Marketing with Michael

For those of you who haven’t heard of Reddit, it is a website that people post things from the internet to that they find interesting or feel strongly about. You will find anything from pictures of adorable baby animals to political discussions. One of the things Reddit has is a subreddit (section of the website) called AMA, which stands for “Ask Me Anything”. People who are either relatively famous or have experienced something others would find interesting create a thread for other members of the site to ask them questions.

One night while I was browsing Reddit, I noticed that Bear Grylls, host of Man vs. Wild, had done an AMA. After closer inspection, I noticed that unlike other AMA’s I had seen, this one was heavily branded. He did video responses and linked to them, the videos being found on a branded YouTube Channel made by Degree Men. Now, they have done even more with it, and the video responses are laid out on the Degree Men’s “The Adrenalist” website. The cool part about the whole thing is that people did not feel like they were being marketed to at all, it was just a really interesting AMA. But they were totally being marketed to. 

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What is the difference between the Facebook “Like” button and the “Recommend” button? Nothing, when it comes to functionality, but the message it send to the reader’s social network could be vastly changed. The Facebook “recommend” button was created after the “Like” button, the reason being that there are things in life that you wouldn’t want to say you like, but still want to share. For example:

8,997 people like that Steve Jobs died?! Those monsters!

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If you use multiple social networks, there’s a chance you are like me and sometimes post similar things on all of them. For example, when I write a new post for Marketing with Michael, I post the link on my Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ account so people I’m connected with in all of my networks can see them. When doing social media marketing, it is very important to know which of your social networks’ fans and followers are engaged and which aren’t, so you know that what your doing is fine, or if you should be trying something different. Or, you may not be a marketer at all, and you are just curious if people actually check out the links you post. Either way, here is an easy way to figure out how many clicks your links get, and which social networks get the most. 

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Recently at work, one of our apps was given a bad review. This was extremely surprising, as I have been doing marketing for this particular application for a little over a year to see the app get a ton of press, none of it bad. When I read the review, I found that the negative things the reviewer had written were blatantly untrue.

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How often do you check-in to a place you are at? If you do at all, you are one of few according to recent findings that say that only 4% of adults use location based check-in services. Nevertheless, competition has been fierce for which service people use to check-in with; that is, until recently when Facebook and Gowalla decided to let Foursquare win it, which was incredibly wise on their parts.

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When you go to a job interview, most people expect to be asked what they feel one of their weaknesses are, and they usually have a thing ready for a response. That thing for me is that I’m a bit perfectionist. This doesn’t mean that I think I’m perfect. I know for a fact that I’m not, and I do not believe anyone else is either. What it does mean is that once in awhile, I have a hard time drawing the necessary line on a project at “good enough”, and instead want to push forward on the project until it reaches absolute perfection. Here’s a story all you other perfectionists will probably relate to:

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As a rule of thumb, when it comes to having your users promoting your product in some way, or receiving some form of promotion of yours to their email, you let them opt-in to that. It’s common sense. Sometimes, you still see some companies trying to trick people—the ones that are taking a chance on their product or service—into promoting their company for them or receiving promotional materials. Recently, there was a service that tried to do this, which resulted in them getting shot down by Mark Zuckerberg himself. See the Facebook wall post below:

“That’s lame”, says Mark. Couldn’t have said it better myself. 

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Recently, there was a story in the news about how it is suspected that Newt Gingrich bought the vast majority of his Twitter followers. This conclusion has come after a report that only 8% of his 1.3 million followers are verified human beings, which is lower than most Twitter accounts. Newt denies that he paid for followers. Whether he did or not, I would recommend to anyone doing some sort of marketing via Twitter that you do not pay someone to have a bunch of accounts follow you. This is not only because it makes you look like a complete loser when people eventually found out what you did; it is because having a large number of real or fake Twitter followers, in and of itself, means nothing.

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If you have a marketing degree, it is likely that you have done a competitive analysis. You have probably done more of them than you would care to remember. In my case, I have done some form of competitive analysis for almost every marketing class I had taken (they didn’t feel it was necessary to sneak one into market research).  What was shocking to me when I got a job in the real world was that in all those marketing classes, my classmates and I were doing the competitive analyses wrong.  Not completely wrong, mind you; when it came to practicing the general concept of researching the market your product is in and saying how you should differentiate, we were dead on. But, the way we did the research part was flawed, and probably why that part was incredibly boring to do.

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What is Personal Branding? 

The other day, I heard a co-worker talking about someone he knew that was always tweeting. He scoffed, saying “he’s really into building his ‘personal brand’”, with quote fingers around “personal brand”. Personal branding is exactly what it sounds like—it’s a brand, like a company would have, but it’s for yourself instead. Something people sometimes get confused about when talking about personal branding is that the things that make up your brand can only be professional things, so basically just your LinkedIn. This is not true. Your personal brand is made up of all different parts of your life that others see, whether it be professional, fun, good, or evil. The phrase “building a personal brand” is relatively new, but the concept itself is not. For example, look at General George S. Patton. 

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