Creativity Has No Limits When Marketing On Social Networks

Everyone likes getting "a lot for a little." That's what it's all about. Finding a sale, being a "good shopper," basically getting what you pay for and then some...that's the goal.

To me, social networks give people the opportunity to get what they "pay" for times a million. I mean, realistically there is very little to pay for, but the opportunities are literally endless.

My excitement about social network marketing was reignited by this new Burger King promo. It is perfect. Their ad campaign is all about the "tiny hands guy" who can't hold onto the huge burgers at Burger King. They tie this in really well with searches that don't have any results.

For whatever reason I feel like THESE are the kind of things that I want to spear head at some point. The ability to have a creative idea receive worldwide exposure is something that blows my mind. In addition, if done correctly, it can be marketed specifically toward a target audience that the company selected.

Who would've thought that this kind of effective and direct marketing would literally EVER exist for basically no charge. And it'll only get more effective and more direct in the future.

Wow. Talk about "getting your money's worth."

NFL Players Tweeting With Each Other

My whole life I've been a diehard sports fan. One of the most memorable days of my entire childhood was getting connected with someone who had an all-access pass to the 49ers player's parking lot. I met Steve Young, Ken Norton Jr., and Jerry Rice. But just seeing and hearing them talk, not even to me, was the coolest thing EVER.

On a different level, I've found the chatter between football players on Twitter to be very intriguing. I wont tell my kids about it, but I definitely find it interesting to see. The conversation that I'm mainly referring to was between the two biggest characters in the NFL: Chad Ochocinco and Terrell Owens.

These rowdy receivers who come up with touchdown celebrations weeks before they occur, happen to be close buddies now. As a result, now that "T.O." is a free agent, Ochocinco has made it loud and clear that he wants T.O. to be one of his teammates.

I eavesdropped as Ochocinco and T.O. discussed T.O.'s status. Ochocinco asked him "Have you signed on the dotted line yet?" to which T.O. responded "On the flight to Cinci!"

I feel like this eavesdropping gave me inside information that wouldn't realistically be reported on ESPN because nothing actually was happening, just some chatter.

As a sports fan, that's all I need to make my day a whole lot more interesting.

Beyond What We've Learned So Far

Of course APOC has provided all of its students with valuable knowledge, gotten fantastic speakers to present to us, and given us a very innovative learning experience that one would be hard pressed to find elsewhere.

In addition, from a variety of sources, we have received fantastic recommendations for websites, web tools, and other instruments of the digital kind that we can all take advantage of. I decided awhile ago to keep a list for myself so that I wouldn't forget them. I broke them into categories (that made sense to me) that probably wont be too hard to follow along with.

How selfish! My kindergarten teacher would be very disappointed in me for not being a better sharer...

*PLEASE COMMENT TO LET ME KNOW WHAT I'M LEAVING OUT

Marketing Analytics

-feedburner

-twitterfeed

-salesforce

Blueprint/wireframes

Gomockingbird

Lovelycharts

Development

-Wordpress

-Joomla

-Drupal

-Ning

-weebly

Sharing

-Google Docs

Outsourcings

-Elance

-Odesk

-Orangeslyce

Crowdsourcing

-99designs

-Deviantart

-Gettyimages

Twitter in a box:

-http://p2theme.com

-yammer.com

SEO

-Google Trends

-Google Keyword-Search

-SEOmoz

Enjoy,

Brian

More Connections...Thanks APOC

So as I discussed in my blog post about my business idea, I've started to look more seriously at starting this company. From what I can tell and how people have responded, the perception is that this could be both a very useful and potentially lucrative service.

However, I'd never really ventured into the whole seeking out a designer stage. Luckily for me, an awesome site designer/logo creator/brand extraordinaire named Tim Pederson came to our Wednesday night class. Zac told me to explain the idea to Tim to get his take on the idea. Tim loved it, and so I asked for his contact info so we could discuss it further. Apparently he thinks it'd be a piece of cake, and wants to tackle it once he finds the time to.

