This post started out as a comment on Douglas Karr’s post about Why aren’t Marketers Running to Jaiku. After 3 paragraphs in his comment box, I decided I’d just make a blog post out of it. So, go read his post and then read mine. 
I’ll give you three reasons why marketers aren’t all over Twitter and Jaiku (yet).
- Too busy to experiment with a new service
- The rules keep changing
- What the heck is a Twitter?
Too busy doing their jobs
I’m sure you’re already saying, “but, that is their job!” Sure it is, but so is everything else. I don’t work for an “internet” company, but we do have a rather large web presence, pull millions of pageviews per month, and have both marketing and web staff. We even sell things online (more and more each year). But while our marketing manager has probably heard of Twitter, she probably hasn’t thought about using it to promote our products or services.
Why? Because she’s too busy with all the other traditional and non-traditional marketing work that has to get done (including, but not limited to: meeting ridiculous deadlines imposed by people with no true sense of the work that goes into marketing with a budget that is almost non-existent). There is already a long list of other things that need to be done in the off chance she has a little extra time. Woot seems like a company that should already be exploring this. However, a major airline company? I bet they are under enormous pressure to perform and while micro-blogging could possibly be a huge success, they probably have a limited amount of time they can spend on exploratory projects.
The rules keep changing
Another major conflict is marketers trying to keep up with all the rules that keep changing when it comes to online marketing. There are probably lots of marketers that are just now coming into fully realizing the potential of RSS feeds and blogging, and likely feel their content should be served from their website. In fact, they probably have pressure from their superiors to increase traffic to their site. The idea of pushing that feed-like content off to some new service that probably seems redundant to what they are already capable of likely doesn’t make sense.
I can hear the IT department now: “Why? We already provide hundreds of feeds for that stuff that anyone can access.”
What the heck is a Twitter?
Twitter and Jaiku are not what I would consider mainstream. Most marketers have probably never heard of it (or have, but don’t fully understand what it is). In a larger sense, I’m not convinced people that use Twitter know exactly what it is, or what it could be. And that isn’t a bad thing, it’s actually a very good, interesting, and even exciting thing. But while that can be a source of creativity and innovation for those on the bleeding edge, it can also be a source of confusion and obscurity for others.
Parting thoughts
In case you missed it, I agree that these two services could be a goldmine for a savvy marketer. I just believe that most marketers (savvy or not) are too busy doing their jobs to do their jobs (if that makes sense). Marketers in smaller, more web-based companies are in a much better position to recognize the potential of such emerging web trends and take advantage.
I feel like marketing departments should start hiring for a new position called “Exploratory Marketing Specialist.” This person would ignore traditional marketing techniques (and leave it to other staff) and focus on finding new avenues such as Twitter/Jaiku to market their products (and it wouldn’t have to be limited to online marketing). This might be hit-or-miss, but I bet the “hits” would more than justify the extra position in the long run.
I’m sure there are dozens of ways people are coping with news feed overload. I thought I’d share a technique I recently stumbled upon by playing around with my Google Start Page (iGoogle, now).
First off, I use iGoogle as my start page and have been for a while. It works quite well for me because I tend to use a number of Google services (GMail, Google Docs, Calendar, Analytics, Adsense, Adwords–I lose track of how much I use Google). There always seems to be a widget to help me either use Google or keep track of my day to day web life (I particularly like having an open text field I can quickly type notes in without having to open up a program or email myself something).
I also use the Google Reader widget to view my feeds from various blogs, websites, custom searches, etc. My problem was I had way too many feeds trying to occupy a tiny, 10-line Google Reader widget on my start page. If I blinked, stories could have moved down and off the first screen. I thought to myself… “man, I wish I could have more than one of these Reader widgets on my start page.” Well, you can!
Just go find the widget in the widget library (like usual) and just add another one… and another one, if you want. I quickly loaded up the full Google Reader app in another window and organized my feeds into different folders (news, web-dev, and local blogs, for example). I then went back to my Google Start Page and set each of my 3 Google Reader widgets to the 3 different folders. Presto! I had 3 differently categorized river-of-news feed widgets staring me in the face.
“The test,” I thought, “will be if Google can remember which folders I want displayed day after day.” So, I hit refresh–even closed my browser and came back–and the separate folders held!
Ok, so maybe I get a little too excited over small victories. I just feel like I’m getting a little closer to that virtual newspaper of the future I kept reading about in college. You might take this feat for granted, but intelligently combining and sorting this amount of content across this many completely different publishers in such an elegant and simple way was not possible much more than a few years ago (at least, not this widely available).
Viva feeds!
A full-featured, easy to use rss/atom feed parser.
I have a few different websites/blogs and some of them are related to one another either by content, purpose or similar audience. Specifically, my new website wpZipper.com has been receiving a fair amount of traffic lately and I wanted an easy way to cross-promote this blog, wpstar, and pull some traffic this way. My simple fix involves a slightly customized script using the SimplePie feed parser.
