How to properly pre-launch a show

December 13, 2008 · Filed Under Online Marketing, social media · Comments 

Several months back NBC announced that Jimmy Fallon would be taking over hosting duties for Conan O’Brien once Conan replaces Jay Leno next year on the Tonight Show. He’s just a kid (35) compared to O’Brien (45) and Leno (58) and although I don’t watch a lot of late night talk shows, I’m definitely interested to see what Jimmy brings to the table, or desk, I guess.

Earlier tonight I saw a tweet scroll by that was a response to @jimmyfallon. Usually when I see a celeb’s name as part of a twitter account, I’ll visit the profile page to see what’s what. I like to try to figure out if it’s really the celeb doing the tweeting, or if it’s some marketing guy. Not that I mind the ‘marketing guy’ angle, I just like to see how they are using social media. Regardless, what I found on Jimmy’s profile page was a link to LateNightWithJimmyFallon.com, and this is where the fun begins.

On the site Jimmy is doing a daily video blog. The first few have been a behind the scenes look at the studio where the show will be taped, meet the announcer and the first installment of “Ask Jimmy“; a weekly segment where he’ll answer questions sent in by the community. If you record a video asking your question and send it in, there’s a chance you’re going to end up being part of the segment. I’m looking forward to more episodes of Ask Jimmy.

It’s great to see a show taking advantage of social media. And take advantage they are. Aside from Jimmy personally twittering, check out this post where they list 18 ways to connect with Jimmy online. Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, etc… As I’m writing this, Jimmy has over 3500 followers on twitter, 879 friends on Facebook and 3300 friends on Myspace. By interacting with the audience before there’s even a show to watch, Jimmy’s going to build a buzz for the show that will be far greater than if they went with the usual commercial onslaught in every popular TV show on NBC during the month leading up to Jimmy’s debut on the show.

Congrats to NBC and Jimmy Fallon for realizing the benefits of social media.

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CJU 2008 Recap

September 18, 2008 · Filed Under Online Marketing, Technology, mo30dc2008 · Comments 

I’m sitting in the Santa Barbara airport waiting for my flight back home after spending the previous 3 days at the CJU conference. I have an hour to kill so I figured I may as well get started on this post while things are fresh in my mind.

Day 1
The first event of the conference didn’t start until 1PM on Tuesday. I spent the morning having breakfast, getting my hair cut and doing the tourist thing on State Street. I then made an awesome rookie mistake and I showed up at the corporate offices of CJ around noon and announced, “I’m here for CJU.” The lady who answered the door says, “uh, that’s down the street at the hotel by the water.” Oops.

I show up at the hotel about 10 minutes after 12 and check in and get my welcome package. It’s a CJ bag with a notebook that has a metal cover and the CJ logo embossed on the front. Inside it has the schedule for the conference and about 50 sheets of lined paper. This came in quite handy. Also included in the package were a pen and a tape measure from show sponsor Home Depot. I put the pen and notepad in my messenger bag and left the bag and the tape measure on a table filled with a number of CJ bags with tape measures left inside. A cool gift to be sure, just not something I wanted to carry for 7 hours before I returned to the hotel.

The first breakout sessions were to be held at 1PM. But, I had requested a CJU Lab appointment and they scheduled me for 1PM. CJU Lab is a one-on-one consultation with a CJ employee. They will log in to your account and answer any questions you have. These sessions are supposed to be 45 minutes long. I got amazingly lucky and got to stretch that appointment to nearly 3.5 hours. If I got back on the plane and headed home immediately following my CJU Lab, it would have been worth the entire price of the trip. Big thanks to Risa. She’s a CJ Rock Star and really knows how to dig in to the CJ data. She made the mistake of giving me her card with her phone number and email address. She may live to regret that. ;)

Unfortunately due to the length of my Lab appointment, I missed the second set of breakout sessions as well. The next event we took part in was the Mixer that took place at the Santa Barbara Zoo. I made a few contacts and I got to feed a giraffe. Not a bad mixer if you ask me.

Day 2
The keynote speaker for the event was Guy Kawasaki. I really enjoyed his talk. He kept the mood light, even telling a Microsoft and Mac joke about screwing in light bulbs. I previously wrote about his keynote, so I won’t cover too much of it here. I’d just like to say that CJ did a great job picking Guy as their keynote speaker. I urge you to check out Youtube for some of guy’s work. Also, he has published a number of books that you may be interested in. I plan on checking out a couple myself.

