Marketing Safari

Catch of the Week - February 22nd

Each Sunday I post links to the most interesting articles I've come across that week. Most of them are found via Twitter, Sphinn or my RSS reader. Enjoy!

Marketing, SEO and Social Media

Dan Zarella writes on Mashable about the Science of ReTweets
Adrian of MeetInnovators talks to Laura Fitton (@Pistachio) about Twitter and making money

Since we're talking about Twitter and money, here are The Dos and Don'ts of Promoting Your Business on Twitter from Sparkplugging

Why Big Brands Struggle with Social Media from Mashable

And finally a few good thoughts on Why Business Writing is so Bad by David Silverman

The Wild Catch
(other stuff than marketing that I still find interesting and worth sharing)

Want something different? Check out this animated video from Greenland about a shepard trying to negotiate with Mother Ocean to get his sheep back:

Happy reading

Hjörtur

If this is your first time on my blog, you might want to consider subscribing to my feed or email updates (here on the left). You can also follow me on Twitter.

Looking for my Free Ebook on Recession Marketing?

You can download the book for free. It's my contribution to fighting the global recession, hope you enjoy it and find it useful.
"The Marketer's Magic Chest - Marketing tips, tricks and tools to unlock the chains of recession"

You are welcome to share the book, forward it, blog about it or distribute it in anyway.

Hjörtur

Catch of the Week February 15th

Each Sunday I post links to the most interesting articles I've come across that week. Most of them are found via Twitter, Sphinn or my RSS reader. Enjoy!

Marketing, SEO and Social Media

Interested in knowing how Internet Marketing helped Obama become a president? Check out this presentation on Read Write Web.

Is citizenship journalism the end of professional journalism? Or the best thing that has happened? Here are a few thoughts on the relationship between the two.

Sometimes the communications between the two isn't too good though. This is a good reminder that if you're having a bad day, don't take it out on Twitter. Watch your language, what happens on Twitter, stays on Twitter.

Now, this isn't supposed to be a catch up on the gossip of the week, so here are a few post with some practical quality content.

What robot.txt means and how it can be used and abused from SebastianX

14 Tools of Highly Effective Twitter Users by Kenny Hider

And finally, Sean Maguire's interview with the world's greatest SEO on SEOmoz.

Travel marketing

Soultravelers3 article on Twitter and travel 2.0

Todd Luciers article on how Destination Marketing Organizations can make use of Twitter.

The Wild Catch
(other stuff than marketing that I still find interesting and worth sharing)

You need more to read? OK, check out this new social media site, Publetariat, for authors who self-publish. (We all have a dream of publishing one day, don't we?)

Happy reading

Hjörtur

If this is your first time on my blog, you might want to consider subscribing to my feed or email updates (here on the left). You can also follow me on Twitter.

The Real Value of Twitter Followers

The trend on Twitter these days is to follow as many as you can in the hope that people follow you back. Those who do, are usually those who have auto-follow, that is, they automatically follow everyone back who follows them.

When they reach the limit of 2.000 they start unfollowing everyone who hasn't followed back. By doing this, people can get quite an impressive number of followers very fast. But what is it worth? Is the value of your followers in the number of followers, or is it how many actually do follow you. Which is worth more, a 100 dollar bill or 100 billion dollar bill? The 100 billion dollar bill is only good for three eggs (and probably only two by the time you're finished reading this).

The value is not in the numbers. It is in the relationships you create. You see, the people that auto-follows back are usually following thousands or tens of thousands of people. That means they are never going to read your tweets. You're just another meaningless number. I'm sorry to break it to you.

Consider what you are really looking for before you go out and follow just anybody. Ten good twitter friends that you can always look to for help and chat with are worth much more and do much more for your ego then 10.000 followers that never read you. I know Guy Kawasaki and Pete Cashmore have tens of thousands of followers who actually read what they write. The difference is, they got their followers by providing value, not by chasing auto-followers. So basically, create value if you want to get valuable followers.

Hjörtur
@hjortur

ps. If you tweet, please share this with your Twitter followers:
The Real Value of Twitter Followers http://zi.ma/100bnfollowers

If this is your first time on my blog, you might want to consider subscribing to my feed or email updates (here on the left). You can also follow me on Twitter.

The Soul in Social Media

I grew up in a small fishing village on the north-west coast of Iceland. We were about 400 people living in the village and only 3 kids in my class. I loved it. I knew everybody and everybody knew me. I knew my place, knew who my friends were and if something came up, it was dealt with. It's difficult to pretend or try to be someone you're not in a small village like that.

