Reuven is sitting on his couch browsing the Jewish Press. On page Z23 is the full page ad you submitted. Zalman, Reven’s neighbor, is at this very moment studying the Menorah display in your shop. The three foot Menorah is standing in the center of the display with a huge ” 1/2 Price ” sale tag attached.

Who is more likely to end up the obscene purchase? Yeah, your new best friend Zalman.

That’s what contextual marketing is about. It’s much easier to sell to someone in the store than to try to drag in a sale off the streets. You can paper the streets with signs promoting your sale. You can put a full page ad in every newspaper in the United States but better and more important than any of that is being there when the customer is actively looking for you.

Make sure your ad appears on a blog talking that’s talking about high-end Chanukah presents. Make sure your ad appears any time it’s relevant because the last thing you want is to lose a customer for the 3 foot silver Menorah with golden cups.

If you choose to address an embarrassing situation head-on there will be discomfort; no one likes to admit to a mistake. What this will engender, however, is a feeling of honesty; a sense that there is a human behind the scenes who is real and makes mistakes like everyone else. Bringing humanity into the picture is a good thing. As people we relate to other people and that’s why we get frustrated when we talk to voice-mail and automated systems. We, as customers, enjoy that human connection.

Now, you can choose to ignore the situation and hope it goes away. And usually it will , to an extent, especially if it’s a minor problem. But the opportunity to connect with your audience, your market, is an opportunity that shouldn’t be overlooked. I’m obviously not saying that you should create these situations, but you should make the best of them when they are there. This is a chance to really connect on a personal level.

Sometimes an embarrassing situation is exactly what your company needs.

1) C.C. Chapman, managingthegray.com

Sure, we can all hope that a video will go viral. Who wouldn’t want that type of success? We’d all want it … But, it shouldn’t ever be the measure of success in my mind. Focus on the content, the story, the message you are trying to get out. If people connect with it then it’ll spread and remember it that is important as well.

2) Seth Godin, sethgoin.typepad.com

Notice that ideas never spread because they are important to the originator.

3) Scott Stratten, http://un-marketing.com/blog/

If your “viral video” has 12 views, and 8 of them are you refreshing it, it isn’t “viral”

4) Michael Szpilzinger, http://www.denagraphix.com/blog.html

I find this whole Old Spice Guy thing intriguing. Not because I find Isaiah “‘I’m on a horse” Mustafa so be so debonair. I am talking more about what he and Old Spice failed to accomplish – translating an engaging campaign into a successful one – from a sales perspective….While Old Spice sales are up in general, the viral campaign did not move the sales needle much (according to early indications)  I was really rooting for Old Spice on this one, but it seems so far that male YouTube viewers, while not wanting to smell like women’s body wash, still think of Old Spice as Old Man smelling body wash.

5) Joseph Jaffe, jaffejuice.com

I’m a big fan of the masters of pass along. I don’t profess to be expert in how viruses are spread; what makes them infectious and what defines, differentiates or classifies one virus from another. It’s terrific when the “world” in “world wide Web” embraces a piece of video (did you see the one where the elephant paints a self-portrait?), site (www.manbabies.com) or idea (moveon.org).

That said, I’m not terribly sure that it’s predictable or reliable to plan for this kind of spreading of the word and, even more troubling, I’m not convinced that it actually works.

Here’s the thing: In this day and age, all content has the ability to be wildly viral, that is, embraced, internalized, evangelized and disseminated. Rather than plan with the end in mind, might I suggest instead that we focus on the idea itself and the means to achieve that end. In other words, getting back to basics to generate compelling, relevant and engaging content and then liberating it to be embedded, hacked, mashed and showcased accordingly.

So now, please pass this post around to one gazillion people or your neighbors cat will die.

Now me and you – we’re pretty bright. There is no way that we’d fall for any cheap email hoax or dare buy any product from any unknown spammer. But I’m not talking about illegitimate businesses.

I don’t have numbers for this, but what percentage of spammers are illegitimate businesses trying to rip off consumers. If it was less than 90% I’d be shocked. But for argument sake, let’s say it’s 95% illegitimate and the other 5% are legitimate businesses that are “spam marketing”. That’s 10,000,000,000 emails sent by individuals or companies that purchased lists of names and then pressed the send button.

Why do we all hate spam? It’s unwanted, it wastes our time and is designed to be interruptive and intrusive. We resent it. When I talk about spam, I don’t only mean non-targeted email blasts. I mean any email that I did not explicitly welcome. If I received an email from a well meaning Jewish company that got my name off a list that they bought, it would tick me off. Why? Why do they feel they earned a right to bother me in middle of my day just because I was on a list of Jewish males between 18 and 40.

