Are you a Meatball Sundae?

For any business planning to start using web 2.0 tools, including blogging, I recommend a visit to Seth Godin or read his latest book “Meatball Sundae”. Seth is one of the most experienced marketers who has worked with the web since the earliest days and a guy who knows what he’s talking about.

Here’s a short excerpt from the introduction:

What’s a meatball sundae?

Maybe this is familiar. It is to me, anyway:

You go to a marketing meeting. There’s a presentation from the new Internet marketing guy. He’s brought a fancy (and expensive) blogging consultant with him. She starts talking about how blogs and the ‘Web 2.0 social media infrastructure’ are just waiting for your company to dive in. ‘Try this stuff,’ she seems to be saying, ‘and the rest of your competitive/structural/profit issues will disappear.’”

Just grafting these new tools onto your organization is a recipe for disaster. The risk of cognitive dissonance by your customers is great. .

This is not really new, the same was true when websites first appeared on the scene about over a decade ago and most executives - after first ignoring the web - thought that having a site would be a panacea for all their marketing problems. After huge amounts wasted, we now know how wrong that assumption was.

The corporate culture and the brand have to be consistent to be believable and communications need to be consistent across all channels and touchpoints to be credible. There are no shortcuts to success.

 

THE EXPECTATION ECONOMY

reports Trendwatching in their latest newsletter is an umbrella trend that neatly captures the zeitgeist for mature (and rapidly maturing) consumer societies, while also incorporating and explaining many other subtrends. Yes, it will keep you busy. It’s a rather long read, but as always contains a lot of food for thought for any marketer in any industry.

“The EXPECTATION ECONOMY is an economy inhabited by experienced, well-informed consumers from Canada to South Korea who have a long list of high expectations that they apply to each and every good, service and experience on offer.

Their expectations are based on years of self-training in hyperconsumption, and on the biblical flood of new-style, readily available information sources, curators and BS filters. Which all help them track down and expect not just basic standards of quality, but the ‘best of the best’.”

And here are just some of the those many sources that people have at their disposal in their permanent search for information to support their decision making.

 

Intro to The Semantic Web for Non-Geeks

Just came across this video on the Minding the Planet blog. It explains in easy to understand terms what is happening on the web.

It will affect a whole number of industries including financial services as consumers are able to use the intelligent web at their disposal.

Tags: intelligentweb, semantic web

 

Financial Firms Lead Web Ads, for Now

writes eMarketer citing a Nielsen Online AdRelevance report

Although this graphic covers December 2007 only, I do think the lead over the other industry categories would be similar the rest of the year.

The big question here is what share of this significant online ad spend is by credit unions?

My guess - a very small amount, which relates to my earlier post today about blogs and attitude to the web in general.

For credit unions to compete effectively in this tough market for financial services they will have to make a strong effort here and shift marketing dollars online to get share of voice. If they do start to spend money on web based marketing, they also better have a website capable of converting those dollars spent into new customers and share of wallet by existing customers.

 

75% of Journalists Get Story Ideas from Blogs

This report covered recently in Marketing Pilgrim contains some interesting facts that support the idea of maintaining a corporate blog, combined with a website, as an effective business tool.

Not only will it increase your visibility in Google but there are a number of side effects that might well get you wider attention beyond just the immediate blog readership. Definitely worth consideration.

 

To blog or not to blog…..

is the issue addressed in CU Brand Blog a post on Currency Marketing.

From the evidence presented only a tiny number of credit unions are blogging and for others - how many is unknown - it seems to be on the radar screen but not a high priority.

To me the larger issue than blogs, is the one of how most CUs are looking at the web itself as a business driver today. It seems that many consider the fact that they now have had a website for a number of years as good enough and the issue of “the web” is ticked off on the to-do list. How many CEOs and VPs of Marketing do realize that merely having a presence on the web in the form of a static website is far from enough? My guess would be a minority, still.

Now that the web has entered the mainstream - and the more than 100 million blogs is just one manifestation of this fact - and social networking, social media, user generated content, viral marketing etc. are here to stay, the website needs to be at the core of any credit union strategy and by this I mean overall business strategy, not only marketing strategy.

Once this fact has sunken in, the question of whether having a blog is the right thing to do or not is then at least asked in the right context. As long as a truly customer focused web strategy, anchored by a solid, enterprise strength, interactive, dynamic website, is not at the core of a credit union’s overall strategy, talking about blogging is a mere side show.

With the web moving as fast as it is now and with consumer behavior being influenced in more fundamental ways than ever before, important decisions in this key area need to be made sooner rather than later.

 

Beyond Web 2.0

Here is the presentation by Dave Mayette, CEO, L9 on the topic of what’s coming next on the web and how important it is to pay attention. Staying on the side lines is not an option!

 

‘Decade of Data’ Study

reported in MarketingVOX

reveals a number of shifts in consumer behavior over the past ten years at a macro-level in media consumption, purchasing habits.

A PDF of the full report is available at Vertis Inc.

 

Our best wishes to everyone!

Have a wonderful Holiday Season!

 

The future of online investing

ING Campaign To Support Relaunch Of ShareBuilder Site This looks very much like the way young people will be investing in the years to come. To compete with ING will require innovation and a web based approach to reach clients for financial services.