Tactical Execution

I was recently featured in an article written on Digital Media Buzz.  The article is about how companies like Facebook and Twitter will develop their revenue models in the future.  Read the article and please leave a comment – good, bad or indifferent – at the bottom of this post.

Other contributors to the story included Kevin Flaherty from Wetpaint and Teri Ross from Imagine That – good company!  If you are working on a related story, feel free to contact me for a quote.  Thank you!

The most effective thing a small business owner can include in
marketing materials like brochures, newsletters or on a website is
testimonials accompanied by a photo. It’s a well known fact that
third party endorsements are more effective than first person claims,
and the inclusion of a photo dramatically increases trust. For a
dance studio owner whose direct audience consists of children but
whose paying audience consists of parents, a series of positive quotes
by other parents along with their photos can directly increase
conversion.

Service professionals like insurance agents are increasingly using
Twitter as a way of marketing their services. The platform is ideal
for sharing bite-sized nuggets of expertise, insights and advice. In
my case, I summarized my book into 300 marketing-related tips and
release them regularly as tweets. The strategy has worked and I now
have over 20,000 followers.

Every month that goes by, internet marketers are offering prospects
more value before requiring a purchase decision. Just like Costco, we
are almost always allowed to sample the goods before buying anything.
On the internet, that means more and more services offered at no
charge, coupled with premium features for those who need them. Google
is an excellent example of this philosophy, providing a host of
sophisticated services for free. This trend will surely continue as
companies trip over themselves to attract your eyes, your thoughts and
eventually, your wallet.

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter offer tremendous
opportunities to creative companies who wish to engage their
customers, but they also come with a burden of authenticity. Social
media platforms bring interactions much closer than traditional media
channels and customers rightfully assume they are communicating with a
real person. That presents a challenge. Authenticity is paramount to
online success on today’s social internet and corporate communications
need to reflect that reality. As a rule of thumb, those writing ‘on
behalf of’ someone else should always say so unless they are the
exclusive proxy voice for that individual.

The greatest monetization opportunity available in the Google Voice
phone offering is with premium service features. With more and more
people working from home or other non-traditional working
environments, the need for cloud-based professional services will
continue to rise. The Google Voice offering will undoubtedly have
free basic features but can also offer a wide array of services
catering to the mobile working professional.

VoIP digital audio transmission is becoming increasingly common in the
business world. Now that garbled sound quality and packet loss issues
have been largely resolved, most people can no longer tell the
difference between a VoIP call and a traditional phone call. Indeed,
multinational corporations are already using such technologies for
their offshore customer service departments, Vonage being a perfect
example. While transmission cost savings are abundant, there remains
an installation requirement that can be expensive for large
corporations. Telecom providers are rushing to provide creative
options and corporations are left making breakeven calculations.

A useful Keyword Monitoring tool for SEO Professionals, Website Owners and Bloggers has been visibly floating in the Internet Marketing world recently. This website is called KPMRS.com and it allows you to check your Website Rankings on search engines for the keywords of your choice.

KPMRS is strongly catching up in SEO Tools

KPMRS offers its users Keyword monitoring on three search engines – Google, Yahoo and Bing, apart from a host of other supplementary services such as a Google Page Rank monitor, Social Activity Prober, Back Links tracker, Alexa Ranking Charts, Graphical widgets, and then some. KPMRS is also being launched on your iPhone soon and promises a lot of new, intelligent features and tools in the development pipeline. I suggest you check out this website pronto!

With broadband connectivity, the internet is supporting more rich
media than ever before, allowing content producers to bypass
traditional channels like TV. The trend is moving away from mass
marketing and towards micro-segmentation where viewers can find
information catering to their individual preferences. Webcasts,
webinars and blog talk radio are perfect examples and we can expect to
see more and more content shifting to those channels in the future.

Today’s information economy requires producers to categorize their
content into beginner, intermediate and advanced. Beginner content
should be given away for free as a way of demonstrating expertise and
building trust with the audience. Intermediate content should also be
given away for free, but only in exchange for contact information like
an email address. Examples might include white papers or industry
reports. Advanced content needs to be monetized to generate revenue
and profit. Most importantly, advanced content should be described in
all beginner and intermediate content, forming a sales funnel for
prospects and customers.