I’d like to start this series and let you know every time I come across a great online marketing tool to give examples of how to create buzz on the web. I think most of us have not yet fully realized what possibilities online media offers. So get ready to be surprised — and note, all this is done simply online. This first one is from the new Intel ad agency Venables Bell & Partners located in San Francisco. Its a small ad agency with only one location, but size does not matter as you can see in this and many other examples. Here they created buzz with a website and funny animations for the Napster relaunch.  Click on the picture to see the animation and how they get people to subscribe with their e-mails.

Favicons are the icons in the browser URL line that are small versions of companies’ logos (typically) and as such an important part of a their corporate identity.

Google was not entirely happy it seems with its last favicon redesign from mid-2008 so decided to tap into volunteer help calling for submissions. The outcome is this new favicon:

Update: as Francis Turner pointed out this new Google favicon resembles color-wise that of AVG, a security software vendor, which has been around since 1991, suspiciously well:

And another guy had a lot of fun pulling together 24×24=576 favicons into a “modern art” favicon gallery.

Ever wondered what a blog in Germany is worth? In a bit less than a week we will know when the auction in eBay closes. Robert Basic, one of Germany’s most read German speaking IT bloggers, is selling his blog site on eBay and currently the highest bid has reached 22,550 EUR. (update: the blog sold now for EUR 46.902,00) The auction is open for another 6 days. Why he is selling the blog site he explains in an interview. I must admit that I have not heard of him before so was reading this interview and he seems to be a nice guy who kept a good amount of modesty and irony both of which typically US tech blogs like Techcrunch have entirely lost - maybe never had. Example: Question: If you could decide what the blog would be worth how much would you say? Robert puts a finger on his lips, smiles an says “One million dollars”. (please click the link)

While even this amount would let the US tech blog community smile and pretend to yawn, I think that they will actually watch this auction quite carefully. Why? Well it is interesting to see what an IT blog sells in Germany as you can then apply (Michael Arrington for sure has an Excel sheet prepared for that ) factors for viewers, location etc. and can come up with  what their blog would be worth.

As it turns out in  the interview he is not a friend of Google also because he sells links which is against Google’s policies.

Der Maßstab von Google ist nicht dieser bullshit wie “dont be evil” oder gar der Mensch letztlich, sondern ganz einfach Geld. Was ist das aber für ein Maßstab? Das wäre mir egal, wenn Google nicht zu diesem Infodealer mutiert wäre, dessen Rolle in Zukunft weiter zunehmen wird.

(The measure of Google is not this bullshit “don’t be evil” or even the human being at the end, but simply money. But what measure is this? I would not care if Google had not mutated into this info dealer whose role will increase even more in the future.)

Being asked if he would sell out to Google as well, he smiles and then says: ” That would not work as I sell links, which is against Google’s policies, and they would not break their own policies of course. ” and smiles again.

The world famous Berlin Philharmonic are selling tickets for live streaming its events. One time viewers pay 5 euros, the whole season costs 89 euros. I can see that this could be an interesting way to sell more tickets to a worldwide audience who cannot attend such events.

YouTube also seems to be getting into this and is trying to launch some viral marketing campaign. Let’s see how far reaching this will be.

While it is not surprising that YouTube dominates US online video viewing, it is interesting to note that people watch four times longer on Hulu. (12min vs. 3min) Hulu can only be streamed in the U.S. right now though.

While the current economic downturn might also play a role for this increase of course, still, it shows how the importance of video and multimedia on the web has increased.  Time to include video into your product marketing planning? From the comScore press release:

More than 146 million U.S. Internet users watched an average of 87 videos per viewer in November. Google Sites attracted 98 million online video viewers, or approximately two out of every three Internet users who watched video during the month. Fox Interactive ranked second with 58.1 million viewers, followed by Yahoo! Sites (40 million) and Microsoft Sites (35 million).

Year end you can find on each popular tech blog a list of the most read stories. Seeing the results I am getting suspicious and ask myself: Why is it that practically all most read tech blog posts are about one of these US tech companies: Apple, Google, Microsoft (”AGM”)? Is there nothing else to report about, do people only read about these companies or are there other reasons for this?

Techmeme: (of the top 50 stories in all of 2008, 41 were about AGM)

Engadget: (in the top 20 list 14 were about AGM)

GigaOm: (no list yet, would be interesting to see, I suspect it is in the at least 30% neighborhood)

Techcrunch: (has no list yet, but I bet it is also around 50%, they only comment on the Techmeme list maybe to distract from it? )

Ars Technica: (only 2 of the 10 most viral stories, but they seem to go after other even stronger buzzwords: “sex”, “scam”, “crime” which is found in 7 of the top 10 stories.)

The trend towards online PR and product marketing is much more far-reaching than having a website. All our clients are focusing their efforts more and more on online PR and online marketing & sales tools. Even the most conservative and slow-moving ones will increase their online part to reach at least 50% of their overall expenses. What are their reasons?