This was really cool to hear from someone who really knows what he's doing out in this digital space. With this bit of encouragement, James and I plan on collecting and analyzing more data to figure out exactly how this whole thing should operate.

Let me know your thoughts!

WordPress and Other Similar Services

Last Wednesday, Raanan Bar-Cohen of Automattic spoke to our APOC Online Technologies class about all the sites and services Automattic operates. One of these is WordPress, a site that many use for blogging, and even more use as the platform for their website.

You see, now, instead of hiring some random dude across the world who communicates in English through Google Translate to build a website for you from scratch, there is a more universal language. One person can build a site and be done with it, and another person can easily step in and take over from there.

BRILLIANT! WordPress and several other sites like Drupal and Joomla have made this whole "startup" thing even easier.

This is starting to make me more of a believer in the Chris Anderson's basic message of The Long Tail. Because of the new streamline way to make an online business idea a reality, a bunch of smaller businesses will be popping up and combining to have the same share of the market as the big dogs.

Connecting With A Classmate's Connection

Lisa Jacobs, one of my APOC peers, recently posted on her blog that her godson had started a company called OrangeSlyce that was basically an "elance.com" for college students who are looking to help small businesses and vice-versa (currently it just consists of ASU kids, although I signed up for it anyway).

Not only do I think this service is of an incredible value to the small businesses looking to "outsource" their work, I think the website is spectacular. So clean and well designed, in fact, that I messaged them and offered my marketing assistance (as they had a posting of their own looking for workers). It turned out that they didn't need my help, however, the CEO Sean Coleman emailed me back, which started an ongoing conversation. Thus far we have discussed marketing strategies, ideas for how I should design a website of my own, and useful resources for each other to use.

I plan to keeping in contact with Sean in the future, and thank Lisa for commenting on her godson's soon-to-be-huge business.

A Way To Return Lost Stuff

My friend James and I both spent this past summer working at internships in Madrid, Spain. There were three different groups of USC students there. One was from the engineering school, one was from the language school, and we were with the business school. What all three groups of students had in common, aside from the fact that we were from California, loved the nightlife, and never wanted to leave Madrid, was the fact that over 50% of each respective group lost a valuable item during the adventure. Whether it was a camera, a wallet, or a iPod, it was GONE.

This sucked...and there was no hope to get any of it back, not even if the finder of the lost item WANTED to get it back to the rightful owner. This hit home for me late in the trip when my brother lost the camera that had pictures of us RUNNING WITH THE BULLS. I still haven't come close to forgiving him for that one.

However, it inspired me, and my friend James. While we were eating at what happened to be the oldest restaurant in the world, we came up with an idea for a service that would help people have their lost items returned to them. Essentially, we decided that a service that registered one's device to a database that rewards people for returning found objects might be of interest to people in this world. They would receive a sticker in the mail that went onto their device that would instruct the finder how they would receive a reward for returning it.

We talked about this a lot, came up with some really good marketing ideas for it, but then realized we don't know yet if people would even sign up for such a thing. We both are entering the marketing field, and know that marketing today is building a product around your consumer. Our Professor referred to this as being market driven (finding the needs of the consumer and creating a product to satisfy that need) instead of product driven (creating a product and creating a need for the product).

This lead us to create a survey. Using SurveyMonkey, we created what we think is a pretty effective survey that answers our questions. We would've like to have asked more questions, but since we don't have the upgraded account, it limited us to 10. If we get responses that are positive, we will create a more specific account that will tell us more about our potential costumer. I've already generated over 60 responses just by posting it as my Facebook status and messaging people asking them to spend a minute on it, and would be especially happy if you took it as well!: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/82DVRFR

Through 60 responses, there clearly is a lot of interest. The perceived value of this service has showed a wide range (some think it should be free, others think it should cost more than $7). It's about split in half right now.

I'll give a full analysis on here in a few days about what kind of results we received and what our next step might be.

Stay tuned!