Prediction: Recession Is Good For New Media Marketing

There's lots of news today about a possible recession. The Federal Reserve made the biggest rate cut in 24 years today to head a recession off at the pass but the stock market isn't really responding well so far. While a recession (or even the hint of one) will increase fears in many traditional sectors of media and marketing, I think new media marketers will benefit from this and here's why....

• Blogs don't cost anything to start.
• Online video is free. So is creating your own video channel on YouTube.
  
• Creating a Facebook group doesn't cost anything.
• Recording a podcast costs next to nothing.
• A basic Flickr account to engage your customers is free.
• Twitter doesn't charge to message the people most interested in what you are doing.
• AdWords only cost you something when someone clicks your ad (and you determine the cost per click.)
  

There will still be marketing in a recessed economy. There will still be marketers spending money in a recessed economy, even if there's not as much of it. What marketers will be paying for, however, is not the use of the technology, the air time to broadcast it's message, or the placement for ads. What they'll pay for is help to use the new media well. When in the face of decreased marketing budgets new media will emerge as the cheaper option because companies will pay consultants (i.e. digital coaches) a few thousand dollars to teach them how to fish the new way. This may be the tipping point for new media marketing as marketers and advertisers give it a shot out of financial necessity rather than being convinced that it's the right thing to do. Whatever the case, a recession is going to be good news for new media marketing. It's bad news for traditional advertising and marketing, but Google was already telling us that.

My Top 10 Web Tools

This will be one of my final posts for 2007 so in keeping with the top 10 lists from the year, here is my own top 10 list. These are the top 10 web tools I have found make my online life and work much better. If you aren't familiar with some of these I wholeheartedly recommend you check them out...and in case you were wondering, each one is free for use.

1. Gmail - Without a doubt this is my number one web tool. It's the hub of my online existence.
2. Del.icio.us - I love this site. It's my primary source for bookmarking websites. My page is at Del.icio.us/fourthbill.
3. Twitter - This is becoming a new favorite. Twitter is a microblogging tool that's one part messaging system, one part social network, and one part addictive. I'm finding it a great additional outlet to this blog and a new way to discover emerging ideas and connect with new people of similar interests. You can find me at Twitter.com/billseaver.
4. TinyURL - Once I got hooked on Twitter I found this to be an invaluable tool for referencing links and keeping my character count below the maximum.
5. Google Docs - If I ever have to collaborate with people on docs or spreadsheets this is my go-to resource.
6. Google Reader - I've only switched over to Google Reader in the last few months. I used to read my feeds with Sage but I'm really liking Google Reader and have made the full conversion.
7. Ping-o-Matic - Every time I write a blog post I ping a number of different services just to let them know it's out there. Ping-o-Matic makes that possible in mere seconds and that's why I like it.
8. Feedburner - Feedburner continues to emerge as a necessary tool for me. I use it to track both my feed stats and site visitors but it had me at hello with the blog post email feature that lets readers get these posts via email rather than coming to the blog or subscribing with an RSS feed reader. I think I can personally account for fifteen bloggers using Feedburner for that feature alone.
9. Facebook - Facebook has been my social network of choice most of this year and it's allowed me to connect with people that MySpace never did. Not sure why, but it did.
10. Picnik - Picnik is still one of my favorite websites. It's photo editing made easy and was actually integrated with Flickr recently as well. That's a double dose of goodness.

BONUS: Firefox - None of the above sites would be nearly as enjoyable and useful to me without my browser, Firefox. If you don't use it, quit using Explorer or Safari and get on the Firefox bus. It really is as good as everyone says. Now go download it.

What is proper Twittequette?

I recently rejoined Twitter after many months away from my initial infatuation with it. As I've been in it heavily now for a month and have observed a culture unto itself but haven't found anything that talks about proper Twitter etiquette. With something this new there are always a lot of opinions but there seems to be some consensus around the following areas:

• Ad value to the conversation. Don't just plug yourself, your blog, your product, etc. all the time. Twittequette: The occasional plug seems to be accepted but there should be a balance between other tweets and the purely promotional tweets. I credit Mitch Joel for pushing this idea.
• It's okay to be random. Consistence on a regular topic from any one person doesn't seem to be expected. A person you follow may link to an interesting story with one tweet and then talk about a movie he just watched with the next tweet followed by a really helpful observation or question in the third tweet. Twittequette: The randomness and even the mundane can sometimes be the most interesting.
• Don't have too many more people following you than you're following. There is a sense that it's bad form to have significantly more followers than those you are following. Twittequette: If you're not following the people who have chosen to follow you you're not part of the conversation. You're just a diva giving a lecture (albeit a lecture with 140 characters or less.) I credit Jeremiah Owyang for this idea.
• Don't carry on lengthy conversations. If you follow two people who are also connected to each other they can send messages between them. You'll see both sides of the conversation. That's interesting to a degree but the downside is that they can also dominate you Twitter stream with a lengthy conversation. Twittequette: If you know it's going to be more than a single question and response conversation it's better to jump over to email, instant message, phone, or some other non-Twitter means of communication.
  

I'm sure there are more items for proper Twittequette. If you have one (or more) to add I'd love to see them in the comments.

I'm back on Twitter

Several months ago I jumped on the Twitter bandwagon with a slew of other people. I thought it was a pretty cool micro blogging platform, but to be honest, I really just checked it out because I saw a lot of other people doing it. After a week or two I kind of lost interest but over the last few weeks I've found myself going back to it. Here are a few reasons why:

• It's a great way to promote your blog to people who have willingly shown an interest in you. The thing about Twitter is that people who are "following" you will see every time you post so they have elected to receive your updates. What else can you ask for than notifying people about a blog post when they've already shown an interest. I think that's what Seth Godin calls permission marketing.
  
