Hmm fancy that?

Pinterest, I’m so sorry it’s not you, it’s me. I just want permission to hang out on other sites that let me purchase an outfit right on the site. You see I’ve discovered  “Fancy!”

While I love Pinterest, I love efficiency more. Fancy has beaten Pinterest to the ROI. The items you love, collect and “Fancy” versus “Pin,” can also be bought right on the site. No need to travel to third-party sites to make a purchase. While I’m not an impulse buyer usually, this efficient business model capitalizes on the impulse buy immediately. Why is this a good thing? It is the virtual equivalent of not letting the customer, leave the store. The longer they stay in the store, the more they buy.

When I first found Pinterest I loved being able to share the things I love with friends. However, I also wondered, how the heck do they make money? While there are featured products etc, to serve as advertising, If you send consumers elsewhere to make a purchase there is a greater possibility they won’t finish the transaction. Fancy is smart to keeps the customer in the store and still allowing them to share interest and purchases with friends in a social media platform.

 

Online marketing, a great “how to” info graphic

The Noob Guide to online marketing is as thorough an info graphic as I have seen. I just had to share! Click on the graphic to get the large version

The ever-elusive Alpha Mom

A lot of time is spent in conference rooms trying to figure out how to capture our attention. We are usually college educated yet family minded. We work in and out of the home and always get things done in spectacular fashion. Trendsetters yes! leaders of the mom pack, yes and no. The truth is we lead in our element. So how do you engage us? Well I can tell you it is not easy. Our time is precious and almost every minute is accounted for with work, home, school schedules and extracurricular activities. Did I also mention we have our own interest book clubs, professional associations and online groups? It’s a full day and week, so how do we manage it? We cut out the BS! Pardon my French but we have no time to be pitched or wooed. All that we want are the quick solutions to our problems and we usually rely on the advice of a trusted few moms who know us, know what we like and the kind of lives we strive to make for our families.

So how do you get our attention? Make our lives easier. We don’t want to keep up with the Jones’ we are the Jones’. As with all things, there is more than one type of Alpha Mom. I am the techy Alpha Mom. I wanted an iPhone because I saw how it simplified my gadget life. I went from five devices to one. No longer did I need a cell phone, iPod, calendar, laptop and address book all in my purse. I have everything I needed in one device that allows me to schedule the family, keep up with work, workout at the gym and send Christmas cards. I can even keep up with my stepchildren with text messaging while scheduling their flights to visit us. This brilliant invention even amuses my children in the waiting room at the pediatricians.

Looking for how your product will take the pain out of all the things that we need to get done in a day is only part of it, but it’s a great beginning. Keeping it simple and get it into the hands of the technology mom, or the baking mom, or the crafty mom, or the fashion chic mom is another key component. It’s like finding the right apps for your device. As the techy Alpha Mom, I am able to explain to another Alpha Mom why your product is great just by using it. When another mom sees my child calmed by the pain of a shot while watching Dora the Explorer, she’s sold. If my app buzz’s and I send my husband a text to pick up his prescriptions all while watching the 4 year-olds practice their dance to “rubber ducky,” she’s all but put it on her Christmas list. When I snap a little video while they practice, upload and share with family, if she can she’s stopping at the AT&T store on the way home.

So I probably, haven’t told you anything you don’t know already. We are not that hard to understand, but we know each other best and the real way to get our attention is to understand the roles of Alpha Moms. That’s why the crafty Alpha mom, who I know is laughing as she reads this, calls me to set up her 13 year old’s Facebook account. We don’t do it all ourselves, in our world “There’s a Mom for that!”

Gym membership or skills?

 

Skills, abs, skills, abs oh let’s get real you want the abs, you need the skills. One of the best things you can add to your repertoire, especially if you want a job in social media marketing, is to get training in an area where you are weak. Since most business schools teach you marketing, and even digital marketing, as in my case, they don’t have a lot to offer in social media marketing yet. Employers looking to add people with these skills will appreciate the get up and go of candidates who have taken the initiative to teach themselves.  So like the crazy woman I am, I went to Mediabistro.com. Mediabistro offers a host of valuable courses for about the same price as that gym membership. So make a New Year’s resolution you know you can keep. You know you want skills too!

