THINKing

More Marketing Tools

Here’s another round-up of marketing tools and resources found on the web:

SpotMixer offers self-service tools to small- and midsized-advertisers for creating TV commercials online. Its customers now are able to distribute their ads through Google AdWords. 

I’m now using Quantcast to get deeper demographic information about my website traffic.  Quantcast is a media measurement service that lets advertisers view audience reports on millions of websites and services. It combines directly measured audience data with panel-based estimates to deliver accurate third-party metrics and easy-to-read profiles on digital media properties.

Widgipedia is a search engine and directory for - you guessed it - widgets.

Have the need to poll your visitors? PollDaddy is your application.  The free version is very powerful.

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Best THINKing

What is the best content in your RSS reader? Do you have a way to filter the wheat from the chaff? One way to do it is with AideRSS, the intelligent assistant that continuously monitors RSS feeds, finds the good stuff, creates a PostRank™, and delivers it to you.

It uses an algorithm that takes into consideration relevance and and reaction to blog posts, and then scores the posts accordingly. Here’s what AideRSS says are the top THINKing posts:

Brand Trust

Green Content Marketing

Soft Economy? No, Soft Marketers

The ROI of Social Media

Email Is Alive And Well

What are the top posts in your blog, as ranked by AideRSS? Any surprises? Wade into the conversation.

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Cool Marketing Tools

Photo Courtesy of Morguefile
Here are a few marketing tools and resources I’ve come across recently.

The first is the complete Zip Code Index, a detailed resource containing more than 42,000 US Zip Codes, along with their associated demographic and geographic attributes. There is no cost to download it.

Can’t get enough of Web 2.0? Well, then Go2Web20 - which bills itself as the complete Web 2.0 directory - is for you.

HubSpot provides a couple of useful tools for online marketing and PR folks. First is the Website Grader, a free tool that judges the marketing effectiveness of websites. Their new tool is Press Release Grader. Although I have a few quibbles with it, it is still a good first pass on a release to make sure you have covered the basics.

Here are a couple of Twitter-related tools. Tweetbeep lets you know when a keyword you have registered is being tweeted about. I’ve been using Summize a lot lately to search Tweets related to My Creative Team. Want to tweet about something in the future but schedule it now? Then, TweetLater is for you.

Want to know what gas prices are doing, how your sports team is faring, or what your competitors are up to? Want to get your daily horoscope, or need to set up reminders? Alerts is the service for you.

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Get Your Filtr On

PR Pros have been paying tons of money for media clips for eons, and some still need to have a paid service to keep up with everything said about them, their organization or their clients. But, there is a new service that the smaller company can set up for free, called FiltrBox that offers many of the same features of the higher priced services. The service now is out of beta, according to the FiltrBox blog,

Information Overload and overpriced media monitoring are now a thing of the past! We are thrilled to announce that the Filtrbox media monitoring service is now available to the public. The service emerges from private beta today with an entirely new user interface and a number of new features.

Here’s what you get for free:

• Up to five separate filters and 15 days of article history
• Entirely new Flex user interface
• Additional sources, including Twitter and FriendFeed monitoring
• Search, Sort, and Preferences
• iPhone formatted Daily Briefing emails
• Flagging of important articles
• Google Alerts import
• Drag and Drop Filtr management
• Content widgets based on custom RSS feeds

Sign up for FiltrBox here.

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Building Your Personal Brand

The best brands are always looking to improve. Same goes for personal brand building.

If you aren’t learning something new, you’re wasting space and hurting your brand. Digital technology makes it easy to pick up some new skills or knowledge. Books and lots of them can be found free and online. There is a blog that lists a variety of sites which offer access to online books, including some audio ones. Discover more here.

I also found the Online Education Database recently and it has 100 free podcasts from the world’s best universities. So, if you want to brush up on your quantum mechanics, learn about the historical Jesus or Hannibal, this site is for you. There’s also a list of 200 free online courses.