1. Reach their target groups: blogs can be sent out automatically to your clients, media and analysts, portals and just about anyone who is relevant in your product markets.
2. Monitor success of PR and marketing campaigns: either you measure a certain key word combination and how your own content and company is linked to it across the whole Internet or you take other metrics taken from your landing pages to measure success of a PR and marketing campaign. These tools are often even entirely free.
3. Do competitive analysis: of course you can do monitoring of your competitors’ activities as well and in real time.
4. Save costs: many monitoring tools are free, as mentioned; changes can be done instantly; and face-to-face meetings and seminars are very costly compared with a webinar.
5. Do reputation management in realtime: in fast-moving ICT markets it is impossible to fix a reputation issue by traveling around or making phone calls with media and analysts. The way to do it is in a high-quality content blog and then distribute the link to thousands in your market so that it becomes widespread.
6. Collect leads: if you have excellent information on your web such as webinars, ebooks, whitepapers, podcasts, ROI/TCO calculators etc., people are willing to leave their contact details. Key is the quality of the information. Excellent content is needed.
7. Host/organize your own online community: if there is not yet a leading portal out there for your specific product market then you have the chance to set up a leading portal. Once your competitors have done it and succeeded you will be too late even if you invest lots and lots of money. People will not look for more than maybe 2 or max. 3 information sources for a particular field. If one provides all they need, they only have to look at that.
8. Influence media and analysts: where do media and analysts gather their information from? From the Web online, of course, as everything else would be way to slow. You are still trying to reach them with phone calls? Sorry, they are busy with their RS readers and information filters reading what is going on from the web, no matter how charming (or attractive ) your PR people may be.
9. Measure market buzz and fine-tune marketing/sales campaigns: for large corporations with a multitude of products, it is difficult to communicate as they have simply too much information at hand and coming out. So why not monitor what is being discussed out there in each product market currently and adapt your own marketing campaigns.
10. Get customer feedback for product improvements: information collected online is often more reliable than focus group feedback. Online, people say what they think, as they feel it is anonymous. In a focus group or face-to-face interview there are group dynamics that are difficult to filter out and lead to wrong results. At trade shows, people also like to talk a lot of (nonsense), and information gathered there often bears little relation to the real world.

This statistic below from Germany is interesting for two main reasons: Firstly, Internet downloads have not been affected at all by the economy as more people use the Internet to inform themselves and also to buy directly with downloads. The other important point is that the 30-year and older categories are making up more than 50% of all downloads. Anyone claiming that the Internet is only for the teenagers and not for business and older people needs to rethink, otherwise they will face reality in a tough way very soon.

In ICT marketing, as everywhere else, there has been a shift to online tools. This should be familiar turf for any marketing professional in IT and communications companies. If not, it is high time to learn this area before your competitors do.  In short, digital and online is the way to go also because it is less expensive and success can be measured with very high accuracy. This will be even more dominant in 2009 because it is so cost effective when done properly.

But be aware: simply moving print content to a website will only show that the digital and online marketing rules have not really been understood at all - there is much more to it than that. It is a new world of working. So while it should be clear that we have a new digital and online marketing world here and now, what will be the favorite sales and marketing tools for 2009 and beyond? Here is my list:

- TCO or ROI calculators have been great tools if you can simplify your advantages into numbers (btw. this does not only mean cost savings, but could be longer product lifetime, longer maintenance intervals or faster learning curve, whatever - of course reduced CO2 footprint could also be a good one now).

- audio webinars can open doors if they focus on a current hot topic. If there is no such hot topic that excites your target group then this is not the tool to choose, though

- audio and video newsletters: combine your e-newsletters with digital media content and they will love it!

- podcasts: record your presentations as a podcast or your newsletter content or a webinar or your CEOs last keynote speech; I was surprised to see how many top executives listen to podcasts as a way of keeping up to date on business trips - check out Stitcher, for example, one of the most successful news media and also available for the iPhone btw.

- e-books: no not simply moving again print content to an e-book, it is much more than that. e-books need to be written in a format that is suitable for the e-book reader. If you have special clients that are worth an e-book investment then get them an e-book reader on company expenses - the beauty is that you have now a great platform to submit more and more info to them and have them read it conveniently on the next business trip together with some other books as well. It is a great way to establish a nice information exchange platform between you and them. And of course the e-book can be used to read other books as well  Last,  but  not least for anyone in ICT, e-books should be a great gadget that fits the philosophy of going digital and using the Internet for exchange. It is your business so you can show that you are using it as well proactively.

These are a few of the top tools. To use them properly, you need to have a regular  creation and updating program - they all communicate a message that your marketing and information are really up to date, so you need to prove it, too! And finally, you should make sure that it all ties together. Make all of these an entry point to your sales process, in the way that best suits the buyer you are trying to entice!

The Obama campaign has shown how the future will look like not only in politics. Do you have a plan like this for 2009?

Traditional way: use journalists, voter lists, phone banks, direct mail

vs.

Obama’s way: social networking on the Web, can use now an opt-in e-mailing list to bring the message directly to the people, also helps during the transition period see http://change.gov/

This quote in the New York Times sums it up nicely:

“Thomas Jefferson used newspapers to win the presidency, F.D.R. used radio to change the way he governed, J.F.K. was the first president to understand television, and Howard Dean saw the value of the Web for raising money,” said Ranjit Mathoda, a lawyer and money manager who blogs at Mathode.com.

“But Senator Barack Obama understood that you could use the Web to lower the cost of building a political brand, create a sense of connection and engagement, and dispense with the command and control method of governing to allow people to self-organize to do the work.”