Create-It! Inc. Consulting and Speaking on Creativity, Technology and Innovation, featuring CEO Jordan Ayan Business Newswire Services: Cost-Effective PR

In today's economy, everyone is looking for cost-effective tools and services to help promote their business.

One of the best values in online publicity can be found in PR Newswire ( http://www.prnewswire.com ) and Business Wire ( http://www.businesswire.com ), two electronic distribution services for business news. A standard press release only costs a few hundred dollars to write and distribute electronically, making it a very low-cost, high-impact promotional tool.

Both services enable you to promote your company's press releases to thousands of newspapers nationwide. More importantly, however, dozens of content-hungry web news portal sites now feature corporate news from Business Wire, PR Newswire, and other online news services. This makes it easier for any organization large or small to promote its news announcements to a wider audience of potential buyers.

Business Wire charges $450 to distribute a news release of 400 words or less to its "national" list, which covers media in all 50 states. PR Newswire charges $610 for its US1 national news circuit, which includes over 2,500 newspapers, magazines, TV and radio broadcast media, and financial media.

GOING MOBILE: The Advertising Billboard In Your Pocket (Dow Jones)
File this one under "great trade show ideas". Talk about an excellent way to reach your customers as they get off the plane and during a multi day even to drive traffic to your booth...get on the SMS bandwagon.

The mobile phone is becoming a new frontier for advertisers, with companies ranging from chocolate manufacturer Cadbury Schweppes PLC to agrochemicals business Bayer AG experimenting with promotions using text messages, ringtones, downloadable logos, competitions and discount vouchers.
Read the whole story at:
http://biz.yahoo.com/djus/030225/0624000494_1.html

Everything you wanted to know about Google's acquistions of Blogger. See the links at the bottom of the article.Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - Google Buys Pyra: Blogging Goes Big-Time

An Elephant in the Room: The Online At-Work Audience

Further Validation of the At-Work Market

Website Drive-to Contest - Why didn't I think of this?
OH Danish Bakery in Racine Wisconsin has one of the most innovative website drive-to contests I've seen in recent memory. OH Danish Bakery sells Kringle in the store, online, and via the phone. In order to promote sales from their website, they have a contest where you can visit the website, enter your info, and be entered in the drawing to win a Kringle. However, the drawing resets every week. So, if you entered last week, you are no longer eligible this week and have to revisit the site to reenter. For me, this has become a weekly ritual. Not only do I think about buying Kringle every time I'm at the site, but I feel better about my chances for winning because the contest resets every week. Better still, they have a feature that allows you to simply reenter your email address to be reentered into the contest. You don't have to fill out the entire form every time. I suspect that the rate of reentries would drop remarkably if they were to require contest entrants to fill out the entire form.

Have I purchased Kringle as a result of my visit to the site? Well, no. However, it's the first thing I think about whenever I hear anyone is going to Racine or happen to be there myself. I don't know of any other bakery doing Danish Kringle. I don't care. OH Danish has my business as a lover of Kringle because they keep their store top of mind and have a superb product, and as a marketer for this simple yet seemingly brilliant idea that keeps me coming back to their site week after week.

This blog's in Google!
Try as I might to get my site listed in Google, the submission process has not been friendly to me. However, an interesting thing happened on the way to a merger... A day after the news of Google's purchase of Blogger, this site showed up right under an Amazon.com listing when I searched on my name. Don't get me wrong, I'm not that narcicistic, I just like to see how my good name is doing on the Internet.

I was just reading an article by John Hiler on the weblog being a full blown disruptive technology. I tend to view this as an omen, along with everything else that has been written about weblogs in recent months. In Malcolm Gladwell's words, I believe that weblogs have reached a tipping point. It's only a matter, but a day will soon come where no self respecting academic, researcher, self publisher, or tuned-in professional will be without their own weblog to capture their thoughts and ideas in real time.

Video vs. the Web Seminar - A Test of the Web's Flexibility
I received a call a couple of weeks ago from a sales manager in Florida. He was working on a large national account opportunity and needed to rally some corporate resources to reinforce our position as a company that could meet their needs and had the support infrastructure to deal with them on a national level. This is nothing really new for any company that deals with large multi-state accounts, but the catch was that they wanted to hear it straight from the person responsible for execution - not just from some sales person.

From the outset we thought "hey, let's do a web seminar with them and get everyone together for a 1/2 hour" - that would work great. Or so we thought it would work great. Trying to synchronize the schedules of several VP's and managers is sometimes the last task one wants to undertake on short notice. The idea of a web seminar was looking less and less appealing after every phone call.

I have always perceived the Internet as allowing us to be more flexible. But after several hours of scheduling and rescheduling, an apparent weakness of the Internet, and web seminars specifically, was beginning to show through. You still need to get everyone to the Internet to participate in a presentation surrounding the Internet. You still need everyone all at the same time to be in the same virtual space. I guess this is one of the reasons for our dismal results of web seminars as a lead generation tool - it's too hard to get working people together during the day to hear your pitch.

