A few weeks ago, I presented a new technology to a group here at Godfrey. I started off by asking if any of them were twittering? A few (mostly under the age of 30) were, but the majority of those in the room had not heard of Twitter.

So what is Twitter? It is designed as a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent "updates".

Text based posts or “tweets” are limited to 140 characters and can be sent to the Twitter web site, SMS, to your mobile phone, instant messaging or a third-party application such as Facebook.

USA Today recently ran a good article summarizing the history and craze of Twitter. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/2008-07-20-twitter-tweet-social-network_N.htm

Sounds like another way to stay
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The revolution in how people use media has ignited the upheaval in marketing communications strategy we are calling hyperintegration. It begins with media, but doesn’t end there.

Time was, the job of media professionals was to make the best purchase among a limited number of advertising media. In the consumer world, that meant TV, magazines, newspapers, and radio. Maybe outdoor.

In business-to-business, the range was even tighter: which trade journals fit the best and were the most cost-effective?

The explosive growth not only in the number of options, but in their essential nature has changed the situation dramatically. A podcast offers informal, but personal, contact. A video shows rather than tells. A webcast demonstrates expertise. And it’s hard to beat search – paid or organic – for generating leads.

The point is, it’s not just about reach and frequency any more.
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We’ve talked often about the role of branding in helping to improve marketing communications effectiveness and that certainly is its most obvious use, especially when you are trying to justify budgets to management and financial people.

Branding has a “softer” side, however. And that is branding’s role as self-revelation, as an opportunity to tell the world who you are.

For some, that can be a major event in a corporation’s life, giving you several equally-important opportunities:

• To understand the past, what made customers trust you years ago, and how they think of you now.
• To organize the present, to sort out what issues are temporary and transitory, and what factors have long-term consequences.
• To shape the future, to decide what kind of company you will be in five, ten, or even 20 years.

To do that, of course, branding has to be much more than graphics, colors, and typefaces.
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New technologies. Media fragmentation. The changing marketing landscape. B-to-B marketing professionals are dealing with them – in many cases struggling with them – as day-to-day realities of the way we “do” marketing today.

One of the consequences of the new marketing landscape is that, as you necessarily devote ourselves to learning new technologies and media channels, you can lose focus on the big picture. It takes time and attention to learn how to properly execute a search engine optimization program, and keep it going continuously. It takes time and attention to implement and constantly tweak a search engine marketing program for continuous improvement. And to know, understand and leverage the continuing stream of new media opportunities and techniques available to B-to-B marketers.

There are endless details and procedures involved in optimizing press materials
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The Changing Media Landscape - the notion that the way today’s consumers get their information is fragmented. Today there is a full spectrum of communication technologies, and they are constantly evolving. This new media landscape, applies not only to consumers, but also impacts the B2B market.

This is evidenced by a new study released last week, published by the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and conducted by Ipsos Research, illustrating that America’s business executives are shifting their media habits.

The study found that 70% of the C-Suite received a daily e-mail alert/newsletter in the last
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The economy is creeping towards a recession. The DOE’s 13 SEER mandate has helped level the playing field, household buying habits have changed dramatically since the popularity of the internet, and media options have drastically fragmented. With all of this going on, how can a low to mid level HVAC contractor compete against the big guys? While there is no perfect answer to this question, there are some suggestions to help you spend your precious marketing dollars wisely.

Start by looking to your manufacturer and distributor advertising programs. There are literally thousands of dollars available to dealers who agree to use branded and sometimes pre-packaged advertising programs. In fact some manufacturers offer up to 4 times a dealer’s advertising investment!

Next, think about timing and placement of your advertising. What are you really getting out of your investment? Case in point: if you put all of your dollars into yellow pages advertising then you
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To start, the key to a successful search engine marketing (SEM) campaign, just like any advertising campaign, is determining the goal of the program, and defining the specific products and/or services that will be promoted. Focusing on keywords and phases often leads to a long list of keywords that you then try to mold into a campaign. 

Another important step is determining the content of your landing pages. Do you already have landing pages that support what will be promoted? If not they need to be developed, and designed so that visitors feel compelled to break anonymity. This is where the visitor moves from a nameless "page view" to a prospect. Also, having landing pages that are relevant to your keywords and your ad will help increase your ranking (and enhance your visitor's experience).
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You may be reading this after clicking on our E-news item that 45% of integrated marketers in a recent study haven’t spent marketing dollars on emerging media like social networks, blogs, or word-of-mouth initiatives, but are interested in doing so. Of course, the other side of the coin is that 55% have implemented some kind of social media effort.

Why haven’t the 45% made the plunge…or at least stuck their toe in the water?

A new study by TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony sheds some light on what we have found to be true through experience. The authors of the survey of 71 marketing professionals in the U.S., Canada, France and the U.K. say that many marketers, “particularly the slower-moving” ones (their words, not mine!), want “best practices” and “proven models.” That’s understandable,
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A recent article in B2B Magazine cites moves by B-to-B media companies Reed Elsevier, United Business Media and Ziff Davis that, collectively, point to the difficulties trade publishers are having in managing the migration from print to online.

Ziff Davis filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing a decrease in revenue from print advertising and subscriptions. UBM announced that it had restructured CMP and eliminated the CMP name. And Reed Elsevier put its Reed Business Information unit on the block.

While we are not happy to see reputable trade publishers suffering, the future belongs to those who leverage technology and find, or hold on to, the B-to-B audience. As we discuss in our white paper on this topic, trade magazine publishers once owned the franchise as aggregators of information.
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I’m back in the creative seat again. I volunteered to step in and head our creative staff after we agreed Jim Everhart, my predecessor, should spearhead our hyperintegration efforts.

I’m looking at things from a slightly different perspective now – a perspective of someone with a lead “creative” title and responsibilities. As I remove my account manager hat, something strikes me. We creative folks have more tools at our disposal – blogs, podcasts, email marketing, and the list goes on. Our primary function has always been to think of new and unique ways to tell our client’s story, demonstrate a benefit and craft compelling ways to reach out to a marketer’s various constituents – engineers, channel partners, integrators, other influencers and ultimately, end-users.

Sure, we still need to apply our traditional creative skills, but we now have these new, exciting tools at our disposal.
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