Are your blog, Twitter feed and e-mail newsletters full of “important,” “relevant,” and “compelling” facts about why your products and services are better than your competitors? Do you make a great case? Lay out all the facts? Drive home the important messages?

You could be chasing away the people you are hoping to engage.

Like the creep at the cocktail party that can’t stop talking about himself, companies that have little to offer beyond traditional “Me, Me, Me” marketing messages are finding little audience and even less engagement in the realm of social media.

These days marketers are all abuzz about social media. They want to find ways to better utilize social media to “harness the groundswell” and “go viral.” The problem is most don’t deliver content that anyone would want to read, much less forward to a friend.

The truth is, most people don’t care that much about your products or your company. And why should they? People go online for information and entertainment – not a sales pitch. If you want to attract and engage their attention, provide content that will trigger their “a-ha” reflex, relieve a pain point or provide some form of entertainment.

In a recent post on CopyBlogger, Sonia Simone discusses how boring, self-serving content has “killed” e-mail marketing:

Self-centered content is dull… I get dozens of messages every day that are so boring and self-centered I can’t be bothered to unsubscribe. I just set up a rule to automatically throw them in the trash as they come in. Or I let them pile up in the spam filter until I feel like deleting 20 or 30 at a time without looking at them.”

Any marketer will tell you they understand the need to provide valuable information online. But what constitutes value? Unless someone is actively researching a purchase, a list of specifications isn’t going to hold much value. Besides, that information is already available on your website.

To be effective in social media, you’ve got to stop selling and simply provide information that offers independent value. Industry trends, interesting anecdotes, helpful tips, links to important content from other sources – anything that your target audience will be excited to read.

Providing content that is relevant but not a direct sales pitch, builds credibility and authority for your business. It creates trust and ongoing engagement. People want your content. They’ll wait for it, open it, read it and forward it on to others.

If you establish and nurture this type of relationship, then when they are ready to make a purchase, they know and trust you, putting you high on their list of potential solutions.

Scott LoSasso, President of LoSasso Advertising, answers questions from the audience and panel moderator Gary Slack of Slack Barshinger at Google offices in Chicago.

In an effort to help traditional advertising agencies understand how to implement search marketing strategies, Google invited a panel of agency experts to share their insights on how they have used search marketing and other online strategies to improve client and agency performance.

Scott LoSasso comments, “I was flattered to be asked to sit on the panel. The past few years have been such an interesting time of change in this industry. We continue to work very hard with our clients and staff to integrate everything we do. It requires a vigilant effort and a fundamental shift in thinking. This was a fun event and I was happy to share some of what we have learned.”

Google offers a full suite of tools for search management, and they are in the process of rolling out new support services to help agencies leverage their platform.

The Brunswick Wii-a-Day Giveaway has seen strong initial results from a push in social media sites like Facebook.

In a recent effort for our client Brunswick, LoSasso kicked off the Wii-a-Day Giveaway in September. This effort was primarily supported by the launch of a new social media presence for Brunswick on Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, developed by LoSasso’s interactive division. While the giveaway continues, the response has been so strong, we couldn’t resist sharing a few key results to-date.

Our primary strategy for the giveaway has been online promotion, but point-of-sale materials in the bowling centers has worked alongside online efforts to boost participation as well.  Pre-registration promotion was sent through Brunswick’s Bonus Zone email marketing database. Communications promoted the coming contest and new social media pages, encouraging “fanning” and “following” to be in the know about contest details, winners and general happenings.

Since launching the program three weeks ago, Brunswick has amassed more than 11,000 active Facebook fans and over 100,000 entries into the giveaway. The program has also generated several thousand new opt-ins to Brunswick’s e-mail couponing program the Bonus Zone, more than 3,000 direct coupon downloads for immediate discounts on bowling and over 4,000 requests for more information on Brunswick’s new Wii Bowling Clubs – a core objective of the initiative.

The giveaway continues through the end of October, but so far results indicate that Brunswick’s first venture into social media has found a highly receptive audience.  If you are interested in learning more, here are a few links to check out – and while you’re at it, why not enter to win!

Brunswick Home Page
Brunswick Facebook Page
Wii-a-Day Registration Page
Brunswick Twitter Page

Photo by Timothy Morgan

With all that’s changing in marketing these days, it’s easy to get caught up in the technology. Easy to forget that, ultimately, it all comes back to the basics – like focusing on customer benefits. In a recent post on Copyblogger, Sonia Simone writes:

“Benefits are the little black dress of marketing: always appropriate…The insanely simple and direct way is just to put a bulleted list on your sales page under the title: Here’s What [My Product] Will Do For You. List out the seven most important wonderful things that your customer will experience as a result of doing business with you. Make sure this list can be seen “above the fold” on the screen — in other words, without the viewer needing to scroll.”

While you may find the technique a bit too simple, the point is well made. List your benefits. Make sure they won’t be missed.

She wraps up her post with a link to another marketing “secret weapon” – your call to action. You’ve told them how your product or service will benefit them. Don’t forget to tell them to do something about it.

All too simple you say? Way too marketing 101? If your marketing has a tight focus on the basics, you’re probably doing better than a lot of your competitors. If you’ve gotten a little soft – or a little too self-centered – maybe a little 101 is just what you need.

I was recently in Seattle attending the amazingly informative SMX Advanced conference. It featured dozens of enthusiastic search marketing brainiacs with a lot of great information and ideas. The first session, Social Media & Search Marketing: Not the Same Old Stuff, offered many insights. Here are a couple of my key takeaways from the first presenter, Dave Snyder co-founder of the search marketing and social media firm Search & Social.

