NEW! Viewstream eGuide – Evaluating Social Media Claims for 2010 Posted by John Assalian on August 18, 2009 As we roll through the last half of 2009, social media has carved out a permanent place in marketing. There’s been a social media frenzy as marketers rush to be a part of the latest trends. With the acceptance that it is here to stay, it is important to take another look at what social media means for marketing. We’ve done a lot of work with social media for our clients, and we’ve had a chance to test what it can do. We’ve also seen a lot of companies adopt social media in the past year. Despite a lot of talk from the gurus and experts, social media can often surprise marketers with disappointing ROI. If you are currently using social media in your marketing, or plan to do so in the next year, you will want to read my new eGuide, Evaluating Social Media Claims for 2010. This brief book reviews some of the biggest claims made about social media, include the costs, best practices, and perceptions of what it can do for your business. It lays the groundwork for a new understanding of marketing in 2010, one that uses social media as a tool, not a strategy, to market based on message, content, and the importance of speaking directly to prospects. Instead of social media for the sake of social media, this guide can help you perform social media marketing that is targeted, effective, and that leaves you in control. View the eGuide now and begin to rethink what social media means for your business. In doing so, you can leverage the power it has to help grow your business!
Content Marketing: Seven Ways Posted by John Assalian on June 11, 2009 Today we presented our webinar, Your Prospect Is Your Champion: Seven Ways To Increase Sales Ready Leads with Content Marketing. In the presentation, I shared some insights into how tech marketing departments can achieve better sales-ready leads, execute more effective lead-nurturing strategies, and sustain competitive advantage using uninterruptive, informative content. If you missed the webinar, download the pdf, or view the slideshow below. Your Prospect Is Your Champion: Seven Ways To Increase Sales Ready Leads with Content Marketing View more OpenOffice presentations from Viewstream. We had a great group this morning. Thanks to everyone who attended!
Webinar on Content Marketing Posted by John Assalian on May 6, 2009 I will be doing a webinar on Thursday, May 28, 2009, at 10:00AM Pacific, on Content Marketing. The webinar will focus on companies that need a persistent content marketing strategy – and how to create engaging content to bring that strategy to life. I will present the seven ways to use content marketing in your marketing & sales strategy, including: Way #1: Make Your Content Informative, Consultative and Engaging Way #2: Make Your Content Portable with Social Media Way #3: Leverage Your Content Throughout Your Channel/Partner Ecosystem Way #4: Create Thought Leadership in Your Industry Way #5: Develop Tracking/Metrics That Listen Way #6: Create a Long Term Strategy (not just a campaign) Way #7: Crowdsource: Using customer content Please attend – I will present for thirty minutes and have some time for Q/A. See you online!
Viewstream Launches www.ITDatabase.com Posted by John Assalian on May 1, 2009 ITDatabase.com, a startup that has developed a better way to do IT research, launched today. Viewstream worked with ITDatabase on the product launch, including branding, website design/development, messaging, landing pages, product demos/videos and SEO/SEM.Congratulations to the whole ITDatabase team, and to CEO & Founder Travis Van. You guys have a great solution and we wish you all the success in the world.I am also very happy for the opportunity to be on ITDatabase’s Board of Advisors.If you are in tech PR and Marketing, I encourage you take a free trial of the product.If you know anybody in tech PR & Marketing, please refer them to ITDatabase for a free trial.
Example of a Great Viral Marketing Campaign Posted by John Assalian on April 1, 2009 http://www.saveie6.com/index.php Great example of Viral Marketing Focused — only insiders (i.e., the target customer of this company) will get it. Hilarious — anybody in the web dev world will truly appreciate the irony in “saving IE6”. Viral – many ways to spread the word, easy to do so, and clean friendly design. Good job to the creators of this campaign!
