Marketing

The “Google Test” is “type your name into Google and see what comes up.”

But what David Meerman Scott is looking for when he Googles you is not the absence of party photos. He’s looking for the presence of content.

“On the Web, you are what you publish,” he says. “For many job seekers, what pops up on Google are a few random things (like your membership in the company softball league), your LinkedIn profile, and not much else. Sometimes there is a Twitter feed but frequently it was started years earlier and has been abandoned or it’s only updated a few times a month.”

“With more senior people, I always laugh when the top content when I Google your name is the press release that your company issued a few years earlier to announce you are joining.”

If you’re a marketer, you need to be creating content, he says. CEOs are not looking for managers, “they’re looking for doers. They want marketers (even at the senior level) who are passionate about creating content on the Web.”

Meerman Scott says that his CEO friend Jon Ferrara, who is looking for a senior marketer right now, agreed that the “Google test” will eliminate most candidates from consideration.

So don’t delay. Don’t think “oh, I really should update my Twitter” – just try it.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Everybody is talking about Dollar Shave Club, the site that launched on Tuesday and promises to send you a month’s supply of razor blades for a buck plus shipping.

The premise is sexy enough that that fact alone might have grabbed them plenty of new business, but we’re betting the hilarious promo video didn’t hurt.

It feels Old Spice-y (more tennis, fewer horses) but cost $4500 to make.

On the first day, Business Insider says, the site crashed from interest. Dollar Shave Club still managed to sign up 5,000 subscribers that day, which was Tuesday. Now they’re up to 12,000.

CEO Michael Dubin told BI:

The wonderful thing about Dollar Shave Club is that we get to tell a unique story these days and build a unique brand because we’re on the internet and because the rules are different there.
We can be irreverent, but we can be direct. If you look at the video, we are communicating the whole time the product and service benefits. We’re talking about product and pricing. We’re talking about convenience. Yes, there’s a couple of jokes that don’t talk about the business there, but our goal with creating the video was to teach people about our business. And give them a laugh at the same time and that’s going to make them remember it more. I don’t see humor as a conflict. I see it as a vehicle to communicate those same points that other people are doing in a very dry way.

Is there a line that you can cross and it becomes too funny? No I don’t think you can be too funny, but I think you can get too sloppy, but we’re never going to get sloppy. We’re always going to be very communicative with our customer about their product benefits. I’m sure we’ll make mistakes along the line and we’ll be very direct about that as well.

Buying your razors doesn’t have to be a boring, humorless experience. In my opinion nothing should be a boring, humorless experience. If I can make five minutes out of everybody’s month an enjoyable five minutes and they get a great shave on the other end of that, then I’m really happy and I’ve done my job.

For more about this startup, read the interview. Just a reminder that a really slick-looking video can have a huge impact with not very much money.

Twitter is planning to allow marketers to “build experiences on Twitter” the same way that a brand’s Facebook page can be far more complex than a user’s Facebook page, AdAge reports.

The new features will include e-commerce, contests and sweepstakes. No date has yet been set for when they’ll go live, but Twitter’s telling clients sometime this year.

That’s good, because the only features that currently differentiate a Twitter brand page from a regular user page are a large, customizeable header and the ability to make a certain tweet “sticky” at the top of the page.

Ad Age points out that the e-commerce feature is particularly interesting, because “Twitter co-founder and Executive Chairman Jack Dorsey is also CEO of mobile-payments company Square.”

Some companies have already begun experimenting with commerce on the site: American Express is sending offers to Twitter users who perform certain actions, like using a particular hashtag.

Brand pages are available on Twitter only to advertisers.

Facebook Timeline has just gone live for brands, and Ad Age says “it’s as if dozens of little corporate museums just launched on Facebook.” Coca-Cola has posted memorabilia going back a century and a half, including a handwritten letter from a store owner praising Coke, the New York Times is posting historical front pages, and Old Spice has decided that it was created when a ship’s captain and a one-eyed leopard “accidentally mix space rocks, tank weaponry, a race-car spoiler, cool sunglasses and a vampire fang.”

Ad Age has posted a handful of its favorite uses of the new storytelling medium. Here’s another, courtesy of a commenter: the Timeline for the new show Dallas. The show is a continuation of the original ’80s drama, and so to get new viewers up to speed, the page features one of the old show’s characters telling “the truth about the Ewing family”–aka the plot of the original series, complete with stills and movie clips.

While this is certainly a powerful new tool for brands, it’s important to use caution. We note that Coke has plenty of information about “New Coke” (perhaps its biggest failure as a company), which is admirable, but will BP promote information related to Deepwater Horizon?

Dallas-based The Marketing Arm, a marketing and promotions company, is offering a fairly big chunk of cash to anyone who’s been with the company 7 years or more.

According to the Dallas Morning News the company has recently announced that anyone who’s been with the company for seven years will get seven days off and $2,500 to do something crazy they’ve never had the time or money for. Employees with 15 years of service will get 15 days off and $5,000.

The program will cost between $125,000 and $200,000 each year, depending on how many people take the offer.

The catches:

The days have to be taken in one chunk. The time and money must be used to do something personally rewarding or something that betters the lives of others. A four-person review committee approves proposals.

About 50 staffers qualify this year (including those who’ve already passed a seven- or 15-year milestone). Some of the things they’ve planned:

Travis Dillon, director of property management, wants to go to surfing camp in Costa Rica.
Stu Hill, senior conceptor (that’s someone who creates marketing concepts), wants to travel to India for a meditation retreat.
Michelle Palmer, senior vice president, wants to learn how to paint at an art school in Sedona, Ariz.

The Marketing Arm is a part of Omnicom and counts AT&T, Frito-Lay, American Airlinesand GameStop among its clients.