Multicultural marketing in a social media world!

Multicultural marketing in social media is an area that is often left unattended. Let’s face it while some larger U.S companies, such as Proctor and Gamble and Target, have poured resources into their marketing budgets for multicultural marketing, very few of those dollars are aimed at social media and multimedia projects for online audiences. There are several reasons to site; lack of available resources, limited expertise and inability to measure the effectiveness of such specifically targeted social media campaigns. South American company, SocialMetrix, has cornered the market on measuring multicultural social media engagement. Its software, Echo, monitors sites using complex language algorithms that are well versed in Spanish, English and Portuguese colloquialisms. This allows the software to give accurate feedback from consumers who interact with brands in any of the three languages even sarcastically.  You don’t need me to tell you this is huge! Now you can gauge how people feel about your product and company when they are in a space where they may use the comfort of a first language to interact with their friends.

Multicultural activity in social media online is a dominating force in social media networks. CapturaGroup  published a study in 2009 discussing the growing health and activity in social media by ethnic populations. The SocialMetrix Echo software could be a game changer in your company’s multicultural social media marketing.

Let’s Talk Shop…..PhotoShop!

You CAN fix that non-smiling child on the Christmas card, in PhotoShop and you don’t have to be a pro. It’s easier in PhotoShop. Like a lot of professional photographers I fancy myself pretty good in PhotoShop, but even I geek out when an upgrade comes out that makes my work even more efficient. Teaching CS 5.5 this semester has been so fun. I have been challenged by my student’s to answer so many questions and I have really enjoyed finding and sharing the answers. Often I’m asked if you can fix a smile or change the direction of something in a piece of stock art, and the answer used to be “yes (insert pregnant pause here) but it’s a lot of work.” My new answer is “yes and in PhotoShop CS 5 it’s a snap.” CS 5 has a feature called puppet warp that allows slight realistic manipulations to art you don’t have time to re-shoot. So no longer do you have to search for a passable frame from a shoot, you can actually correct the small things from that shoot that didn’t go your way. Here is one of my favorite tutorials on puppet warp . It’s only 3 minutes long so trust me you have the time then you’ll want to go play with it of course. Might be just in time for your Christmas photo.

Let me know if you find this useful, leave me a comment!

It’s all about ART!

I don’t mean the art you’re thinking of but that can be a nice metaphor. A museum clearly thinks about how to present a new collection to its patrons. Recently a client asked me to review the beta version of their mobile app. When I looked at the proposed format, I quickly realized this app was being made in response to their competitors and not for their patrons. The app mimicked the features of the competition and it was not suited for the majority of the client’s unique audience.

It is so important to understand how your audience uses technology before designing convenience apps. This business seemed to forget that their audience is mainly attracted to their niche. There were no niche functions in the application. Gone were the detailed explanations of their services, gone were the connections to a personalized guide.

I gave an honest review. Don’t worry, I was pleasant. First, I shared how great it looked! You need to do this. It’s sort of like telling your friend that her hair looks great before breaking the news about the dress! Start positive then get to the root of it. I suggested they follow the ART process. ART is an acronym I coined, probably because of my background, to remind me of the order in which new media should be conceived. I say should but we all know this rarely happens the first time! Often a new media plan happens after the initial efforts fall flat.

Audience

• Whom are we trying to reach?
• What do they find unique about us?
• What problem, which matters to them, do we want to solve?

ROI (return on investment)

• What will we gain from taking on this expense?
• Will it cost us more than we gain?

Technology

• How does our audience use technology?
• What medium makes sense, to them?
• If they don’t use it, can we re-purpose the technology?

Know your audience, assess the ROI of creating new media for this segment, then and only then choose the technology that will best suite your audience. The point is, if your business is a work of art and serves a niche population; your app should enhance that niche.