Author: flickfusion

Flick Fusion Video Marketing is a pioneering video technology company, specializing in creating, managing, and distributing dynamic and cost-effective online and mobile video products on the world's largest content delivery network. Each video is designed to help our clients reach and engage their customers with richer content and greater impact that results in increased sales and ROI. Data, photos, inventory, audio, music, and special offers are automatically combined to create compelling multimedia video solutions that are fast, easy, and affordable. We look forward to serving you.

Don’t Blend

There’s a common type of feedback I get from clients when presenting new marketing and creative ideas. It goes something like this: “This doesn’t feel like a <insert client’s industry> ad. Let me show you what my competition is doing and we can mimic that.”

I hear this all the time. And itss the single most common form of misguided feedback I receive. Why? Because the point of marketing isn’ to help you blend in — it’s to help you stand out. I’ll say that again… The point of marketing isn’t to help you blend in, it’s to help you stand out.

Striving for anything short of standing out is a waste of time, money and effort.

D. Jones

Marketing Strategist/Creative Consultant

SmackDabble, LLC

There is Nothing Tricky About Permission

There’s an increasingly popular trend among advertisers that think they have to trick consumers into paying attention. They do it with too-good-to-be-true offers, flashy production and bait-and-switch techniques. Does it work? Yes, sometimes it certainly does. But it’s the most expensive, invasive and difficult sort of marketing to pull off. So why try?

Instead, consider just asking your customers and prospect for permission to talk with them. And once you have that, begin an open, honest, straightforward dialogue with them about who you are and how you can serve them. It’s inexpensive (darn near free, actually) it’s totally non-invasive and it works better than interruption marketing.

So who do you have permission to communicate with?

D. Jones
Marketing Strategist/Creative Consultant
SmackDabble, LLC

Cloud Computing and Cars: A Web Services Primer

By Bridget Townsend

Keeping up with shifting technology is an uphill battle when marketing in the automotive vertical. See how web services can help you focus on promotion, rather than your infrastructure.

Web services are not a new invention, but only recently have we seen them gaining acceptance in many industries, including automotive. If you consider the nature of a vehicle, combined with the exploding number of consumers heading online to research and shop for vehicles, this makes sense. Because a vehicle can have over 10,000 options and pricing configurations, ensuring that an automotive selling site has the most up-to-date and accurate information, and that it has the tools that consumers demand (such as allowing consumers to build their own cars by adding options, colors, etc., and then comparing them to other models) is a monumental job. Enter web services.

What web services can do
Before we delve deeper into how web services can benefit a wide range of industries, let’s step back and explain more concretely what they are and what they do. Web services are interfaces that exchange information between an application and a remote data source. They allow software applications to access and use functionality and data created by another provider, or multiple providers. This is an abstract concept, so let’s make it tangible with an example of web services, courtesy of the website XML.com: a music CD. If you want to play a CD, you put it into a CD player and the player plays it for you. The CD player offers a CD playing service. You can replace one CD with another, or take your CDs to a friend’s house and play them on their player. No matter what music is on the CD or what player you use, you can listen to it because the systems talk to each other. This works the same way as web services do. Without web services, every CD would come with its own player and the two would not be separated. This sounds odd, but it’s the way many software systems have been built. In effect, building a software system has been like re-inventing the wheel every time, with all the development time and costs that includes. With that basic definition, let’s circle back to how industries are using web services, and why they would want to. Let’s take Google as an example. Google has popularized web service utilities for businesses and for the general public. Groups ranging from non-profit organizations to book clubs use their Google Groups and Google Docs to share information and stay in touch. Another example is cdyne, which applies web services to a specific domain or demographic. Their demographics web service delivers enhanced census data, which their clients use to target customers or neighborhoods for their own services and products.

Web services for automotive
In the automotive industry, this same concept is applied to a vertical market. Online vehicle shoppers want quick and easy access to the most up-to-date and detailed vehicle data. A vehicle manufacturer or portal site could re-invent the wheel by developing its own configuration and comparison tool to combine raw data with available options, but the creation is time-consuming and requires sophisticated programming skills and constant data updates. Using web services, they create a simple consumer-facing interface and flow data through it from a data provider. They don’t have to create an infrastructure or manage data updates; the provider takes care of that. Every interface is customized for look and feel so every website retains individuality. Check out Vehix.com and Sam’s Club Auto Buying Program for examples. Both use web services to deliver vehicle data, but each interface is customized and unique. And neither company has to worry about updating the data or keeping the service running; the web service provider takes care of that. They’ve increased their capability without having to invest in a new infrastructure, derail their development team or invest in new personnel. Why they work
To continue with the “why” of web services, reduced cost and development time are key. A basic example to illustrate this point: a Microsoft Word document. When you go to write a document, you would never dream of starting by developing your own word processor. Microsoft has already done that, and done it well. They’ve provided the platform and they are responsible for managing it, updating it and releasing new versions. You only have to use it.

