Twitter goes mainstream says an article in The Wall Street Journal and I think it is.

Last week I noticed a few new starters and besides that you see more and more companies using and tracking twitter.

I mentioned earlier the respond on my complaints about netvibes on twitter and their active reply. You see this happening more often. Lately I had the same thing with skype while complaining about the quality.

One thing to be careful for as a company on twitter is again that you deliver value. There are a bunch of companies which just publish their rss feeds to twitter. That is not so bad. But the thing is they never respond if you send them a message. So no interaction.

About this going meanstream this seems more the case in the US. Counting Swiss Tweets look at swisstweets.chor follow swisstweet on twitter. The amount of twitter users in Switzerland is not much, but think also about the quality of its visitors.

By rob

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Performance based marketing can be really attractive for both parties. With the example of affiliate marketing and some tests I did myself I see some basics coming up which I like to share with you.

Performance based can be attractive because there is almost no risk. As a company you only have to pay a commission when a sale is made. For the publisher/sales person there is normally a higher reward.

Performance based solutions don’t suite all marketing campaigns though. Best is to keep in mind a sales agent you pay per sale.

You need a clear goal and clear tracking. If the goal is vague you can better stick to payment per hour or some other sort of payment. When a sales agent has to do all kind of side work he/she will feel this as a distraction if he doesn’t get payed. If he does get payed a company has often the feeling of paying too much.

Tracking must be good. When a sales agent gets the feeling his revenue is going to somebody else he will stop for sure.

The biggest disadvantage of performance based marketing however is time. How do you keep the sales agents motivated. They are investing time and do get a lot of interesting other offers. So there is a competition for the sales person’s time or attention.

This is were trust and incentives get in. And this is exactly the reason why you can do a lot of harm if you are going for a quick gain and forget about your sales agents/affiliates. Be careful you have a name to protect.

MySpace advertising in Beta. Let’s start testing.

Just before the weekend some more thoughts.

Referring to my last post about female digital behaviour. It is often said that in marketing targeting women is often overlooked but very important. Women buy more than man, have a big influence in the decision making process. I think their influence is even growing since women have more often their own job. Which results in more confidence, girlpower. “All the honeys making money“

You even see more and more families in which the women making more money than the man (in the Netherlands at least). I call them Girl leading couples myself.

Research has shown that if you want to target women you need to think further than a pink product or website. We also know that social networks without a specific cause are more used by women than by man. Man prefer social networks like linkedin.com. Can we conclude that women enjoy more the communications itself? I think so.

Women like to share. With the growing amount of social networks, connecting alone is not enough anymore. What has your network to offer. Is it more local, more subject orientated… but maybe we should think more in concepts here.

I still miss the voice of advertising agencies in the interactive field. Advertising agencies have a huge experience in concepting. Large agencies like Saatchi and TBWA have some basic emotion as a core value like love, disruption etc.

Maybe it is time to start social networks based on a concept or emotion in which a certain emotion is the connecting factor. Let’s call them EmoNetworks.

Think about their use in branding. Disruption network, love network, anger network, nostalgy network.. This year the domainname www.bored.com was sold for millions.

Never underestimate emotions. Communism was based on emotions.

Female Gaming on the Rise. Online gaming appeals to your girls and older women.

check the full report on eMarketer.com

By rob

Lately I called several major organisations asking for the online marketing department, the Internet communications person etc. Most of the time this seems more difficult then you would expect.

First a little bit of silence at the other end of the line. Then the receptionist does a quick search in their “phonebook”. Then somebody answers the phone. Either some IT guy or communication assistant if you are lucky. “mm yes Internet communications, we do something about that but we don’t really have someone responsible for that. Maybe you should try..”

It seems like there is no one responsible for digital communications at all or he/she is just unfindable. Seems like digital marketing still doesn’t have its real place within these organisations. Most of the time it is easier for me to find the right person on linkedin.com than for his colleagues inside the company.

Is digital marketing still something for this one guy who cares? Or do they just leave it to the advertising agencies? Seems to me we still have a long way to go.

Most people think of Google Adwords as a tool for acquiring new clients cost effectively. And of course it is a good direct marketing tool. However creatives and advertising agencies should use it as well.

As an advertising agency you need to get as much information as possible about your audience. You want to know their need, their interests etc. Adwords can give you this information. It gives you focus, some clues to brainstorm on. Yes it makes a difference if you know that people are looking for blue shoes lately in stead of red ones. So learn more about how to use Adwords as a market research tool.

Besides Adwords as a research or inspiration tool. It can also be a good tool for branding, getting attention etc. Of course you can learn more about Adwords for branding. However you don’t see much of a creative use of adwords yet.

Most Adwords Ads are like “need a car?, come to us” which is of course effective in DM. But Adwords for branding will need a different approach. What about using estrange statements like “My car is better than yours” or using slogans and redirect to customer feedback “BMW Sheer driving pleasure, want to see what others think” etc…

Start building or reinforcing brand associations.

After the past year of experiments with online marketing video, some winning formats have emerged. One may surprise you — the long-form webinar. (masshightech.com)

A webinar is, as expected, an online seminar. It is a specific type of web conference, typically one way and a webinar can be collaborative.

Interesting is that webinars seem to be very effective for marketing purposes. This is interesting because it is in line with the bigger trend of delivering relevance and content to customers in stead of the old fashion disturbing tactics.

So when you think about making an online video. Think about being relevant and think further than Youtube alone. Howcast for example is only for How-to video’s.