We have been shooting video for sales training for some time but have never approached the issue of sales presentations with a video solution. However, this seemed like the most opportune moment to try. Why?
1. Flexibility - we could shoot anyone, anywhere, at whatever time was convenient for them and compile the results later
2. Cost - we have a basic investment in in-house video capture and editing equipment making the shoot and editing simple and cost effective
3. Impact - A recent article by the Harvard Business School extols the benefits of using video for impact in sales presentations

We shot a video of the involved parties over the course of 2 days and had the video ready for shipping to the sales rep by the end of the 3rd day. We were able to capture everyone's 'best side' through the magic of video editing and had control over the branding and personalization of the message through the use of custom corporate branded transitions and customer verbiage. We now also have an archive and a script template on which to build more presentations of this nature.

The results of the video in front of the customer were phenomenal! Never before in the history of the account has any vendor drawn the attention of all of the top officials and CEO at the account. Since our video featured our CEO, they felt it necessary to bring the same level of decision power to the meeting, resulting in a faster track through the decision channels that we could have ever achieved with a web seminar.

As a next step, we are going to try a video in the context of a web seminar for a customer presentation. By using some boilerplate video, we hope to achieve the same level of impact without having to round up resources everytime a unique customer opportunity arises. The personalization aspects should be able to be achieved through the web seminar portion of the presentation.

For more on the AMA's pre-recorded video web-seminar, visit this link:
http://www.marketingpower.com/webcastE2-18

For more on Harvard Business School's article on the impact of video, please click below:
Lights, Camera, Presentation! Liven Up Boring Meetings With Video
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/pubitem.jhtml?id=3331&sid=3331&t=career_effectiveness
A short video can be worth a thousand PowerPoint slides at your next meeting. And putting together a compelling video is not as difficult as you think. Action!

Technology is not always perfect, or maybe the moderator just doesn't like me. Either way... I tried to post this list of websites to a listserv for the AMA but it hasn't gone through in several days. I'll just put them out here.

There are several sites that I visit at least once a week

www.imediaconnection.com - This site is one of the foremost news sites on all things I-marketing related. Their newsletters often provide the freshest content anywhere, which is always on the site before the newsletters. I use this to keep current on what 'everyone else' is doing.

www.avantmarketer.com - AVM does some really great in-depth stories and interviews with leading I-marketing visionaries. The site is not as rich in content as some others but what's out there is first class.

www.online-publishers.org - The Online Publishers Association is for anyone doing online publishing, or interfacing with online publishers. Since most of my internet marketing and advertising is on content sites for our industry I read this to keep up to date on how they are doing things like dayparting and what the latest consumer internet trends are.

www.webmasterworld.com - Need details on when Google is spidering sites or the latest details which pay-per-click engines are performing for your peers? This is your resource to ask a pool of experts. Many times this site will give you more than you ever wanted to know, but if you're looking for detail it's here

www.mediapost.com - The one stop shop for thousands of articles on all things online media and advertising. They also have a discussion area called the Spin Board which is a continuation of the articles posted by the editors and staff writers. Discussions in here are usually insightful.

www.marketingfix.com - I am a HUGE fan of blogs (weblogs) - This is one of the best, and there are thousands. Marketing fix has fresh content aggregated from everywhere. I sometimes check this site several times a day! Blogs beget blogs - through this one you'll find others that are just as worthy - Blogs on Internet Marketing are the best way to get the freshest content from like minded marketers (find one that suits you...someone that writes what you want to read) that links to the best of the best on every Internet Marketing site known to man.

www.internetretailer.com - If it happens with an online or catalog retailer, you'll find it on this site. I never miss their newsletter either as we have gotten literally dozens of ideas for our catalog house website. They always highligh best practices and case study results from all types of internet retailers from Amazon to the corner bookstore.

Others that have already been mentioned that I find indispensable:
www.clickz.com
www.marketingprofs.com - I love how they rank most popular articles - this is a dynamite resource

It's days like these that I love Internet Marketing and the inherent contradictions it holds for us. This morning, I get my usual dose of the avant|marketer email newsletter that comes about once a week. AM usually has engaging interviews, and this week's is no exception. The subject is the state of Internet Advertising Strategy and the guest of honor is none other than the founder of Modem Media, G.M. O'Connell. Modem Media is one of the Internet Advertising industry's pioneering companies.

The interview with Mr. O'Connell goes on to state that the way we're all going about Internet Advertising is rather flawed in that we are not respecting the Internet as the 'pull' advertising medium that it is and treating it as a 'push' medium like everything we've done before with print, leading up to the current state of banner blindness that we're all afflicted with today. I agree with Mr. O'Connell because he's speaking my language. I too use the Internet to 'pull' information on products and ideas that I'm seeking more information on. Like most B2B decision makers, I follow the a 3-step process of search, click and convert. My search usually starts in Google, and I convert on those sites that have the most relevant information for me at the time. This flow parallels O'Connell's argument that "Brands need to be visible in pull-through channels, because that's how awareness gets created on the Internet, not by pushing messages out to consumers, which only works against what users are trying to do - what they're trying achieve - at any given moment. The main ways to build pull-through awareness for the marketer are to pursue a keyword purchase strategy or [search engine] optimization." I couldn't agree more - until...