After a short break we went to the Exploring Affiliate Marketing Opportunities hosted by Jupiter Research. The covered a lot of information about trends with consumers purchasing and how things are looking for the future. This information didn’t hold a lot of interest for us, but there were about 200 people in attendance for the session so it held a lot of interest for quite a few people.

Remember when I said Risa was a Rock Star? As we were leaving this session, Risa spots me and runs up and stops us. She had done some research over night to answer an important question that came up during our lab appointment. See what I mean? Rock Star!

After lunch I came back and went to the Web 2.0 Affiliate Marketing in Practice session. This was my favorite session of the week. They were driving home the point of using social media in order to drive traffic to a site. Melissa Salas from Buy.com was a panelist. She is somebody who has completely bought in to the social media phenomenon. She blogs, she twitters, she’s in the forums, she’s doing whatever it takes to make the connections. Many of the topics that they spoke about I was familiar with, but listening to somebody who is an evangelist for the methods was informative and a lot of fun.

The next session was called Where Do You Rank in The CJ Marketplace? This was focused on the data available inside of CJ and which data you can use to rate your publishers. They also spoke about ways to make your offers stand out in your vertical and how to offer select publishers incentives that can cause them to drive mass traffic to your offer. If the previous session was my favorite, this one was a close second.

Day 3
The final day of CJU was pretty light. We had a breakfast buffet overlooking the ocean followed by CJU’s Believe it or Not. This was a game show like presentation where had 3 advertisers making up 1 team and 3 publishers making up the other team. The host asked a series of questions that each team had to agree if it was true or false. Most of the questions were designed to show off some specific stats for CJ. Things like the number of publishers driving over a million dollars in product sales and other similar questions. Not a lot of useful learning to be had in this session. It was more of an entertainment session.

The final session we attended was called Innocent Until Proven Guilty. This was an interesting discussion. They had 4 panelists who where talking about how top publishers are all using data feeds from the advertisers to create shopping sites. But, their big complaint is the fact that all data feeds basically suck. Rather than the advertiser spending time to clean up the data feed, it becomes the onus of the publishers to make sure the feed is clean. This is a huge time waster and is likely costing everybody large sums of money. Rather than spending their time trying to drive traffic and sales, each publisher is having to spend their time doing manual cleanup of the data. Even though I don’t use the data feeds, I can certainly feel their frustration.

After the final session, everybody went outside to have lunch. But, before lunch started they held the drawing for the door prize. A Mini Cooper. I’m quite sad to say that I didn’t win.

I enjoyed my time in Santa Barbara and at CJU. I met some great people, I learned some very interesting information and I’ve come home with a To Do list that’s a mile long. I have big plans for our programs and I’m looking forward to digging in and growing the relationships with our publishers and help them earn more money by providing them the tools and support they need to succeed.

I also came away with a goal for myself. By this time next year I want to triple the number of leads being sent in by our publishers. I’m not fooling myself and thinking it’s going to be an easy task. However, by putting in some effort and constantly asking how we can help our pubs, I certainly think it’s doable.

We shall see.

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The art of the keynote

September 17, 2008 · Filed Under Online Marketing, mo30dc2008 · Comments 

Over the past couple years, I’ve seen a fair amount of keynote speakers. I’ve realized that the keynotes that I remember the most are the ones where I was entertained along the way. if the speaker comes out and throws data and stats at me for an hour, first off, I’m probably going to stop listening about 10-15 minutes in. I’m also likely to forget anything and everything they’ve said by the time I get back home.

This morning at CJU I watched the keynote given by Guy Kawasaki. Luckily for me, and for Guy, he is an entertaining speaker. He talks about how he’s listened to thousands of different pitches from people who think they have the next huge product to hit the market. I’m sure it’s listening to all of these that has molded his speech giving in to the form it is today. He says he gives his speech as a 10 point list. This way, if he sucks, at least you have an idea as ho how much longer he’s going to suck.

I won’t recount his entire speech, but there were a few points he made that really stood out for me. The first was “Make a Mantra”. Your company should have a mantra, not a mission statement. He told a GREAT story about how companies go about creating mission statements by sending the management team on an offsite event where everybody has to get in at least 1 word. At one in particular, one of the members submitted a mission statement that was taken directly from the Dilbert Mission Statement Generator. It came in 3rd in voting.

