The ad shares an amazing cross section of data in a very easy to digest format – its visual, relevant and its presenting numbers about what people are using their Sprint cell phones for NOW. Like:

• The number of cell phone users – then how many just hung up
• The number of incoming emails – and the power of spam filters
• What people are searching for
• How video is being used on their phones
• The popularity of texting – even in business meetings
• People using their phones for Twitter – and the fact that 26% of the population has no idea what Twitter is
• That people are using their phones to research destinations (such as restaurants) and oh, by the way, we even lose those phones
• And the fact that now, the first thing people do when a flight lands is turn on that cell phone!

That is a TON of information – relevant information with a little humor built in – that is conveyed in less than 60 seconds! And as someone who uses my cell phone for just about every one of those purposes, I got a really good sense that if I ever needed to change providers, that Sprint would have everything that I need. Luckily Verizon has done a great job of offering the services I need at a price I am satisfied with, but if I ever considered changing, the first network I would think of would be Sprint.

What other ads/commercials have you seen that are so effective, especially in today’s highly fragmented ad market?

1. Your Website

Traditional websites were fairly static, one-way conversations where the website’s purpose was to inform/education, promote or sell to a specific audience. Today’s consumers want more than that – they want to know who they are doing business with; they want to know the voice behind the product and they want to be able to have a conversation with that voice.

If you have a traditional website, add a blog component to it and open up the conversation between yourself and your potential customers (and existing ones, too). Not only does it give a voice to your brand, it allows you to educate your customers, build a relationship with them and market yourself.

WordPress the perfect platform for adding that blog component. It is open-source, free, and very easy to learn. You can add it on to any existing website or you can start from scratch and let your blog be the face of your online presence.

2. Your Email

This is a real easy one!! Use a signature block in your emails that you send out. Include your name, website address, tagline (if you have one) or one-liner highlighting your area of expertise, and any other contact information you want in front of your potential customers.

3. Get Social

There are social networks for everyone and everything! Facebook, Twitter, and Ning are just the tip of the iceberg. Social networks allow you to expand your own network and tap into the connections of others with similar interests. Be professional, consistent and genuine in all of your social networking endeavors and you never know what doors will open!

Discussion forums are another form of social networking. Find forums that are in your area of expertise or your potential customers area of interest and get involved. Ask questions and answer questions, be genuine and willing to give before you expect to receive anything!

4. Be Part of a Two Way Conversation

Develop a list of other sites that encourage two way conversation and get involved. Leave meaningful comments on posts that interest you. Always use your first name or recognized nickname when leaving a comment. Do not insult the site owner by leaving “keywords” in place of your name – I usually delete those comments here. Do leave the URL of your website in the URL field (when available) and use an email address that works in the event that the site owner would like to continue the conversation directly with you.

5. Be a Guest Author

Most blog owners I know will gladly post an article written by someone else along with a byline, if that article is well written and pertinent to the site. This is a great way for you to share your expertise with a different audience and expand your reach at the same time.

Your Turn…

This is by no means a complete list! What are some other ways you have used to market yourself online?

Thanks to Ryan at College Crunch for inspiring this post.

The Olympic Games kick off today and whether you are more interested in the athletic stories or the political stories surrounding the games, there is certainly no shortage of information online. If you do a search for Olympics on Google, it finds more than 82,000,000 results and that number is sure to grow rapidly over the next few weeks.

Since I will be spending a lot of time covering the games for the next few weeks at my site Sport Girls Play, I have arranged to have some great guest writers for Essential Keystrokes. There are a few guest spots still available, so if you are interested, let me know.

If you have kids, be sure to check out the Olympic-themed printable activities I have posted on my newly redesigned Printables4Kids site.

GO WORLD! I’m rooting for all the athletes and the inspirational stories that each of them brings to Beijing.

Jeremiah Owyang used Twitter to create a MicroMedia event that resulted in more than 2500 opinions on the commercials, their effectiveness, brand relevance, and overall appeal. As Twitterers, like myself, watched the ads we sent our comments to a Twitter address that Jeremiah had set up just for the event. Using one of the Twitter search engines (I was using Twitter Search) I was able to read what others had to say about the commercials, too. Jeremiah has already written a post about the aftermath (A Night at the Twitterbowl), his analysis and some tips to brand managers.