Why Click Through Rates Are Not So Important Posted by John Assalian on January 26, 2009 Anyone interested in the web advertising industry should check out this ComScore white paper. The paper argues that the Click Through Rates (CTR) fail to quantify the value of Online Ads. The reason is simple: users will often seek via search or through offline methods the brand and then purchase the product. Clicking right there is only a small part of the value — if you actually go out and measure the impact of a campaign you can get some true value metrics. Online advertising is starting to look a lot like TV or print advertising — a way to get your message out to audiences that will respond depending on the quality and quantity of the advertising, not so much the medium. Hopefully, reports and data like this will help people understand that it is not all about click through rates. The data say: “The results presented in this paper will show the manner in which online display ads work in affecting consumer behavior, revealing that there are indeed latency effects and branding effects even when click rates are minimal.”
Facebook Turns Off Whopper Campaign Posted by John Assalian on January 15, 2009 Viewstream’s favorite advertising agency (Crispin Porter) recently launched a brilliant campaign for Burger King — offering a free Whopper to any Facebook user who removed 10 friends. (Tagline: “You like your friends. But you love the Whopper.”) The marketing campaign, dubbed the “Whopper sacrifice”, prompts users to download an application to their Facebook profile. The user then chooses ten friends to eliminate from their “friends” category, and is then rewarded with a coupon for a free burger. Then the Whopper application proudly boasts: “You have been sacrificed for a free Whopper.” While most Facebook applications emphasise relationships between friends, the Burger King application is among the first to promote division as a marketing tool. Over 221,831 Facebook profiles de-friended for a coupon before being shut down. Well, Facebook didn’t like this campaign so they turned off the app — somehow it violated their privacy policy (yah!). Congratulations to Crispin Porter on a brilliant campaign — it is unique, funny, and gets attention. Check out the site here.
72% of IT Prospects Use Online Video to Make Purchase Decisions Posted by John Assalian on December 10, 2008 Couple of points from this TechTarget Presentation: 1 — Prospects WANT video — shows that marketers produce less video then prospects want. 72% of users use online video to research tech solutions. 2 — Syndication is critical (one video leveraged to many places). Prospects view video content on multiple sites (youtube, corporate sites, content providers, etc.). 3 — Users like diverse amounts of video content (demos, case studies, testimonials, conferences). 4 — IT Buyers like COMPARABLE content. Thanks to Tanya at Xinify for sharing the presentation!
How To Make Product Demos Sell Posted by John Assalian on December 5, 2008 Flash Presentations, Flash Demos and Online Demos are VERY effective tools to help sell your products and solutions. Most companies have product demos on their websites, and most of them are not very good. Considering that if you look at web analytics, product demos are the type of content that people actually click on and will watch, companies ought to invest in making quality product demos—and leveraging this communication across various mediums. Viewstream has a lot of experience in creating product demonstrations — and we wanted to share some of our tips and tricks. So we wrote an article, that shares some of our insights. It’s a little long for a blog posting, but check it out here. Please make comments to the blog!
The Stumpy Tail Cattle Dog Posted by John Assalian on November 5, 2008 There is a great case study here of how to use a multi channel media strategy to bring a product to market, and align everything around keywords and key messages supported by varied media types. I have seen this integrated marketing and PR strategy work very well for many of Viewstream’s clients. If played right, using this strategy creates significant competitive advantage. As companies like google continue to dominate, vertical content sites are growing slower than the big content sites (Social Networks, YouTube, Google) – which means an integrated communication/search strategy is a better place to spend your dollars then on online advertising. From the data that I have seen, the long tail is beginning to look like The Stumpy-Tail Cattle Dog (a dog that has no tail). I am simply amazed at how many times clients tell me that they got a call from someone who found them on Google and then closed a huge deal. By the same token, ROI from online advertising has never looked sadder – with a decline in online ad click through rates and the unreliable data from advertising properties. Search drives sales – we have always known that – and the data shows this more and more. Viewstream is well positioned in this changing environment as we are able to work quickly in many mediums (integrated search, digital media, website, creative, messaging) to get companies to market faster, better and cheaper than the slower advertising conglomerates that companies have traditionally relied on.