thinks

Are you hip to MacHeist? For the second year running, order MacHeist here, get great software and benefit one (or all) of ten charities of your choice.

However, the group behind this program does very little marketing, relying instead on word of mouth. And succeeding brilliantly. Here are five reasons how MacHeist leverages viral media to its advantage and how you can too:

• Offer value 14 useful shareware programs for 49 bucks is a great deal. Many sell individually for close to that amount. Who doesn’t want to brag, er… tell their friends they got a killer deal?
• Ask customers to tell their friends It’s amazing how few events ask customers to pass information along. You can’t gain traction virally if people don’t think to pass your message along.
• Give customers an incentive for telling their friends If asking doesn’t work, bribe customers to tell their friends. MacHeist gives folks who get their friends to buy get access to additional software, one extra for the first order and a second for the second. (That applies to me too if you order yours here).
• Timebomb the offer MacHeist stops offering this deal in just under 24 hours. Exclusivity works to heighten the interest level - and the “how cool am I?” factor for your customers.
• Appeal to emotion While viral media typically depends on humor for its emotional punch, MacHeist uses a charity appeal. They’ve raised over $300,000 and contribute 25% of each sale to charity. What makes customers feel better than helping others (and saving money doing it)?

Word of mouth is some of the best marketing your brand can get. And these tips can help you build word of mouth for your brand.

I haven’t seen many folks pick up this Clickz story about e-commerce and Web 2.0, but it’s genius. Blogging and tagging aren’t as important as blocking and tackling when it comes to serving your customers. While the article is far less supportive of new technologies than is appropriate, you’ve got to get the right strategy and the right objectives in place before worrying about the tech side.

Launching a new e-commerce initiative? Then check out Read/Write Web’s advice for startups first.

Technorati Tags:
business, marketing, social, social networks

Number 5 on Yahoo’s Top 10 news searches for 2007 was Oil and Gas Prices (Google reports its details differently, focusing instead on fastest rising/falling, not total volume). Additionally, “Yahoo! Searches found that people searched for ways to help the environment, on a global and personal level.”

So, will environmental concerns hurt e-commerce or business overall? Not likely. What it may do though is keep folks closer to home, which in turn likely will drive further increases in local search. How well do you show up in search? Does your business use its locale to its greatest advantage?

Seth Godin encourages businesses to see these types of “problems” as opportunities. And this looks like a great opportunity.

Technorati Tags:
business, google, local, local business, marketing, yahoo

Google appears to be offering a new, “scrollable” ad type within AdSense. My daughter ran across this on an American Idol blog.

The value to publishers is more inventory per page. Advertisers gain more opportunities to be seen. But is anyone going to click on the scroll?

Josh Bernoff, Charlene Li and other fine folks at Forrester have a report on what they call “The POST Method” for social strategy. It’s an excellent report, well worth the read for many folks at larger companies interested in the best way to set social strategy for their firm. Charlene and Josh both have excellent insights into the right way to do social strategy.

For instance, the way that Josh got folks to review this report (and their forthcoming book) illustrates excellent social strategy implementation.

I learned about this report from a link on Josh and Charlene’s blog, encouraging bloggers to tweet Josh if they were interested in a review copy of the report. (Tweets are messages sent via Twitter, for those new to both). He offered the report to the first 100 TWITs. (TWITs are what many folks call the folks using Twitter. Ah, how we love our irony). What impressed me about this method is that Josh sized up his audience first, connected bloggers using social platforms such as blogs, RSS and Twitter. Who better to review a report about social strategy than the folks using social technologies. But, key to both the report and the approach is Josh didn’t start by saying, “I’ll use Twitter.” He started be knowing what mattered to his customers, then using tools that worked for those folks. It might sound obvious, but that’s precisely Josh’s point. Too many companies start with “Let’s use some cool new technology” without thinking first about what value it has to their customers. Your business can use Twitter in a number of ways. But that doesn’t mean you should in all cases. Josh just happened to demonstrate one of them. His colleague Peter Kim listed other uses for Twitter in a recent post, too. But without the right objectives and strategies in place, you won’t see the value you should.

So, should you buy the report? The answer depends on your budget. For many large companies, the cost is low relative to similar reports. For small companies though, I’d recommend waiting for Charlene and Josh’s book. I suspect it will cover everything in the book, plus some and for a much more reasonable price.

Hugh MacLeod never ceases to amaze me. Today, he coins the phrase “social marker” and discusses its importance for people to establish relationships. He also wants you to ask why your product isn’t a social marker. It’s a great question. And a critical one for small business.

Carmen Pirie quotes Mark Earls in the comments: “All mass behaviour is the result of interacting individuals within a specific context.” One obvious context for many small businesses is local. It’s not the only one and, for many customers, it may not be the most important social marker. But for certain customers, in certain contexts, it’s crucial. Why are some businesses landmarks? What did it take to get there? Why isn’t yours? Is it because you are invisible?

Read Hugh’s post. Read the comments, too. People are asking key questions about the difference between social markers and brands. To me, it’s a semantic distinction. The key remains, what are you doing to ensure you become a social marker?

Technorati Tags:
gapingvoid, hugh macleod, marketing, social, local, local business