This is a fairly quick and dirty way to do this, but it works beautifully. Here is how it works on wpZipper.
First, grab a copy of SimplePie (just click that big ol’ blue button–this isn’t a tutorial on how to do this in WordPress– I’ll do a write up on that later). Follow the directions and upload the simplepie.inc file to an appropriate folder on your server (I put mine in an “inc” folder).
Next, create the function to check the feed of the blog you want to link to. In this case, I want to check if there has been a post in the past 24 hours at wpstar.com. If there is, I want to display a link to it. I tend to put all my functions inside the same PHP file and then include that file on all my pages that require functions. Here is what the code looks like:
function check_wpstar(){
include_once('inc/simplepie.inc');
$feed = new SimplePie('http://feeds.feedburner.com/wpstar');
// Create a new array to hold data in
$new = array();
// Loop through all of the items in the feed
for ($x=0; $x < $feed->get_item_quantity(); $x++) {
// Make sure that we have a handle for the current item.
$item = $feed->get_item($x);
// Calculate 24 hours ago
$yesterday = time() - (24*60*60);
// Compare the timestamp of the feed item with 24 hours ago.
if ($item->get_date('U') > $yesterday) {
// If the item was posted within the last 24 hours, display a message.
echo "pssst! There's a new post today over at wpstar!";
}
}
}
This code was originally grabbed from a forum post at SimplePie and customized. As you can see, the code loads the feed from wpstar.com and compares the timestamp of the most recent post against a time constraint (in this case, 24 hours). If the most recent post has occurred within the past 24 hours, then a message will be displayed alerting website visitors. If not, nothing is displayed.
Finally, you’ll want to call this function somewhere on your page (where you want the message to be displayed). The code you would use would be like this:
<?php check_wpstar(); ?>That’s it. Check this out in action over at wpZipper.com. The message appears at the very top of the page if a new post has been made on wpstar within the past 24 hours.
A couple months ago I was invited to beta test a new website statistics service called Reinvigorate. The site is another free traffic monitoring service a la StatCounter, Google Analytics, etc. I’ve been tracking a dozen or so websites with it and find it to be a slick, simple and useful tool to get a handle on what your traffic is, what it’s doing on your site and where it’s coming from.
Now, if you are doing some serious e-commerce tracking and need lots of detailed stats that are kept for months and years at a time, this may not be for you. The details on each visitor seem to drop off after a hundred or so uniques. I’m sure this is due to space limitations (which is understandable). You do appear to have access to the aggregate data (uniques, pageviews, view depth, return visits) for at least a year or two.
I’d say, overall, some of the things that stand out about this site is the simple way the data is presented. I love the Summary view which acts as a dashboard of current activity on the site. A unique feature that some sites can take advantage of is the “name tags” feature. This allows you to place some code on your pages to further identify a visitor to your site and track their activity through reinvigorate. For example, if you have a section of your website where users can log-in. If you are tracking info like their name/username and email address, you can have that data tracked inside reinvigorate. The Summary view will even tell you who is currently on your site by their name.
A couple things I’d like to see are rss/atom feeds for each site I track so I can choose different ways to monitor the traffic on my sites. Being able to customize the Summary view with little “snap ins” of data from different sections of the reinvigorate site would be an awesome feature. For example, I could have my “active visitors” on the left, and a graph of daily traffic on the right, with a list of active pages below, etc. I’d also like to see the number of active visitors on each of my sites on the main account view that lists all of my sites. Sometimes, I just want to check in and see what activity my sites have at certain points of the day. This would make that much easier.
If you haven’t already signed up for the beta test, I suggest you do so.
I’m not sure how they manage to afford sending such cool direct mail marketing pieces to small time operations such as myself, but Veer always seems to send me stuff I don’t want to pitch in the trash. I realize that’s the point–it’s just an expensive one.
Yesterday, I received a puzzle in the mail from Veer. Of course, like most, I get excited when I see a box in my mailbox. Even though it still wasn’t my Snap t-shirts, I was still happy to have received such a unique marketing piece. As you can see below, the box has a fun and interesting design–enough to grab and keep my attention.
They added a nice hook to the whole deal. There is a discount code visible once you put the puzzle together. I happen to have a great interest in creative marketing techniques and, while not everyone’s cup of tea, I find this one to be rather compelling. I’ve yet to actually buy anything from Veer. They have some t-shirts and other swag in their online store that I wouldn’t mind having (they tend to be expensive). So, a discount code might be what gets me to purchase something.
I don’t exactly have lots of free time to put a puzzle together, but I’m sure Veer knows this, so perhaps the discount is a decent one given the time commitment of putting together a 500 piece puzzle. I’m sure curiosity will get the best of me and I’ll dump this thing out on my desk and work at it while I’m on the phone. I’ll update this post if I ever put it together and let you know what kind of discount they gave.
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