If you’ve earned my trust and I gave you my email address, then I’ve opened my door to you. I’ve given you permission to talk to me about what you can do for me. If you bought my email address, then you’ve broken into my home. You may get in, but there’ll be a shotgun in your face before you can say “spam”.

RSS (most commonly expanded as Really Simple Syndication) is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated works—such as blog entries, news headlines, audio, and video—in a standardized format.^[2] An RSS document (which is called a “feed”, “web feed”,^[3] or “channel”) includes full or summarized text, plus metadata such as publishing dates and authorship. Web feeds benefit publishers by letting them syndicate content automatically. They benefit readers who want to subscribe to timely updates from favored websites or to aggregate feeds from many sites into one place. RSS feeds can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader”, or “aggregator“, which can be web-based, desktop-based, or mobile-device-based. A standardized XML file format allows the information to be published once and viewed by many different programs. The user subscribes to a feed by entering into the reader the feed’s URI or by clicking a feed icon in a web browser that initiates the subscription process. The RSS reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds. RSS allows users to avoid manually inspecting all of the websites they are interested in, and instead subscribe to websites such that all new content is pushed onto their browsers when it becomes available.

Ok, maybe that wasn’t as clear as I wanted it to be, but then again I didn’t really want to go into it right now. There are so many fantastic marketing blogs out there like Managing the Gray, Seth Godin’s Blog, Marketing Over Coffee, etc. that offer such great insights you really should be taking advantage of. The blogs are free, the advice is free, the RSS delivery is free. Follow them on RSS; follow them on Twitter; follow success to find it yourself.

There are many strategies that can be used to determine the sources of traffic. For example: using different coupon codes in your various print ads will help you determine where a sale is coming from; different coupon codes distributed to various coupon sites like retailmenot.com can also help you track effectiveness. Google Analytics will help you see who is finding your site from an organic search on a search engine, who is referring your website from within their own and who is  entering the URL directly into their browser etc.

Separate landing pages for each advertisement on Google AdWords or YidSense are critical. For every advertisement you create, both YidSense and Google offer a destination URL in addition to the displayed URL. This way, for example, an ad can display www.MarketingJewish.com but when you click on it, the actual destination will be www.MarketingJewish.com/index4125.html with index4125.html a replica of the MarketingJewish homepage in both look and function. With Google Analytics I can now compare the effectiveness of index4125.html (a YidSense ad, for example) with index4126.html (a Google AdWords ad). Separate landing pages are necessary for each campaign you run and each service you use. The cost of creating a separate landing page for each advertisement and for each keyword is minimal and will help you determine the most effective campaigns.

You may hate Facebook. You may find Twitter a fantastic waste of time. It really doesn’t matter what your excuse is, the fact of the matter is your reason is probably wrong (even religiously motivated).

First of all, owning the virtual property afforded by social networking outlets like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn costs you nothing. As the Jewish people are known for their bargain-hunting abilities, this should be reason enough. But moreover, owning your name and your company’s name is important in order to make sure that nobody else owns it. Imagine how frustrating it would be to find your name unavailable. Go now and reserve your names – then come back and read the rest of this post. I’ll wait.

Finished?

Good. Now go back out there and do the same thing for MySpace and any other social networking outlet. I’m not waiting this time, you’ll have to come back on your own time.

Now, here are more reasons why you should be on every social platform. You should be out there using these platforms because your clients and potential clients are out there using these platforms. And if clients are looking for you, you need to make sure you’ll be found.

Next, outlets such as Twitter allow you to see when others are talking about you. Do you realize how important that is? When a customer says something nice about your company, you’ll probably want to throw him a “Thanks”. When there is a complaint, you want to make it right and not let it spread. Lies or misinformation can likewise be thwarted.

This reason is also why you should set up Google Alerts – a lesson for another time ( you can cheat, though, by going here and reading about it yourself).

LinkedIn and Facebook have additional benefits that I will, G-d willing address in the future.

Remember when I said religiously-motivated reasons weren’t enough to stop you from being on social networking platforms? I wasn’t kidding. First of all, I don’t mean that you should be out there socializing with the world. I mean only as it pertains to your company, interaction is essential. However, you don’t have to be out there surfing the Information Side Streets searching for mentions of your company. There are programs that will do most of the searching for you. Just make sure that a human does the actual interacting with people.

Jokes Explained 101: SpaceIn TwitterFace is a composite of  MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook .

For example:

“We do SEO, Search Engine Optimization, because SEO is for businesses who want to get a top ten ranking in Google. If your company needs SEO, to optimize your site for better ranking on search engines like Google or Bing, then SEO Genius Site Optimizers, Inc. is for you.”

