This week’s Darwin Award goes to Joan Pallone of Metro Brokers for her bus bench advertising.  I cringe when I see small business owners falling trap to this ego based advertising. For the money,  outdoor bus benches are no longer effective. Let’s explore why this is a HUGE waste of money… And this week’s Marketing Darwin Award Winner.

Points of Failure

1.       Not targeted – Some outdoor ad sales person will argue this is low cost advertizing but this is just another form of “pay, spray and pray” broadcast. It’s not targeted to home buyers or sellers

2.       Phone number is spelled in a word -303-466-HOME –  Bad move these days. There are more than 300 different types of  handheld/phone devices on the market  and if you are like the millions of blackberry users ( including me), your phone keypad does not correspond with the 1950’s letter matching to numbers systems. My numbers don’t match (The same holds true for people with phone systems that want you to spell out a name) and I just give up.

3.       No website – Need I say more? Come on, it’s not 1975.

4.       No links to social media. Only one way to connect, the phone. See number three for explanation of that.

5.       No differentiation – No where in this horrible outdoor display does it teach me how to buy, separate Joan from all the other Realtors?

6.       No connecting with the reticular activator - Most people have been trained to ignore this type of advertising. This ad does nothing to pull me out of my “block out the noise comma” and make me pay attention. Just visual noise.

7.       The ad gets blocked when people sit on the bench to wait for the bus.

8.       The bench does not face the line of site for drivers who pass it. The ad  depends on the driver to turn their head to read it.

9.       Poor location. – This bench is on a two lane street  with businesses on one side of the street and homes on the other. The only people who have a great view of this bench are the people who’s homes back up to this street and look out the back windows of their homes. Audience of 4, maybe 5 families and the wonderful people who wait for the bus.

10.    Not trackable – Why on earth would you do any kind of marketing these days that does not have a way to measure effectiveness

11.    This is ego marketing. These ads are sold to puff the ego of the name of the business on the sign.

Outdoor advertising is a huge waste for the small business. It takes hundreds of thousands of dollars for branding and a bus bench is a complete waste of small business marketing dollars. Joan should be asking for a refund or looking for someone to help her with marketing in the digital, wireless world.

Be smart. Stay connected.

Staying connected to your customers is a critical factor in being successful for business. The same holds true for the “not for profit” sector too.

Recently I met with leaders and thought leaders in the local political arena through the invitation to a reception thrown by The Colorado Freedom Coalition.  A topic of conversation at the reception was the challenges of staying connected to voters, policy makers and influencers in the political process. It was pointed out in the discussions how well the Democratic party did in the last election by staying connected to the voters and especially the voters on the bubble or independent voters. The result was remarkable and the democrats won the vote of indepent voters because they were better connected to the voters they needed most.

Non profit organizations face the same challenge commercial business organizations do, staying connected to your customer base through the education cycle of “buying in” (becoming a customer) and then retention of them for life.

If you are not paying attention to your supporters, someone else will. It’s that simple.

Non profit organizations must take the same steps that commercial businesses do today by actively building networks and communicating with them by:

1. Effective list building – identifying who your target customers are and how to communicate with them
2. Granular segmentation of your lists – being able to segment your lists into micro groups for one to one marketing based on their needs, interests and behaviors
3. Deployment of CRM – Customer Relationship Management is vital in being able to organize, track and execute all communications in a single database
4. Content that hits the reticular activator-your communications must stand out and grab the attention of your customers. This is a science and can make your communications be needles and not hay
5. Executing effective communication channels – customers now have many vehicles for communication. Email, text, social media, blogs, etc. You must be able to communicate across all channels
6. Automated follow up systems – customers only buy or buy in when they are ready, not when you are. You must deploy drip systems like Infusionsoft to work for you when you dont have cycles to follow up.

If you run a non profit, you wont be able to stay top of mind without taking on a customer for life, attention connection strategy. Success will be found by those organizations who make attention connection a priority and act upon it.

To get attention, you must pay attention.

Stay connected my friends.

Happy Father’s day to all.

As a father of five wonderful children who teach me lessons each day, I pray that being a good father is one of my life’s greatest accomplishments.

May the day be filled with rest and joy.

I pondered if the should be a Darwin Award winner but quickly decided against it since the business I am referencing has been in business for three decades.  However, with that said, we have recently seen many business like the Rocky Mountain News, one of Denver’s oldest businesses shutter it’s doors 4 months shy of 150 years in business.

