Guerrilla Web 2.0 Marketing

What is Guerrilla marketing? Wikipedia defines it as this:

"Guerrilla Marketing" was coined by Jay Conrad Levinson in his popular 1984 book Guerrilla Marketing, as an unconventional system of promotions on a very low budget, by relying on time, energy and imagination instead of big marketing budgets. The term has since entered the popular vocabulary to also describe aggressive, unconventional marketing methods generically.

So my dad opened a Fishmonger the other day and shortly after that I got the call:
‘Jon, I need to market the restaurant.’
‘Cool, what’s your budget?’
’ Budget? Emails are free.’

Try to remember that the most advanced piece of equipment when my dad started out in retail was a machine that sent papers over the phone line and was considered a personal success when you received one without the machine jamming!

So of course, before I knew it, I was in a Guerrilla marketing campaign, which I haven’t attempted since the early naughties in the web 1.0 days. When I thought through a strategy, I found myself surprised that I had not entered a low/no budget campaign in the social media space as it is the perfect place to do it. I’ve obviously been spoilt by big client budgets of late so it’s time to get back to basics.

Guerrilla Web 2.0 marketing is all about getting people to ‘chat and share’ without spending a cent.

So I did what I do best and started a blog to place the restaurant right in the middle of the social space. It’s called www.fishmongermidrand.com (if you have no luck with that, try www.fishmongermidrand.blogspot.com as I have just registered the domain) so as you may have figured out, the restaurant is a Fishmonger in Midrand.

But you need a conversation point and a reason for people to share information about the website so I devised a 2 for 1 sushi special with my pops that will be available all day on Wednesdays. It is my hope that (of course) a killer special like this will get people spreading this blog around the South African internet and it will get some people into the restaurant.

So if you like sushi (and here is my shameless plug), sign up your email at the blog and spread the news about it please! I’ll also let my loyal readers know that the first voucher comes out this Monday so sign up now!

There might be a few more shameless plugs from me going forward for a while so please excuse me or listen to my plugging and help me spread the word. Thanks!

Technorati Tags: guerrilla marketing,guerrilla web 2.0 marketing,sushi,2 for 1

The Other Jon Bishop

del.icio.us Tags: marketing in rambes

So a lot of people have asked me why I refer to myself as Jon M Bishop online as the M can be pretty pratty, comments I tend to agree with somewhat.

The problem is, there is another Jon Bishop. Well I’m sure there are plenty ruddy Jon Bishops on the planet as it is so boringly common, only eclipsed by, perhaps, John Smith, but in the social media blogging space, there is another Jon Bishop.

Needless to say, hanging in the same space talking about the same things with the exact same names is bound to cause confusion. So after some analysis and a show on The Podcast Sisters about keeping your online brand unique, I decided to tweak my name to Jon M Bishop for these reason:

• Jon Bishop beats me in the Google rankings.
• He posts more regularly than me.
• He’s been around longer than me.
• He’s got a better looking blog probably because he uses Wordpress. I will fix this one day!
• There are some other Jon Bishops kicking both our asses on the Google rankings including a DJ, a guitarist and a plastic surgeon.

Has it Worked?

Well searching for Jon Bishop, I place somewhere down the middle of the mighty third page. Search Jon M Bishop, and I’m bringing up the tail of the first page which is great. Although in reality, I don’t know how many people would search  for Jon M Bishop when looking for me.

5 of the Best Ever Social Media Promotion Ebooks around

Pic by jblyberg

 

1. Social Media Starting Points – Chris Brogan

If you’re looking to show your organization how to get into social media and social networking, this downloadable starting points document to open up the conversation. – Chris Brogan

2. The Web: Hidden Games – C Weng

This book will describe the view of websites as games in general, and then study Digg, YouTube and Facebook as specific case studies. It will show you what the goals of these websites are, how to play, and how to win.

3. The eMarketing Textbook – by Quirk

eMarketing: The Essential Guide to Online Marketing This marketing ebook download illustrates Quirk eMarketing's commitment to the Open Education Declaration which aims to make educational resources available to all students.

4. Unleashing the Idea Virus – Seth Godin

Just like Godin's earlier "Permission Marketing" book, I devoured "Unleashing the Ideavirus" in a single sitting. What a great source of inspiration and practical ideas about viral marketing.

