marketing

Jeff Howe writes: idea jams “allow people to discover the fringe question (or idea, or solution), then tweak it, discuss it and bring the community’s attention to it.”

“Idea management is really a three-part process,” says Bob Pearson, who as Dell’s former chief of communities and conversation rode heard on IdeaStorm. “The first is listening. That’s obvious.” The second part, Pearson says, was integration, “actually disseminating the best ideas throughout our organization. We had engineers studying IdeaStorm posts and debating how they could be implemented.”

The last part is the trickiest and most important: “It involves not just enacting the ideas, but going back into your community and telling them what you’ve done.” Starbucks, which maintains its own version of IdeaStorm, employs 48 full-time moderators whose only job is to engage the online community. In other words, Starbucks is investing the vast share of its resources in the second and third parts of the idea management cycle.

Listen, evolve, report. Sounds like good advice to me.

I don’t know if it’s just the Mother’s day effect, but the top 10 online retailers for May 2009 were dominated by flower shops. The top shop is converting almost 40% of their visitors to buyers, though the average is just over 5%. Tim, meanwhile, claims he’s lowered his bounce rate to just 10%.

Japan‘s The Ministry of Foreign Affairs English-language Web Japan is a bottomless trove of in-flight magazine-quality stories like ANTIBACTERIAL EPIDEMIC and J-culture-hyping love-fests like Honoring The World’s Manga Artists.

If American propaganda efforts are this bad, why do foreign governments even bother blocking them?

VA Linux founder Larry Augustin on OSS

In Augustin’s view open source development became a necessity in the 1990s when the cost of marketing a program came to exceed the cost of creating it. “My favorite is Salesforce.com. In 1995 they spent under $10 million in R&D and over $100 million in sales and marketing. That doesn’t work.”

“Open source enables people to reach all those customers. It’s a distribution model. The people who create great software can now reach the rest of the world.”

Businesses get the most protection from the GPL, he insisted. “They get protection from competition.” The license’s insistence on reciprocity means no one can take the code you wrote, tweak it, then compete with you.

Found on Jeff Nolan’s blog:

Competitive Intelligence: “a large fuzzy animal may be a bear.”

Marketing: “SAP can help you understand your fuzzy animals. With over 30 years in the fuzzy animal industry, we know if you are looking at a bear, a guy in a coat, or a large dog.”

Communications: “In today’s world of increasing challenges, It’s obvious fuzzy animals are what our customers care about.”

Sales: “Who cares what it is. Let’s kill it and eat it.”

Ken forwarded me this podcast of Robert Cialdini speaking on his Six Weapons of Influence, which he lists as

• Reciprocation
• Commitment and consistency
• Social proof
• Authority
• Liking
• Scarcity

Cialdini’s book is in its fourth edition, and has apparently been adopted as a text for more than a few classes and the concepts have worked their way into everybody’s marketing seminars. Motivation speaker and marketing yakyak Patricia Fripp summarizes those six weapons like this:

• The Old Give and Take–and Take
• Hobgoblins of the Mind
• Truths Are Us
• The Friendly Thief
• Directed Deference
• The Rule of the Few

Academics often feel uncomfortable mixing marketing in their fields, but isn’t it worth a look?

Lynne Puckett on the Web4Lib list pointed me to Web Pages That Suck and highlighted this quote from the site:

Nobody cares about you or your site. Really. What visitors care about is getting their problems solved. Most people visit a web site to solve one or more of the following three problems.

• They want/need information
• They want/need to make a purchase / donation.
• They want/need to be entertained.

Too many organizations believe that a web site is about opening a new marketing channel or getting donations or to promote a brand. No. It’s about solving your customers’ problems. Have I said that phrase enough?

Then, while Googling for something else I ran across a post in Branding Blog

If you’ve heard me speak publicly, you’ve heard me say, “Talk to the customer in the language of the customer about what matters to the customer. Bad advertising is about you, your company, your product or your service. Good advertising is about the customer, and how your product or service will change their world.” Do you know the language of your customers?

Connected, no?

I don’t want to admit to being interested in marketing, but I am. Here’s a few links…

Blogs:

• Church of the Customer
   
• Seth Godin
   
• Aaron Wall’s SEO Book.com
   
• Threadwatch.org
   

Randomness:

• Writing, Briefly
   
• Google’s search result quality evaluation guidelines
   
• definition of the Google Economy at Wikipedia
   
• The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of PR