THINKing

Top 7 Links To Kick-Start Your Leads

Got an offer from Aberdeen Group  to receive a research report on generating demand for your business. You must register but it is worth the effort if you want to learn how the biggest and the best are generating leads and retaining customers in order to increase ROI.

Here are a few bonus lead generation links, just for you.

Marketing Benefits Of Lead Generation

Lead Generation Blog

IAB Lead Generation Best Practices

Is Your Lead Generation Site Proposing Marriage On The First Date?

Lead Generation Misconceptions

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Back To The Media Rolodex

A couple of weeks back, we delved into the My Creative Team Rolodex to search out some key media contacts. Let’s take another look, this time at The Wall Street Journal.

Mailing Address: 200 Liberty Street, Lobby 8, New York, NY 10281

Main Phone: 212-416-2500

Email Protocol: firstname.lastname@wsj.com

• Deputy Bureau Chief, technology - Peter Grant, 212-416-2693
• Entertainment Editor - John Lippman
• Advertising Reporters - Suzanne Vranica & Brian Steinberg
• Consumer Products, Food - Sarah Ellison
• Personal Technology Columnist - Walter Mossberg

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RSS 101 - Top 16 Links To Get You Started

RSS is a great way to ensure the quality content you want is delivered to you and not into your spam folder. But many computer users still have not embraced this organizational tool. So, I thought I’d put together a post on all you need to know about RSS.

Let’s start with the RSS consumer first. According to RSS Basics,

RSS is a defined standard based on XML with the specific purpose of delivering updates to web-based content. Using this standard, webmasters provide headlines and fresh content in a succinct manner. Meanwhile, consumers use RSS readers and news aggregators to collect and monitor their favorite feeds in one centralized program or location. Content viewed in the RSS reader or news aggregator is place known as an RSS feed.

Now that you have the basic terminology, here is a tutorial on how to get started using RSS. Tutorial Contents:

1. Definition of RSS Feeds
2. What goes in the feed?
3. What can a feed do for you?
4. How are feeds different from e-mail?
5. How do people read feeds?
6. How do you find the feeds you want to subscribe to?
7. How RSS helps your search engine visibility
8. Who is reading feeds?
9. Putting Your Web content in a Feed
10. Where Are We Feeds Headed?
11. More RSS Resources

Marketers, I think, aren’t engaging consumers through RSS because they feel the volume isn’t there. But it is. More than 6 million Americans consume media and news through RSS, according to a Pew poll.

This volume, while not as high as email, offers real advantages to the marketer. For one, it gives marketers an uncensored channel to the consumer. Robyn Tippins of Yahoo! riffs on the topic in a video interview with PodTech.

BONUS LINKS:

RSS - Best of the Web?

RSS Resources

RSS Strategy

RSS Feeds For The Rest Of Us

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Search Me

A new comScore survey by Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, Yahoo! and Proctor & Gamble seems to indicate that packaged goods brands should shift much of their branding money into search engine advertising. eMarketer reports that,

Nearly 44 million visitors searched for packaged foods in the study period. Baby products attracted 15.7 million searchers, personal care products 9.8 million and household products 1.7 million. Searchers spent about 20% more than non-searchers across the four categories.

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Creativity & You

95 percent of what we know about the brain, we have learned in the last 20 years. So, your beliefs about creativity were probably shaped by faulty information. For instance, many believe that only special, talented people are creative – and you have to be born that way.

Wrong.

The notion that geniuses such as Shakespeare, Picasso and Mozart were `gifted’ is a myth, according to a study at Exeter University. Researchers examined outstanding performances in the arts, mathematics and sports, to find out if “the widespread belief that to reach high levels of ability a person must possess an innate potential called talent.”

This particular study concludes that excellence is determined by five key elements:

• opportunities
• encouragement
• training
• motivation
• practice (this one, most of all)

The research also indicates that few showed early signs of promise prior to parental encouragement, and no one reached high levels of achievement in their field without devoting thousands of hours of serious training. Consider Mozart who trained for 16 years before he produced an acknowledged masterwork.

