The World Needs A New Marketing Blog

Let me start by saying I like to network, reconnect, meet new people, etc. I welcome your friend request.

I don’t know about you, but it seems like my incoming “mystery friend requests” are on the rise. I used to respond to each one individually, but now I offer this advice to everyone. This is the same advice I give my social media networking students at the Small Business Development Center at State College of Florida, and I think it will help you connect with ALL of your desired new friends—not just me.

If I don’t immediately recognize your name or face when I receive your friend request, I have to try and guess why you’re “friending” me. Here are a few possibilities that come to mind:

To make a business contact or further your career

To meet someone with common interests

To hire a marketing company

To sell me something I really, really need

To spam me about something I really don’t need

To find out when I’m going to be out of town so you can steal my stuff

To try to steal my identity

Because you’re a stalker

Because you have me confused with somebody else

Yikes! That’s a lot of opportunity for confusion. But it only takes a moment to make a quality contact with a new Facebook friend if you follow a few common-sense steps:

(1) Tell me why you’re introducing yourself or if this is a re-introduction.

(2) If this is about business, have plenty of information on your Facebook page to help me figure out why you’re introducing yourself—including your company name, your city and a recognizable photo of YOU (not your kids, ferret or favorite celebrity). Make sure your security settings allow potential friends to see that information.

(3) Both (recommended).

Again, I’m not a snob. I love to meet people. That’s why I’m on Facebook. But just like you wouldn’t walk up to a stranger at a networking event, silently shove a business card into the person’s hand and instantly move on to the next person, it is also bad form to “friend” people without offering some context. Unless you’re a spammer, one quality connection is better than 1,000 thoughtlessly accepted.

More great news to share!

SARASOTA, Fla., October 15, 2009–Odato Marketing Group has opened a digital multimedia studio in Sarasota, relocating its headquarters to 1721 Independence Blvd. The studio allows Odato Marketing to produce photo, audio and video Web content in-house for the firm’s clients, which include market leaders in healthcare, education, manufacturing and consumer brands.

“Forward-thinking marketers are focusing on inbound marketing and creating compelling content,” said agency president Rich Odato. “Interruptive media advertising is certainly not dead, but it is changing. Customers are choosing where, when, how and why they interact with brands. The ‘why’ is relevant content and today, content is more than words.”

Odato noted that the studio is meant to supplement, not replace the high-quality photography and videography partners the firm has worked with in the past. “Our plan is to provide multimedia services that are in synch with the economics and speed of the Web,” he said. “We have no ambitions to produce national television commercials in-house.”

Odato Marketing Group (www.odatomarketing.com) is a five-year-old advertising, public relations and internet marketing agency with operations in Sarasota, Florida and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

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Thought I’d share today’s news:

SARASOTA, Fla., September 1, 2009—Odato Marketing Group, an advertising, public relations and Internet marketing firm operating in Sarasota and Pittsburgh, has received an Award of Excellence in the 2009 American Graphic Design Awards. Odato’s entry, a national print ad campaign created for a Sarasota-based manufacturing company, was selected among the top 15 percent from more than 8,000 entries.

The campaign will be published in the GD USA Design Annual and www.gdusa.com.

“This award reinforces what we’ve known all along—that our team is producing national-caliber creative,” said agency president Rich Odato. “I especially credit our creative director, Michael Brown, for the design and concept, as well as our client for having the vision to embrace great work in an industry known for utilitarian marketing.”

The campaign, developed for polymer-sheet manufacturer King Plastic Corporation (http://www.kingplastic.com) ran in national and international trade publications in the woodworking, plastics and marine industries.

For more than four decades, Graphic Design USA has sponsored national design competitions that spotlight areas of excellence and opportunity for creative professionals. The American Graphic Design Awards, the largest of these, is open to advertising agencies, graphic design firms, corporations, publishers and more. It honors outstanding work of all kinds and across all media.

Now in its sixth year, Odato Marketing Group creates traditional and digital-media marketing programs for clients in healthcare, manufacturing, education and other sectors. To learn more, visit http://www.odatomarketing.com.

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A Clickable Action Plan

Social media can seem overwhelming to busy executives and entrepreneurs. There are too many choices, too many technologies and too many buzzwords. And just when you think you’ve got it figured out, it changes. The exciting thing is that there are ways to make money and grow your business with social media that are still being explored. So if you’re ready to get in touch with your inner Lewis and Clark, here are some of the tools I think are critical for successful social media networking—for now, at least.

Start With The Big Three

http://www.linkedin.com/
http://www.facebook.com/
http://twitter.com/

All Sarasota-Manatee Businesses Add This
http://www.energizemybiz.com/

Sarasota-Manatee Manufacturers Add This, Too
http://sama-community.ning.com/

Learn What People Are Searching For
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

Find Out What’s Been Said (and Read)
http://digg.com/
http://delicious.com/
http://www.stumbleupon.com/
http://www.reddit.com/
http://buzz.yahoo.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/

Consider Starting a Blog
http://wordpress.com/
http://blogger.com/

Find Sites to Publish Your Articles
http://www.articlepr.com/Article_Submission_Sites.shtml

…And Your Videos
http://www.youtube.com/
http://video.google.com/

…And Your Photos
http://www.flickr.com/

…Even Your PowerPoints, Docs and PDFs
http://www.slideshare.net/

Happy Exploring!