Don’t live in the past. If your business is not evolving, you may be one day closer to shutting your doors.

To many of us long for “back in the day”. Human nature is to reflect back with a melancholy view that things were better. Maybe they were, maybe not. One thing for sure, marketing and customer communication has changed.

My almost Darwin winner this week is Papa J’s.

I award them the 1/2 Darwin award for their signage and living in the past. Look at both their website and the signage on the building. The website says they have been in business 32 years, the sign on the front of the building says 31 years in business.  I called to verify and it turns out they have been in business 33 years and nearing their 34th birthday. ( I would never hard code a sign or portion of my website with a date that is expired… marketing 1o1).

Papa J’s has excellent food and good service.  Both of these qualities have weathered the test of time. Yesterday’s success and more than 3 decades is a great achievement but this is no assurance for future success.  Change is here and no longer can we expect to rest on our heals of what worked yesterday.  Dont think for one minute that you will be able to attrack and maintain the attention of your customers for life if you are marketing the way you did just even 12 months ago, let alone, 5, 10 , 20 or 30 years ago (31, 32, 33 or what ever the real number is).

Google and the other also ran search engines, change their algorithms on a regular basis. Twelve months ago, how many in the mainstream had ever heard of Facebook or Twitter? Let’s be honest, not many.

Twitter has been offered over a billion dollars for their company that has been in existence for 3 years.  Why? Because Twitter and the other social medias companies now have the attention of the consumer. This is the method they have chosen to stay connected.

The question for business owners and marketing managers is ” are you keeping up?”

Here are a few recommendations we all should be observing.

1. Be nimble in your approach to marketing. Nothing is constant but change.
2. Stay connected with those who are in the eye of the tornado when it comes to marketing and communications.
3. Get a centralized database and CRM System. – Methods of communication may change, but being able to track your customers and how THEY prefer to communicate is critical. We highly recommend Infusionsoft.
4. Done hard code anything ( check out Papa js’ outdated sign and website).
5. Put yourself out there, be in the streams where the fish are. ( see my posts on grizzlies in the stream.

Everything has changed. Don’t be the next Rocky Mountain News.

To get attention, you must pay attention.

A simple and basic technique to increase SEO and traffic to your website is to do publish a press release from time to time. The Press release should be laced with your key words, your company name and appropriate websites but most importantly shoudl be distributed by a firm who submits the press releases to Google and other search engines.

Content is king. Stay connected and get the attention you want by staying visible to your target audience.

Need help, let us know, Attention Connection is what we specialize in.

As our digital and physical lives blur further, the internet has become the information hub where people spend a majority of their time learning, playing and communicating with others globally. Staying connected is more important than ever. If you are not participating in Social Media, you really need to rethink your strategy.

Sometimes it is easy to lose sight of just how staggering the numbers are of people collaborating, researching, and interacting on the web.

I thought it might be fun to take a step back and look at some interesting/amazing social media, Web 2.0, crowdsourcing and internet statistics.  I tried to find stats that are the most up-to-date as possible at the time of publishing this post.

The numbers presented below should be a close representation of today’s numbers (please correct me in the comments if you find more recent numbers somewhere and I’ll update).

Let’s break them down by section:

Google search stats:

1,000,000,000,000 (one trillion) - approximate number of unique URLs in Google’s index (source)

2,000,000,000 (two billion) – very rough number of Google searches daily (source)

$110,000,000 – approximately amount of money lost by Google annually due to the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button (source)

24,400 – number of people employed by Google (December, 2008)

68,000,000 – the average number of times people Googled the word Google each month for the last year (source:  keyword tool)

$39.96 - the average cost per click for the phrase “consolidation of school loans” in AdWords (source:  keyword tool)

1,430,000 - the number of Google results for “Robert Scoble”

136,000 - the number of Google results for “Admiral Ackbar”

Wikipedia stats

2,695,205 - the number of articles in English on Wikipedia

684,000,000 – the number of visitors to Wikipedia in the last year

75,000 - the number of active contributors to Wikipedia

10,000,000 – the number of total articles in Wikipedia in all languages

260 – the number of languages articles have been written in on Wikipedia

(source)

YouTube stats

70,000,000 – number of total videos on YouTube  (March 2008)

200,000 – number of video publishers on YouTube (March 2008)

100,000,000 – number of YouTube videos viewed per day (this stat from 2006 is the most recent I could locate)