Web services follow the same logic. An expert in the space has already developed the platform; customizing it is much cheaper and faster than developing it all over again. Consider the example of cloud computing, which allows developers to exploit functionality without having to implement a full-blown application. Because this practice is cheaper, and because the internet is increasingly more reliable, more companies are adopting this approach. Early adoption within a handful of Fortune 500 companies, including Proctor & Gamble and General Electric, sets the stage for cloud computing to go mainstream. This “cloud” allows companies to more efficiently and cost-effectively store, manage and share data without any hardware or software to download, install or maintain. Their customers can focus on their core competencies, not the infrastructure.

Another benefit of using an existing web service is access to the innovations of that implementation. As we all know, technology is never static; changes are happening every day and trying to keep up with new functionality can derail a development team from focusing on the core competencies that result in immediate revenue.

As an example from the automotive industry, many companies need to be able to decode vehicle identification numbers (VINs), but they generate revenue by creating consumer-facing websites that help consumers find the their perfect vehicle. They don’t need to build a VIN decoder, they need to buy one. What they’re presenting to the consumer is key, not what is happening on the back-end.

Conclusion
If you are developing websites for your clients, or are tasked with bringing all the providers together who are essential for functionality and deployment, you should consider taking a closer look at web services. By using an off-the-shelf solution and then building on that platform, you can save your clients time to market and significant funds and give them access to groundbreaking innovations. As a result, you have more money left in your budget for marketing and promotion, and your clients can get a head start on generating more revenue.

Bridget Townsend is director of engineering, product and client services for Chrome Systems, Inc.

Source: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/20362.asp

The Worse SEO Mistake You Make

By Brandt Dainow

Learn where most companies misstep when it comes to his crucial component of their online marketing strategies.

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of tuning the content and coding of a website in order to maximize its listings in search engines. SEO should be part of every well-rounded online marketing program. Pay-per-click advertising is all very well, but it means you have to pay for every visitor. SEO is about getting free traffic from the search engines. Over the course of two years or more, nothing has a better return on investment than SEO. Thus, if you plan on having a website that runs for more than two years, search engine optimization should be a key part of your online marketing strategy.I started doing search engine optimization in 1996 when Web Position (the world’s first SEO tool) was in beta. I remember receiving an e-mail from the company that pointed out that its tool would make it possible to sell SEO services to clients. At the time, nobody was doing search engine optimization, but it was instantly obvious to me that such a service would be essential if people wanted to be found on the web. I have now been doing search engine optimization for 12 years — and in some areas I “own” Google.

The most common mistake that organizations make with regard to SEO is bringing their SEO consultants into the process too late. Many companies fail to give SEO its due consideration during a website’s design phase. In fact, many companies don’t give it any thought at all until after a site’s design has been finalized. However, it is during the planning and design processes that SEO considerations are most important and will provide the greatest advantage.

Coding for success

The coding of a site affects search engine optimization in many ways. In fact, coding has a greater impact on a site’s listings in the search engines than the site’s content. Many sites — including those of some top brands — simply cannot be read by search engines at all. If you want to see for yourself, install the Google taskbar in your browser and start looking at the page ranks that appear when you visit various sites. Page rank is Google’s assessment of the global importance of a site. It will not take you long to find major sites that have no page rank. Unless the site is very new, a lack of page rank means Google cannot read it.

The technology used to build a site has a direct bearing on search engine optimization. For example, most search engines will not read pages if a URL contains a question mark. A question mark indicates that the content is the result of some dynamic process, such as a content management system or PHP. In other words, it tells a search engine that the content is being generated automatically.

When a search engine perceives that content is automatically generated, it has no way of knowing if the content is generated every hour or only once a year. There is typically a delay of six to eight weeks between the time that a site is read by a search engine and the time at which it appears in the listings. Thus, the search engine has no way of knowing whether what it has just read will still be there when it sends a user to the page in a month or two. In short, any page with a question mark in its URL is potentially untrustworthy. It was precisely for this reason that the mod_rewrite module was produced for Apache. (Microsoft has a similar module for IIS.) Mod_rewrite enables you to lay static URLs over dynamic ones. Adding mod_rewrite to a system before you start coding it is a small job. Adding it to a large dynamic shopping site after it is running is a major headache, and may simply be impossible.