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Get The Flock Onto Your Computer

Flock has supplanted Firefox as my favorite browser. It is powered by Mozilla, the same engine that supports Firefox, however it has so many more features designed for our new social, digital world. There is a nice demo of Flock by Candy With A Why, so I won’t recreate the wheel.

Here’s what I like about it. It is a nice tool for handling all your RSS feeds. Sometime back I said that we needed an Outlook type platform to make RSS as ubiquitous as email. Flock is close. It also makes it simple to handle all of my accounts: del.icio.us, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, you name it. Finally, it has a feature that allows you to track your friends on all their accounts. Get it and use it.

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THINKing Essentials - Media Relations

Photo By laffy4k (Flickr)

There has been a lot of good content here in THINKing, and you may have missed some of it. So, this is the first in a series to bring some of that content out of the dusty archives and back into the light of day. Today, let’s revisit some previous posts on media relations.

46 Essential PR Links

Top 17 Media Relations Links

Media Relations How-To

Printed Press Kits: A Contrarian View

Six Tips For Perfect Email Media Pitches

Top 8 Media Relations Links

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Sending Out An RSS

Photo By photopia (Flickr)

RSS is a friend of mine. Subscribing to feeds helps me keep current on a wide variety of blogs and topics. So, today I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on using RSS.

Now, I have a number of blogs I keep up with, like those of my digital colleagues Jason Falls (RSS feed) and Rodger Johnson (RSS feed), to mention a couple. Instead of visiting their sites ever day, I subscribe to their feeds and have the information come to me. Feel free to subscribe to this blog’s feed.

I’ve started using the new browser from Flock and have found it an excellent tool for keeping up with key feeds. It’s Firefox on steroids. But that is a topic for another day.

Now, another tactic is to use Google’s blog search for terms or phrases you follow. For instance, I follow the phrase “stumbleupon marketing“. So, type in your term under Google’s blog search. When the results come up, you’ll see in the left hand column about halfway down is the word “Subscribe”. Below that is the word “RSS” hyperlinked. Click on that and you’ll be subscribed to the search. Anytime it changes, you’ll be automatically updated.

How are you using RSS?

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BlogUpp!

You’ll notice the window in the sidebar to the right that provides a thumbnail snapshot of another blog. This is from BlogUpp!, a new blog promotion tool widget that I am trying. I’ll report back on how it works to drive traffic. Here’s what BlogUpp! says about itself:

• BlogUpp! snapshots your blog and reads your RSS regularly
• Blog’s thumbnail shows on other blogs with our service activated
• The thumbnail is accompanied by your blog’s most recent article
• For every 10 readers of your blog, it is shown to 9 readers on other blogs
• An identical widget projects on your weblog, listing relevant blogs
• Each link clicked in the widget opens a new window, not closing your blog
• And all this is completely free and with no effort whatsoever

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Accidental Branding

Oops, I’ve built a brand. Now what do I do? That’s sort of the premise behind a new book, Accidental Branding: How Ordinary People Build Extraordinary Brands, that comes out March 19. I’ve just finished reading the galley proofs.

Author David Vinjamuri, adjunct professor of marketing at New York University, has compiled the stories of eight remarkable entrepreneurs who started out to build a business but built brands instead.

The features on each entrepreneur read like Vanity Fair profiles. So, they are entertaining as well as informative. My favorite was on John Peterman of J. Peterman fame. It was probably my favorite because like Peterman, I’ve always believed that brands  should build a myth and spread those myths through stories and lore.

Peterman faced a unique brand challenge. After building this exclusive brand that was known primarily only by the well-heeled, the Seinfeld show hijacked the brand for the purpose of satire. It almost took down Peterman, the company.

The author sums up the book with Six Rules that I totally agree with:

Rule No. 1 – Do sweat the small stuff.
Rule No. 2 – Pick a fight.
Rule No. 3 – Be your own customer.
Rule No. 4 – Be unnaturally persistent.
Rule No. 5 – Build a myth.
Rule No. 6 – Be faithful.

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