Join Michael Wunsch and Scott Million as they discuss Social Media Marketing and where it fits in a complete interactive marketing strategy.

 LeapCast - LFI Tips and Trends: 04.24.08 - Where SMM Fits: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Join Amberly Stitzel and Michael Wunsch as they discuss Interactive Marketing considerations for online contests.

 Mark: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Join Mike and Katina as they discuss the critical decisions that can make or break a successful interactive contest campaign.  

 Smart Planning and Promotion for Online Contests: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This week I’ve been working on updating our communications plan, confronting the eternal question of lead generation – how to create a message that appeals to as many as possible without losing the individuality of the message.

While I’ll probably never be accused of leading a perfectly balanced life, I do believe that most things work out best when a balance is found between the extremes.  While I would love to deliver a message that is entirely personalized to every recipient, such messaging would make it impossible to reach enough people to provide benefit.  At the same time a generic message, while providing a much greater reach, will likely fall on deaf ears 99.9% of the time.

We’ve all encountered both extremes in communications – from the bland generic mass mailings sent to every mailbox in the country to the direct sales call from someone that seems to know my every move from the last two years. 

The good news is that technology is rapidly advancing the ability to find the balance by delivering personalized, targeted messages to a broad audience of people.  While this may not be the middle path to enlightenment, it does provide some exciting opportunities for creating and delivering your message.    

Imagine a marketing world where your message is screened by a panel of judges who impact the visibility of your brand. Follow that by a voting process where the consumer determines whether or not your message is kicked out of the competition. Sound like a far-fetched marketer’s nightmare? In reality, it’s just everyday interactive marketing!

Whether you like it or not, your online brand is in a contest. It is part of a judging and voting process that controls the visibility and longevity of your message. Search engines place a great many well-conceived rules and regulations around your message, and then judge your site to determine how well or poorly you did.

Beyond that, search engines respond to the voting public. With each search conducted, the search engines count the votes. Sites that receive the highest vote tallies (i.e. clicks) are granted higher scores in the competition for that search term. Over time those sites with relatively fewer votes are “kicked off” the top five, then off the first page, and so on.

So how do you ensure your site is the Kelly Clarkson of internet marketing?

Build it right. This isn’t hard and the rules are established. Find an interactive agency with the credentials and experience you can trust to build your website in a manner the ‘judges’ will like. (And don’t try tricks – the search engines are smarter than you!)

Stay relevant. If you abandon your website once it’s built, consumers will do exactly the same. Everything from content to imagery to site features and tools need constant updating, indexing, and growth. Search engines reward activity and so do users.

Get talked about. We may root for the underdog and empathize with the wallflower, but in online marketing, it’s the brand socialites who get all the votes. If you haven’t yet gotten serious about getting talked about…now’s the time. Coordinated, measured, and consistent activity in blogs, podcasts, video sites, and social media communities will start and sustain excitement about your brand that turns into votes.

And remember, the most savvy American Idol contestants don’t let the judging and voting scare them. They make an impact, mold opinion, and drive their own result. With a little hard work and the right partner, your online brand can do the same.

B. Todd Bright joins Mike today on the LeapCast! The former VP of Marketing for LFI stops by to discuss his current duties at Frost Brown Todd and promote his new series in Business First. From wheat grass to explosions, this LeapCast has it all!

 LeapCast: 4.10.07 - A Visit With B. Todd Bright: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

A discussion about marketing gone too far… or has it?

 Standard Podcast: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Last week I joked with Jeremy that I was going to start charging people an hourly fee for counseling and therapy services. Both in my personal life and my professional life here at LeapFrog, I find that I’m someone people come to with their problems. Sometimes they want some good ideas for resolving their problems, and as a fairly out-of-the-box thinker, I’m generally pretty good at that. Sometimes I think they just want someone to “feel their pain.”

Those are the people I’d like to charge for the “couch time.”

Psychology, specifically the psychology of personality, has always been interesting to me. The human psyche, what motivates people (and what doesn’t) is pretty fascinating stuff. The drivers that motivate human behavior are of critical interest to marketers.

There are several different systems out there to classify people into different personality types or temperaments, and they all have their different relative merits. But at a high level, I think it’s important to realize that they are not describing who people are. They are describing their most important strategy for behavior. People rarely surprise me with how unpredictable they are. They more often surprise me with how eerily easy it is to predict what they’ll do, sometimes before they themselves know what they’re going to do.

A personality type is a (mostly) unconscious strategy that people use to make decisions so that they don’t have to think about every action they take, and so they can get a predictable outcome to their actions. Humans love predictable outcomes, even if they’re not great outcomes. Most people use the same few basic strategies with the same basic assumptions and values. Given a good enough understanding of the most common strategies, and enough time around a person to learn what strategies they rely on, it becomes increasingly easy to predict what their actions will be. The way a long-time married couple can appear to read each other’s minds is an example of this.

In some ways, marketing is a form of this parlor trick, performed on a mass audience. The better you understand the common denominators of the largest part of your audience, the more effectively you can predict what will and won’t motivate most of them.

Which can be remarkably useful information to have handy.