A sophisticated industrial design company posted this question to its Facebook fans: “Does content trump design when [design] is the company’s product?”

The short answer is this: Content is king, but content is more than words. If your brand is about style your entire Internet footprint must project sophistication.

In my experience, “content” started out as a goofy term created by Web programmers who didn’t really care what the site was about. Visual webmasters worried about the visuals, programmers worried about the code, ad agencies wanted to preserve the integrity of the brand and clients wanted whatever was in the brochure to be on the Web site. In the early days, nobody worried about “content” the way we think of it today.

The struggle between style and technology took a turn for the worse when SEO experts started dumbing down site designs to feed the search engine spiders. They wanted content, but mostly as a means to enhance keyword density. This created amazing results for some companies for a while until search engines got wise and started looking more at backlinks (links from other, credible sites back to yours) and other factors, as an indication of the quality/relevance of a site.

In order to build backlink love, site owners learned that they needed to provide people with interesting stuff to read. Programmers still didn’t care what the “content” was, but they knew Web sites needed content and plenty of it. They even came up with ways to let site visitors help create it. Web 2.0 was born, the Web became awash with fresh content and the rest, as they say, is history.

But the story continues to change as the demand for information, entertainment and community evolves to include multimedia dialogue between companies and customers. In the ten minutes or so it took me to write this, 100 hours of new video has been uploaded to YouTube, ranging from slick movie trailers to homemade video reviews of products by end users.

I believe in content-based “inbound” marketing and I understand how it can cause people to think of Web sites as plain boxes to hold content. (This blog is a good example; check back soon to see some evolution here.) But demand for multimedia content is exploding. The next batch of hot content marketing books will talk more about this.

Thanks to the multimedia content revolution, brands have more opportunities to project style than ever before—and customers want it. From a design-constrained environment like Facebook to the wide-open canvas of multimedia content, to emerging opportunities like iPhone apps., style is back, baby!

Video by Odato Marketing and Dickinson Studios

At least not before you read Ed Barr’s: http://edbarr.blogspot.com/

Ed brings a unique perspective to the art, science and soul of communication. His posts around June, 2009 are particularly moving, as he educates on communication topics related to the experience of his young son’s open heart surgery.

The posts are personal; the lessons universal.

Odato Marketing Group is one of the three finalists for Young Business of the Year in Sarasota. The script for my video interview follows. The question was: “What advice would you give someone who is thinking of starting a business?”

When someone is thinking of starting a business, there are plenty of books, Web sites and counselors out there that can help with writing a business plan, raising capital and making sales.

But I think too many companies fail to invest enough time defining their values. Every entrepreneur should create a written values statement and look for partners, employees and even customers who share those values.

At Odato Marketing Group, we have our Cornerstones, which are Integrity, Attitude, Ideas and Results. They help us stay focused on what’s important and guide us through the thousands of daily decisions that our business plan couldn’t anticipate.

Some time in the distant future—say six months from now—I’ll probably look back at this post the same way we look at our dusty VHS players wasting away in a corner of the attic. In my humble opinion, these are the best free or low-cost tools available today to help companies market online. These are my opinions only. No hate mail, please.

Professional Networks: I like LinkedIn over Plaxo. Sorry Plaxo.

Social Networks: I’ve seen an explosion of Facebook activity among my professional friends in the past few months. Don’t forget to do corporate and personal accounts. The old corporate “pages” were practically worthless, but the new version is better.

Blogs: Wordpress has excellent functionality and can operate from their server or yours. Wordpress has some great add-ins, including Add-to-Any and several good RSS and Twitter sync options.

Microblogs: At the moment, Twitter is still on fire, especially among twentysomethings. I prefer the status update feature on Facebook, but I’m doing both.

URL Trimmer: I like bit.ly. It helps you save your precious 140 characters on your tweets, while adding some great tracking functionality

Keyword Research: I recommend starting with Google’s keyword tool. It’s easy, free and shows the relative competitiveness of various terms: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. While you’re learning about keywords to target, don’t forget that you’re looking at some rich insight about your customers and what they want. What you see might surprise you and reveal new opportunities.

SEO Analysis: The folks at HubSpot have developed website.grader.com, which can provide some insightful feedback. It’s more technical than most users will understand and it will discover areas for improvement with nearly any site, but I think it’s based on sound SEO principles. While most people are thinking about Google, don’t forget Yahoo and MSN.

Social Bookmarks: Digg, Delicious and Stumbleupon seem to be getting the most traction.

Newsletter: Constant Contact remains our email newsletter of choice. It’s affordable, works well and will help you stay on the right side of the CAN SPAM laws.

Video: Finally, YouTube may be the Google of video, but don’t forget Google Video.

Thumb through your favorite local or trade print publication. You’re bound to spot these common errors. Most are easy to fix.

Putting the logo on top.

Failing to say something meaningful to the customer right away.

Competing headlines (the eye doesn’t know where to go first).

Throwing too much stuff in there.

Including your photo and/or not including a visual of interest to your audience.

Multiple designs thrown together within a space.

Poor design flow (the eye doesn’t know how to flow through the ad).

Insufficient relief space (reading this ad looks like work) and sloppy margins.

No clear call to action and/or Web site for an intermediate step.

Amateurish logo design.