So what ads were my favorite? Overall, I felt the field was pretty weak this year. Too boring, too predictable, and downright stupid in many cases. But if I have to choose, my Top 5 were:

1. Budweiser’s Rocky/Clydesdales spot – the Clydesdales are always a classic
2. Coca-Cola – Charlie Brown and balloons parade
3. Toyata’s Big Wheel races – appealing to the 70s/80s kid in many of us
4. Diet Pepsi Max – the Chris Katan cameo made it successful
5. Victoria’s Secret – excellent timing, tie in to both the Super Bowl and Valentine’s Day

Did you miss the game and the commercials? You can see them all in the order they appeared at www.myspace.com/superbowlads.

What were your favorites? Which ones did you really dislike (Amp Energy, Careerbuilder, and Salesgenie for me)? And which ones do you think the companies got their money’s worth out of? 

So, are you shopping today? What are the hot items on your list this year?

I might do some shopping this evening after the kids go to bed, but I got most of mine done on Friday – online. I was not going to brave the stores, but took advantage of the great deals that my favorite online retailer, Amazon, had all day. Plus, Amazon has the best shipping and has NEVER let me down.

Here are seven common mistakes businesses make when starting an e-newsletter:

1. Failure to get permission. I am really hoping that this one should go without saying these days, but you cannot add people to your mailing list without getting their permission first. Building a list may be a challenge at first, but using ethical methods will always produce better results. You can add people who you have established as contacts (via some previous communication) as long as you provide them with a clear means to opt-out of future mailings.

2. Using your regular email client. Raise your hand if you have ever sent or received an email where a large number of recipient email addresses were in the To or CC fields? I see a lot of hands!! Apart from the fact that it is bad manners to broadcast your contact list to the world, you have absolutely no reliable way of tracking your newsletter campaign’s effectiveness if you send it out via Outlook.

Email marketing services such as Constant Contact, 1ShoppingCart and Aweber, give you tools to track your campaign’s effectiveness. You can see how many people received it, opened it, when and what they clicked on, and you have the ability to manage opt-in, opt-out, and bounces. One client we converted to Constant Contact (from Outlook broadcast) in August of last year is still singing its praises four campaigns later. (Shoestring Smarts has a good article on the major email marketing service providers)

3. Lack of focus. Before you send out your first e-newsletter, you need to have a plan. What is the primary purpose behind the e-newsletter? Are you aiming to inform, sell, drive traffic to your site, or a combination of the three? Set up a rough editorial calendar so that each issue has a primary message and each article or excerpt works to reinforce your focus and/or brand.

4. Lengthy copy. With a printed newsletter it is much easier to define copy length – columns, text boxes, and pages help draw the boundaries for us, but electronic media boundaries are not as defined. A web page could keep going as long as we can keep scrolling.

• Craft your headlines carefully and break your copy up into quick reading blocks.
• Include just the “teaser” paragraph in the e-newsletter – bring the reader back to your web site for the complete article. (Bonus – you get more information about what your readers are interested in using this method)
• Use subheads and bullets to increase readability
• Don’t forget to add an image or two

5. Image blunders. When you send out an e-newsletter, the images need to reside somewhere on the web in order for your readers to actually be able to see them. E-newsletter newbies often make the mistake of linking to images off their desktops or copying and pasting them into the body of the newsletter. You must either load the images onto your web server or if you use an email marketing service you can upload the images to that server. The URL of the image must be the full URL, not just the image name.

Another common image blunder is using image files that are too large. An image on the web looks no better at 300 dpi than it does at 72 dpi. The only difference is in the file size. Optimize your images for size and your readers will thank you.

One more tip – be sure you give your readers a link to view the newsletter on the web or better yet, a text only version which can be helpful for those getting their email on a mobile device.

6. One hit wonders. In addition to having a focus, you need to have an idea as to how often you will be sending your e-newsletter out. You need to allow sufficient time between issues for you to gather/write quality information, but you need to be sure you don’t wait so long between issues that your readers forget about you. Don’t forget to let your readers know how often they should expect to hear from you.

7. No call to action. This has got to be the absolute, number one pitfall I have seen businesses stumble on. Don’t just leave your readers with a pretty email message – offer a coupon, deal or other compelling reason to visit your website, purchase your product, hire your company, or simply pick up the phone.