Here’s another new technology that marketers should keep on their radar: how to integrate digital music into their online campaigns.

According to Smartblog on Social Media, services like Spotify and Grooveshark are more than just social novelties.

Here are a few ways businesses can use digital music in their marketing strategies, courtesy of Smartblog on Social Media.

• “Give your customers a takeaway….Using services such as Grooveshark or Spotify’s partner, ShareMyPlaylists.com, businesses can create compilations for patrons to reinforce the memories from an establishment….It reminds them of a delicious meal, an invigorating workout or that really sassy outfit they purchased while in your place of business.”
• “Showcase your personality….If you own a little coffee shop and want to keep the atmosphere filled with calm and easy vibes, you can take an evening to compile songs that you feel best fit that climate. That can help you draw your ideal crowd and also introduce new customers to your brand personality….if I’m choosing a new gym to join, I’d like to know if it’s a ‘C+C Music Factory’ type of atmosphere or a ‘Nickelback’ one.”
• Three more tips at the original post.

We’ve written a lot about Pinterest lately as the image-sharing social network has been responsible for a near-meteoric rise in referral traffic for some sites.

But a Forrester blogger questions the true value of Pinterest to marketers.

“There’s no denying that Pinterest is fun, looks great, and a lot of people love playing with it. That is also true of kittens but no one’s rushing to include them in their 2012 marketing plans,” blogger Darika Ahrens says.

Why not? For one thing, she says, while Pinterest did grow by 4000 percent from July to December 2011, it’s still small potatoes. Google+, the “small” social network, has 400 million users. Pinterest receives 11 million visits a week, which is nothing to sneeze at but not enormous, either.

For another thing, that crazy study from last week is derived from Shareaholic’s proprietary data from its plugin and “is not necessarily representative of wider web user behavior.” (That isn’t to say it isn’t, and in fact it very likely may be—but the data isn’t there.)

“At most,” Ahrens says, “these early statistics put Pinterest as ‘one to watch’ for 2012, but should be way down the interactive marketers list of trends to consider for 2012 and firmly behind issues of multiscreen marketing, customization, local-mobile, effective media buying and attribution.”

While the “real world” of average people who buy products hasn’t really caught on to the idea of QR codes, they (along with other “real-world-based tools” like augmented reality) are exciting to a lot of marketers.

In a nonscientific poll from SmartBrief’s “SmartPulse”, nearly a quarter of marketers said they were most excited about these technologies, choosing them over location-based social networks, niche social networks, and mobile support for social networking.

Smartbrief is careful to point out that “this poll isn’t so much about what our readers expect in the new year, so much as what they’re hoping to see in 2012.” So there may be a reason—whether technological or otherwise— that explains why it may be unrealistic for QR codes to take off.

Or maybe they’re just waiting for the right implementation…got any ideas?

We expect “Twitter triage” to be a big part of job descriptions for the years* to come, and thought so even before reading this new study from Maritz Research.

EMarketer reports that the study found that half of the consumers who tweeted a company with a complaint expected the company to respond, but only a third actually received a response. The older the consumer, the more likely they were to expect a response.

Not only that, but more than four in five of those surveyed would have liked to have heard back.

And since responding to customer complaints on a public forum like Twitter can increase positive branding and thus be thought of as a marketing function, expect Twitter to be a big part of your workload going forward.

*Or at least months, which are each 10 years in Internet time

Editor’s note: This is a controversial idea because it goes against nearly all the job search advice there is. Mass-spamming potential employers with a generic cover letter? That’s nuts! Yet, for Nickolay Lamm, the author of this guest post, this approach worked—and he says it saved him time and frustration. Check it out right here, and then let us know what you think.

If you’re like many people, your job search consists of responding to leads posted on websites such as Careerbuilder.com, Craigslist.org, etc. Fact is, 80% of jobs are not advertised. When I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh this year, I found myself applying for jobs that weren’t even in my field of study because that was all that was posted on online job sites.

Rather than applying for jobs online and filling out forms, I contacted hundreds of businesses out of the blue, with a generic cover letter, who weren’t advertising any open positions. Doing so saved me time (because I wasn’t spending 30 minutes on one application), lowered any competition (I was the only one contacting each business), and gave me freelance opportunities. The result of my cold contact job search resulted in over 20 job leads, one full time internet marketing position with InventHelp, an inventor service company, and one internet marketing freelance position for MASSolutions, a strategic marketing firm.

Here’s exactly how I did it…

1. I made a cover letter in which I detailed my accomplishments throughout my 4 years in University and made sure that the letter would appeal to any employer that was looking to hire someone for a marketing position.
2. I created a website and LinkedIn profile. That way, if I caught the eye of an employer through my cover letter, I would assure them that I’m a professional if they happened to search my name in Google.
3. I e-mailed my cover letter and resume to every business in my area that had to do with marketing. To make the letter sound personalized for each business, I added the name of the business, their address, and changed maybe a sentence or two within the body.
4. I managed my leads. After sending my cover letter and resume to about 500 businesses, I received 20 leads.

The “mass contact” approach allows you to look for jobs without spending hours filling out applications. The key to getting responses, however, is to spend a lot of time on your cover letter. Your cover letter should make any employer say “Wow…this guy (or girl) would be an asset to my company.”

A lot of job search advice says that you have to spend a lot of time on your cover letter so that you can customize it for each business you send it to. True, if there are five or so companies that you have your eye on, spend time customizing your letter. However, most of us don’t have the luxury of focusing on only several companies. Creating something generic that appeals to anyone in your field will not only let you uncover hidden jobs and lower your competition, but keep you sane as your job leads start to come in.

Below is the original generic cover letter I sent out…

Read more