The Cheap Revolution

From 5 to 5 Million - Business ways for reaching customers explode

2009-07-17T12:00:00-04:00

In 1906, a creative business owner might be able to come up with 5 ways through which he could reach his market. - Newspaper - Signage - Word of mouth - branding/packaging and... hmm... I came up with four. As I said, a creative business owner could do a little, but not much, better. In 1920, the first commercial radio broadcast took place and, during that decade, Madison Avenue became synonymous with Advertising. The age of Mass Communication had taken place. Slick guys and gals in Manhattan could help a business navigate the multitude of options that emerged alongside the...

The Anthropology of Social Media

2009-06-03T07:00:00-04:00

Small businesses are being lured by the bright shiny object called Social Media Marketing. To be sure, this is an important development. One way to look at this phenomena is as a collection of tools that you can add to your SMB marketing toolkit. A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter-and getting smarter faster than most companies. - the cluetrain manifesto (www.cluetrain.com) In his article "Having the Right Tool is 90% of the Job" published in...

Flying Blind: Metrics are #1 challenge blocking online-offline marketing groups

2009-05-17T22:47:34-04:00

Flying blind just isn't as much fun as it used to be. Recently, eMarketer published results from a recent study (Q1, 2009) of marketing organizations. The marketing organizations are having trouble collecting and correlating information from multiple channels, with diverse vendor-partners managing those channels. eMarketer writes: Unfortunately, the necessary data is currently scattered across organizations. Data formats are inconsistent and so is terminology. Until these problems are solved, marketers attempting to integrate traditional and digital advertising channels will continue flying blind. I think the problem is bigger than that, though. True... finding, collecting and integrating the data is difficult in...