Let me tell you a few more interesting facts about creativity:

- Research shows that everyone has creative abilities. The more training you have and the more diverse the training,the greater is your potential for creative output.

- Additionally, it has been shown that in creativity quantity equals quality. In fact, the longer the list of ideas, the higher the quality of the final solution. Typically, the highest quality ideas appear at the end of the list.

- The average adult thinks of three to six alternatives for any given situation. The average child thinks of 60.

- Creativity is an individual process. Traditional brainstorming has been proven ineffective because of fear of social disapproval.

- Groups are best for idea selection rather than idea generation.

All of this is interesting and enlightening but doesn’t necessarily get to the root of the issue of creativity. I think there is one element even more important than the five mentioned above. Let me tell you a true story to illustrate what I think the prime factor in creativity is.

A New York publisher was concerned about the lack of creativity among his editorial and marketing staff. He hired psychologists to try to determine what differentiated the creative employees from the others. After a year of study, the psychologists discovered that there was only one difference between creative and non-creative employees: belief in their creativity. Creative employees believed they were creative, and the non-creative ones believed they were not.

So, you are creative, I guarantee it. All you have to do is believe me. Is that too much to ask?

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More Media = More Results

A new study from the Magazine Publishers of America reveals a blinding glimpse of the obvious to me. The study shows that a multimedia approach to marketing increases effectiveness. Duh.

Now the interesting part of this story is in the math, particularly when it comes to magazine advertising:

Magazine ads had a major impact on building web traffic, with a lift of more than 40% over the control group, on average

Including a URL address in magazine ads significantly increased web visits. When the URL was included, the percent change in visits tripled

For the Automotive category in particular, magazine ads had significant impact in driving traffic to the auto brands’ websites-with an average increase of seven points, representing an 85% lift, over the control group

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BlogRush Update

We talked recently about BlogRush, the blog widget that is supposed to drive traffic to your site. It was working great initially, but BlogRush was almost too successful and underwent some serious reprogramming. It has taken much longer than they anticipated to fix. BlogRush is about to roll out the new version and I’ll be interested to see how it works. If you have a blog and are using the service, let us know your experience.

As a reminder, here is the BlogRush widget.

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Is Email Dead At The Hands Of Social Networks?

I was reading a piece from Bill McCloskey this morning about whether social networks will kill email. According to McCloskey,

ISPs like Hotmail and Yahoo mail, though, are taking what I’ll call “The Facebook Threat” seriously. Worried that social networks will begin siphoning off much needed traffic necessary to maintain high banner CPM’s, these ISPs are beginning to incorporate social networking functionality into their email offerings, according to a recent article in The Wall Street Journal.

Email isn’t going anywhere. In the newer media scheme of things, email is TV. It is ubiquitous - there are 1.4 billion active email accounts. And it is totally integrated in work life. Social networks are just the latest in a long line of other media - blogs and RSS come to mind - that are slated to kill off email.

Stop the deathwatch. Email is not on life support yet.

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Social Marketing For The Cause

Cause marketing has always been a good way to build goodwill and word-of-mouth for organizations. I wrote a piece about cause marketing that outlines why it is the right thing to do from an overall marketing perspective. Today, I read an article about marketing via social networks from Melinda Krueger that is worth a read. Says Krueger,

Channel some of those marketing dollars to a charitable cause, and let your association with that cause be your entrée into the social network. Will participants know that you may have commercial as well as charitable motives? Certainly. But if you are helping to heal the sick, feed the hungry or solve one of the many pressing problems of our day, does anyone really care?

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Top 5 Links For Writing Creative Briefs

A member of the MarketingProfs forum posted a question recently asking about how to write creative briefs. It seems every agency has its own format for writing creative briefs, but all want to get the same basic information.

Here’s a link to an article I’ve written on writing creative briefs, and some more links to additional creative brief information:

AdCracker

ByteStart

Capitol Media

Elise.com

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