Sure, stuffing your site with keywords might help you get higher ranking in the short term. In the long run though, you are likely to tick-off Google with that sort of keyword spamming. But its worse than that. Oh so much worse than that.

As Google points out in their own SEO guide:

Even though this guide’s title contains the words “search engine”, we’d like to say that you should base your optimization decisions first and foremost on what’s best for the visitors of your site. They’re the main consumers of your content and are using search engines to find your work. Focusing too hard on specific tweaks to gain ranking in the organic results of search engines may not deliver the desired results. Search engine optimization is about putting your site’s best foot forward when it comes to visibility in search engines, but your ultimate consumers are your users, not search engines.

Your content is not a game; it is what defines your company and its what makes me decide whether or not I trust you. Its not just a matter of getting people to your site – its about getting people to trust you and to buy your product/service. When visitors see your site as a jumble of keywords that don’t provide any real content, they get annoyed – and rightfully so. If I end up at your site after a Google search because you jammed it with keywords, I feel fooled and ticked off.

Is SEO important ? You better believe it.

Are there legitimate SEO services? You bet.

Remember, you can fool Google (at least in the short run), and you may even get visitors to your site. But dishonesty (yes, that’s what keyword spamming is) will only get you so far. If you have good content, real legitimate content that speaks to what your business truly is, only some minor content tweaking should be necessary. Some other SEO strategies will also help (meta tags, titles etc.) but the content must be real.

Your visitors are people, not search engines. Real content is crucial and visitors to your site judge your company on what they see. So rise to the top and engage your potential clients with true legitimate content. Otherwise what goes up, will come down with a crash.

Taco Bell decided to do something a little different. Ads were placed  in prominent newspapers like the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. The ads read: Thank you for suing us”. Taco Bell essentially said – thank you for giving us the opportunity to prove ourselves. Taco Bell also put out TV ads encouraging visitors to check out their website for facts about how great their meat is while marketing a new menu item.

Taco Bell is shrugging off the lawsuit, turning around the media attention and saying hey, we didn’t make a mistake. Its a frivolous lawsuit our meat is excellent and oh, by the way, check out our great menu. Sounds like a decent strategy, no?

The problem is best put by in an article by Jeff Reeves on MSN Money

What’s more, Taco Bell is forgetting itself and fighting a battle it ultimately cannot win. By engaging in the beef dispute from a quality angle, Taco Bell execs are refusing to admit that the company thrives due to cheap snacks at any time of the day or night.

Take this comment posted on the YouTube video where the president defends the company’s recipe: “Taco Bell= 12 pounds of food for 3 dollars. I don’t care whats in it, everything we eat is apparently gonna give us cancer and/or kill us anyway.” Doesn’t sound like loyal customers care, and similarly it’s unlikely those who turn up their nose at the restaurant are going to consider it high quality due to this ad campaign.

If Taco Bell truly wanted to change customer perceptions, it should have taken a page out of the Domino’s Pizza(DPZ) playbook. The company was brutally honest about its product’s failings with customers in a groundbreaking campaign last year. If you don’t remember, it involved customer descriptions of the old Domino’s pizza as “cardboard” with sauce like “ketchup,” or, bluntly, “the worst excuse for pizza I’ve ever had.” Domino’s used the ads as a way to point out that they were listening, and changing the entire pizza recipe as a result. As momentum built behind the bold campaign and new pizza formula, sales rose in kind – including a 11.7% sales increase in the third quarter of 2010.

I can’t wait to see how this plays out.

To illustrate:

I place an order with Israeli Flags and Pins Inc. (ficticious company, as you know from Know Thyself, of course) for 5,000 customized pro-Israel bumper stickers for my State of Israel Bond breakfast. It takes four days to create and two days for ground shipment . I place the order and tell him I need it ASAP. The sales rep,  has a two real options in front of him:

a) Guarantee delivery in six days time – the actual time it should take.

b) Guarantee delivery within eight days but promise to work hard to get it to me earlier.

Other than the obvious fact that option “b” allows extra time for contingencies, it does one  more major thing -it gives Israeli Flags and Pins Inc. an opportunity to make a major impression on me. When I get those bumper stickers two days or even one day ahead of schedule I’m loving Israeli Flags and Pins Inc.; they just made my day.

However, if I was promised delivery in six days, and it was delivered in six days –  that’s okay, its just not make-my-day-awesome. And if it comes one day later, I’m mad. Not the best way to maintain a happy customer.

Obviously don’t go overboard – don’t tell your customers you need two weeks and then deliver the next day. That’s playing games and that will never go over well. Just leave yourself enough room for a win-win scenario.

More marketing tips to come within the next two or three months – or Monday.