Entries Tagged 'marketing' ↓

Last week, while I was making sure my privacy settings were fined-tuned after reading all the buzz about Google Buzz, I stumbled onto a neat feature of Google Accounts that I hadn’t seen before. It’s called Dashboard, and it’s a great concept: most of the information that Google has accumulated about you is collected in one place, and you’re given options to manage how you share it all.

If you’re like me, you have almost a dozen Google services — Gmail, Picasa, Voice, Reader, Checkout, Alerts, Analytics, etc. Making sure that everything is set up correctly and not inadvertently exposed to the world is an otherwise painful task that is made easy with Dashboard. By scrolling down and glancing at the summaries of your various services, you can make sure that the pictures of Grandma’s birthday party aren’t visible to the world.

So, despite some other privacy setbacks (really what were they thinking with Buzz?), I think this is a leap forward for a company to expose the data they have about you and give you choices about what they do with it. Imagine the grocery store doing this with your preferred card or your phone company with the data they collect from your wireless bill (and location data they get from your GPS). It’s great when consumers have the choice about how their information is used, and kudos to Google for getting this one right. They still have some work to do given how much info we end up giving them, but definitely a step in the right direction.

The most successful companies are the ones that work every day toward building what I call a “culture of ideas”. Google is the prime example of this — if you work at Google, you’re encouraged to spend 20% of your work time on ideas that interest you. Think about this — Google “loses” one day a week of productivity from their workers while they pursue projects that they find interesting!

Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll find that it is anything but losing for Google. In fact,

The New York Times today has an article about how YouTube is transforming the nightly news. As more high-quality, user-generated content is uploaded to YouTube by professional news networks, semi-professional hobbyists and amateur aspiring Ron Burgundys, the potential for customized, localized news delivered directly to your computer whenever you want it becomes a reality. Google, which owns YouTube, has already built out Google News to deliver fresh and personalized news that they’ve harvested from news sites around the web, and YouTube video news is a logical next step.

No doubt, this is great. However, with smaller city newspapers failing across the country and even the venerable Times in trouble, the long-term sustainability of content providers is a serious question. Right now, Google News and YouTube news videos are fueled largely by professional journalism companies that make their money selling advertisements in print and video media. However, as Google steps in and uses the content without providing an adequate revenue stream back to the content creators, the prospects for professional journalism look dim.

I have a ton of photos that I’ve taken over the years, and managing them is a constant challenge. Part of the problem is simply the fact that there are so many great things you can do with digital photos — view them online, make cool photobooks, create collages, order prints, send them to friends and family, etc. There are many different applications that are useful for photos, and while some of them come close to doing it all, there still isn’t one solution that works for everything.

I just got off the phone with 1-800-Flowers.com. I had tried to get flowers sent to the hospital yesterday, but they failed to deliver them, so I canceled the order. I called back today to try to re-enter the order with a different address, and finally gave up after speaking to several apathetic employees and getting left on permanent hold. The pivoting issue was a minor one related to a gift code, but their seeming unwillingness to even attempt to solve my problem ultimately caused me to go elsewhere.

Any site on the internet requires visitors to be successful. For social networks, this is even more important, because the quality of the site is defined largely by the quality of user interactions and contributions on that site. About 6 weeks ago, I started up a site, The Free Agents which caters to people between jobs. Its a social network where people can share their experiences and meet others in the same situation.

Over the last several weeks, I’ve been working hard to promote the site. I have no formal training in marketing, so my efforts have come mainly from trial and error and also from advice from marketing professionals, both through their blogs and from actually speaking with them. There are other guides on the internet about generating buzz for your website, but most of them are long on generalities (“Know your goals”) and short on details. This guide is an attempt to nail down some of the strategies that have worked for me, and help others that are getting involved in the social marketing landscape.

Disclaimer: this is a work in progress, so I have inevitable missed some key points or approached some things in an unusual way. I welcome your comments below!