should we be so quick to rule out agencies?
...Over the last few years I’ve become increasingly less interested in the core concepts of advertising. While so many in our business want to talk about concepts, I fancy ideas. When they speak of campaigns, I push for conversations. And when they boast of impressions, I can’t help but think about impacts. At first I …
What if by allowing you to experience something you “thought” you knew about, even virtually, I could change your mind about your perception of that thing/event/brand? Would that be a powerful marketing tool? Would you invest money, time and effort behind that sort of thing? I’m thinking most would but first, you’d need the case …
Is it possible to create a 52-week video blog social media campaign using nothing but an iPhone? Could you shoot, edit and publish entirely from a mobile platform? And would the content be interesting enough and of high enough quality to actually drive traffic to the blog site? That’s what we’re hoping to find out …
I’ve always felt like Marketing was like legalized gambling. but with all the new challenges, technologies and such, it seems one of the greatest challenges folks are having in today’s expanded marketing environment (digital, social media, traditional advertising) is understanding how to gamble their precious marketing dollars in ways that favor them and not “the …
If you ask the folks over at New Patlz State University of New York they might say, Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook. According to this blog post about their social media ordeal … On the evening of Wednesday, September 30, the SUNY New Paltz Facebook Fan Page mysteriously disappeared. But they were not alone, …
Mardi Gras Twitter Branding Experiment View more presentations from Tom Martin.
...Today I’m off to Curitiba, Brazil, a city I’d never heard of prior to being invited to come there and speak about using social media to alter brand perception for destinations and festivals. But what makes this even more interesting is what you find when you virtually visit Curitiba as I did with my kids …
Breadcrumb Marketing is about enticement, allure, information, and persuasion — all without the buyer really realizing they are being sold.
...Have you ever seen someone use email in a way that is so brilliant, yet so simple that you smack your forehead and think, now why the hell didn’t I think of that? Recently I did… my friend Sloane Berrent has found a way to use the standard “I’m out of the office” email as …
Have you ever worked on the blogger outreach component of a social media plan? If so, what’s the first question you get asked? For me it is usually, where do we find the Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs). Brands that want to engage bloggers in social media platforms to help carry the message always want the …
This weekend I was reading the Wall Street Journal and came across this Florida Tourism ad. No doubt, it’s part of the effort that all Gulf Coast states are undertaking right now to fend off summer vacation cancellations due to the oil spill. On one hand I applaud the simplicity. There is no concept here…it’s …