I also lived in Reykjavik and later Copenhagen. And I like the buzzing city life, where you can blend in, you can find the kinds of people you like and you don't have to communicate with those you don't like. For the most part. You can be whoever you want to be and don't have to follow the strict norms of the small villages. You can also easily get lost in the crowd if you like.

I like the village life, but it is way to limited to offer me and my children what I want. Mainly in regards of service and access. So I choose to live in a city. At the moment I live in a suburb to Reykjavik, a city of 160.000 inhabitants.

This has been the development around the world in the last decades. People move from villages to the big cities. The small villages are deserted. The small shops close down because people shop in malls. The craftmen shut down their work shops because the factories make things faster and cheaper. The small networks and companies get acquired by large ones. Everything moves to the masses. Everything is standardized. Everything is mass produced. And the personalization got lost. We got lost.

Today, this is changing. The development we are witnessing on the Internet is only the most evident one. This is happening offline too. Shop locally is part of this development, because actually, it's not stuff from the local mass production factory we are looking for. We are looking for something personal. Something with character. Something with soul.

So where comes Twitter into the equation?
It's my village of choice. You see, on Twitter, I can surround me with people of my choice, people who share same interests, same passions or same views in one way or the other like in the big cities but experience a similar feeling to the village, a small community where everybody knows everybody and supports each other and there's a set of unwritten rules and norms people follow.

Social media allows us to get the best of two worlds. The variety of the masses and the close personal communication of the few. It's bringing personality back to the equation. That's why social media has become more popular than porn (yes, we actually still do prefer personal communication over porn). And because of social media, we can't pretend. People will tell. So let's be ourselves. Put our soul into it. It's so much more fun anyway :)

Hjörtur

If this is your first time on my blog, you might want to consider subscribing to my feed or email updates (here on the left). You can also follow me on Twitter.

Catch of the Week - February 8th

Each Sunday I post links to the most interesting articles I've come across that week. Most of them are found via Twitter, Sphinn or my RSS reader. Enjoy!

Marketing, SEO and Social Media

Loic Le Meur interviewed Seth Godin at TED and asked him about how you can change the world by building a tribe and why he doesn't use Twitter.

Brian Cray wrotes about what happens when @mashable tweets your site.

Why Link Building is not a job for your interns from the Zite Interactive Agency Blog.

Have you ever imagined what live would look like if there was no Google? The Next Web did.

And finally 10 useful privacy settings you should be familiar with on Facebook from AllFacebook.com

The Wild Catch
(other stuff than marketing that I still find interesting and worth sharing)

Like Icelandic superjeeps? Arctic Trucks, the makers of the Hilux that Top Gear took to the North Pole just conquered the South Pole. You can read about it on antarcticachallenge.com

Ever wondered what Twitter looked like in 1649?

Happy reading

Hjörtur

If this is your first time on my blog, you might want to consider subscribing to my feed or email updates (here on the left). You can also follow me on Twitter.

A Year of Value, Not Wealth - Urban Lifestyle Report

I just got my hands on the first issue of the now free Urban Lifestyle Report - and I love it. The ULR is a new media trend report for marketers and published online. It's been published for some time for subscribers but now they have decided to distribute it for free.

It contains some excellent articles about new media, predictions for 2009, articles about Twitter and loads of other good stuff. I've got a short article there as well, called "A Year of Value, Not Wealth" where I describe my predictions for the year of 2009 and the rise of the new influencers but there's a lot of other articles there that are really worth reading.

Check it out, you can download the Urban Lifestyle Report for free.

Hjörtur

What Do They Eat in Africa?

I got this question the other day. Well, actually, it was Googled and someone clicked a link over to my blog because he or she obviously though he might find information about what they eat in Africa. I was a bit surprised as I don't write about food, though I occasionally mention Africa. One of my posts apparently made it to the first page on Google for this query so there probably isn't much information about what they eat in Africa on the Internet. Part of the reason might be that they don't all eat the same. It's a pretty big continent, you know.

But what does this mean? Well, I could have convinced some that people in Africa all eat McGiraf burgers. Or canned hippos with ketchup. Or have nothing to eat. Or what ever I could think of. And if I portrait it in a semi-credible way the person looking for the information might actually believe this was the truth.

What is really a food for thought here is the question: Where does the knowledge of the next generation come from? The first four results on Google? That is a bit disturbing thought. Maybe it's not all that bad that Wikipedia usually takes second place in the SERP's. Try googling some questions and see how much sense the results make. You can post the results in the comments if you like.

