How do we market when the Internet is incorporated
into our things, and not just our screens? The answer
is a strategy that transcends platforms and looks deeper into the psychology of humans, leveraging the promise of the Internet and the ability to be a click away from experiences generated anywhere on the planet. Moz Co-Founder Gillian Meussig explains that it lies in community development, management, and brand marketing.
69. Blogs + Blogging
Comment Marketing
News/Media/PR
SEO
Social Networks
Word of Mouth
Q+A Sites
Forums
Online Video
Podcasting
Webinars
Research/White Papers
Infographics
Social Bookmarking
INBOUND MARKETING!
(AKA all the “free” traffic sources)
Direct/Referring Links
Type-In Traffic
Email
Local Portals
89. Distribution of Gillian’s Workdays 2011
43%
19%
7%
32%
Conferences & events
Days at the Office
Days in Transit
Days Speaking at
Conferences
Other Days Out of Office
132. Marketing in the Time of the Internet of
Things
gillian@outlinesventure.com
@SEOmom
Parting
thoughts
Editor's Notes
What do we do when it opens the door for the delivery gal
Photo credit: http://uxmag.com/articles/the-internet-of-things-and-the-mythical-smart-fridge
And for that matter, what do salespeople do when we
So, I’m not going to talk to you about that just now. Instead, I’m going to talk about something I actually know something about. But I’ll be back, I promise.
This aspen tree cluster is interesting. The trees on the surface appear to be separate organisms, but in truth, everything you see here and for many miles around is connected by a single tree root system. Is it a single plant? Many plants sharing a survival resource system?
How about a ‘community’ of organisms perhaps able to survive on their own, but ‘choosing’ to connect – ‘choosing’ to be interdependent In order to truly thrive? Frankly, no. What we see is perhaps a survival system, but survival systems do not a community make.
Flocks of birds? Same deal. Expedience is operating here, and certainly community is formed in part for expedience, but as Rand and Dharmesh are fond of reminding us, correlation is not causation. In this case, similarity is not definition.
Here’s a modern human cluster. This is the crowd that gathered in Washington to see President Obama’s first inauguration. Does this group have the underpinnings of a community? Not really. They shared values, goals, and this experience. They shared hopes and dreams that were being fulfilled in that moment. They were passing on the experience to young people, sharing it with elderly – so all age groups were present on this frozen morning. But the group came together and dispersed at the end of the day. It is unlikely that the entire group would reassemble or connect in ways again that would define it as a community. So no: this is an interest group; a passionate one, but not a community.
Photo credit: http://sfbayview.com/2009/rev-joseph-lowery%E2%80%99s-inaugural-benediction-%E2%80%93-video-and-transcript/
Hmm. Possibly. They share values, goals, and experiences and they come together regularly. They tend to drift apart in adulthood, but it’s possible that one might say that Girl Scouts and their supporters – perhaps especially their long term highly committed adult supporters could be an addressable community. At least for us as marketers.
Photo credit: http://worldpeace.org/blog/?p=3803
The AMA. Is this a community of people or an interest group? I can tell you one thing – it’s a POWERFUL group. And we will come back to this group later in our discussion today. Spoiler alert - you want to be a lot like these guys, even if they look boring just at the moment.
Hmmmmm. Political communities. Like free radicals – they can be powerful and dangerous. Something we’ll want to keep watch on if we are to improve civility and peace on planet earth in the coming years.
By and large, communities – and culture - are formed and grounded in: Shared Values
And shared experience will trump the other two by a country mile.
Photo credit: http://daverabbit.podomatic.com/
Here’s my point – I agree with Brian Kavicky: there’s a difference between people and personas. The personas we create, while sometimes valuable, pale by comparison to the complexity of real human beings. I urge you not to get too comfortable with your personas; they are mere shells of the ralityof the human experience.
I’m counseling you to base your marketing on something BIGGER and more powerful than persona marketing… I call it community marketing.
