It’s The Chins Favorite Time Of Year

They’re here to sing all your holiday favorites. Give them a try!

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Should Joe the Plumber be a Facebook Advertiser?

Could Facebook advertising be for small businesses too?  If you’re living on Planet Earth these days, you’re no doubt hearing about Facebook’s explosive growth and how anybody who’s ever heard of “Avril Lavigne” is using it.  Your friends are on it, your co-workers are on it, and—look at that!—your Mom is on it, too.

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Building Relationships

In a recent webinar, Jamie Turner, editor of The 60 Second Marketer, gave tips and suggestions on how to use LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to grow your business. Several points were shared but one item to remember is that we are building relationships with these tools. Marketers can utilize these tools to move a stranger to a friend, a friend to a prospect, a prospect to a customer and a customer to a loyal advocate. We cannot expect to immediately jump to a loyal advocate. As marketers, we must make efforts to “date” our new friends and allow them to experience our company before they commit. 

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The Next New Thing Syndrome

Excitement in the world of marketing always seems like it is attached to the latest and greatest. I call it the-next-new-thing syndrome. Social media has everyone’s ear right now. If you were to gauge the relative import of all marketing strategies from the amount of Twitter and blog traffic they receive, it would be easy to conclude that most marketers should be devoting a majority of their budgets to a social media focus.

Don’t get me wrong, social media is not simply a fad. It will become a cornerstone for good marketing at most companies. But that fact doesn’t eliminate the need and responsibility for CMOs and other marketing executives to consider tried-and-true approaches to their efforts as well as funding new media initiatives. What most CMOs would find immensely beneficial is concentrating their efforts on connecting the old to the new to create an effective contemporary communications strategy.

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The Ears Have It

Sound has always fascinated me, well before the days of Dolby 5.1 surround.  A well-crafted audio track can do more to liven up the screen than the most gorgeous actress in Hollywood.  Don’t believe me?  Try this little test.  Play a segment from your favorite movie or TV show, first with the picture off and the sound on, then the reverse (no sound, just picture.) Which does a better job of conveying the message or setting the mood?  There’s a reason why radio was originally called “theater of the mind.”

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