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Wow.. do you remember the first car phones. Those big black boxes that you would plug into your cigarette lighter. It would suck if you actually used your cigarette lighter to light a cigarette because you would have to unplug your phone and then plug it back in. Then we had those big whitish things that looked like a 2X4. Then the flip phones. Now, we have so many things that we can get and do on our cell phones and they fit in our pocket.

I remember watching the news to hear what was going on in the world or those special reports that were like 1 to 2 hours after the facty. We would need to wait for the news crew to arrive and setup before we could see or know what was going on. We used to watch the TV van go by with the big tuning fork on top and just wonder how that thing worked. Today, we have instant access to upload videos and pictures. Who needs TV crews when you have the American public out there ready and willing to take your video and/or picture at a drop of a dime. If you did something wrong, the common response would be “Prove it. No one saw me!”. You can’t do that nowadays. Wait a few minutes and your little escapade is up on YouTube or on Facebook or someone is tweeting about it along with the video with your hand in the cookie jar.

Do we even need to watch the news anymore? Do we even need to have a newspaper delivered to our home or office? Why cut down any more trees? Just read the paper online or download a book to your iPad or Kindle and your set. I have rss feeds coming in on any major news story as it happens so I don’t need to wait until 6PM to watch the daily news. I can just go to www.cnn.com or www.foxnews.com for the latest or go to any website that I need to for science, travel, technology, entertainment.

But I guess the question is… DO we really need a television any more except to use it as a playback device? We can watch our favorite shows online now. We use our DVR’s to record our shows because we are not home to catch them so we watch them when we do get in. Soap operas are going away.. THANK GOD!. Game shows… eh! News.. we already spoke about that. Made for TV movies… Don’t have time for that. We need a TV to watch our rented DVD’s or the ones that we purchased. We need a TV to entertain our kids with Teletubbies, Sesame street, etc.. but, WAIT, those are on DVD now as well. Which is good because you can just pop one in at any time and your set.

Isn’t our mobile technology or just plainly put, technology, really affecting more than just news coverage. Next thing you know we’ll have a usb connector in the back of our heads and all we would need to do is come home, connect, upload and in a matter of minutes or even seconds, we have everything that we wanted to watch already imprinted in our brains.

Done.. what’s next on the agenda!

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I will admit that I am a fan of Google Reader. I have my keywords added and every morning I have several articles to peruse. Several articles have been publicized on how to use social marketing or social media to brand your product to increase sales, on what to avoid doing, on what you should be doing, and several on “We are the best at it” so we can help you do all of these things. Every one has their recipe and, is one better than other, could be. I believe that for each opportunity comes a different recipe. A little bit more here and a little bit more there. A higher temp to cook faster or you may only want a simmer. I know these analogies are terrible but I think it’s true.

Today I came across this article that deals with the 10 Essential Rules for Brands in Social Media by Taddy Hall from Advertisers Age. He points out some interesting facts if you are trying to sell your product utilizing Social Media and he even states that this is not an exact science.

Here are the steps for you to read:

1. The 1% Rule
In category after category, our data show that a small fraction of site visitors are responsible for a substantial portion of total site traffic. On average, the percentage of influential users (defined for our purposes simply as a visitor who’s subsequent sharing actions result in at least one additional site visitor) on a given site is 0.6% and rarely above 4%. However, these influencers regularly generate 20%-50% of total site traffic and an even higher share of conversion (defined however a site owner so decides). To make social media marketing effective, marketers have to identify and engage — and better recognize and reward — these super-influentials.

2. The 2-4X Rule
When it comes to conversion, visitors driven to a site by influencers are to to four times more likely to convert compared to visitors from other sources, such as display advertisements or paid search. That means your landing pages for people coming from shared links and social sites should reflect these visitors’ interests and offer enticing deals that will encourage them not only to convert but to share the deals with others.

3. The New Media/New Pipes Rule
In today’s socially driven internet, it matters far more what consumers do with your content than what you do with your content. What they say about your brand means more than what you say about your brand. Our data shows that content spread from consumer to consumer through word-of-mouth is far more powerful at driving brand preference and purchase intent than content distributed by the brand itself. This has profound implications in social media. To illustrate, if a brand puts content on its Facebook fan page, it is far less likely to go viral than if an influential consumer puts that very same piece of content on his or her page or posts it to a relevant community of enthusiasts.