By avoiding these pitfalls, an e-newsletter can become an ideal customer relations and sales tool.

I’d love to get your feedback on this topic! What makes or breaks an e-newsletter in your opinion?

Sam Decker of Bazaarvoice was one of the presenters and he talked about using User Generated Content, such as user reviews to generate more sales at your site. As a matter of fact, a recent Sherpa study found that 58% of online shoppers prefer sites with reviews.

Who do you trust more when getting information on a potential purchase – a sales rep or marketer? Or do you trust someone else like you, who has already purchased the product you are looking at?

I think that there are two main reasons why word of mouth or user reviews are so powerful.

It’s all about the money

For one, we perceive that it is less likely that the reviewer has a monetary stake in the sale of the product, therefore they are really telling the truth as to how good the product is or is not. The sales rep or marketer will most definitely receive some form of monetary gain from the sale of the product.

It’s all about the experience

Secondly, who is going to be able to better tell us the benefits of a product, how it is used, what works great, and what the product’s downfalls are? The user who purchased, used and reviewed the product. After all, word of mouth advertising has been around for a long time has always been perceived as more “authentic”.

The sales pitch could tell us the product benefits, but we are naturally going to be more drawn to the product if other users can sing its praises or warn us of a sub-standard product.

What about paid reviews?

Does the fact that a reviewer was compensated in some way diminish the value of the review? I think it all depends on the source. If the reviewer does a nice job of giving us the products pros and cons and let’s the reader know that it is a paid review, then no, it doesn’t diminish the value of the review (in my opinion).

What does this mean for your business?

Let your customers do some of your sales work for you! Give them a platform to speak their minds whether through user reviews or comments. Then take that information and implement it in a meaningful way at your site by featuring top rated products or in the case of a blog, use the popularity plug in to help you feature your most popular posts.

The webinar was very interesting and over the next few days I will share more of the insights and statistics I found helpful.

Join the conversation! What do you think of user generated content for generating sales? What are some examples of sites that really implement this strategy well?

What was the inspiration for SOBcon?

Liz Strauss and I had talked some last year about possibly doing a business blogging conference in Savannah. But as we looked at it more closely, my wife and I felt that the project would be bigger than we wanted to take on ourselves right then.

At the same time a couple other people approached Liz suggesting that it would be a great idea to gather some of the crowd that meets at Successful-Blog every Tuesday on Open Comment Night.

Chicago seemed like a great central place to bring people together. And with the idea coming from several different directions at the same time, it made sense to move forward.

We decided to build the conference around the S.O.B. Award that Liz passes out each week. The idea was to come up with a different kind of conference experience. Instead of making our conference about the speakers we chose to make the conference about the attendees.

Using Open Comment Night as an inspiration, we’ve put together a large group of folks who will be leading sessions with the idea that they will be as interactive with the attendees as possible.

Blogging ultimately is about people and interacting with one another. The most successful blogs out there build a sense of community. So we’ve pulled together a truly dynamic group of folks and will have several shorter sessions rather than just a few speakers talking at you for a long time like you might find in

The overarching theme for the whole thing will be helping folks take their blogging to the next level. The way we’ve set it up there will be plenty to take away for everyone, from the novice blogger just getting started to the person who’s been blogging since Technorati was only tracking a few million blogs.

What will you (meaning Chris Cree) be speaking on? What do you want attendees to gain from this?

I’ll be moderating a panel about blogging tools with representatives from MyBlogLog, Evoca, and TheGoodBlogs. These three services are great ways that bloggers can add tremendous value to their own blogs and build community at the same time. We will be taking questions from the audience for each of these folks so it will be a chance for folks to find out what they want to learn about these tools.

I was offered the opportunity to have my own time on the platform. But I figure the conference isn’t about me. And with my background in operations, planning things out, making things happen, and solving problems quickly on the fly I felt I would add more value to the conference by helping out more behind the scenes the day of the conference.

By bringing together some blog tools that folks may or may not have heard of I figure I’m multiplying the value I bring to the conference more than I would by just speaking on my own.

Will the conference only benefit bloggers?

That’s a really good question that I hadn’t considered before. Obviously our intention initially was to bring together bloggers and help them take their blogs to the next level.

But when you think about it successful bloggers are also successful networkers. For someone looking at the possibility of getting started blogging, what better way to get a really solid network out of the gate than to get to know some folks who are already knocking it out of the park?