If you read Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s Stanford University dissertation, describing the algorithms they wanted to use in a search engine, you will find that a great deal of space is devoted to the analysis of the importance of pages according to their position inside the navigation structure of a website. Therefore, how you arrange the pages and how they link to each other has a direct bearing on the search engine optimization of those pages. I have used this information to look at potential site designs and, in some cases, have found that the core content would actually rank as less important than the site’s privacy policy, simply because of the way links were built to the respective sections.

There are many ways of coding the same page, and not all ways are equal to a search engine. Dynamic menus are a case in point. At present, search engines cannot run JavaScript or Flash. The only hyperlinks that they can follow are standard HTML <A> tags. You want search engines to follow your links because that is how they find the pages inside your site. It is therefore important that you create navigation structures that they can follow. Some dynamic menus can be followed by search engines and some cannot. It depends on how they are coded. Generally speaking, menus that are dynamic because of changes to CSS properties are fine. However, those in which the target page is called via programming are not. Once again, it is best to lay considerations like this down during the design brief because changing every link in the site later is expensive.

This becomes more important if you plan on having a content management system (CMS). If software is going to be writing your copy, or code, you need to ensure that what it produces is as search engine-friendly as possible. Many content management systems generate horrific code from a search engine point of view. Once again, changing a CMS after it has been deployed is a major nightmare — and often impossible.

Early communication for optimal results

You often won’t hear complaints from SEO consultants unless search engine activity is absolutely impossible (and sometimes not even then). SEOs are used to dealing with (from their perspective) sub-standard sites, sites that are barely readable by search engines, and sites that contain many problematic elements. SEOs have learned to accept such sites, and they often have no choice but to do the best they can with the garbage they are given by customers. Many SEOs have learned that pointing out problems may result in a client’s deciding to go to a yes-man who will not make waves and is happy to take the client’s money for a year or two while achieving nothing.

If you want to get the most out of search engine optimization, your SEO consultant should be the first person you talk to when developing a site — before you even write a brief and start searching for potential designers. The sites that have had the most success when I’ve worked with them are the ones that asked me to modify their briefs to cover the requirements of SEO. The last time I did this, three of the five design agencies that had been asked to bid withdrew because they could not meet the standards required to make a search engine-friendly site. Throughout the design and construction process, I worked closely with the coders. Most new sites don’t get listed by Google at all for months. Our site was No. 1 in Google within two weeks of launch.

Bring SEO experts into the discussions of what will be built at the earliest possible moment. Don’t let the design agency or your own designers get their feet under the table until you have spoken to the SEO expert.

There are many elements that need to be considered during the SEO process, and these discussions often result in the SEO expert becoming the most unpopular person at the table. Such conversations often degrade into a litany of “no, you can’t do that because the search engines don’t like it,” followed by “no, you can’t do that because the search engines don’t like it.” Companies have to watch their favorite design features drop like flies. Sometimes designers have even gone so far as to accuse me of trying to cripple their designs. But ultimately, it is not the fault of the SEOs; they are just the messengers. They are simply telling you the way things are. When it comes down to it, if you want your site to get listed in the search engines, you have to give the search engines what they want.

Remember: Search engines do not have to list every site on the Web. In fact, despite what they may claim, they don’t even try. All a search engine has to do is provide people with a list of 10 reasonably valid results from which to choose. The lesson: You need the search engines. They don’t need you. Therefore, it is incumbent upon you to understand what they require and give it to them.

Bringing an SEO in after a site is finished is like deciding to do the electrical wiring on a house after you have moved in. By bringing an SEO into the site design process, you can save time and money later. In addition, your site is likely to achieve listings that it could never achieve if SEO were undertaken after the site was already finished.

Design a site for the search engines, and the viewers will follow. Design a site the search engines can’t read, and nobody will ever know it exists.

Source: http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/20052.asp

Better Place?

I’m going to take a break from my normal market-centric rants to call attention to this fascinating article about a new company called Better Place. The company’s basic premise… mash together automotive and cell phone business models to create the infrastructure and consumer demand necessary for the mass-scale adoption of electric cars — and the elimination of the oil-based economy.

Crazy? It’ll never happen? Read the article from Wired and judge for yourself.

