It’s really fun to think about your marketing plan on a global scale. It’s big time with a potential to reach billions of people. But like any great marketing plan, its quality, not quanitity to brings paying customers to your door.

I am very interested in the idea of hyper-local marketing that Michael Lefebvre, The Uncommon Agent is doing in Norfolk, MA. Mike is a real estate agent in metrowest Boston that has begun doing feature videos of local town businesses. Take this one for example of Joe’s Barber Shop.

This video is successful in many ways: you get to know a town business and some history of the town, you get to know Mike and his “giving back” to support local businesses, and you are entertained by the story. This is a perfect vehicle for someone like Mike who is in the business of making connections and convincing people about hisknowledge of the area.

But this could work for corporations as well. Imagine a company like Comcast (who tries to be involved in a local level) highlighting local businesses like this. It would do wonders for their brand.

What do you think about hyper-local marketing?

Today I read a blog post by Dave Rosenberg on Facebook and how much money they are making from the sale of virtual goods. Some estimates have come in at $34.5 million of how much Facebook users have sent on virtual goods.

Virtual goods. That’s right, fake goods that you can buy for people and post in their profiles. But this line is what caught my attention:

“The vast majority of Facebook gifts are bought from the first screen of gifts in the directory–almost 80 percent of the total sales come from the group of the first 20 gifts. This points to the self-reinforcing nature of popularity (the crowdiness of crowds rather than the wisdom of crowds) when popularity data is made public.”

This “crowdiness of crowds versus the wisdom of crowds” is a very important concept to think about as it pertains to e-commerce, blogging, and establishing power users in social networks.

People like to follow the crowd. In the Facebook example, the most popular products rise to the front and this prequalifies the selections for those who are not as decisive. The thinking may be, “well others like these products so I should too.” When strategic levers are in place, marketers can leverage this phenomenon to create great results. Read more…

I was driving down the highway yesterday and notice a freshly installed sign along the way. It was one of those “Adopt-a-Highway” sign. On it, there was a logo from a generic tech company acknowledging their sponsorship and commitment to keeping that stretch of road clean.

This got me thinking. Can this be applied online?

What if we take the idea of trash along the road and associate it with SPAM comments on a website. The websites I write for are not even close to popular yet I still spend 5 minutes a day policing and deleting my SPAM comments. I can’t imagine the time and effort required to controlling SPAM for huge sites with huge traffic.

What if there was a company that handled all your SPAM for free? A company that made money by facilitating a new type of sponsorship for advertisers: adopting a website? Here’s how it would work:

You sign up with this made up company. They gain limited access to your commenting engine with the ability to monitor and administer the comments. They sell advertising to put up a banner on your website. Something like, “Forum Moderation Sponsored by Company X”

For all I know, this may already exist. But if it doesn’t exist already, do you think it would work?

Last week I was chatting with two of my colleagues: THE Michael Schneider and Doug Gould. The topic of the conversation was the temporary nature of online creation. Doug talked about how the nature of online creation prevents people from actually holding it in their hands or displaying it on their shelf. Will magazines or books or newspapers ever go away? Of course not. But more and more , technology is enabling people to bring things with them digitally.

Change happens. And creative people learn to adapt to the new parameters. Take album cover art for example. There was quite a divide at the dawn of compact discs where fans of the large format art on album covers were upset with the small format of CD jewel cases. But people adapted. Now you can find some pretty cool and innovative ways that designers have made CD covers just as precious (albeit smaller) as their vinyl counterparts. Read more…

There was a recent study that is sure to cause some ripples in the email marketing industry. In a recent study by Q Interactive and Marketing Sherpa, 56% of those surveyed said they consider email from legitimate companies spam because the message was, “just not interesting to me”. Wait, it gets worse: 50% of those surveyed said they call emai spam if they were contacted too frequently.

Also: “31% of respondents said that they consider “e-mails that were once useful but aren’t relevant anymore,” to be spam.”

This is obviously a huge statistic for email marketers. How can marketers stay relevant in a market where even brand awareness is not enough?

[Via DMNews]