Your company has a story to tell.  In days gone by, you’d tell it is small ways, with individual interactions with each of your customers, or in slow ways, such as your weekly newspaper ad.  Business rose and fell with the times, but most businesses could follow some well-worn paths to success.

Fast forward to 2010.  The “recession” is 2 years old.  To quote a poster in my bank, “Save is the new Spend.”  Your customers’ buying habits have changed irrevocably.  Add in the technology and communication booms that we are seeing make it even into little old Medford, and what this guy used to be able to count on can’t be counted on any longer.

Have a great (or poor) interaction with one your customers?  You can now count on it to be blasted out to their 500 Facebook friends who will then Tweet or Yelp it all over the valley in record speed.  How’s a small business owner to keep up with all this change?  Its coming from so many angles and now its coming 24/7.  Well,  no one ever said entrepenuership was for sissies.  So tighten up your chin strap, hang on, and let’s make a PLAN to battle back.

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Your brand is online whether you like it or not.  Customers right now in this valley are talking about you and/or your competitors.  They are looking for what you sell, asking each other for advice, searching for (more…)

So unless you’ve been living under the same rock that allowed me to miss the whole Book of Eli thing – what a great movie, why didn’t someone tell me – you’ve by now seen the Old Spice Man commercials. The buzz around them is how much “free” exposure this campaign has received. But here’s the thing. They actually spent a ton of money and effort to prime that pump.

Almost every client I speak to is lured by the potential of free internet marketing. “I’ll just build a Facebook page and my business will go through the roof” is involved in nearly every conversation I have these days in one form or another. And while Facebook and YouTube were critical to the success of the Old Spice Man, it didn’t happen the way our local businesses think it can.

Here’s some comments from someone I respect to which I’ll add our local spin for you.

When Old Spice, W+K et al, made the decision to produce extremely rapid custom content based on the popular character, they changed the very way we will look at advertising going forward. The big question for everyone is: What does it all mean? Here are a couple of thoughts.

1. Creative and production matter (still)! It seems that the death of high-quality content in the advertising world has been greatly exaggerated. With the Old Spice Man, we saw that a great creative concept and high quality production work can still trump most challenges facing advertising.

Since the local advertising bar is much lower, you can leap over your competition with just a little extra effort. (more…)

When I was a teenager, I learned a valuable lesson about dating from one of the Wise Men in my life.  He told me if my goal was to get a girl to go on a date with me (I know quaint, huh?  Oh for simpler times), I had two options. 

Strategy Number One involved asking as many girls as possible.  If I asked enough girls enough times, one of them was bound to say yes.  You gots to love those odds – although maybe I was going to have to sacrifice a bit on “quality.”

Strategy Number Two involved focusing in on one single girl, spending the same amount of effort as in #1, but completely focused on a smaller “market.”  The odds were lower,  but oh man, she was perfect.

I’ve realized two funny things about this lesson over the years.  First, he was right.  Really these were my only options that weren’t depressing – who wants to wait for a friend to set you up with someone?  Does that ever really work out?  Second, these same two strategies are what I get to choose from when looking at search engine marketing.

The principle holds true whether you are talking about Search Engine Optimization or Paid Marketing such as Google Adwords.  In either case, you can pursue your customers with as very broad net, or stalker-like precision. (more…)