Category Archives: Marketing and SEO

Digital Media Strategy, Marketing and SEO

Is Apple Playing Games with iTunes Rentals?

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Last night, my friends decided to rent Superbad since some of them had not seen the movie already. They looked for it on Comcast OnDemand but it was no longer available. I knew I’d rented it in HD from the AppleTV store, cheaper than Comcast, so we looked there as well. I was surprised to find that Apple now only has Superbad for sale at $14.99 and no HD version.

Where is the rental version of this movie? Why has it suddenly disappeared? The AppleTV was even kind enough to remind me I’d already rented this movie when I tried to buy it.

I wonder what’s going on here… is Apple carrying out some kind of experiment? Do you know of any other movies removed from the rental pool?

Chime in with your comment. We’re now using the Disqus system for your convenience.

superbad-bigposter.jpg

[image found via http://scenescreen.wordpress.com/2007/12/03/he-said-she-said-superbad/]

Digital Media Strategy, Marketing and SEO, Social Networking

Go Viral with the 3 Stripes

Who knew the graffiti scene was so complex? This successfully-viral ad from Adidas, takes us behind the scenes with a graffiti artist:

The production quality of the ad is top-notch, the content is interesting (did you know there are several types of paint can nozzles available? I didn’t) and branding was subtle but effective. I have the Adidas brand burned into my head – even though I don’t recall them selling any particular product with this ad.

I found this via Chris Brogan’s blog.

Did you like the ad? Pass it around then and tell’em where you found it.

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Digital Media Strategy, Featured Articles, Marketing and SEO, Ratings Analysis, Social Networking

5 Mindset Shifts Every Media Executive Needs to Make

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Media executives thinking about distributing their content online (and they all should) need to make important mindset shifts in order to understand what the digital revolution is all about, how it affects their business and what benefits it can bring to their operation.

I’ve outlined five mindset shifts every media executive needs to make:

1. Digital Is Your Battleground

OLD: We sell advertising space on television and throw in a bonus on our internet properties.

NEW: We sell advertising space on our Internet properties and throw a bonus on our television network.

Drastic? Yes! But you need to start thinking this way if you want to understand where your company is headed. Digital content distribution will eventually be your main revenue stream.

You need to start thinking digital:

  • Have all your content ready in digital formats suitable for distribution via downloads, podcasts, iTunes, streaming and cellphones.
  • Convert your advertising rates to digital format and train your sales people in the new lingo: figure out how much you charge per minute per thousand viewers and use this as a starting point.
  • Think about how you’ll monetize your shows online and plan accordingly: pre-roll, mid-roll, banners, page sponsors, and subscriptions are all valid.

2. Engagement Is The New Rating

OLD: What matter is the size of our audience.

NEW: What matters is how engaged our audiences are.

You’re used to thinking about how many million viewers your shows garner. You need to start thinking about how many ways your shows intersect with your viewers’ lives. Study Lost and look up how many online communities have grown around the show.

Let your audiences interface with your content. Make it shareable in a way that lets you track views and advertising. Turn your content into a social object. Make it either:

  • part of the conversation,
  • a conversation starter, or
  • a gathering place.

If you’re creating content for TV or film, plan ahead and create additional content for digital distribution: side stories, character background, games, behind-the-scenes footage. There’s only so much you can tell in a one-hour show… develop your story online.

Don’t be afraid to listen to your audience, or to talk to them.

3. Your Earnings Will Come From Elsewhere

OLD: How are we going to make money online?

NEW: How are we going to make money if we don’t go online?

Of course you need to make money. And enough people have lost their shirts online to make even the bolder ones worry (think of them as the pioneers, with the arrows stuck on their backs). But look at it as an investment… just like you invested in HD technology, Beta SP, Nielsen reports and new studios: make a business plan, plan a strategy, hire a consultant, set-up a team, start small, think big, or not. Your current market is shrinking, it’s time to look elsewhere.

4. There Are More Than 24 Hours In A Day, There’s More Than One Distribution Channel

OLD: We deliver content 24 hrs a day on one channel.

NEW: We deliver unlimited content via unlimited distribution channels.

Forget about a 24-hour day. You now have access to unlimited audiences willing to watch any content at any time. Many of them are even willing to consume multiple content simultaneously. The programming grid is a thing of the past. You still need to offer quality content, but when it’s always 5pm somewhere, the meaning of prime-time changes.

