Australian Honda jazzpacking ads cross international borders with recognizable YouTube sensation Bangs

Honda in Australia came out with a series of Honda Jazz commercials that I liked so much, I had to watch them all. The series pokes fun at hipsters, rappers, ninjas and weight-lifting meat heads. And while they may have offended some segments of the population, it in an odd sort of way appealed someone like myself, who most marketers would classify as a mainstream member of society – even though I live in the U.S.

Anyways, I though they were funny, so I thought I would share them.

A really smart creative, created one of my favorite commercials by featuring my man Bangs. You may have heard of his number one YouTube single,  Take U to Da Movies.

Even thought I am not a mom, I had a nice Mother’s day. I had lunch with my mother and two grandmothers. I had to getting going because I was finishing up putting together a shed in my back yard, but upon winding down I saw a nice Mother’s day commercial by Proctor & Gamble. With no further ado, here it is:

Depending the industry, chances are you have been approached on some level about putting up a billboard. You may want to consider it, however before signing off you should make sure expectations are clearly set.

Remember that your audience has between two and eight seconds to understand and react to your message and that it takes approximately nine impressions before a message sticks. For the average passerby who isn’t paying any attention, it can be difficult. To combat this, make sure your billboard is simple, has an easy follow up and that it is not the only way you going to market a product or service.

Below is a simple list of dos and dont’s, when planning and considering placing a billboard:

Do:

• Place a billboard if you are looking for brand awareness.
• Keep your message simple.
• Add a web address and phone number for people looking for more information.

Don’t:

• Place a billboard with too many key messages.
• Expect to be able to clearly measure ROI, unless you use a vanity phone number or url, which starts to defeat the purpose of branding.
• Expect just because you put a phone number on a billboard it will prompt people to call you.

[digg=http://digg.com/business_finance/Expectations_of_Facebook_Marketing]Clients interested in social media marketing are almost always interested in what they can do on Facebook. And it’s understandable why; users spend hours each week looking at pictures and interacting with friends. When discussing Facebook marketing, it is important to have reasonable expectations about what is possible and what is most likely to happen, given your client’s requests. When putting together a Facebook marketing plan, below are a few things you should and shouldn’t expect.

Expect:

• Expect to do a lot of audience research if you want good results building an application.
• Expect negative reactions if you decide to send out mass messages to random people or you are making a lot of random friend requests. Facebook could suspend your account if you do this. Conversely, you should try posting videos, notes and pictures and allow people to look at what they find most interesting.
• If you build an application, expect to have to put in some time promoting it before it promotes itself.
• Expect a lot to your application usage growth to come from friends inviting other friends and news feed notices going out showing that someone has added or utilized part of an application.
• Expect that you should to utilize other social media sites like YouTube, Twitter, Digg, and blogs to achieve the greatest results.

Don’t expect:

• Don’t expect people to become fans of your brand or business, just because you created a page.
• Don’t expect people to put a great deal of time and effort into conversation with your brand, unless they are uniquely touched or are passionate about your company.
• Don’t expect great results, if you aren’t doing anything that brings value or entertainment to the end user.
• Don’t expect a lot of people to click on your ads if you are simply looking for brand awareness. Offering an incentive or posting a low price for a product will most of the time increase your click through rate.
• If you build an application, don’t expect users to tell friends on their own. It’s best to have sharing built into the application.
• Don’t expect a great campaign to last forever.

Please feel free share any tips or advice if you think I may have forgot any. Additionally, here are some more great resources to check out:

The Top Five Viral Facebook Techniques – AllFacebook.com

Facebook Developers Network – Facebook.com

A Failed Facebook Marketing Campaign (About Walmart) – Social Media Optimization Blog

Facebook Marketing Stunt Backfires – Marketing Pilgrim

Search the internet for SEO rules, tips, secrets and guides and you’ll certainly find enough information to start optimizing your site.

From there after you do all of your keyword research and incorporate your key words into your meta tags, headers, text and anchor text, chances are you’ll get some new visitors to your website.

Overtime, chances are good that your rankings will eventually drop. Early in my experience, I attributed this to timing and the creation of new pages with similar content. While I was partly correct, I definitely underestimated the importance of user behavior and the minimization of my bounce rate. 

What can you do to minimize your bounce rate?

1. If you are a local service company, get local. If you are in Kansas offering cleaning services, attracting a visitor from California does you no good. Chances are the visitor will leave the site without looking at any further pages. Include your geography in a lot your keywords and pages.
2. Get specific. A potential customer looking for something specific has a higher chance of sticking around on your site if you offer specifically what they are looking for. The searcher may also be closer to making their purchase decision if they are searching for something specific.
3. Make sure you have a clean design. Nothing can ruin your credibility as a good company if your site looks like it was designed in 1997 on Geocities.
4. Administer some A/B testing  prior to launching a redesign. Show a few people a couple of designs and test how easy it is for them to find the types of information they are most likely searching for.

Moving from a position as an Internet marketer to a healthcare marketer, I’ve seen how different successful social media marketing can be depending on the industry.

Specifically within healthcare, patients are looking online for information about conditions, treatment options and physicians. A recent study however showed that their decisions about which physician they want to see still comes down to word-of-mouth suggestions from primary care physicians, friends and family members; not necessarily from something they read on the Internet.

Look no further than Minneapolis-based Carol.com to see that online word-of-mouth and price comparisons factor very little into decision making about which physician patients go to see.

Carol.com was social healthcare web site that wanted to do for healthcare what Travelocity did for the travel industry. The site allowed patients to rate service and compare pricing among competitors.

Since going live with the site in January, the company has decided to shift the focus of their company to software and consulting. Their sites for the Minneapolis and Seattle area’s will remain live, perhaps to be redeveloped when more consumers are ready.

