January 2011 Archives
By Mark Macias
How much did you spend on your last political mailer? Does the thought of someone tossing that pamphlet in the trash still disturb you?
I’m still amazed with the number of political candidates who continue to use the postal service as part of their main communications strategy. We aren’t sending birthday and holiday cards in the mail. We don’t fax letters to constituents anymore. So why are we paying thousands of dollars to mail pamphlets that nearly every voting household will label as junk?
The worst part of this communications strategy is that you can never accurately measure its success. Regardless of the research, no one can tell you which voters took the time to read your mailer and which voters threw it away.
What if I told you your campaign could reach thousands of more voters with video and for only a fraction of that mailer budget. Your video would introduce you to voters in a personal way, give them a glimpse of how you speak and what you believe. Your video would be more entertaining and compelling with its natural sound, music and moving parts. And with the power of peer groups, there is a statistically higher chance that your video would be forwarded to undecided voters.
By Mark Macias
When you break down the Internet in simple terms, everyone is trying to sell you something. They might break into different sales pitches – food, clothes, art, love, sex, entertainment, even ideas – but when you take a closer look at each web page, you will discern that everything really boils down to your wallet and mind. Everyone wants a piece of it.
And you don't have to be a business owner to understand this concept. I have friends who promote their blogs on Facebook and Twitter. It's a smart start, but this strategy needs to go a deeper if you want to grow your customer or fan base over the Internet.
Let me break down this idea with a restaurant example.
One of the biggest misconceptions about Twitter I think is that it is a social network like Facebook. The founders have indicated Twitter is not a social network, and is in fact geared toward real-time search. The fact is , Twitter and Facebook are completely different in my mind. Twitter has turned “Search” (and the RSS feed) into a human generated activity with sharing information. More importantly, using Twitter applications like Hoot Suite or Tweet Deck we can search on Twitter on any topic-- even ourselves. From there, we can find valuable links to information that people are tweeting about topics we are interested in.
What will get me a bit fired up is when I read
Google should buy Twitter because of the amount of money being poured into Facebook. These two platforms are completely different and do not compete against each other -- because Twitter is not a social network. So that logic makes no sense. Now if an analyst wrote Google should buy Twitter to extend its Search services I would see a bit more of the logic, than just the arms race mentality that is now going on between Google and Facebook, along with reading the ramblings of an analyst that is just getting upset that Google is not buying Twitter to jack up its stock price.
However, Google has already started to bake in real-time relevant Tweets into its search stream (its good to see the Internet is still “open” in that regard). The challenge for Twitter I think will be how it can generate revenue as it costs continue to rise to support this service. Both Google and Facebook receive most (if not all) of their income on targeted ads that appear on the side of the screen. Much of the discussion around Twitter involves the same thought process, which is why you are starting to see “sponsored tweets”.