The second point he made that I really liked was “Let 100 Flowers Blossom”. When you create a product, you have an idea of who your target audience is. But, when you get your product to market, it’s not always the people you think are going to buy your product that end up being your best customers. you may think it’s going to be Fortune 500 business men but find out it’s college students. If that happens, don’t waste your effort going to the Fortune 500 guys and asking why they don’t like it. Instead, go to the college students, find out how they are using it and what they like about it and then, give them more of it.

If you ever get called upon to give a keynote, I strongly suggest you check out a couple Guy Kawasaki videos before you do. The worst that will happen is that you’ll give an engaging talk and people will be entertained and blog about you when it’s all done.

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Why/How do you Twitter?

September 5, 2008 · Filed Under Online Marketing, Technology, mo30dc2008 · Comments 

If you asked most people a year ago if they use Twitter, they’d have just looked at you funny. Wait a second, if you ask MOST people today if they use Twitter, they are still going to look at you funny. But, if you ask anybody in the tech industry, anybody who spends much time online or now the marketing industry if THEY use Twitter and their answer is most likely going to be yes. If you are one of the 8 people left on the planet that read blogs but haven’t yet heard of Twitter, let me give you a quick description.

Twitter is a site where people micro-blog. Each message, called a “Tweet”, is limited to 140 characters. Normally it answers the question “what am I doing right now?” People then sign up to follow their friends messages to find out what they are doing right now.

Twitter As A Marketing Tool
Over the past year, Twitter went from being a novelty item to being one of the most powerful tools for getting your message out to the masses. To give you an example, Barack Obama (as of the time of this post) has over 72,000 followers on Twitter. He has sent 187 messages out telling his followers where he’s speaking, what rallies he’s attending, discussions he’s having that can be seen online, etc… It doesn’t take a genius to figure out how powerful it is to have people listening to what you have to say. Want a good example? On 9/1, Obama sent a message asking his followers to give $5 to the Red Cross by sending a text message or calling an 800 number. Think about it. He could have just as easily been sending his followers to go perform some action that pays him a portion of everything they earn. 72,000 people who have gone out of their way to receive marketing messages from Barack Obama. In the right hands, that could be very profitable, don’t you think?

Not everybody uses Twitter as a way to make money. Some people/companies use Twitter as a supplement to their blog or to tell people that new information is available on their site. The idea being that the people who have signed up to follow you (as a company, in this instance) are your die hard fans who want to know AS SOON as new info or new features become available. It is not uncommon to see posts that simply say “New blog post about blah blah blah. Check it out” and have a link to the new post. Sure, the same people that are your followers would most likely find that new post on your site, but by telling them via Twitter, they know immediately and they come to your site right away. And as a bonus, the text that you sent in your Tweet will also show up when people search for words on Twitter that exist in your post.

Ways To Twitter
There are several ways to use Twitter, starting with twitter.com. Then you have free software apps for your desktop. I personally have tried two of them. Twhirl was the first one I tried. It has a simple interface and as far as I know, it’s the only software that lets you manage multiple Twitter accounts from one location. Next I moved on to TweetDeck. This is mainly what I use when I’m at my desk as it lets me see replies to my tweets in one column, direct messages in another column and then I have the ability to create new columns that search the Twitter Universe for keywords I select. This is a great way to find other people who have the same interests as you.

When I’m not at my desk, that doesn’t stop me from sending tweets. Actually, when you are out and about is when you should be tweeting the most. You can add your cell phone number to your twitter account which allows you to send updates from your phone. There are two main ways this can be done. The first way is to send an SMS message from any phone. However, if you have an iPhone, there’s a free application called Twitterrific. This lets you post Tweets and read the Tweets of those you follow. I personally like Twitterrific because as I’m typing my message, it lets me know how many more characters I have before reaching my 140 limit.

Who should you follow on Twitter?
After I added all my friends and co-workers, I did a few searches. I found people who were twittering about things that interested me. I started following them and then I’d check out their list of people they follow. I found some terrific photography blogs this way. Give it a shot, you’ll be pleasantly surprised at your results.

If you aren’t already using Twitter, you owe it to yourself to at least give it a shot. It’s certainly not for everybody, but it’s definitely a marketing tool that needs to be considered. You can find me at twitter.com/vegasgeek

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