5. Viral Marketing with Blogs – Brian Clark

Viral Blogging. Link Bait. Tagged. Dugg.
If you know what those words mean, you’re likely looking to do the first, create the second, and have the third and fourth happen to something you’ve written. If you don’t know what those words mean, relax. They’re simply new terms for a timeless concept you likely already understand.

5 New Web Services I Can’t do Without

Thanks to Mykl

A few years after mobiles became stock standard communication tools, the phrase was coined: “How did we ever survive without them?” The same phrase can be attached to my five new favourite web services.

1. Wordle

Easily (and almost instantly) create great tag clouds like this! Also great for doing brands bullseyes for you brandy marketing types out there. You can also just throw your RSS feed in and it will make a groovy tag cloud of your blog!

2. Issuu

A top class tool for making professional PDF animated page turners for free! All you do is upload your PDF and Issue does the rest! It’s so good that I use it for my clients! It’s also got a bit of a Web 2.0 community style thing going on to share your docs.

Check out one I did for a client here

3. Animoto

Create brilliant videos out of your images. Make your website and presentations come alive with these professional looking videos with real music that you have the right to use for any Animotos.

4. Sproutbuilder

Make fully functional, shareable Widgets in minutes. This is also a tool that I use to create work for clients. Look at these podcast widgets that I created for a client here.

5. Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is a new Abode Air based desktop client for Twitter. It’s got some great features like one button re-tweets and the ability to make groups. It also has quite a dynamic layout with lots of options to customise your view, be it one column or three columns which include your groups, replies and DMs. With a few extra features, like logins to Jaiku etc, and keeping a history of replies, Tweetdeck could definitely topple Twhirl as the king of Twitter clients.

More Advertising Money Will be Spent Online than Anywhere Else in 2009

Respected agency, 
ZenithOptimedia  has predicted that 2009 will be the year that the Internet becomes the number one destination for advertising revenue in the UK, as reported in MediaWeek. While traditional advertising is predicted to grow by 5%, a surging 32.3% growth is predicted for online spend.

The over-hyped credit crunch is turning out to be Internet advertising’s best friend

Many Internet and Social Media evangelists would call this the tipping point for the Internet’s reputation as a credible source to spend ad revenue (and may it never be questioned again!) and will be running back to clients armed with the stats. The dot bomb era wasn’t that long ago showing the powerful surge in reputation and power the Internet has undergone in the last five or so years, thanks mainly to pioneers like Facebook, Myspace and Google and the advent of Web 2.0 and Social Media.

Stealing from Baskets.

The over-hyped credit crunch is turning out to be Internet advertising’s best friend. With companies fearing a slow year, advertising budgets are being tightened, putting pressure on marketers to produce tangible, accountable results on a smaller budget

. The Internet is of course the ideal platform to engage with under these parameters so many marketers are shifting funds from (already reduced) traditional advertising budgets and putting them into online budgets, creating a ‘stealing from other baskets’ scenario. This single factor could be the major reason for the swing in fortunes of Internet ad spend this year and next.

Possible reasons for the surge in online spend:

• Credit crunch. – Advertisers need to be wiser with their spend and online seems to be the answer.
• Social Network advertising is booming as measurable results overtake hype.
• Traceable results. – The single best feature of online advertising.
• Niching. – As marketers channel their efforts to a much tighter audience, Internet, once again, provides the solutions with psychographics, niche social networks, opt-in marketing activities etc.
• Viral – The best place to go viral is online and when it does, you can pat yourself on the back because it is money very well spent!
  del.icio.us Tags: internet ad spend,credit crunch,marketing in a recession

50 Top UK brands over the Past 50 years

del.icio.us Tags: 50 golden brands,marketing society

The Marketing Society UK are celebrating their 50 years of existence by publishing the 50 ‘golden brands’ ( I assume this means the best) of each year for the past 50 years.

The website is great to play around in and is certainly a fresh take on ‘brands of the year’ type surveys that usually come in some kind of over-styled PDF with nothing much else that one could call useful.

Be sure to click on some of the brands and check out the case studies on each of them, sometimes containing video, book links, and the ability to comment etc.

