CarbonGraffiti - Email and Online Marketing

With the increased fragmentation and proliferation of markets thanks to the Web2 explosion, knowing who and where your audience is has become a lot harder. So what can you do to better target your potential customers?

 

What’s happening in digital marketing these days? Not much, so it seems.

This past week I attended, albeit briefly, the TFM&A show in London. I normally love trade shows – the glitz, the glamour, the schwag - the buzz always gets me really inspired. This time it was all a bit different though. Maybe I’ve been getting used to the B2C arena in the last 1.5 years and become somewhat removed from the furore that is a B2B marketing tradeshow, but overall there was a strong theme I couldn’t shake – it’s all the same.
 

It’s not social media, or email marketing, or the family of acronyms that includes SEO, PPC, SEM, SMM, CPA, CPC, ATOS, or any others. It’s really quite simple - the most important thing you as a marketer will do in 2009 is analyze.

 

Walked in at 8:30 am to find my desk as one massive present. This is the stuff of legend and lore.

For many of us, answering the question ‘What are you doing’ is analogous to checking our email – we do it several times a day and it’s become second nature.  But for every new social network we jump on, there are friends, families, and colleagues who will ask us ‘Why are you doing it?’

They’re questioning what drives and motivates us to open up our daily lives to anyone and everyone, when it’s possible that no one’s listening.   They can’t imagine opening a Twitter account and talking to an empty room, so why do we bother?
 

The Curriculum Vitae. That all-important sheet or more of paper that represents your first ever point of contact with a potential employer. Your CV is an extension of your professional self and comprehensively consolidates and highlights your professional talents and accomplishments, as well as your skills, education, previous roles and abilities. But in today’s internet-powered marketplace, isn’t an 8.5” x 11” sheet of paper just ‘Employment 1.0’?

Why submit a static, physical document when it doesn’t even include numerous glowing referrals of your past or present work?

 

Lifestreaming. It can be defined as ‘an automated, effective way to centralize one’s various web activities into a single, unified website or stream’ and it can take various forms. Some people use services like FriendFeed or Tumblr, whilst others opt to make their own. Whichever way you choose to aggregate your activities, the fact remains that a platform is becoming very necessary to pull them all together.

 

Freelance Folder have just posted a fantastic list of more than 35 of the best social media tools that are sure to help make your life easier. From juggling multiple social networking profiles to digging up your old high school friends, this list has ‘em all.

View the full post at: http://freelancefolder.com/35-social-media-tools-make-life-easier/ or keep reading for the quick n’ dirty version.

 

UPDATE: No, I didn’t win. But, being shortlisted out of 3 nominees for the whole South of England is fine by me. Not bad considering I’ve been in Brighton for only 1.6 years!

The award night was great, you can see my pics on Flickr, or my videos on YouTube of the actual awards ceremony. Kudos to Plugin Media for their great application of glowsticks, and my congratulations to the eventual Farm Freelancer of the Year award winner, Bevan Stephens. See Bevan’s winning site here.

Ecstatic is an understatement!

I’ve just been confirmed as a shortlisted candidate for the Digital Media Awards: South ‘Freelancer of the year award‘, with the actual award ceremony (and judging) to take place here in Brighton on November 27th.

 

Silverpop have just announced something pretty monumental for the email marketing industry: they’re the first major ESP to bring the next big thing in today’s marketing environment to the email marketing space – email marketing is going social.

It was only a matter of time that email marketing and social media would collide (I’ve been racking my brains for the last few months trying to find a way to marry the two) and kudos to Silverpop for bringing their version to market first.