But, if you only have time to read a few books over the summer, how do you choose from Amazon’s 33,000 titles in marketing, advertising, and social media?  Ugh.

We filtered through our library and found what we believe are today’s five best books to read. They offer you a well-rounded understanding of the latest consumer preferences, marketing strategies and technology need-to-knows. Hopefully you’ll have time to devour a few. (Oh, and for those of us who spend more time in their cars or at the gym than sitting with a book, there’s always Audible.com)

1. DON’T MAKE ME THINK – Steve Krug

Although it’s a couple years old, it’s still the best book on what makes a great website. It’s written in plain, and downright funny, language. We often give it to clients as gifts. It’s not for programmers. It’s for the rest of us.

2. TRIBES – Seth Godin
Seth hit another home run with Tribes. He took what is happening in the world of marketing and applied it to basic human behavior. By the time you finish this short book, you’ll feel like you’re viewing the world through a whole new lens.

3. THE NEW RULES OF MARKETING AND PR – David Meerman Scott
David just revised this book with new updates, so make sure you get the latest edition. It has the best examples of how things have changed for marketers, along with the new rules of engagement. It’s simple, useful and inspiring.

4. TRUST AGENTS – Chris Brogan and Julien Smith
For anyone who has spent a year or more in social media, this book may seem a bit simplistic. But the overall message of how trust drives today’s world of marketing is the most important and valuable take away. It makes you want to be a better person (and marketer).

5. WEB ANALYTICS 2.0 – Avinash Kaushik
OK, maybe sections of this book get into a little too much detail, but you can skip those parts. Avinash is so entertaining in the way he explains current web technology, you’ll be chuckling while learning. Don’t be afraid of the title (or his name).

What books would you add to this list?

Since its inception, the Nordstrom brand has centered around being helpful, right? Like a phone call telling you they remembered you were looking for shoes to go with the suit you bought last month, and they just got the perfect pair in. Or how about the American Express openforum.com, a free website with tons of information that claims huge success in helping business owners succeed. Oh, and its content contributors are donating their brains and talent at no charge to American Express.

It’s easy to talk about big brands like these, but how about the success some smaller brands are enjoying due to their helpfulness? Like Kellogg Garden Products, with a website full of gardening tips from soil calculators to fun kid gardening activities. Their website Analytics show a huge percentage of visitors time being spent on the pages they’ve built simply to be helpful, and their brand recognition confirms this.

Big or small, these brands understand they must give in order to receive. Paying it forward may end up being the most successful marketing mantra for the 21st Century. The question is, is your brand ready?

1. Keep giving and contributing more than the competition. Pay back will be huge.
2. Every tweet, blog entry, comment and status update will be saved forever and is permanently part of your brand.
3. Before permission to market comes permission to connect. There’s a lot of trust building in between.
4. Make it easy for people to find you. While you’re out looking for business there is an entire market looking for you.
5. It’s not about B2B or B2C it’s about person to person marketing in social media.
6. Use the back links function in Google to see who is linking to your competitors. Reach out to those connectors.
7. Go wide with social media then build strong deep networks by going deep with the phone, Skype, webinars or in-person.
8. Twitter search and tools like Twellow.com can dampen the noise down from millions on voices to the exact ones you’re targeting.
9. Picking a fight publicly stays on record long after the battle is done. Rarely is it worth it.
10. Not getting the results you want? Are you asking for help often enough? It’s about community. Reach out.
11. Share and give more than you think is practical… then do it again. It will build positive momentum for your brand.
12. When partnering with other social media influencers start by making sure your values and principles are aligned.

Clients often ask us how much it costs to produce an online video ad. Their initial thought is that, because the media is usually free, the production cost should be lower. Sorry. There’s no correlation.

Think about the process of inbound vs. outbound marketing for a moment. Outbound marketing includes traditional advertising. Intrude. Repeat. Intrude. Repeat. You didn’t ask to see the ad, but it’s going to be pushed in front of you anyway in the hopes that you will like it, remember it, and respond to it. Oh sure, the option is usually there to fast forward past it on TV, push the button on the radio, or flip right past it in print. But, you at least get a glimpse of it before you make that choice. A glimpse you didn’t ask for. A glimpse that cost the advertiser a lot of money.

But inbound marketing is different. Inbound marketing puts the exposure responsibility on the consumer. This is why it’s often called “viral”. It’s based on making something so compelling that people will not only see it and share it, but also search for it. Quite the opposite of traditional media, eh? This viral effort often requires spectacular creative that comes in the form of incredible production, or just a brilliant simple idea.

Does that mean it always has to cost a lot? Not always. Like we said, it’s about the idea more than the production (see Levi’s successful viral video campaign that cost less than $10,000). But usually the few successes in the online viral world have involved substantial production costs.

Take the Evian Roller Babies ad above. When totaling its US and international versions, it just surpassed 100,000,000 views online, making it the most viewed television ad in online history. In comparison, this year’s Super Bowl had 106,000,000 viewers and the average 30-second spot cost was a little over $3,000,000 dollars, and that’s before any creative production. Media costs for Evian’s 100,000,000 viewers? Zero.

But when you find out the production costs for this spot were well over $1,000,000, you realize the cost of the ad production has nothing to do with the media on which it airs. In fact, in addition to the message needing to be even more impactful online for the viewer to become your media distributor, the beauty and curse of online ads is they’re not limited to :30 seconds. And those of us in the production world know, with TV spots, the longer they are the more they cost to produce. Ouch.

