Category Archives: Marketing

LinkedIn’s Clever Nod to Early Adopters

Posted by Andy Boyer in Marketing, Social Media

In Marketing these days, it’s all about “Influencer Identification.”  As in, “How do I spend as little money as possible to reach the most important people who will say good good things about me?” It’s a simple srategy and hard to pull off.

On the flip side, there’s something you don’t see a lot of – the followup.  After spending all that time to get the early adopters to make referrals to the majority, many brands simply forget where they got their start.  That’s what makes this simple email from LinkedIn’s CEO so clever.

Dear Andy,

I want to personally thank you because you were one of LinkedIn’s first million members (member number 121884 in fact!*). In any technology adoption lifecycle, there are the early adopters, those who help lead the way. That was you.

We hit a big milestone at LinkedIn this week when our 100 millionth member joined the site. 

When we founded LinkedIn, our vision was to help the world’s professionals be more successful and productive. Today, with your help, LinkedIn is changing the lives of millions of members by helping them connect with others, find jobs, get insights, start a business, and much more.  

We are grateful for your support and look forward to helping you accomplish much more in the years to come. I hope that you are having a great year.

Now, this email did a few things for me.  I never really consider myself an innovator.  Occasionally an early adopter.  But I was #121,884 out of 100,000,000, and I needed to go into Excel to figure out that makes me in the top 0.122% of LinkedIn adopters.  Not just top 1%, but dang near the top 10% of the 1%.Telling me that little stat is a nice way of showing me some love without seeming insincere.

Maybe more importantly, it also makes me realize and remember that LinkedIn has been an important part of my online world for a long time.  I may not go there every day, and I may not currently use it as much as I use other services like Pandora or Twitter.  But I needed that gentle reminder that while I had fun flings with MySpace, Shutterfly, Biznik, Ning, WetPaint, Lala, Digg, Delicious, Foursqaure, Gowalla, and 100 other intrguing networks, LinkedIn has weathered all the storms, making it through both the good and bad times.  It’s never been the sexiest or most interesting site, but it’s always there, does exactly what it promises, and occassionally provides me little unexpected moments of joy. It’s slowly turned into that trusted friend that you can’t imagine life without – something way more valuable than those little daliances into the new and exciting things that always disappoint.

So it’s not often you get to say complimentary things about an old brand.  But I like LinkedIn’s nod to their longtime fans.

Super Bowl Ads Part 1

Posted by Andy Boyer in Marketing, Personal, Social Media

Remember when the Super Bowl was simply all about the commercials during the game itself?  Well how great is it that now we have YouTube, so we can watch all the commercials BEFORE the game itself, including all of the “Banned” ones that “didn’t make it.”  (Don’t you just love that every brand has a “Banned” commercial now?”

According to early research, this Volkswagen gem is leading the pre-game hype for Best Ad.  

Gaming the Social Media System

Posted by Andy Boyer in Marketing, Media, Social Media

It appears the time has come – or maybe it had already – in which clever entrepreneurial types can more easily game the social media system.

Now that we’re a good 4 to 6 years into companies leveraging social marketing programs, we’ve finally infiltrated the marketing directors who still don’t quite get the concept of building meaningful relationships.  We’re reaching a few decision makers who want quick fix solutions and simple metrics that don’t really correlate to anything actionable.

This article from Social Media Today talks about the proliferation of social scoring.  In concept, it seems like a natural evolution.  Why pay the same CPM to reach everyone, when you can pay a little higher CPM, but buy fewer impressions, to just reach the people who matter most?

But I think the principle breaks down when you take into account that once you use some arbitrary calculation such as “Klout” score, you have – by definition – developed a real world game in which the prizes are monetary.  Rather than spend our time on some casual puzzle game, why wouldn’t we develop ways that we can get on Virgin’s VIP list.  

This “Game-ification” of our online lives is not a new concept.  Scott Dodson talks of it in a very eloquent and interesting manner.  But once we’re using our social profiles, or creating alternate social profiles, to try to game retailers and get on their influencer list, we start to see the business benefits of social media breakdown.  

It seems to me that soon we’ll start to see a separation between companies run by marketing directors who are managing social programs with made up metrics, and those who actually understand their customer base.  And if you find a company with the former, go run up your Klout score and get free stuff…

Busy Seattle Technology Marketing Week

Posted by Andy Boyer in Marketing, Seattle, Social Media

If you’re in technology marketing and advertising, this is going to be a busy week.

Tuesday: Social Media Club October Event “Building Ambassadors Using Social Media” at The Canal in Ballard, 5300 34th Ave NW, Seattle, WA 98107 (6-9pm)

Wednesday: TechFlash Meetup at Spitfire Grill, 2219 4th Avenue Seattle, WA (5-8pm)

Thursday: NWIAG.com October Event at Havana’s Social, 1010 E. Pike St, Seattle, WA 98122.  (5-9pm)

See you all there.

Rich Barton Explains Online Marketing in 3 Sentences

Posted by Andy Boyer in Marketing, Media

So, my friends and colleagues have been working in the online space for a long time.  Going back to driving downloads and pushing POS items, all the way now to Facebook Apps and QR codes.  We’ve seen a ton of fads and fixtures.  I bet I’ve signed up and tried out hundreds of programs.

Last night Rich Barton spoke to a group of alumni from the UW CIE.  He ran us through a list of his new projects, and a history of Zillow.  But he framed all of his companies under 3 simple tenets, which pretty much sums up the entire history of the internet, no and forever.

  1. If it can be found, it will be found.
  2. If it can be rated, it will be rated.
  3. If it can be free, it will be free.

Find me a company that has been able to break this.  Anyone?

My New Favorite Social Tool – Flavors.Me

Posted by Andy Boyer in Marketing, Social Media

Nothing revolutionary here, and I may be a little late to the ballgame on this one. But I’m having a lot of success working with Flavors.me as a super simple, 10 minute way to build out nice looking web properties.

There’s nothing genius in the concept, but the execution is unbelievably quick and easy. In about 20 clicks, you can aggregate together all your social feeds, upload background pictures, change the font colors, and – if you choose too (I haven’t yet) – grab a custom url. So if you publish for multiple blogs, in theory you could grab all the rss feeds from those blogs, and suck them into your single Flavors.me page. 

There’s real value in the system if you are struggling with clients who have multiple locations, and can’t decide if they should have different url’s, different Facebook pages, etc… This gives you a nice aggregation capability.

For personal branding, I can’t think of anything much easier. Get your resume, photos, designs, feeds, reading lists, etc… all dragged into one place for an employer / client to look through, and save them the hassle of google.

Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.