I don’t know about you, but I’m not going to miss seeing these things all over the place. Altho, I did enjoy where Pantano’s swapped his name for “America” and “Service” on some of his signs.

I watched a rather long presentation by the CEO of a large media operation this week. Usually I try to avoid these things, but it was highly recommended by a partner/friend so I fired up the web browser and prepared myself to fight sleep.

The presentation turned out to have a lot of good information, but I really perked up when he started talking about how they actually turn away clients for certain mobile marketing platforms. The reasoning was this:

• The platform relies a lot on the fact that customers trust their brand.
• The platform is permission based. People must opt-in to get deals via the platform.
• If a advertiser offers deals aren’t good, people will not use the platform and it loses value.
• Not only does it lose value for that one advertiser, but it does so for all the advertisers and thus the station operating the platform.

Because of this, they don’t look at this particular relationship with advertisers as being a provider/client relationship. They see it as a partnership. Both parties live and die together based on the performance of the platform, and so they pick their partners carefully.

Sometimes, the easy money robs you of more in the long run.

When I worked at WWAY, we always greeted the ratings book with a high mix of anticipation & anxiety. The provider of the numbers that we lived and died by also provides a crazy amount of information about digital media, consumer trends and a wide array of info that’ll make your head spin.

Click on the big pic of their homepage for a link to the wire section, or if you’re interested just in marketing, I highly recommend the Media + Entertainment Section.

story via Brand Flakes for Breakfast

It’s a interesting story – a restaurant is about to go under and social media comes to the rescue. You’ll need to read the story over at All Facebook: How Facebook, Radio & Mimosas Saved A Local Restaurant, but I want to make a couple of points:

• They already had a awesome product
• They didn’t do this alone (They partnered with a Hilton Head promotions group on Facebook with over 66,000+ Fans)
• They gave away stuff for free ($25 gift certificates)

I’ve decided to take a 30 day break from social media.

I still believe in the value of social media as a business promotion tool, but I’m taking a long look at who I follow and why.

980+ people are hard to keep track of and it’s beginning to feel a lot  like a online networking group to me. I’m following a lot of people in hope that they’ll notice how awesome I am and they’ll throw some work my way. Unfortunately, instead of spending time actually being awesome, I’m wading through tweet after tweet of shameless self-promotion and auto posts from Mashable & Techcrunch.

I think the value of social media is the ability to be authentic and engage people on a personal level. You don’t always make a immediate buck on it, but the return on investment comes in the long haul. A little shameless self-promotion isn’t bad, but too much and it loses the personal touch. You might as well buy broadcast time if that’s all you’re gonna do.

My battle cry for social media has been, “Don’t tell me how great you are. Show me!”

I think it’s time I heeded my own call.

Seth Godin is very popular among the social media/internet marketing crowd. He should be. He’s awesome.

But if you look at Seth’s internet presence, you’ll notice something. There’s a twitter account ( http://twitter.com/sethgodin/ ), but it’s private and he’s only allowed 5 people to follow him. The public account, like Seth’s Facebook Page, is really only a feed leading back to his blog. No responses from Seth. No @replys to anyone. Just a feed that points back to his home.

So much for engage or die.

It’s not that Seth never responds. He occasionally replies via email, but hardly ever via social media channels.

So, what gives?

Here is my theory: Seth is about much more than social media. Seth is *the* idea guy. The thread that runs through all of his work isn’t something as trivial as “engage or die” nor does he have blog posts about “100 steps to master social media”.

Seth’s message is this: “Be Awesome”.

It sounds like a oversimplification, but take some time & read through his books. Comb through his blog posts that you can’t leave comments on. It’s there over and over again.

Be Awesome.

Every time someone mentions the word “blog” to me, I get up on my soapbox and say, “If you’re not going to update it at least once a week, don’t even bother. Doing it badly is worse than not doing it at all!”

And, yet, here mine sits.