I mean think about an opportunity hang out and rub elbows with folks like Steve Farber, Mike Wagner, David Armano, Wendy Piersall, Phil Gerbyshak, Liz Strauss, Dr. Rob Wolcott, and Andy Sernovitz. That is just a tiny sampling of the folks who will be in the room at this conference. And not all of them are even speaking!

Is an opportunity to spend some time with these all these folks and more valuable to non-bloggers? There is no doubt in my mind the answer is a resounding yes!

Which speaker are you most looking forward to hearing?

I’m especially looking forward to the panel session from the Iowa contingent, Drew McLellan, Mike Sansone, and Mike Wagner.

I’m an operations guy by training and experience. These three will be talking about marketing. And that’s an area that I am always wanting to learn more about.

Which session do you think will be most valuable?

I guess that depends on where someone is when they get to the conference. If you are hungry to gain more insight on Networking, Marketing, Videoblogging or Podcasting, Design, or Word of Mouth Marketing, there will be a session for you. There will be sessions by Blog Coaches and there will be some blog critiques done right there live.

Ultimately, though I suspect the most valuable session for many folks will be the Live Open Comment Night that we have planned on Friday night right after the concert by Christine Kane.

I think that session will be the most valuable because it will be the most interactive of all the sessions and it will give people an opportunity to begin to get to know one another. It will be a great starting point for people to start adding to their networks.

Have you registered yet? What are you waiting for? It is going to be a great event – an event like no other!

So Wendy was leading the contest until she caught wind of the tactics Steve was using to get members for her community and she decided it was time to take off the gloves! In the name of disclosure, Wendy has offered to pay me to blog about their little competition.
So go join Steve’s community so Wendy can win! If you want more information on this whole contest, check out Wendy’s blog and get involved.

And Wendy, you can take the amount you offered for blogging about this and add it to your Kiva donation kitty.

It’s my first Thursday Thirteen and I figured I would return to my roots on this one. Let’s give our sites a mini-audit using this checklist of 13 things every website needs!

1. Title – Do you see that blue bar at the top of your screen? What does it say? At a minimum, it should have the title of your site plus a few key words or phrases that will help your users find you in their bookmarks. 50-80 characters is optimum.
2. Description – You need an “elevator speech” for your site – a concise, descriptive summary of your site – up to 250 characters including spaces. You need this in your meta tags, but also keep it handy for when you register your site with directories and/or social marketing sites. It is also what appears under your site title (see #1) when being listed in the search engines.
3. Keywords – Not just any old words, but approximately 1024 solid characters of descriptive words used in your site. Don’t list keywords you think might be popular but don’t appear in or apply to your site.
4. Navigation – Is the navigation on your site intuitive? Is it laid out in a logical manner? Keep it simple and specific. You don’t want to lose your readers because they have to click through 8 layers of navigation to get to the info they need.
5. White Space – Make your site easy on your readers’ eyes by giving all the elements room to breathe. Ample white space around images and margins will give these elements more impact. See this article at A List Apart for more explanation.
6. Content - But not just any old copy. Your main page needs a minimum of 250 meaningful, content rich words. Remember, your visitors are in a hurry – give them the content they need in small, easy to read chunks, set off by subheads, bulleted lists and short paragraphs.
7. Fresh Information – When was the last time you updated your site? Create a news section or at a minimum, change out the content or images on your home page regularly.
8. Spell Check – Don’t tell me you forgot this one! Take the time to tend to the details like spell and grammar check – it will save you future embarrassment.
9. Images – A picture is worth a thousand words and a well-placed picture or graphical element will save your web site from eternal loneliness. There are plenty of places to get images for free or at a small cost. And don’t forget to tag those images, too!!!
10. Quality Links – Provide your readers with quality outbound links and seek out quality inbound links. Your PageRank will thank you.
11. Call to Action – What is the purpose of your site? To sell a product? A service? To get more readers? Make it easy for your readers to figure out what your purpose is and to act on it. And don’t forget to put your ads above the fold.
12. Copyright – Your content is yours and while the average, rule following individual can understand the Creative Commons License, others can’t. Protect your information.
13. Contact – How can anyone do business with you if they can’t contact you?

There you have it! I’m sure there is more to the list – feel free to share!

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