With that said, the Internet is an important place to reinforce suggestions made by friends and family members. Search engine optimization and web design are critical parts of reinforcing image and reputation. A well designed web site with good content might help raise the level the perceived care a potential patient thinks they will receive.

Another note about Carol.com 
The concept behind the site was perhaps a bit too ahead of the times. Pricing for consumers may become more important as more people switch to high deductible insurance plans.

The underlying  issue behind the lack of success may have been that most people don’t want to think about healthcare until they have to and at that point, pricing is not always on the top of their minds. 

Additionally from a healthcare providers perspective, providers had to pay for a listing on the site while many of the individual services listed were rarely offered and priced individually. And while many physicians still in practice were taught to never advertise it is tough for marketers and administrators to justify costs.

SMS Marketing Sign

I was impressed last week to see my apartment building utilize SMS text messaging as a call to action on a sign advertising available apartments.

Curiously, I texted for more information. I was immediately texted back once with pricing information and again with a link to view photos.

Utilizing text messaging is a move that makes so much sense, I am surprised that this is still a relatively new tactic for marketing.

A Neilsen mobile survey released in September 2008, reported that Americans text more than they talk. This in contrast to a similar report released in July 2008 that stated only 16 percent of mobile users utilize their phone for surfing the web. 

Beyond these statistics, I am sure that my apartment building has record of each phone number that texted for more information. That makes for easy follow-up and continued conversation.

Your website should be considered the most important piece of your online marketing puzzle, but if it is the puzzle, you might be in trouble.

While your messages may be strong; Are they strong enough to rank highly in Google, as well as help bring you closer to making a deal?

Balancing building your pages for search engine rankings, as well as closing a deal is a tough. That is why it is important to expand your marketing efforts beyond your website. Consider the following tools for pushing your key messages online.

Google Adwords: There’s no easier way to attract visitors, then to pay for them. With Google Adwords, you create a simple text ad that shows up when people search on Google use one of your keywords during a search. You’re basically advertising to an audience that’s already interested in you. In addition, ads can be placed regionally. Businesses in competitive spaces like laptops and watches, should be aware that ad placement is done through a bidding process and can get relatively expensive.

Blog: A blog is a critical piece of the online marketing puzzle. Not only do they attract visitors through search engines better than a static web pages, but they also bring a real voice to a company. A blog is a great area to make announcements. In the online world, a blog posting can have easily as much impact as a traditional press release.

YouTube Video Channel: YouTube channels have the potential to reach millions. A recent article on TechCrunch [http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/07/the-internet-as-a-force-in-politics-obama-would-not-have-won-without-the-internet/] reported that Barack Obama received 14.5 million hours in free exposure during the last election.

If you are having doubts, YouTube videos channels can be customized to reflect your brand. And in terms of quality, you don’t have to worry about creating HD quality video, since the web is not set up to display that.

Twitter: Twitter is a free microblogging service, which asks people to report on what they are doing. The service is unique in that users can microblog by texting from their cell phones. The craze hasn’t entirely taken off, but once you try it, you’ll probably get hooked.

Facebook/MySpace: Social networking, blah, blah, blah. I’ll save this explanation for later, but if you haven’t explored the possibilities, social networks like Facebook and MySpace are great places for spreading your key messages.

New tools for pushing your key messages come out everyday. If you think I missed one, please share by leaving a comment.

When building a brand, reaching the masses seems always be of the utmost importance. We need to sometimes ask ourselves the tough questions and think about whether anyone in the masses really cares about what we are selling. Social media marketing, which often times can be tough to sell to a top level executive, has proven to be successful in niche markets. A new two-year study by Universal McCann, entitled When did we start trusting strangers? says that social media marketing can have a much greater reach than just niche markets. Below is an excerpt that I thought explained well, what all of the buzz is about in regards to social media. 

Today the web is driven by its’ users and peoples’ thoughts on everything are found across the web, personal blogs, to reviews on price comparison sites and wish lists on Amazon are just some examples. It is now incredibly easy to share opinions and cultivate influence, often without even trying. The result has been the democratisation of influence to the masses.

This is a fundamental change in the way we source and share opinions and today anyone can wield influence far beyond their immediate social group. In the old days the conversations we had with our immediate peers generally stayed inside that network. Today opinions and experiences are shared worldwide. Never before have we been exposed to so many opinions and recommendations from so many people – most of whom are complete strangers, without the aura of expertise or celebrity recognition.

The result is an influence economy that is forcing everyone in the public realm including the owners of products and brands to become more transparent, open, conversational and honest. They have to rethink the way that influence is distributed and the role of marketing communications in an information landscape dictated by consumers.

Social Media Marketing Application Visual

Marketers who explain to other marketers that they specialize in social media marketing are often times met with smirks and rolling eyes. Social media marketing by most marketers is still seen as a waste of time as in most cases the campaigns fail to reach mass audiences.

It must be understood that social media marketing is focused on allowing brand evangelists to be the spokespersons for a product in hopes that their enthusiasm will influence others.

In order to achieve success social media marketers need to focus on building relationships and starting authentic conversations. The question then becomes where to host these conversations.

Ideally the platform would be on a social platform that is all about the brand that the marketer is trying to promote, although utilizing an existing popular social network like Facebook, MySpace or YouTube will allow for greater reach.

The key to connecting on an existing social network is bringing something of value to the users and allowing them to easily share it with their friends. This can be done by building a unique and useful application. Unless you are a developer, this should be done by contracting with a digital advertising agency. When contracting out, make sure to see examples of applications they have already built.

Facebook Application Information
Open Social (Myspace, LinkedIn, Ning, Friendster) Application Information

The topic of social media marketing is huge. I hoped this helped your basic understanding. Look for more posts about this subject including case studies in the future.