05.06.08

Slow Down and Smell the Marketing

Posted in Best Practices, Social Media at 9:59 am by Mosey

Sometimes marketing smells great, like fresh flowers, or bacon, or other good-smelly things. Sometimes it smells like, well you know what bad things smell like, pick one.

In this rash world of Web 2.0 where we decide and Twitter on something within minutes of learning about it, sometimes it is nice to see that sometimes things move slow when we aren’t paying attention.

For example, iPhone is being launched in Australia and 10 other nations, bot quite yet but it is planned. That is right, a phone so hip it has been copied by three other companies in various formats is finally making it to the small, island nation of Australia.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that commercials for the 2009 Super Bowl (early prediction: Falcons and Raiders) will cost three million dollars each 30 second spot. That is right, in the time it took for you to figure out if I was serious on my Super Bowl prediction some dot com your mom never heard of will have dropped 3 million dollars, plus production, plus planning to make a semi-funny ad.

I always look at that number and think “do you know what i could do with a 3 million dollar budget.” Really, that is some amazing stuff to build there. World class, with a two year budget. Sometimes it feels like companies move slow because they always moved slow. I am sure what-ever-it-is.com with a 3 million dollar two year budget could bring in 100 million visitors in that time.

What this leads me to is that sometimes, even if you specialize in social media and what that hot new whatnot is, you need to slow down and let people catch up. An article in Ad Age recently broke down nine types of user personalities and how each of them uses new technology. There are some surprising results.

Key quote:

While marketers may not be spending huge marketing dollars on social media yet, they know they should be using it to reach consumers. Coremetrics’ “Face of the New Marketer” study found that 78% of marketers see social media as a way to gain a competitive edge, but fewer than 8% have budgets devoted to it.

Oh but it is coming… that 8% will be 40% this time next year. You may want to be on the Mayflower and not the 100th ship after. Much like the movie Armageddon things are sometimes only cool the first time you see them. If you start now, even a small project, even a taste of what you want you can gain experience and learning you will need. It is a lot cheaper now than when the market is saturated and glossy and shiny.

And by the way I gave you the team, I am not giving you the Super Bowl winner, that is just silly guessing.

Technorati Tags: online marketing, social media