Marketing

We got the following letter in our inbox this morning from a writer who applied for a job at a marketing firm. He said the letter didn’t get him the gig, but he did land an interview and the promise of freelance work.

John, the writer, asked for any tweaks that might help him land a gig for next time in this tough market.

So, without further ado, read on for the letter and a few tweaks from us. Leave your further suggestions in the comments.

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Check out the awesome video above from 24-year-old marketer Matthew Epstein, in which he asks Google to give him a job while wearing a fake mustache and no pants.

According to Epstein the video got him 300,000 unique visitors to http://googlepleasehire.me, 400 LinkedIn requests, and phone interviews with not just Google, but also Amazon and Microsoft.

Epstein’s campaign has also attracted the attention of a lot of haters (after all, he isn’t wearing pants in part of the video and he himself admits he’s not a great actor). Even a job counselor that CBS 5 in San Francisco said, in so many words, that this was the silliest thing he’d ever seen. (That video is here; the exact quote appears to be “Heheheh….we here don’t recommend anyone do anything like that. The idea hasn’t come up. We haven’t thought of getting our job seekers to do anything like that. Therefore I don’t think you need to do something like that.”)

But in the end, this guy has had an interview with Google and most of the haters haven’t. Good on you, sir.

According to Econsultancy, they’re dying out as social media and the lack of anyone clicking on ads, ever, threaten the traditional digital shop’s business model.

Margins are already slim, Econsultancy blogger Chris O’Hara (also SVP, Sales & Marketing at TRAFFIQ) says, and the fact that the industry keeps shifting isn’t helping.

Problem 1: The tools you need for a digital marketing campaign are now free, low-cost, or run by startups eager to gain customers by offering their product cheaper.

Problem 2: nobody clicks on ads, O’Hara says. (This is mostly true, though obviously some people click on ads.) He argues that the traditional ad is no longer compelling and digital marketers that want to stay relevant need to come up with “ads that do things on the page, such as expand, or play video, or tell a story. The exact types of things you cannot do with a standard 300×250, 728×90, and 160×600 commoditised ad unit.” (That may explain the prevalence of things like AOL’s Project Devil and Gawker’s homepage takeovers.)

Problem 3: PR can do a lot of this social media stuff in-house. “A few years ago, this would have been unthinkable, as the cost of hiring a media team would erode much of the margins. Now, with ubiquitous access to platform technology, PR agencies are looking at building small in-house media teams to leverage social budgets, and make deploying social marketing campaigns a core expertise.”

If O’Hara’s analysis is sound, the next few years may be rough ones for digital shops that can’t innovate, while PR will be ascendant.

On the other hand, any agency that hasn’t been exploring social media or more creative ad units is probably already DOA…

Google has said it will remove brand profiles on Google+ until it launches official business profiles at the end of the year.

Ford was one company that put the pedal to the metal testing out Google+’s potential for marketers, setting up profiles, generating posts, and offering plans for Huddle group chats and Hangouts.

Google is allowing Ford’s planned chats to occur before it shuts down the Ford profile, but after that, marketers should sign up for a pilot program that would experiment with marketers on the nascent social network.

“Right now we’re very much focused on optimizing for the consumer experience, but we have a great team of engineers building a similarly optimized business experience for Google +,” Christian Oestlian, a Google+ project manager, said in a video aimed at marketers.

You may believe that Groupon is a bubble or that it’s a bad deal for merchants but two things are true: daily deal and flash sale sites are excellent marketing opportunities for brands, and job opportunities for writers.

Groupon alone employs hundreds of freelance writers to create the copy seen every day.

And now, as the New York Times reports, flash-sale sites like One Kings Lane and Gilt have also hired away writers. At One Kings Lane, ex-Elle Decor and Domino writers create slideshows and articles on home decorating; at Gilt Taste, Ruth Reichl serves as editorial adviser.

As the NYT also reports, Gilt is moving from a way for brands to dump excess inventory to a place to introduce new products. Volkswagen sold three 2011 Jettas on Gilt, for example, at $10,000 off.

“This wasn’t a sales objective, it was only three cars,” Charlie Taylor,general manager of digital marketing for Volkswagen of America, told the Times. “It was very much an awareness play, meant to build buzz.”

It worked; VW sold 69 cars at full price as a result of the Gilt sale.

And after Saint Parfum sold some candles at more than half off, visits to its website climbed to 6,000, up from 250 on a typical day, and 20 new retailers asked to stock the candles.

“Our pitch actually starts that way now,” Susan Feldman, co-founder of One Kings Lane, told the Times. “Instead of, ‘We can help you with your excess and closeouts,’ the marketing part of it is really much more powerful.”

Twitter promoted trends, which cost $25,000 for a day when the feature launched last year, now cost $120,000 for a day, ClickZ reports.

That’s a huge increase in just over a year, making the sell, if you’re in marketing or PR, that much harder to the folks who hold the purse strings at your company.