Living Your Brand – It Starts With People

A few weeks ago, we discussed how your brand is more than the sum of your tagline, logo and name. Rather, it’s a promise that you deliver to individuals every time they interact with your company. And that promise begins and ends in one place — your people.

Even in an automated and digital world, people do business with people — it’s there that we begin to judge the organizations we dealing with. So, if you’re positioning your dealership as “the customer-friendly alternative to the big boys” then your people best live every aspect of that. If your brand promise is “the lowest price, no exceptions,” then how your people act and make decisions should change to reflect that.

In short, if your people can’t live your brand, then it doesn’t matter what your logo looks like or your tagline says.

D. Jones
Marketing Strategist/Creative Consultant
SmackDabble, LLC

Dipping Your Toe Into The Social Media Pool

Social media…it is THE internet buzz phrase of the past year. MySpace, Facebook, MeetUp, Twitter, Flickr…they’re all changing the way people interact with the internet and each other. But entering this social space as a dealership can be a bit scary. So here’s one idea to get you started.

Take a look at Meetup.com. Meetup is a social networking site that allow people with like-minded hobbies and interests (i.e. stay-at-home moms, fly fisherman, unicycle enthusiasts, etc.) to find each other, organize “meetups” and communicate with each other. Consider signing up your dealership, or an individual within it, for the local Corvette collectors group, or the classic VW owners group – whatever makes sense for your dealership. Doing this will give you an opportunity to interact with fans of your brand and perhaps even host a “meetup” at your dealership where members can test drive special vehicles or get a sneak peek at the new models.

Try it and let us know how it goes.

D. Jones
Marketing Strategist/Creative Consultant
SmackDabble, LLC

Video Has Officially Arrived

Nothing has changed the way consumers use the Internet quite like video. Youtube.com and its brethren have fulfilled the true multi-media promise that was made back when we were all still on dial-up. We knew the day would come… and it has arrived.

So what’s made it happen? Well first of all, well over 50% of all internet users in the United States now have high-speed internet access. Secondly, simpler video editing software and less expensive video cameras have made user-created video affordable to middle America.

Video and multi-media are no longer nice-to-haves for dealership websites… it’s a must have to remain competitive. In fact, video has been shown to increase click rates and the time a user spends on your site.

In short… It’s time to make video a part of your dealership’s web system.

D. Jones
Marketing Strategist/Creative Consultant
SmackDabble, LLC

A Brand Is A Promise

I’m often asked about “branding” in terms of a company’s name, logo or tagline. Although these three elements are important, they constitute a small fraction of your brand.

Instead of thinking about your brand in terms of logos and taglines, think of your brand as a promise. Your brand is the promise you make to customers, employees, strategic partners, the media and everyone else. When you talk about brand, you’re really talking about experience — the experience an individual can expect each and every time they interact with your company. This extends to every touchpoint of your business, from calling customer service, visiting your showroom, clicking out to your website and returning to your dealership for service.

Thinking about branding in these terms forces you to ask different questions about how you run and position your business. Branding in this way can have dramatic effects on your business — effects that changing up a logo or tagline will never have on their own.

D. Jones
Marketing Strategist/Creative Consultant
SmackDabble, LLC

Web Marketing Grows, but How Much?

JULY 3, 2008

A Look Behind the Numbers

“More than one-half of the average marketer’s budget is now spent online,” according to a press release from lead generation company Clash-Media. The firm conducted its “Online Lead Generation (B2C) Report 2008” in May with E-consultancy.

But the press release may be a misreading of the report. According to respondents, a greater proportion of lead generation budgets is being spent online (on average, 53%) than offline (44%).

The survey’s methodology seems to confirm the point.

Of those polled, 73% said their channels to market were “online or multichannel,” and 23% said “online only.” Only about 4% said they were “offline only.”

So respondents were focused largely on online approaches. The rest of the summary issued with the report was more accurate. Among the findings:

Seven out of 10 responding marketers said their companies used search engine optimization, paid search and e-mail marketing to in-house lists.
Offline marketing methods largely decreased, with only press and television advertising growing. Over 90% of marketers saw online lead generation as a growth area.
Print media was still the most commonly used offline method to generate consumer leads (65% of organizations).
Natural search (79% of respondents), e-mail marketing to in-house lists (75%) and paid search (71%) were the three most commonly used online methods for lead generation.

Without question, online ad spending in the US is rising quickly. eMarketer predicts double-digit growth will continue for the next several years.

Source: http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?id=1006376