112,486,327 – number of views the most viewed video on YouTube has (January, 2009)

2 minutes 46.17 seconds – average length of video

412.3 years – length in time it would take to view all content on YouTube (March 2008)

26.57 - average age of uploader

13 hours – amount of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute

US $1.65 billion in Google stock – amount Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for in October 2006

$1,000,000 – YouTube’s estimated bandwidth costs per day

(sources here, here and here)

Blogosphere stats

133,000,000 – number of blogs indexed by Technorati since 2002

346,000,000 – number of people globally who read blogs (comScore March 2008)

900,000 – average number of blog posts in a 24 hour period

1,750,000 – number of RSS subscribers to TechCrunch, the most popular Technology blog (January 2009)

77% - percentage of active Internet users who read blogs

55% – percentage of the blogosphere that drinks more than 2 cups of coffee per day (source)

81 - number of languages represented in the blogosphere

59% – percentage of bloggers who have been blogging for at least 2 years

source

Twitter stats

1,111,991,000 – number of Tweets to date (see an up to the minute count here)

9,000,000 – number of Tweets/day(March 2000) (from TechCrunch)

86,078 – number of followers of the most active Twitter user (@kevinrose)

63% – percentage of Twitter users that are male (from Time)

Facebook stats

200,000,000 – number of active users

100,000,000 - number of users who log on to Facebook at least once each day

170 - number of countries/territories that use Facebook

35 - number of different languages used on Facebook

2,600,000,000 – number of minutes global users in aggregate spend on Facebook daily

100 – number of friends the average user has

700,000,000 – number of photos added to Facebook monthly

52,000 – number of applications currently available on Facebook

140 - number of new applications added per day

source

Digg stats

236,000,000 – number of visitors attracted annually by 2008 (according to a Compete survey)

56% - percentage of Digg’s frontpage content allegedly controlled by top 100 users

124,340 - number of stories MrBabyMan, the number one user, has Dugg (see updated number here)

612 - number of stories from Cracked.com that have made page 1 of Digg (see all 41 pages of them here)

36,925 – number of Diggs the most popular story in the last 365 days has received (see story here)

We all need to stay connected.  The numbers are staggering. Maybe now you can see why social media is important for you to be working in.

This post is a reposted from http://thefuturebuzz.com. Used with permission.

Dogs are pack animals and very social. People are not much different and that is why people and dogs get along so well. Everyone loves a loyal companion.

Our family has a Bassett hound, Tootsie, who just loves attention. With seven people in our home, Toosie has a large pack in her mind. Bassett hounds are great family dogs because they are so gentle, good natured and great with kids.Tootsie is a funny dog and very playful. She will seek you out and either nuzzle up to you for some love or she will  drop at your feet, roll onto her back, with her feet in the air so you can rub her belly.

A lesson  we can learn from the Bassett hound is that if we pay attention to our customers, they will come back to you like Tootsie does to our family members. Even at times when you don’t want love and affection, here comes Tootsie with her sad eyes, big ears and her wagging tail. Ready to love you and get some love in return.

If we don’t pay attention to our customers, they will find another pack. Its that simple. We see this all the time, organization which have gotten so busy finding and winning new customers, that they don’t pay attention to their customer base.  There tools like Infusionsoft marketing automation that make customer contact automatic.  By implementing these systems, you can stay top of mind with your clients without having to remember to do it. Remember, if you are not paying attention to your pack, your customers, someone else will.

Get connected, pay attention.

To get attention, you must pay attention.

Follow up failure could be the number one problem many businesses face because it’s the root of sales success. Without sales, you don’t have a business, you have a hobby or a dream that does not monetize.

The local franchise of American Pizza Company learned a hard lesson; I call this follow up failure, one and done.

In less than 9 months the local American Pizza Company went in and out of business in Westminster, Colorado.  Sad part is, I could have helped keep them in business had they just followed up with me. Let me explain.

I live 7 blocks from their failed store. As the crow flies, I am only a few hundred yards away but open space parks separate my neighborhood from the small retail plaza they used to occupy.  Seven short blocks away and they could not even find me, a potential great customer.  I am a great customer for a pizza store because I have 5 children ages 6-14 and pizza is a staple in our home. Ask my two boys what they want to eat, 24/7 and pizza will be one of the top 3 choices.