SMX Advanced 2009 in Seattle - Photo by Andres Andrew Larsen

The Power of Links is the Problem with Links

Historically, getting links to your site has been one of the most effective techniques for boosting results in Google. If other sites link to your content – especially if their anchor text includes your keywords – your content is seen as more important than pages on other sites without links. Sort of a link popularity contest.

Additionally, the concept of “trust,” represented by the age of the referring links or sites, meant that older more trusted links and sites would deliver higher rankings. This helped combat against new sites spamming links to improve their rankings.

That’s all great, but not without problems…

• If you weren’t already well linked, it was hard for others to find your content and link to it.

• If you needed to get the word out fast, traditional link building was too slow.

Legitimate new pages were at a disadvantage since they had little trust built up with Google. The result was that searchers looking for timely information were often bombarded with older, less relevant search results.

To address this issue, Google developed the Query Deserves Freshness or QDF Model. QDF says that if news and social media sites are publishing lots of new content about a topic, it should be given greater importance in results. QDF is basically a measure of global enthusiasm for a topic.

With the exponential rise in social media content, there is a huge source of new “social signals” that Google is monitoring to help deliver the most relevant results. Inbound links are essential, but Social Media provides new ways for “hot” content to leapfrog “trusted” results in Google.

• News coverage
• Blog coverage
• Viral activity
• Micro-blogging through Twitter
• Social networking activity on Facebook, Linked-in and others
• Social bookmarking on sites like Delicious
• Social news activity on sites like Digg
• Search volume – Google Hot Trends

Twitter and other social media activity sends important "social signals" and can help boost relevance in Google. Photo by Bobby James.

Google is Watching

The objective of Google is to provide the most helpful, relevant information to searchers. In order to sort through the mountains of information on the Internet, Google has increased the complexity of what they monitor to determine relevance.

On-page/On-site Analytics - if people are spending a lot of time on a page or site, the content is seen as more valuable.

Upstream and Downstream Data – where visitors come from and where they go after they visit – these signals affect relevance.

Link building to high quality, keyword-rich content is still crucial to organic search success, but Social Media provides new ways to attract the attention of the search engines an get important content out quickly.

In Part 2 of this series, we’ll discuss techniques you can use to increase your social signals and help Google find and rank your content when you are short on time and “trusted” backlinks.

Despite uncertainties in the economy and financial markets in 2008, trends in online advertising continue on an upswing. The latest report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP reports that online advertising revenues reached $5.9 billion for the third quarter of 2008 – up 11% over the same period in 2007, reports a recent post in Marketing Vox.

It comes as no surprise that despite a faultering US economy, online ad spending is up. Now more than ever, the increased measurability, targetability and direct path from online ads to trackable response mechanisms make search marketing and online advertising an attractive place to spend shrinking ad budget dollars. When things get tight, it’s nice to know if what you’re doing is working.

There are tens of millions of blogs in the world churning out countless posts every day – a tsunami of information. A good RSS feed reader can assist in keeping track of blogs once you find them, but with so much noise in the blogoshpere, finding the best blogs on the topics that interest you can be daunting.

That’s where Alltop.com comes in. Billed as an “online magazine rack” of popular topics, Alltop lists the 5 most recent posts for the top 50-100 blogs on each of the various topics covered. The searchable list of topics runs the gamut from politics to astrology – social media to fantasy football. You can click through to the full post or (delightfully more time saving) mouse over and read the first paragraph of each. This is why I can’t get enough of Alltop – it’s a remarkable tool for keeping up with the flood of information in a remarkably short amount of time. So simple, yet so useful.

If you already know about Alltop, you know what I mean. If not, it’s definitely worth looking into.

Scott LoSasso, President of LoSasso Advertising in Chicago, discusses marketing planning for 2009. With marketers concerned about the economy, it’s important to make sure that you don’t stop evolving. Online marketing is essential to  positioning your company for growth coming out of the economic slowdown.

Found this great post on Mashable. It’s a comprehensive list of RSS tools, tips, hacks etc. Anyone have any other good reference links like this one on other new media tools and technologies?

RSS Article

Photo by Torchondo

I’ve been in marketing for almost two decades. In those 20 years, the one thing I have never stopped hearing is the idea that “consumers are inundated with more advertising and marketing messages than they can handle,” and that “it’s harder than ever to cut through the clutter and reach your customer.”

Of course, these things are true. Consumers today are flooded with endless promotional messages – print ads, radio, TV, banner ads, spam email, e-newsletters, Amazon recommendations – the list goes on and on.

And with the arrival of every new electronic device or web application we have new ways to get and share even more information. Blackberries and iPhones, instant messaging, podcasts, You Tube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Flickr, XML, RSS – many people quickly reach a point of information overload.

The good news about technology is that while it can foster information chaos, it also provides the tools to manage the cacophony.

Savvy marketers today know the power of blogging and the importance of RSS feed readers. They are one important way today’s information-saturated consumers are filtering out the noise online while letting through key pieces of information about things that really matter to them.

Whether it’s insights, entertainment, or offers they just can’t get anywhere else, you have to find the things that your customers really want or need in order to get them to subscribe to your RSS feed.

If you can get them involved – posting comments, suggestions or even complaints – you not only get your message out, you gain invaluable insights into what your customers are thinking – and more information about what they want.

If your customer adds your feed to their RSS reader, you instantly become a preferred provider. Someone that has been selected as worthy of keeping up with. Your message faces less competition and is automatically given greater credibility.

Its simple but powerful way to get a leg up in an information saturated world.