• There's a Twitter application for Facebook. I like Facebook. I like Twitter. Combining the two is doubly good.
• I like to keep up with people informally and I'm happy to let people keep up with me the same way. From a micro blogging standpoint, there are a lot of people who I'd be interested to know what their doing and for the ones using Twitter, I like to see what they're into.

If you're on Twitter, let me know. You can find me on there under the highly creative moniker billseaver.

Messaging 2.0

I had the chance to do the web 2.0 overview presentation to a group of marketing professionals today consisting mostly of graphic designers and copywriters (and I also said I'd give a shout out to Ben H. who asked if I would be blogging about the presentation).

The presentation always covers the good old "massive Volkswagon" (MASSVW) that I've written about previously. A recent addition to the presentation was a discussion on the shift in the marketing messaging due to web 2.0. Specifically, it breaks down into two areas: tone and brevity.

Tone: The shift in copy tone is informal, conversational and fun. Compare the following, two email marketing companies tell the public about themselves in very different ways. The first takes the traditional approach and the second takes the new approach:

About Lyris:
Lyris Technologies, a subsidiary of J.L. Halsey Corporation, is a pioneer in the email technology industry. Since 1994, the company has been at the forefront of developing world-class email marketing software and services, while maintaining a record of strong profitability and compound annual growth.

As the choice of more than 5,000 major corporations and growing businesses Lyris' flagship product, Lyris ListManager, is one of the world's best-selling software solutions for email marketing and deliverability, while Lyris ListHosting offers the same powerful capabilities in a convenient, on-demand web-based solution.

About Emma:
In late 2001, Will Weaver and Clint Smith (known in more familiar circles as Will and Clint, or the Tall One and the Not-So-Tall One), began researching the email marketing and communications field. The two had recently started a company they named Cold Feet Creative, and their intent was to apply their sense of style and interface design to a niche market where, against other, more complicated software applications, they might stand out. Email Marketing, with its TargetBlasters and Contact2000s and MailBaboons and MailBaboonTargetBlasters, would do nicely.

So they built a prototype and called it Emma. They liked the name "Emma" because it formed a nice and handy abbreviation of the phrase email marketing and because it brought with it an inherent human quality. It's a real name - like Antoinette or Frederick, only shorter. And that was what these two gentlemen were after - a way to bring software to life, but not literally because the software might decide to begin lopping people's heads off, or running out for sandwiches at extremely inopportune times.

Brevity: With many of the web 2.0 technologies, the opportunities to be verbose are simply not available many times because the technology won't allow it. For instance, a Google Adword doesn't allow more the 25 or 35 characters on a line. Many text messages don't receive more than 160 characters and the popular micro messaging system Twitter doesn't allow more than 140 characters per message. Word counts don't apply in this new micro messaging shift, rather character counts (which includes each letter, number, space, and punctuation mark) are the new constraints on a message.

My Slice of Pi update

Last week I talked about the launch of a new project I'm part of called MySliceofPi.com. One of the things we saw quickly was that the very people we think will use MySlice weren't interested because the price was out of their range. Today we dropped the bottom out of the prices so it's accessible to many more people. The new prices are simply the value of the number, meaning a five is now $5 rather than $50. Whereas the cheapest number to buy was $10 in the previous version, the most expensive one is $9 under the new price structure. We saw an immediate jump in slices after that change today so that was all the affirmation we needed.

In case you're wondering, we did automatically refund the difference in price to anyone who purchased under the old pricing model. Also, for those of you who may be using Twitter, I think MySlice could serve as a shorthand reference (since you only get 140 characters per post) for you if you want to quickly reference something you can say "Pi" and the people would learn that you've got something for them to see on your digit. So instead of Twittering, "check out my tumble log" and providing a link I could just say, "Pi5" which is translated "go to mysliceofPi digit 5 to see my message and link."

Micro messages. The next big thing?

As new media is expanding rapidly and pushing for bigger and better content there's an interesting thing happening...a few new services are focused on micro messages.

Twitter, for instance, is a text only log in which you have 140 characters available per "post" and you can submit them through the Twitter interface, your instant message service, or text message. You can check out my Twitter page to see what I mean.

At the same time, a new mini blog tool has emerged called Tumblr. Tumblr is essentially stripped down blog service. There's no comments available and the tone lends itself to stream of consciousness more than anything else. It does allow images, embedded video, and a long post (if you would want to do that here) unlike Twitter. See mine here.

After playing around with both of these for a while tonight I think there's something really compelling here. My first thought was that these services will be niche successes...meaning they're not the kinds of things a non blogger or those uninitiated into the world of social networking will likely dive into. Then I realized this "niche" grew by at least 35 million blogs and well over 100 million social network registrants last year...so if I'm Twitter or Tumblr, that's a nice fat niche to tap into. Whatever the case both of these are a perfect outlet for someone who feels like they're somewhere beyond the white belt at the web 2.0 dojo. They play together nicely too. Tumblr will pull in your Twitter RSS feed for the perfect melding of the two.

I'm personally excited about this because I've felt like I needed an outlet for things that don't really fit the general topic of this blog. Also, the very nature of both of these means I can't really spend much time on it so it forces me to say what I want and move on with the day. I'm looking forward to twitting and tumbling.