Twitter Lets Me Know if Something Will be Good or Not

 
Thanks to 2725

I have a new vetting system: Twitter. Basically, when thinking of engaging in a new activity (let’s say stamp collecting) or attending an event (such as the Chelsea Flower Show), I ask myself the usual filtering questions: “Is it close enough?”, “Is it expensive?”, “Will there be beer?”.

When living in London in the summer, you have a wide variety of potential events to attend both professionally or personally so you have to choose wisely which ones are worth the effort. So when the usual filtering questions don’t work, I turn to Twitter. “Would I Twitter (or blog) about going to this event or doing this thing?”, “Would I Twitter about the event while I’m there?” If the answers are no for one event and yes for another, problem solved!

 

So stamp collecting and the flower show would both be no but attending a new media conference or finally learning to use Wordpress (.org not .com) would both score a double yes!

Problem solved!

del.icio.us Tags: twitter decisions

Print is Dead in 10 Years! – Microsoft CEO

Steve Ballmer the CEO at Microsoft, predicts that print media will be dead in 10 years. At least he is realistic and not claiming such deaths within 2 years like evangelistic media kook, Leon Orsmond.

Delivering Web 2.0 Corporate Messaging in a Snap

The Snap portion of my presentation at the 2nd Annual New Media Marketing Conference.

Almost all internal communicators agree that the advent of ‘web 2.0’ and ‘social media’ has created a revolution in a stagnated industry, frustrated with a lack of solutions to reach apathetic employees and engage with them effectively. Newsletters, posters, emails, intranets, magazines etc. were just not creating the impact required to deliver their corporate messages.

When I discovered the potential uses within internal communications of this new technology standard, I jumped up and down with joy, booked the video media team for three days and recorded messages from my boss, for the marketing team, until he felt like an over-used answering machine! Back to the media studio, edited the clips, converted for easy web access, rushed back to my office, sent them up to my (well impressed) boss and got to work on showing the entire marketing department these videos, maybe one a week will do? That’s where I got stuck.

How am I going to send these videos or vidcasts, to be more in there with the web 2.0 lingo, to a targeted group of employees at a multitude of different locations across South Africa and the UK? Emails? Not possible. Company’s website? These videos are for an internal audience only. Intranet? It’s so boring that no-one goes on there, plus I.T. is concerned about badwidth demand on the intranet.

Disappointed and under pressure to deliver these messages, I hit the internet for a few days and found Snap. At first I wasn’t sure it was the solution I was looking for exactly but I saw potential in the product especially for a few other HR related comms issues I was helping to solve. So I arranged a demo version for me to play around with.
I was extremely impressed with the flexibility, scalability and variety of environments we got Snap to work in. I also discovered that you could in-fact deliver video (vidcasts), audio (Podcasts) and animated messages which were delivered directly to users’ desktops in a very interactive, engaging multimedia rich manner. This exciting content and delivery method would almost guarantee that the messages get read/watched/heard. Further tweaking and fiddling and I discovered that Snap is also great for delivering targeted messages to any group in any location as well as being able to engage in two-way communication with employees so it is not all top-down comms. I also like how you could attach documents such as e-newsletters and letterhead updates.

So on the surface, Snap can deliver screensavers, pop-up messages, surveys, quizzes, RSS feeds and E-mags. With more Web 2.0 style integration to come. But the real benefit for internal communicators is the ability for Snap to either bolt onto or drive your communications efforts with high response and enthusiasm rates from your audience. Whatever message you want to send out using any medium, be it web 2.0 style vidcasts or podcasts or just basic text and a pic, Snap will have an effective, engaging delivery solution for it, not to mention targeted down to the last user, if necessary, or to an entire global organisation.

Currently Snap enjoys working with clients such as Vodafone, Virgin Media, Netcare and a few more.

The true magic of Snap is hard to explain and is much more effective when seen in action so if you are interested in seeing the solution in action, drop me at line at jonmichaelbishop[@]gmail.com and I will arrange a fully working demo for you.

My Latest BizCommunity Article is live!

For all of you that enjoy my articles on Bizcommunity, the latest one is live here:

http://www.bizcommunity.com/Article/196/16/24204.html

Enjoy!