5. What You Think You Know About Your Audience No Longer Applies

OLD: We must adapt our programming to our audience.

NEW: We can distribute any content to any number of audiences.

Want to create a news show, a sports channel or a cooking network? Why not all of them? If you’re a general programming station. think niches. If you’re a niche-content producer, think multiple niches. You have the know-how and production capability, you don’t need to constrain yourself to one particular audience. Experiment with old content, new content, new versions of old content, old versions of new content… it’s the Internet, there’s an audience for anything.

What do you think?

(Disponible en español en Technosailor.com)

Digital Media Strategy, Featured Articles, General Announcements, Marketing and SEO, Social Networking, Software

The MiamiTwits Twitter Group

Following Technosailor‘s lead, and using his code, I’ve setup the MiamiTwits Twitter group for people in the Miami, FL area (and anyone else, really) who wish to subscribe.

All you need is:

  • a twitter account (of course)
  • follow @MiamiTwits
  • send a direct message to the group (e.g., d MiamiTwits Hello Miami!) and it will be automatically broadcast to the entire group.

Enjoy!

GoogleTrending, Marketing and SEO, Ratings Analysis, Social Networking

Lookout MySpace, here comes Facebook

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This is the first article of a series I’ll call GoogleTrending, where I use Google Trends to compare search terms and come to usually preposterous conclusions based on the trend charts. I hope you enjoy it. Share your favorite trend comparisons -or suggest ideas for new posts- using the comments form below.

MySpace seems to be losing steam as Facebook skyrockets. Facebook should surpass MySpace as a search destination by the end of the year.

Click on the image to open the actual search on Google Trends.

GoogleTrending: MySpace vs. Facebook

General Announcements, Marketing and SEO

Variety: RCTV’s “El Señor Presidente” film challenges Chavez

An interesting article in this week’s Variety highlights the production of the film “El Señor Presidente” by RCTV, based on Miguel Angel Asturias, a Guatemalan Nobel Laureate in Literature.

Read the complete article on Variety’s website.

‘El Señor Presidente’ challenges Chavez

By Anna Marie De La Fuente

RCTV, the 53 year old Venezuelan terrestrial network that was yanked off the airwaves in May for its anti-government stance, is again defying the populist regime of President Hugo Chavez by producing a pic that openly describes a dictatorship in a Latin American country. This is RCTV’s first film production in some 20 years.

Written, produced and helmed by RCTV’s VP of Development and New Media, Romulo Guardia, “El Señor Presidente” (The President) is a film adaptation of the novel by Guatemalan 1967 Nobel Laureate in Literature, Miguel Angel Asturias. Guardia’s production company, Angostura Films, co-produced the pic.

“Aside from exploring a variety of genres, we are looking to recreate Spanish classic literature that will appeal to a broad Latin American audience,” Guardia says. RCTV’s next pic is a horror thriller based on a Venezuelan legend. The web aims to make three pics next year and to eventually build up its feature film production output to 12 a year.

Leading distrib/exhib Cinematografica Blancica, which distributes pics from Sony Pictures and Warners in Venezuela, will release the drama by the end of November on 20 prints, a high count for a local pic.

Guardia shot “El Señor Presidente” in hi-def for less than $1 million in Caracas and other locations. “We had to film in secret in order to avoid being shut down,” says Guardia, a former exec at Discovery Latin America.

“El Señor Presidente” is set in a fictitious Latin American country living under a fierce dictatorship. In the story, the president uses his influence to destroy his rival and enemy, General Canales, the father of the young girl he fancies. “We plan to market the film as a Guatemalan story to avoid any problems with authorities,” says Blancica prexy Antonio Blanco.

RCTV lost its terrestrial broadcasting rights last spring when Chavez’s democratically elected government opted not to renew the web’s license, accusing it of siding with the opposition and allegedly violating broadcast laws. As of July, RCTV has been broadcasting on cable and satellite systems under the moniker RCTV Intl.

The Chavez government has been backing a slew of pics that local industryites and government watchdogs label as outright propaganda films, some shot in the new state-of-the-art studio facility outside Caracas, La Villa del Cine. Chavez has recently been hosting visits from Hollywood activists including Danny Glover, Sean Penn and Kevin Spacey.