Part of it comes out of the fact that I loathe self-promotion. Yes, I’ve got a lot of cool projects that have been hitting the Internets lately, but I hate tooting my own horn. I hate it so much that I’ve entertained notions of trying to kill my business by ending all advertising (Yes, Yellow Pages, I’m looking in your general direction) and relying solely on word of mouth to generate business.

Ah, but I once again digress.

The really fun news making the rounds last week was that Mickey D’s increased their foot traffic by a whopping 33% via a FourSquare promotion. Word of this social media success spread faster than a bad cold until someone at ReadWriteWeb took a little time to think about things and point out that the emperor was not wearing clothes.

The thing that bothers me about the initial reaction to this bit of misinformation is that it reflects what we’re all looking for. We want that magic pill that instantly makes us insanely profitable. A lot of people point to social media success stories like this & the Old Spice campaign and that only creates unrealistic expectations. Facebook pages are created, tweets tweeted and nothing happens.

And then social media gets the blame.

I’m not doubting the benefit of promotions via social media, but it really is a long term investment. It’s not just about motivating potential customers by contests, coupons or the good old bait and switch upsell. It’s really about putting yourself out there and showing who you are and what you’ve got. It’s holding conversations and building relationships.

If you want to see a master at work, check out @CosmicKitchen on Twitter. Hands down, Kris (not a typo) does the best social media marketing of any business here in town. She’s not above a little shameless self-promotion, but she mixes it well with real conversations.

Of course, the fact that they have some of the best food in town doesn’t hurt (I could go for a Reuben right now).

In case you’ve been living under a social media rock for the past 48 hours, Old Spice has launched the current mother-of-all viral social media campaigns.

Apparently, they’ve assembled a crack creative team and locked them in a Portland, Oregon bunker with cameras, a shower and a live internet connection to answer questions posted at various social media sites.

When I first sat down to write this, I thought I was going to poke all sorts of holes in it. Yeah, a big company with a well established character & brand could do this sort of thing with deep pockets, but it really doesn’t do any good for the little guys. Local businesses could never pull this sort of thing off.

But why not?

I mean, yeah, you couldn’t do it on this sort of scale cranking out 87 videos in 11 hours that get national attention, but how about on a micro scale?

Maybe one a week?

With some sort of interesting delivery?

Educating & informing your potential customer base instead while entertaining them?

It could be done.

But you’ve got to have something of value and be interesting first.

Clickbrix QR Codes for Real Estate: via Brand Flakes for Breakfast

QR Codes are nifty little things. I’ve even spotted a few  in the wild locally in Wilmington and we spotted them in a few places around Washington, DC while we were on vacation.

Basically, they are bar codes that can be read by smartphone users. The information that they can contain varies, but the really cool application is that you can use them to direct smartphone users to a web page. Realty companies in the area are starting to use them on for sale signs to direct potential buyers to listings and I’ve seen them at Lowes linking to information on plants & plant care.

They’ve been around in Japan for a while now, but you can generate your own with one of several online tools. Put them in your ads, on business cards or on various items in your store and lead customers to more information to complete the sale.

A client called me last week about re-shooting a video his friend shot for him. I knew I should try to sell him on the fact that I could make it look better, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Why?

I didn’t really think he needed to re-do it.

You see, he’s this really nice gentleman that hand makes turkey calls. They’re beautiful. In this world of slick plastic produced by borderline slave labor, he makes each of these things by hand. There’s a real art & craft to what he does. It’s not high tech. It is very low tech, but it has this human element to it that makes it rare.

He sells them for far less than what they are worth.

The video is DIY, very much like what he does and for that reason, it fits him. But, it also *works*. It shows his calls and how they work. You can hear the sounds and if you have a trained ear you can appreciate how effortlessly he’s producing these sounds.

He’s already had 350+ views on his video and it’s helped him sell calls. I could make it look better, but I doubt that it would make it more effective.

And so I talked him out of it.

Yes, I’m a horrible salesman, but I hope that it’s because I’m more concerned for my clients than my own bottom line.