"The majority of Internet sites worldwide are reached through direct navigation -- typing a URL in the address bar or using a bookmark..." says WebSideStory in an article posted on AdWeek Magazine's Technology Marketing site. In the interest of full disclosure, WebSideStory is also a company that I do business with. WSS goes on to say that a full 64% of the web users landing on its clients' sites came through typing in the URL or following a bookmark. In other words, they've come to the site through their knowledge of the brand, URL, or have been there before and have the site bookmarked and all that effort you're putting into 'pull' marketing is of lesser value than the 'push' marketing you're doing to reinforce your brand and get consumers to remember your URL.

Interesting stuff. However, the UCLA Center for Communication Policy just released the third installment of the UCLA Internet Report:"Surveying the Digital Future" which states that new users spend their time on the Internet doing Email, browsing, and searching as the top three activities. This behavior is also closely mirrored by more experienced users.

Food for thought. Do we do more push, or more pull? I'm drawing the line in the sand based on your company's brand awareness. If you're brand awareness is high, say at 50% plus amongst potential customers, I'd go for push. If you're a small business or your brand awareness is below 50%, I'm all for pull. It's the 'pull' marketing that gets you into the customer's mindspace, and the 'push' marketing that keeps you there. Have a different opinion? Email me!

Creative marketing incentives are hard to find. We all have enough calendars, pens, letter openers, stress relief balls, and vendor logo emblazoned paraphernalia to supply a small county fair. The best incentive I've seen of late are Starbucks Gift Cards.

One incentive I've seen used by our vendors is offering a free Starbucks gift cards to marketing professionals who perform some action on their behalf, take a survey, or attend a survey/seminar on a product of service of their offering. It's an easy way to grow a database, both within client organizations and with new prospects. Expanding the subscriber base at client companies is good "attrition insurance." When our day-to-day contacts move on to other positions, their replacements or colleagues hopefully have already gotten acquainted with us and will want to continue the relationship.

This could be a terrific incentive for email gathering, trade show incentives, or just cool gifts for friends. I've gotten S. Bucks gift cards two out of the last two Christmases, which is about how long we've had a Starbucks here in Green Bay!

For the holidays, Starbucks offers its gift cards in winter-themed formats, which it'll personalize. It'll even address the envelope. For last-minute shoppers, it may not be too late to get on board.
Thanks to ClickZ for the background on this, and to our vendors who've sent Starbuck's cards. Mmmmmm...I remember who you are!

It amazes me how many invites I get for web seminars every day. I have seen 5 already this week! The main problem with the web seminars is that they are never at times that are convenient to me.

Now here's a good idea! The AMA (American Marketing Association) is offering a series of seminars with marketing authorities that are pre-recorded. You still have to sign up, so it serves the purpose as an acquisition medium, but it gives people like me the opportunity to review the webinar on my own time - like right now, while I'm writing my weblog. Check out the info below, and check out the webinar. There are a couple of heavy hitters from Oracle and Yahoo which means tried & true quality content for you.

Morph Your Online Marketing Strategy and Make it Through the Down Economy
It's not business as usual these days. To make it through the down economy, marketers need to think smarter and become more efficient. Hear how leading Internet giants Oracle and Yahoo! morphed their marketing strategies to concentrate on high impact, cost-effective executions to reach their most profitable customer.
* What online strategies lead to success?
* How can segmentation help marketers better compete?
* When do you use online channels vs. traditional ones?
Speakers:
Mark Jarvis, Chief Marketing Officer and Senior Vice President, Oracle Corporation
David Reimer, Vice President, Marketing Initiatives, Yahoo! Inc.
Bob Wallach, (Moderator) American Marketing Association
Check out the free Streaming Media Webcast by going to: http://www.marketingpower.com/webcastE2-18
On Demand At Your Desk via STREAMING VIDEO*
Can be viewed anytime
30 minutes in length
NOTE: You will need the following capabilities to view this streaming media webcast: Real Player 7.0 +, Internet Explorer 5.5 + or Netscape 4.0 +, Macromedia Flash 4.0+

Marketing budgets continue the shift to new media
In a survey by Jaywing, the communication management agency, 40% of firms were planning to increase their budgets on direct marketing campaigns using email and SMS, as well as digital television in 2003. There are a number of studies out now that reinforce this trend from both the UK and the US. The logic behind this trend is elementary, "Marketers want to get more by paying less,". But the real story is in the effective use of cross-media campaigns to drive traffic to the web as the primary method of acquisition/conversion - especially in B2B where we KNOW that our buyers are online for the balance of their workday. It's proven. The cross-media strategy is accretive. Why aren't more companies doing this well???