4. The Martha Stewart Rule
Throw your own party; don’t just cater someone else’s! If you base your social campaigns in venues you don’t control — such as Facebook or YouTube — you may get great “attendance,” but data show it’s hard to convert and retain these party-goers. If your goals are anything beyond building brand awareness, it’s better to have a house of your own where friends can find you — such as your own branded social site, contest site, or customer forum.

5. The Power of “Weak Links” Rule
Influentials generally do have many direct “friends” and “followers,” but what makes them truly valuable is the number and relevance of their extended or indirect connections. As Albert-Laszlo Barabasi illustrated in “Linked,” you are far more likely to find your next job through a friend-of-a-friend than through an intimate contact. These “weak links” matter in the “real world,” and they matter even more online. A critical implication for marketers is the need to track the extended social graphs of their content if they are going to be able to understand and activate the dynamics of influence.

6. The Feed the Fire Rule
Consumers love to share relevant, engaging, useful, and entertaining content with their friends. Make it easy for them to find your content and make it easy for them to share your content. Ninety percent of internet pages have fewer than 10 links pointing to them — making them effectively unfindable. Avoiding this abyss of irrelevance requires more thought and effort than just pasting a sharing tool on your pages. It means actively syndicating and curating your content and distributing it not only through your brand’s social graph, but through the graphs of your most influential advocates and fans. Easy ways to do this include following/friending your influentials’ followers/friends and retweeting/posting content even if it’s not yours.

7. The More Things Change Rule
Our research consistently demonstrates that e-mail and IM remain popular ways to share content. So don’t throw out your old e-mail marketing methods just because Facebook and Twitter are the newest communication platforms du jour. The tried-and-true methods of getting customers to share links via e-mail and IM are still extremely valuable sources of traffic. Furthermore, incorporating social elements into your e-mail, such as incentives to share, can dramatically enhance an investment you’re already making.

8. Horse Before the Cart Rule
Success in social media happens when brands infuse their content with social dimensions (Facebook Connect, most notably), not when they simply stick their ads and content in social forums. In other words, if you want to succeed in social media, your brands and content need to have social attributes — content worth sharing, brands worth talking about, sites that encourage consumer participation and dialog. If your social strategy relies on advertising in social media, it’s probably better to hang on to your money.

9. The PR Pitfalls Rule
Blogger outreach and content seeding may be popular ways to get your message into the social world, but our data show that more than 90% of seeding has no material impact. Up to 5% gets some response, but less than 2% of seeding drives valuable traffic. In other words, if you can’t track efficacy of these efforts, don’t bother.

10. The Customer-Service Rule
Social marketing programs succeed when they provide a service to the consumer. Traditional media-planing processes that begin with reach and frequency targets are largely unhelpful in social media. Reach and frequency — as well as engagement, preference and conversion — are positive consequences of giving consumers content that is sufficiently relevant and useful that they propagate your message across their own social graphs. Focus on providing useful content and offers to your target audience and they will spread your messages for you.

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Internet marketing is accelerating at light speed, with the explosion of Facebook and other social media welcoming businesses into a virtual community of viral expansion and virtually old-fashioned relationships.

Bulletin board-style Web sites are so last millennium, and even e-mail marketing appears so last year unless it’s more honed and targeted to the recipient.

“The day when just having a Web site was good enough is no longer,” says Troy Rumfelt, president of Digital Hill Media. “You need a blog, a YouTube page, a Facebook page, a Twitter feed going out there and all funneling back to your Web site.”

To succeed, social media should involve high-level company officers thoroughly familiar with the brand, in the conversation, such as Bill Samuels Jr., son of the Maker’s Mark founder, and Barry Judge, the blogging and tweeting chief marketing officer of Best Buy.

“People can see through it if they have an intern writing their posts,” says Rumfelt, who has given talks on social media marketing to chambers of commerce in northern Indiana.

“It’s best to have the CEO take 20 minutes out of their day and write a few posts. It’s a great way to build that fan base.”

As important as the medium is, the message is still the center.

“You can’t build a strategy on a platform,” says James Burnes, of Indianapolis, who recently founded Mobiltopia, a venture of Project Brilliant, to provide digital planning for online presence.

“Who in the organization understands our corporate message, understands our language?”

The engagement includes understanding the audiences of different platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, their need for engagement and information, the opportunities to build trust and the strategy for dialogue that includes both outbound messaging and inbound conversation.

“This is all about push-and-pull conversation, not just putting an ad out there,” Burnes says.

