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.

Join the Conversation

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…)

The last year has really been fun to be in marketing hasn’t it?  Think of all the “shiny new toys” that have come of age in the last year.  Facebook, Twitter, and of course the iPhone, Droid, Blackberry and numerous other smart phones.  All these new and exciting ways to reach out to your customers.

Of course all this new technology has come with a learning curve the size and shape of the Matterhorn.  Maybe “fun” isn’t the right way to describe this new landscape.

So on the topic of Smart Phones, what’s a local business to do?  Your winning strategy comes with four steps.

1.  Make a Commitment

The number of people here in the valley with smart phones is only going to grow.  So will their reliance on them as their primary communication / information gathering device.  And the more affluent your potential customer is, generally speaking anyway, the more likely they will be to rely on one of these little gems.  Whether you are ready of not, this is the new reality.  Whether your vehicle of choice becomes an ap, an ad, or a simple text message, you need to have a vehicle in this race as you can be certain that your competitors will.

2.  Don’t Overcommit

Caught you off guard with this one, didn’t I?  The major mistake I see local businesses making (more…)