Hjörtur

ps. this post went accidentally live before it was finished, which is why it may look different from the first time you saw it.

If this is your first time on my blog, you might want to consider subscribing to my feed or email updates (here on the left). You can also follow me on Twitter.

Catch of the Week February 1st

Each Sunday I post links to the most interesting articles I've come across that week. Most of them are found via Twitter, Sphinn or my RSS reader. Enjoy!

Marketing, SEO and Social Media

Ravit Lichtenberg wrote "10 Ways Social Media Will Change in 2009" on ReadWriteWeb.

Wouldn't it be nice to be a powerful A-list blogger? One, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch made to the Times list of the 100 most influential people on the planet last year. But it does have a dark side, as Mike tells us in his post "Some Things Need To Change". Is he quitting?

Are you trying to get more followers on Twitter? Learn from the best. Kevin Rose who's got over 88.000 followers, second to Barack Obama gives 10 tips on how to get followers.

If you use Google Analytics, you might like to check this 10 step guide on how to configure Google Analytics from Dave Chaffey.

Graywolf finally understood Personlized Search after watching this TED video. Now you can too :)

The Wild Catch
(other stuff than marketing that I still find interesting and worth sharing)

Alysson (SEOaly) posted a collection of the best Superbowl ads of all times on Viral Conversations

Happy reading

Hjörtur

If this is your first time on my blog, you might want to consider subscribing to my feed or email updates (here on the left). You can also follow me on Twitter.

Opportunities in a Recession

Tables are turning, games are changing. It's recession which means different economy, different lifestyle and different opportunities. But there are actually more opportunities than ever before.

Here in Iceland we've been hit harder than most other countries. The currency has collapsed. Inflation is about 18%. All loans were either in foreign currency or tight to the inflation so they grow 18% a year. Housing prices are dropping. Unemployment rate is skyrocketing, now at over 7% (used to be less than 2%) and expected to exceed 10%. The government resigned last Monday. Things have been better here in Iceland. A lot better.

So what do all those changes mean? It depends on your situation, but one thing it means is chances. Opportunities. Every change comes with a chance. Those who survive through the recession are those who realize what chances come with the changes and manage to grab them.

I'll give you a few examples:
- when the competition withdraws, they leave a vacuum. Fill it.
- generally lower service lever. Improve your service.
- easier to be outstanding. Be outstanding and your customers will love you for it and spread the word.

Most see unemployment as a negative thing (and usually is for the one that is unemployed). But it also means opportunities. You can get more qualified people for the job that needs to be done. It has been a problem here in Iceland finding skilled people. For smaller companies, it's been impossible to compete with the large banks in salaries. Now this has changed and a lot of skilled people with valuable knowledge and experience is available for reasonable salaries.

We've already heard numbers that reflect the lifestyle changes following the recession, both from the US and from Iceland. McDonalds announced estimated 70% increase in profits in 2009. Don't expect the same from Starbucks. Amazon also announced an increase. Here in Iceland, the benefits of a cheap Krona is increase in tourism. In December, we saw 43% more tourists than Dec last year and 400% increase in Tax Free shopping. Not bad.

Export has also exceeded import for the first time in a long time. That means we are no longer spending more than we make in International trade. That helps.

Regarding the general public, people buy cheap, buy used and do-it-themselves. This means
- cheaper shops grow and more expensive ones don't (McDonalds / Starbucks).
- Used items sell better, whether they are used cars, used clothes, items on garage sales or other stuff.
- Accessories sell better and even cosmetics. You see, if you can't buy a new dress, you buy a new necklace and a new lipstick. If you can't buy a new car, you fix the old one and try to improve it. If you can't buy a new home or a bigger one, you'll just have to make the best of your present one. Paint and screws don't cost much.
- Do it yourself. If you're doing something bigger, it's tempting to do-it-youself rather than finding someone else to do it and save money that way. So offer tips on how to DIY and sell the tools and materials for that.

And of course, if you have money, there are loads of buying opportunities.

This is why it is important to keep your business flexible. So that you can adapt to those changes and grab the opportunities that are out there.

Carpe recession ;)
Hjörtur

If you want to learn more about how to beat the recession, then check out my ebook The Marketer’s Magic Chest which is full of marketing tactics and strategies to beat the recession.

If this is your first time on my blog, you might want to consider subscribing to my feed or email updates (here on the left). You can also follow me on Twitter.