Photo credit: http://daverabbit.podomatic.com/
They support us as we grieve
http://www.planetblacksburg.com/2007/04/the-wall-a-community-in-grief-1.php
Social platforms can grow communities more quickly than was possible before they existed.
Concept credit: http://jrichardstevens.com/articles/wilson_peterson.pdf
And vigilance in handling.
Photo credits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire and http://cooking.savvy-cafe.com/category/campfire-cooking/ and
You see, years ago already, social media robbed us of the ability to spin the message. With more than a billion engaged users on Facebook alone and another billion+ on other social platforms such as Google+, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and hundreds of thousands of industry-specific social platforms, blogs and forums….
Photo credit: http://www.google.com/imgres?q=story&hl=en&gbv=2&biw=1013&bih=637&tbm=isch&tbnid=42vc_CzgE7IBxM:&imgrefurl=http://ajitah.com/blog/%3Fp%3D585&docid=JtZGt3OVTbNfRM&imgurl=http://ajitah.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Tell-Me-A-Story.jpg&w=1428&h=1419&ei=ArGcTrveLqaB4gSsusjjCQ&zoom=1&iact=hc&vpx=88&vpy=160&dur=69&hovh=224&hovw=225&tx=108&ty=128&sig=103195842722407947764&page=1&tbnh=114&tbnw=115&start=0&ndsp=17&ved=1t:429,r:0,s:0
But whether it’s nature is codified in written tenets or not
Photo credit: http://doggies.com/blog/2008/06/07/10-commandments/
…and the breadth of the coverage it receives
Photo credit: http://www.123rf.com/photo_5545967_orbits-of-binary-information-speeding-around-the-world-globe.html
Way back here, I promised I’d get back to the subject… how will market in the time of the internet of things? And here’s your answer:
Support others in their time of need by being generous with our time and toil
I’ll tell you how Moz did it. It’s as good a case study as any.
We started with the basics – a blog that we maintain to this day.
The trick is not to create brilliant content. The trick is to do it consistently. More than 25% of the more than 1M people who show up at the Moz blog, stop by for Whiteboard Friday.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/33
http://news.ycombinator.com, http://delicious.com, http://stumbleupon.com and http://reddit.com have historically performed well, but test your own results
Speaking at conferences such as this was one of the most valuable things we did at Moz.
Email marketing is still one of the most powerful ways to connect with potential clients. And ‘email’ can increasingly be accomplished in more ways through social media platforms. Look at all the options for direct mail online.
We use/love http://www.mailchimp.com (who now has a cool free option for early stage folks)
Be the center of the conversation. Since the blog must be of the highest order (Exceptional Work), we created YOUmoz to accept the ideas and research efforts of our community. We use ‘game theory’ to vote up and promote excellent posts to the main blog. Keep it fluid. Your community manager must have discretionary power.
It becomes interesting with people come to YOUR house to have to the conversation. You can break a single strand of hair – a single connection such as a like on facebook. And it is only intermittently interesting if people talk back to you – that’s 2 strands. But it is the community of people who come regularly to your house to have the conversation about who they are and what they do that will bind them and bring the back into the fold in the event one begins to drift away.
Linkscape is the flagship tool of SEOmoz. It powers not only the ‘Moz toolset and platform, but many of the other toolsets via our API. Roger Mozbot was created to explain that we don’t scrape Google or any other Search Engine to provide Linkscape data.
2011 – We blow it again. And share it again. That’s not so easy.
Once you have a rudder in the water, everyone knows whether, what, and how to do things. Decisions become smooth.
And remember the smart fridge? We’ll be adding healthy options, recipes and more to the content in our fridges, reaching our customers not at the moment of original purchase, but at the moment of ‘highest need’ and attention, which results in purchase decisions.
Photo credit: http://theconcepttimes.com/2011/02/smart-fridge-let%E2%80%99s-you-cook-and-eat-healthy/