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Any type of marketing campaign, no matter what medium, should not be a stand-alone effort. Marketing messages should be universal, spanning across print ads, billboards, television and radio spots, online banner ads and PPC management campaigns. We often refer to this process as “media piggybacking” and it requires continuous monitoring of our client’s other media placements and frequent communication with their internal marketing departments. But watching the media for mention of client’s name or products shouldn’t start after they’ve signed on the dotted line—you should be aware of their media presence much sooner than that.

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Cyber Monday—a clever ploy by online retailers and marketers to increase sales or an actual high-volume sales phenomenon? Honestly, it’s probably a little of both. Seeing as though the day was created in 2005 by Shop.org as a way to compete with Black Friday—the either most dreaded or most blessed shopping day of the year depending on your personal disposition and professional position—it is most definitely a marketing tactic. I would be naive to think that Shop.org did no research prior to announcing the special day. And I know for a fact that there is data to back up the increased sales figures. Therefore, it is certainly a high-volume sales day. For brevity’s sake, let’s just chalk this one up to a chicken-or-egg conundrum and move on to another issue.

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A friend of the PPC Handyman, and professional blogger, brought up an interesting phenomenon, retail stores starting blogs. I checked it out with some retailers I like, and sure enough, it’s being done by Mountain Hardwear:

And Trek:

And Sierra Trading Post:

And Patagonia:

So what is it that these companies are trying to gain by having someone write about the goings on at the store, the trails, or the environment? Simple, it’s nothing new, it’s just the Web 2.0 manifestation of the newsletter. Developing an informal, dare I say friendly, relationship with customers, and more importantly, “potential” customers means big bucks to these companies, worth far more than a modest blogger’s salary (Mark Cuban, make me an offer).
So does it work? Maybe not just yet, but it will. As an early technology adopter, and I’ve been playing with RSS feeds and the like for a little over a year now, and the technology gets better every month. Right now, my Google homepage has about 7 different blog feeds importing into it, and on two separate tabs, I have feeds for cycling and search marketing (bookmark this blog on your own search marketing RSS reader =). It won’t be long before this is commonplace, and just like you have pre-programmed channels on your TV, users will customize all aspects of their web experience.

Smart companies that develop a reputation for fresh content now will gain the rewards of this new, yet to be fully comprehended experience. Two tips: Get a good, interesting writer to do it, you won’t cut it with just another hack like me; Make the RSS link VERY apparent, so that people will easily be able to get your content onto their reader quickly and easily. Do this, and ride the wave, dear readers, this is the wave of the future.

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As an online marketer, I’m frequently amazed at the technological innovations that ad distribution networks come up with. We call most of what they do “targeting”, but in short, they figure out information about you which marketers can then use to show more specific ads. There are two conflicting arguments about the ethics of this type of technology. On the one side, privacy advocates hold that this is an invasive misuse of user data and should not be engaged in. On the other side of things are marketers who defend the technology on the basis that it allows them to show you ads for products more likely to be of use to you than they could if everything was random.

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