A Facebook fan page, for example, can provide information about a company — including timely information about events and special sales — that users find on the screen without looking for it.

A recent advertising campaign by Honda drove viewers to www.facebook.com/Honda rather than the automaker’s own Web site in order to gain more fans.

“Now they’ve got hundreds of thousands of fans that are interested in their product and they can push information to them,” says Chad Pollitt, Digital Hill Media’s representative in Fort Wayne.

Smaller sites focus on specific niches or geographic areas, such as www/smallerindiana.com, which has fewer than 10,000 members and subpages for arts, energy, entertainment, green, marketing, media, opinion, politics, sports, taxes, technology and world.

“There are a lot of industries that have social media platforms,” Burnes says, from commercial office furniture to Colts fans. “Universities are considering social platforms for their alumni base.

“It depends where your customer is. The sales model for most of those places to make money is to sell advertising,” either pay-per-click like Google or display advertising.

Along with social media, Internet marketing can include e-mail campaigns, although experts say mass impersonal blasts from giant stores with “Coupon Inside” are likely to miss some customers.

“There’s an arrogance out there for established brands, and they’re playing a numbers game, assuming someone will click,” Pollitt says. “You need to treat every e-mail address you have as a relationship.

“Then you can segment your e-mail marketing campaign to be more specific to that person. You have to provide value to people in their lives.”

Between the Buns uses e-mail, Twitter and Facebook to give friends the flavor of the restaurant
By GENE STOWE
Tribune Correspondent

Eight years ago, Between the Buns started working to improve a weak Web site and boost online marketing with e-mails that CIO and marketing director Dave Pestrak managed by hand.

Today, the restaurant chain has more than 9,000 people on its e-mail list, 3,000 fans on Facebook and 170 followers on Twitter who enjoy a taste of the eatery’s character in Pestrak’s regular posts and tweets.

The online presence extends Between the Buns’ special events, food and drink specials and other promotions to friends of friends of friends on a two-way street where Pestrak can enjoy compliments and respond to concerns.

“You want that interactivity,” he says, scrolling through a list of good wishes on the restaurant’s 25th anniversary last month. “We have had people who wrote negative things on here. It gives us the ability to respond.

“There is a huge (number) of blogging-type Web sites where people can give restaurant reviews. If I give them a forum to do it, I can deal with it.”

Between the Buns started investing more in the online presence in 2003, when the chain hired Bluehornet.com to manage the e-mail functions, including list maintenance.

A link on the Facebook page allows visitors to sign up for an every-other-week newsletter, identifying segments that are interested in food and drinks specials, sports, special events for adults and kids’ events. They also can recommend their friends and provide e-mails.

“You want the viral aspects,” Pestrak says. “You want friends to refer friends. That’s the whole key to social marketing. It’s what it’s all about.”

About 18 months ago, he created a Between the Buns fan page on his Facebook account. About a year ago, he opened a Twitter account. All carry the flavor of Between the Buns.

“When writing the newsletter and when writing the Facebook and Twitter, I try to inject personality,” Pestrak says, such as joking “I know where my bonus went” when announcing $2,500 in food and drink giveaways during the anniversary.

“You try to put a personal touch in there so they get to know people instead of just a business. We try and have personality at the tables, with the servers – not just ‘Here we are. Come eat. Give me money.’ I try to continue that through our e-mails, our Facebook, our Twitter.

“It has to be social. That has to reflect everywhere here. People didn’t become fans to get commercials.”

The Facebook page includes a gift-giving application where people can send food and drink to their friends. (Facebook blocks pages of users under 21 from receiving alcohol.)

“In my opinion, Twitter is not as popular in the Midwest,” Pestrak says. “It’s an East Coast-West thing. It’s still picking up speed in the Midwest.”

He times the Facebook and Twitter activity to catch people online as they’re getting hungry. Even if they don’t read the alert, it might appear on the computer screen with the Between the Buns logo, keeping top-of-mind awareness for the brand.

“I try and do it at 11 o’clock in the morning, 4 or 5 in the evening,” Pestrak says. “I try to hit people as they’re thinking about lunch or dinner.”

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PBNJ Marketing is proud to show off our new website and our new blog.  It’s funny we have been so busy working, upgrading, and tweaking all of our client’s website, we completely left ours along for more than a year.

But as I was sitting with a little bit of time on my hands, I decided to just update our site and add a few more things and make a little big more clearer and clean.  I hope that all of you like it.  Please let us know what you think.

Thank you,

Robert Maldonado

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