Optimists might say the cream rises to the top in a recession. What's definitely clear from this week's MarCom Professional highlights is that the effective marketing skillset has changed and continues to change apace, and it's not a great leap to conclude that those that "get it" earlier than others will reap competitive advantage, or indeed simply survive this economic winter.
Andrew Grill, for example, examines an article in the FT painting a dismal picture for the advertising industry if it fails to adapt to the changes in media.
Or perhaps now's your time to write a book? Trevor Young brings an absorbing slideshow to our attention portraying Rohit Bhargava's route to book top-sellerdom for *Personality Not Included.
Lastly, a quick hello to everyone who has joined us here on MarCom Professional in recent weeks, you are most welcome. If you like what you see, please do invite your colleagues with the simple "Invite" feature at the top of all our webpages.
Best regards, Philip and the MarCom Professional team.
The Intersection of Facebook & MySpace
by Brian Solis of PR 2.0
Source
An interesting and highly anticipated phenomenon occurred in December 2008, one that received very little fanfare.
December was a particularly busy month for Mark Zuckerberg's high profile social network. According to Web metrics firm Hitwise, Facebook’s share of US Internet traffic hit an all time high on Christmas Eve 2008, earning 2.18% of all US Internet visits.
Perhaps more significant, the traffic volume between Myspace and Facebook intersected at the end of 2008 with Facebook surpassing MySpace according to my analysis of several traffic charts. More...
Social media is media (and the opportunity for the PR industry)
by Stephen Waddington of Rainier PR
Social media isn’t media. It’s social. So says Mark Earls (@herdmeister). I discovered Earls’ blog yesterday (thanks to Robin Grant (@robingrant), MD of We Are Social).
Earls is the author of Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature. Here’s what he says.
Social Media - blogging, tweeting, facebooking and so on - is NOT [primarily] about information (what we write, say or read - just as advertising and all those things we criticise are not either); More...
How an active Facebook group drove 15,000 people to the Singapore Tattoo Show
by David Meerman Scott of David Meerman Scott
I speak at dozens of conferences a year all over the world. Since organizers usually book me many months in advance, I have some visibility into how they promote the events. It tends to be the same old methods: Send an email and a direct mail to everyone who attended last year, buy some email and postal mailing lists and send some more promotions. Most shows build good Web sites and most have decent SEO. But that's usually it.
What if you're charged with promoting a brand new show?
Because there's no previous attendees to draw from the work is much more difficult. More...
Not enough agencies are adjusting to the online world warns IPA
by Andrew Grill of Gigafone
I caught an interesting article in the Financial Times which outlines a report from the IPA on how media agencies are slow to embrace the online world. Quoting from the report
The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising, which will publish the “Social Media Futures” report compiled by Future Foundation next week, has warned that advertising agencies face growth of just 1.2 per cent a year by 2016 if the industry fails to tackle the changes to the media created by sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. More...
Read This, Get Personality
by Trevor Young of One19
I've been reading *Personality Not Included in chunks over the past month or so. The book, by PR consultant and prominent blogger Rohit Bhargava, is worth a look if, like me, you enjoy reading marketing books that are relevant and written with energy by authors who don't take themselves too seriously.
*Personality Not Included explores the theme of the 'faceless corporation' and looks at how many of today's companies lack authenticity and personality.
It's up to date and is littered with short, sharp examples (from the relatively obscure i.e. More...
The PR Professional of the Future
by Trevor Young of One19
Just latched on to this video (via Shel Holtz), produced by Ogilvy PR Worldwide for PR Week magazine's recent 'Next' conference.Here is a snapshot of what some of America's brightest and best PR exponents had to say when interviewed for the video:
"What we do for a living is we tell stories that move people," - Christopher Graves, Ogilvy PR.
"We're going to be what I call direct content creators and have an opportunity to actually tell the story very directly to audiences," More...
Email marketing is more art than science
by Graham Jones of Internet Psychology
Statisticians have been bent double over data about email marketing and have come up with an answer to a question that is pretty pointless. Every year various people try to analyse what is the best day of the week to send out a marketing email. The notion is that if you know which day of the week most people open their emails, then you stand a greater chance of being seen if you hit the inbox on the appropriate day.
Back in 2005 we were told it's definitely Friday, well by a short margin anyway. More...
