Today’s technology revolution for marketing businesses

December 28 2009

The movie Avatar is totally amazing!! The world James Cameron and his remarkable animators created with their technological innovations is just filled with magical and mind blowing imagery. Loved it! Surprise, surprise, the promos on TV feature the battle scenes. But the real magic is in the beautiful world that is threatened with extinction. And spend the extra few dollars to see it in 3-D. The advanced technology is symbolic of the “brave new world” born of the last decade.

Whether you are a fan of the movie or not, it demonstrates one of the hundreds of technological leaps of the last decade. Lets look at some others and reflect on how these have evolved the world of marketing communication in Pittsburgh.

DEFINITION of avatar:

A graphic identity you either select from a group of choices or create on your own to represent yourself to the other party in a chat, instant messaging or multiplayer gaming session—from PCMag.com

WEBSITES: old news, but always evolving

Strrretching the definition, a website is a kind of marketing avatar for a business, acting as its salesman and showroom. While a website is not the company—except for ones that exist only on the web like Amazon.com—the site is out there 24/7, representing it, acting on its behalf world wide.

One site we completed this year for a remodeling contractor allows visitors to flip through a portfolio of projects—from kitchens to outdoor living spaces. And an interactive quiz asks homeowners 10 basic questions about where they are in the planning process—and rates the answers in terms of “readiness”—much like an initial meeting would do.

Since websites compete with each other for attention—and with other traditional and interactive media—the gaming metaphor applies too: it’s about winning the marketing battle for customer eyeballs and dollars. Not too much of a strrrretch of the analogy.

CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS: do it yourself

Allowing you to easily manage your website without the help and expense of a webmaster, CMSs are becoming more popular with businesses. Part of the decade’s technology revolution is about making technology more user friendly.

Three of the six websites we worked on this year offer the versatility of managing and updating a website easily—on Joomla or WordPress platforms—giving the owner much more control of the site from day to day or hour to hour. Combining CMS with Google Analytics, which reports on the activity on your site in great detail, businesses can now fine tune their marketing messages and offers as often as necessary based on actual consumer behavior.

Easing off on the avatar analogy, many other technological innovations have come on quickly and are widely used by millions, even hundreds of millions, of users.

NOTE: In the Old Days you had to tantalize the mass media gatekeepers to tell your latest story; it’s still a good idea. Nothing like a good story in the mass media. But now you can tell the world without their help, using your website, blogs, social media and YouTube, to mention a few. Self publish.

BLOGS & SOCIAL MEDIA: talk with your customers

A blog or social media platform creates the opportunity for dialog between the business and the customer, enabling a kind of conversation, if set up to allow comments. So, if you like or hate this blog post, you can respond right here and now. And I can respond back very specifically, not generically.

A recent report by Advertising Age announces there is “no more Joe Consumer… the average American has been replaced by a complex, multidimensional society that defies simplistic labeling.” Social media, along with rich variety of other Internet options, now enable niche marketing like never before, down to the individual, not just her demographic group.

Fans, Friends and Followers on Facebook and Twitter, for example, mean that you are communicating directly to people interested in you and/or your business. These new options—available since 2005 and 2006—take a little time to get working for your business, but not necessarily money. And they can pay off big time in terms of reaching the people who really do want to hear about you. There are hundreds of examples of social media marketing having a huge impact on the success of a business. I’ve got dozens of these stories bookmarked.

TIP: Use Key Words or Tags in your posts that people will search with.

BTW, the Google search engine discovered this blog within 1 hour of posting.

YOUTUBE: instant fame and quick success

On a kind of opposite end of today’s high tech spectrum is an example I discovered at a holiday party. A kind of shy, average neighbor is into “hooping,” a mini revival of the hoola hoop phenomenon for exercise and sporting purposes. On a laptop at the party I saw for the first time his very primitive video… and was astonished to hear that it had been viewed 4,097 times and got a 4.5 rating out of 5 by reviewers. And check out the comments too: “You rock!.” This is an amazing example of how the world of marketing has moved from the mass, one-size-fits-all approach to very finely defined niche markets with very special interests.

A much better example is the amazing success of Susan Boyle on Britain’s Got Talent through YouTube. Her first appearance alone has had more than 80 million viewings. This has lead to the release and success of her new album. Clearly YouTube, launched in 2005, can reach huge audiences and even give you some indication of the size of that audience.

SMART PHONES: the web any time any where

The word Crackberry is now officially in the dictionary. And pretty much everyone knows what iPhone, iPod and iTouch are. This portability revolution—which also includes compact net books and ebook readers—means your message can reach people instantaneously on the road. With tens of thousands of “apps” available, including Twitter and Facebook feeds, your promotions can reach many customers right now on the road, not two hours from now.

It’s a brave new technology world.