How are everybody talking about you?

Want to be informed every time someone mentioning your name (or your company, your org, your course’s name) mentioned in the news, blogs, and/even twitter?

It is in fact quit easy to do, all you need is a good RSS reader (such as the Google Reader) account, then:

• Go to Google News (http://news.google.com/), do a search on the keyword that you want to monitor, then subscribe to the RSS feed of that search result.
• Go to Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com/), do a search on the keyword that you want to monitor, then subscribe to the RSS feed of that search result.
• Go to Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/), do a search on the you keyword, and then, again, subscribe to the RSS feed for that query.

… you get the idea…

You can certainly go to other search engines to catch all the rest as well, but after collecting all of the above three to read, you probably already feel that’s too much and may not want to care all that much about what everybody’s talking any more. 

Two examples of good use of such approach:

• There was a company using twitter as a real-time customer support channel, they direct everyone to follow them on twitter on updates, and they pro-actively offer support to anyone who talks about them there (even they are just talking to themselves not the service account) as well.  They generated great customer satisfaction that way.
• There are groups and companies using this method to monitor the media so that any potential PR issues can be discovered and addressed timely.

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Best Internet Marketing Posts of 2008

Great post by Tamar Weinberg:

http://www.techipedia.com/2009/internet-marketing-posts-2008/

Best Internet Marketing Blog Posts of 2007

Found this great post by Tamar Weinberg:

http://www.techipedia.com/2007/internet-marketing-best-blog-posts/

Appeal to aspirations not reality

Some of the most dramatic marketing victories have been won by recognizing a simple fact: the tactical target of your communications program does not have to be the same as the market.

An obvious example fo this principle is the advertising for Marlboro cigarettes. In spite of the fact that the ads show only cowboys smoking the brand, Marlboro has become the No. 1brand of cigarette, among women as well as men. The tactical target is not the strategic market.

Prospects don’t take your advertising personally. Rather, they extract from the message ideas and concepts that they can utilize in their own lives.

There are many products where the target is designed to be considerably different from the market.

“Seventeen” magazine has a name and editorial position targeted specifically at 17-year-old girls. But who reads “Seventeen”? Girls who are 13, 14, 15, and 16 years old. When a young woman grows up to be 17, she usually outgrows “Seventeen” magazine.

Virginia Slims is a cigarette whose target is liberated women and female swingers. Each ad shows a woman who is 25 and “with it”. but the market is the middle-aged woman who aspires to that lifestyle. The average Virginia Slims smoker is more like 45.

Both Virginia Slims and “Seventeen” appeal to aspirations and not reality.

The “implication of the opposite” phenomenon

In deciding what message to use for your marketing campaign, be aware of the “implication of the opposite” phenomenon, that is, consumers may intemperate your message as the opposite of what you say.

When a car dealer says on TV, “We’re selling cars like crazy”, the viewers may say to himself, “they must think I don’t think they’re selling a lot of cars”.

So you should put your marketing messages under the implication microscope. Reserve the message and see if that is really what you want to imply.