In the nine months the American Pizza Company was in business, I heard from them once, a mailed flyer menu. I bought from them once, mostly out of curiosity, yet drove PAST their store to go another mile to purchase pizza no less than 18 times and purchased no less than 54 pizzas. Now I am not going to say my 54 plus pizzas would have kept the American Pizza Company in business but I would have been a good repeat customer.

The Pizza chain that did get most of our pizza business in that same nine months was Papa Murphys’ Take & Bake Pizza.  Let’s contrast the difference between the two stores Attention Connection with me the customer.

1.       Papa Murphy’s sends  me a coupon every week in the newspaper. Easy to stay top of mind when there is a coupon inviting me to save money each week.  American Pizza sent me one communication, a menu flyer.

2.       Papa Murphy sends me a email coupon once a week. They have my email and communicate with me once a week.  American Pizza, no email, only one flyer in nine months

3.       Papa Murphy’s has a loyalty program, after 12 pizzas,  I get a free one. American Pizza – no loyalty program.

4.       Papa Murphy sends me home with a coupon each week with each pizza.  When I buy three pizzas, I get three coupons. American Pizza… no coupon. I think you are starting to see the trend here.

The crazy thing about this situation is I drove PAST the American Pizza location to get to Papa Murphy’s location. ( I actually drive past 3 other pizza chains, all who are thriving because they do a reasonable job of marketing their product.)

The lesson here is about follow up. One franchise chooses to stay in touch with me more than 50 times a year and they get my business when their closer competitor ignored me and chose not to be connected. One is in business, one shuttered their door in just nine months.

To maintain customers for life, you must implement systems to attain and maintain connection with clients.  My firm use tools like Infusionsoft to help organizations stay in touch, stay connected. If you are not connected to your clients, connect with us and we can help.

Want 30% response rates for a marketing piece? Forget paper coupons, ask me about text coupons!

To get attention, you must pay attention.  Attention Connection. Be connected, follow up and thrive.

The Social Media/SEO game just keeps changing. Recently Google launched Google Profiles.

I can here you now, another social media profile to manage, ugh. But take a minute and be smart, Google will rank these higher than Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. No one knows the long term viability of social media sites but one thing for certain, Google is not going anywhere soon. I coach all my clients to do social media as a strategy for SEO in Google. The good news is you can post links to all your sites on a Google Profile.

If you don’t have a Google Profile, get one. SEO is SEO.

Sometimes I think to myself “what were they thinking when they did that?”

This week’s Marketing Darwin award winner goes to the “dancing painter”.  (I cant even tell you the name of the company because the young man waving the sign was dancing and gyrating so much, that one could not make out the sign. I was in a hurry and could not stop but hope to return today snap a photo.)

I live the the Denver metro area and a “thing” which has become popular is companies hiring someone to stand on the corner and hold a sign, wave to traffic, in hopes that someone will stop in and see their RETAIL establishment. OK, maybe entertaining and cute but it’s horrible marketing.

I am not sure of the name of the chain of tax services who got the wheel rolling with this concept, but they would go the extra step of dressing the waving sign holder in a Statue of Liberty costume. Now you see on many corners a person standing or in this case dancing on the corner dressed in all kinds of garb, trying to get attention.

Here is why the dancing painter wins the award saved for those companies spending money and working their way to extinction.

Dancing on the corner, while cute, and possibly mildly entertaining, is a false interrupt. It may get the attention of a few people but  it does not hit the reticular activator of those who need their house painted. Since the young man was gyrating so much, I could not even read the same of the painting company. Sort of defeats the purpose.

Let’s pile on the rest of contributing factors that make this a winner:

1. False interrupt – if I am looking for a painter, am I searching the corners of the intersections in my town for a resource? Nope.
2. Does a dancing spokesperson teach me how to buy from this company? Hardly.
3. Not sustainable -If by some miracle this did get my attention, I have no way of reestablishing the connection to this company. Since they are not a local retail operation located next to the where the young man was dancing, I cant just pop in.
4. No follow on education – If i needed to know more, I can  rest assured the young man dancing knows nothing about painting, so stopping and asking him questions gets me no where.
5. No differentiation – the dancing, while unique, does not teach me the consumer why this painting company is better than the rest. No education of benefit or value.
6. Hardly scalable. Yes, unemployment is high but it’s unlikely that you could hire enough dancing sign wavers to grow the business at predictive pace.

I sure hope I can find this company again as it would be nice to help them realize this form of marketing could be one of the worst spends in marketing history.

Goes to show you, there is a marketing sucker born every day.