Just now, after almost a year of online exposure, Evian is taking this ad to traditional television in markets like New York, LA, London and Paris. Will their traditional media exposure pay off as well as their viral campaign did? Time will only tell. But we, the media world, will all be watching.

Certainly this is a networking nirvana. But for many of the 15,000 who came here to also learn, they wandered aimlessly looking for a decent seminar, workshop, or panel, of which there were few that truly delivered. Even Guy Kawasaki trashed Twitter’s CEO, Evan Williams, for his boring Keynote interview, of which more than half the room packed with 2,000 people walked out.

Too bad.  Chris Brogan’s post today addressed this. Hopefully the powers at SXSW will get the feedback they need to have this venue expand appropriately and fix the problem for next year. The opportunity is awesome. There are just obvious challenges to face when something this big grows so fast.

As many savvy marketers have already noted, all media is social. Especially when it works the way it’s supposed to. So what’s all the buzz about this term, social media, as if it’s a completely new form of communication?

Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumble Upon, etc. are just new communication tools. Tools that will most likely change and morph into new formats as technology advances and they improve their ability to create, manage and grow powerful online communities. Remember forums, chat rooms, even My Space? They’re all just tools that have enabled multiple-way communication, the core of what has changed.

We believe the term, social media, will go into the history books sooner vs. later. At least we hope so.

Then again, how much would we have known abut the election in Iran? Or the Southern California wildfires last year? Or updates on the earthquake in Haiti?

Is there a place for a tool like Twitter? Absolutely. If, for nothing else, the amazing data it is gathering. People think Twitter is just a tool for Narcissists to express themselves. But meanwhile, it’s building one of the most amazing LIVE, SEARCHABLE data bases in history. That’s what its all about.

]]> http://www.brandtailers.com/what-is-the-future-of-twitter/feed 0 http://www.brandtailers.com/social-media-noise-trend-quality-over-quantity http://www.brandtailers.com/social-media-noise-trend-quality-over-quantity#comments Mon, 15 Feb 2010 00:51:48 +0000 Brandtailers http://www.brandtailers.com/?p=843 Read More]]> It’s getting very noisy out here in the online world. One billion uploads daily to YouTube, 2.5 billion active blogs, heck even the average person’s inbox gets over 100 non-spam emails daily.

So guess what’s happening? People are starting to turn off and tune out. Especially those who’ve been trying to figure out how to listen over the past two years, when the amount of online noise has increased ten-fold. Oh sure, Facebook is growing. But users are becoming much more selective about who they friend. Meanwhile other tools, like Twitter and Friend Feed, are seeing 20% of their subscribers making 80% of the noise.

In short, quality over quantity is the new trend.

This is good news for smart marketers. With the proper tools you can find your perfect customers and they’ll be able to hear you. You won’t be fighting the equivalent of 1,300 daily traditional media messages the average American didn’t ask to see but the advertisers still paid for. Marketers will get to enjoy quality over quantity too.

Let’s see what happens when the noise quiets down and people start using all these wonderful (yet currently loud) online tools more effectively. It should be the best time good marketers have ever had.

You have those who don’t like Google, fearing it will take over the world. They’re already ragging on Buzz. Then you have the rest of us. The other 98% who say, aha, here’s where Twitter, Facebook and their long tail cousins might actually come together as one. Here’s where the noise that has become way too loud for most of us can get filtered. Best of all by the one company that knows how to do it best.

But let’s back up for a second and quit talking like everyone on the planet uses Facebook and Twitter. Let’s talk about the most used tool on the Internet that even non-techies use every day. It’s called e-mail. That’s where Buzz is brilliant. It’s right there with your email, on your desktop, laptop AND mobile device. It’s in an environment where the vast majority of online users still spend most of their time. It’s using Google search algorithms to help filter out content that you’re not interested in, and it’s quickly addressing the privacy issues that caused such a ruckus with Facebook users a while back.

So, do we need one more social publishing service? No. We need a few less. Maybe, just maybe, this will be it.

Good Will vs. Media Dollars. Hmmmm…. So, I thought to myself, how can a business like Kragen take this concept and make it a home run online brand marketing success?

What if they had some local customers following them on Twitter and, when it started raining, they sent out a message offering FREE wiper blade inserts to the first 100 visitors. Do you think they’d have a huge line at the door? Marketing history says they would.

But wait, how can a store give out 100 sets of wiper blade inserts and justify the expense? At $10 a set that could add up to $1,000 in product! Yup. It sure could. But how much did it cost in media expenditures to get 100 people in the door? How much would it cost if they tried doing this on TV, or some other form of traditional media? And how could the message be distributed in such a timely manner, and thanks to Twitter, shared so quickly with friends, coworkers, family and other miscellaneous Twitter followers who get the offer re-tweeted to them? How much good will could be created by helping customers out, free of charge, at a time when they needed something pertinent to their immediate safety?

What’s the biggest challenge with this type of new marketing concept? Changing marketers ways of thinking. Getting out of the old mindset that you spend money on the media, and the creative, not on good will. That’s old thinking. And it’s really, really expensive thinking. Why not take just a tiny piece of all that money to be saved from expensive traditional media buys and instead use it to be helpful. Yes, even use it to give something away. With today’s consumer, being helpful can pay off ten-fold. Seeing those Kragen guys standing out in the pouring rain smiling and helping customers was enough to earn my loyalty.

By the way, did I happen to mention that almost every customer in the parking lot that day was holding a Kragen bag with other things they had purchased?