But out of Twitter’s 600 advertisers, Twitter’s director of revenue Adam Bain said, 80 percent come back for repeat business. So despite the price increase it must be working for Twitter’s advertisers.

At the same time, Twitter’s “promoted accounts” ad product, which allows companies to gain more followers based on a bidding system, is averaging out at $4 per new follower, Bain said.

That seems high to us.

But Bain told ClickZ it was “a pittance because the ROI is insane. …once they have a follower, they can keep marketing to that guy as many times as they want without worrying about where they are across the web or what kind of mindframe they’re in.”

Incidentally, today’s Promoted Trend is #Super8Secret, which Paramount purchased to promote “secret” preview screenings of the movie “Super 8.” Peter Kafka notes that 1) this purchase is part of a year-long marketing contract Paramount signed with Twitter, committing it to a full year of buys. and 2) the movie’s pretty good.

Guy Kawasaki’s got a book out about enchanting people, so it is not a surprise that he wanted to speak today about how to make people enchanted by you. (Somewhat like Edward Cullen does, we surmise.)

Point #1: people need to like you. So smile, dress nice (but not too nice), and have a good handshake.
One time Kawasaki and Sir Richard Branson were in the same room prepping for a conference. “He asked me if I flew Virgin and I said I’d never flown Virgin…and that’s when he got on his knees and started polishing my shoes,” said Kawasaki. “And that’s when I started flying Virgin.” This anecdote got a lot of laughs but the photo of Branson shining Kawasaki’s shoes looked suspiciously staged. Ah well—the point remains that if people like you they will do things for you.

Which brought Kawasaki to point #2: Read more

Need marketing tips? Rent a copy of “Never Say Never” and start soaking up knowledge, Guy Kawasaki said this morning.

Speaking only partly tongue in cheek, Kawasaki said the Bieber movie is “the best marketing movie ever.”

“You’ll see how hard Justin Bieber works. He’s making 86 stops.” You’ll see how mentor relationships work. And “if you want to see about word of mouth marketing, there’s a section where Bieber’s people look in the parking lot for girls who don’t have tickets and give them tickets. It will bring tears to your eyes,” he said.

And for the skeptical in the audience, Kawasaki said, “do any of you work for a company that totally controls your market segment? I doubt it. Justin Bieber owns girls 9-16.”

Twist Image prez Mitch Joel says that brands should go further than just hiring “content creators” who may or may not be former journalists.

That’s because marketing content, no matter how engaging, is still just marketing. “What makes great content spread is how unique and inspiring the message is, not in how it slants into a direction that ultimately positions your company as the only one to buy from,” says Joel.

Why not hire a real, unbiased “content creator”—a real journalist?

“We’re not talking about a journalist who is working for you as a writer,” he says. “That would be missing the point. The idea here is to start creating content that is both valuable and needed. … It’s about adding so much value that your clients (and potential clients) need you in their lives because the insights and information that you’re providing are so valuable. The challenge (of course) will be in doing this in an honest and credible way. Marketers don’t have a strong history of being able to pull this sort of stuff off, because we just can’t help ourselves but to push our own wares in the moment of truth (which is sad). The only way this will work is if the brand truly does let the journalist be an actual journalist (instead of a corporate shill).”

Our take: Probably not going to happen; marketers don’t like giving up control of their message, especially if that message in the hands of a trained journo turns out to be something unflattering about the company.

And readers have so far been reluctant to trust journalism coming from brands, though it’s been tried in some industries.

But what do you think?

Putting a note at the end of a blog post explaining the author’s ties to the subject is becoming the most popular solution to journalism’s conflict of interest problems.

But a new behavioral economics study shows that the “solution” may actually be part of the problem.

“None of us are saying that transparency is a bad thing,” Daylian Cain, a behavioral economist at Yale University, told the Boston Globe. “But almost always, it fails to work as well as we think it does.”

The first study asked people to serve as experts giving other study participants advice on how to estimate the price of a house. When the experts were paid higher according to how high the estimator guessed, the experts gave worse advice.

No surprise there, says the Globe. But when the researchers required the experts to disclose their conflict of interest, the experts’ advice got even worse.

“After having behaved honestly and virtuously, you then feel licensed to indulge in being a little bit bad,” said Don Moore at the University of California Berkeley, who collaborated with Cain on the study.

In a separate series of experiments, conducted at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, tested whether patients would be able to make better, more informed decisions after being told of their doctor’s potential bias.

People said that if a doctor prescribes a drug but discloses that she has a financial interest in the company that makes it, they’d be less likely to take the drug. But in practice, people were actually more likely to comply with the advice when the doctor’s bias was disclosed. [The researchers] say that people feel an increased pressure to take the advice to avoid insinuating that they distrust their doctor.”

People were more likely to make better decisions (i.e. to discount biased advice from a doctor) if the disclosure came from a third party, if they weren’t made face to face, or if there was a “cooling off” period before the person was asked to make a decision.

We don’t really want to speculate on what this might mean for the FCC’s blogger rules or Michael Arrington. But it’s likely to cause waves down the line.