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Marketing and SEO

Upside-down Marketing

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As I was walking through downtown Miami the other day, I came upon the following sign:

It immediately reminded me of a recent post by Alex King about his business priorities. In a nutshell, he explains that he prioritizes his communications so that emails are replied to in the following order:

  1. Current clients
  2. Returning clients
  3. Prospective clients
  4. New potential clients

While we’ve probably all been guilty of dedicating more resources to client acquisition than to existing clients, especially when starting up a business, Alex’s list makes a lot of sense. Ideally, you’d want new clients to know that -once they’re clients- they’ll be your top priority.

(Of course, if you happen to own a large enough business that you can have a dedicated client-procuring department, then this doesn’t really apply to you – although it’d still be a nice philosophy to adopt).

So, what’s wrong with the sign above? It gives first-time clients perks that your repeat clients are not getting. They’re basically catering to the one-time customer. And while I have absolutely no idea how the salon business works, I’d bet it depends on loyal, repeat customers. Maybe they’re in their growing phase, and don’t have enough regular clients yet… But still, why penalize your repeat customers with higher prices? Wouldn’t it be smarter to offer repeat customers a better deal? That way new customers can come in, try the service out, and know that if they like it they can come back for a better deal.

What do you think? Are they being dumb or smart?

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Marketing and SEO, Social Networking, Software

Using Twitter as a Marketing Tool

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A friend recently asked me about ways his clients could use the power of social networks. As I was explaining to him the nuances of socnets as marketing tools, it occurred to me that Twitter could be used as a powerful marketing weapon. Imagine being able to immediately reach your clients with breaking news at zero cost.

Here are some examples, for different industries:

  • Retail: inform clients of new promotions, sales, time-limited offers, etc.
  • Real Estate: post new properties the moment they come on the market.
  • News: breaking news, behind the scenes info, insights into developing stories.

In this context, it’s no different than an RSS feed to which your readers subscribe – except that Twitter is somehow more immediate, and more personal than an RSS feed. Twitter, you see, is a two-way communications medium, whereas RSS is one way.

I searched the internet for more examples of people using Twitter in this context. One company using this is Woot.com, a website where you can buy items at ridiculous prices during a short amount of time (and very small inventories). I subscribed to Woot’s Twitter feed to check it out: Woot broadcasts the latest deals via Twitter. If you’re into the whole Woot thing, you’ll want to be informed as quickly as possible about new deals, as they usually go quite fast. Receiving a short tweet (that’s what a Twitter message is called) on your cellphone or Twitter app is preferable to constantly checking the Woot home page. After all, some of us have work to do.

Woot’s Twitter solution is as simple as it gets. You subscribe, you receive a tweet every time a new product comes up for sale (or when a product sells out). It’s one way (you don’t get to talk back), but who wants to talk to an automated script anyway?

Guy Kawasaki also uses Twitter as a marketing tool, this time to advertise new posts that appear on his Truemors website. But he sends too many tweets throughout the day and he won’t automatically add you to his list, which means you can’t talk back to him.

Robert Scoble, of Scobelizer fame does get it. He doesn’t send too many tweets, and he will automatically add you to his Twitter list if you add him to yours. Seems to me like the right thing to do. I certainly don’t want to be listening to someone’s tweets if I can’t reach back to him when I want to follow up on something he said.

NBC’s Jim Long uses his Twitter account to share behind-the-scenes looks while he’s off on secret media tours to Iraq or following President Bush to Australia. Though he won’t automatically add you to his list (so that you can tweet him), I get the feeling he would if you ask nice enough (and I suppose Guy Kawasaki would too. The problem with this it that you need to be able to contact them through some other means, as it’s not possible through the Twitter interface). Jim does, however, post a little too much as he tries to keep the conversation on a very personal level. [UPDATE: Jim’s mentioned on the comments that he does automatically follow people on Twitter.]

Here’s a short list of Dos and Don’ts if you plan on using Twitter as a marketing tool:

  1. Do use Twitter to sell your products, ideas, offers, insights, etc.
  2. Do advertise your Twitter account on your website, business card and marketing literature. Here’s mine.
  3. Do create a conversation. Add your users to your Twitter account. Let those who listen to you, talk to you.
  4. Don’t spam. Really. You don’t have to post everything to Twitter… your important messages will get lost amid the junk. If yours is a high-volume Twitter channel, let users know before hand.
  5. Don’t rely on Twitter 100%. Twitter’s service has been down a lot lately. Use Twitter as one more tool in your social media toolbox.

What about you? How do you use Twitter?