Digital Marketing

We've heard a lot about the "post-PC" world ever since Steve Jobs heralded its arrival with the launch of the iPad 2 in March 2011. As Rachel Pasqua and I note in our forthcoming book, Mobile Marketing: An Hour a Day, Jobs’ proclamation, coming from the leader of a computer manufacturer, was alternately bold and precarious, signaling as it did that the future lies in portable computing devices like smartphones and tablets. Or maybe it was just recognition of the writing on the wall.

During a recent graduation speech for a custom Mini-MBA: Digital Marketing program delivered at a fortune 100 company, the senior global VP in charge of all global marketing recommended to the 40 executives that they “be brave”. She continued that senior management was not likely to explicitly bless new initiatives nor provide clear and concise directions. Her advice was that they take the learning and skills gained in the program and be brave by implementing them in the face of this ambiguity and uncertainty.

Back on Oct. 30, 2011, The New York Times published “Advertising Companies Fret Over a Digital Talent Gap.” The article by Tanzina Vega, a media reporter at The Times, said, “A talent gap is growing between the skills that many new advertising jobs require and the number of people who have those skills.” She added, “The talent pool, advertising technology company executives say, is not a deep one.

For a long time, advertisers and their agencies have been trying to achieve greater synergies and efficiencies in their marketing by "integrating" tactics across channels. For example, adding URLs to TV ads, QR codes to print ads, unique 800 numbers for radio ads, etc. Integrating is definitely better than not integrating. But the problems of measurement and attribution could not be solved because the metrics were different in each channel and not easily correlated and multiple marketing touchpoints could be the "cause" of a single customer action.

I got the feeling I wasn’t in Kansas anymore when the students in my social medial marketing course form a closed group on Facebook and then decided whether or not to invite me to become a member. And I knew I wasn’t in Kansas when one of the students in my digital marketing course asked, “What’s the hashtag for this class?” So, where was I? I was in New Jersey.

To many, “The Internet of Things,” a predicted, transformative moment in time when nearly all “things” in the physical world will be interconnected, wirelessly, with communication capabilities linking the physical and virtual worlds for a variety of cooperative applications, is a distant point in the future. To others, the internet of things is now. http://bit.ly/f16CRh

One of the most exciting parts of my job at Rutgers is exploring the intersection between marketing and other academic disciplines. Often the most innovative marketing concepts and ideas live on these interdisciplinary boundaries. One such example is neuroscience and marketing. Neuroscience is the study of the nervous system, and understanding how the brain functions. Advances in functional MRI ("frmri") techniques have made the economics feasible to begin to allow researchers from other disciplines to apply these tools and techniques to their inquiries, including the field of marketing.

YouTube is changing the hearts, minds, and actions of people every day. YouTube allows more than 475 million people worldwide to discover, watch and share originally-created videos. People are watching two billion videos a day on YouTube and uploading hundreds of thousands of videos daily. In fact, every minute, 24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube. Some of this video is compelling -- and compelling content can come from anywhere.

It’s all about watching trends, but not the way you have been taught.

Most online entrepreneurs try to identify a new trend in its earliest stages.  The belief is the sooner you jump on a trend, the more revenue you will generate from it.  Then, over time your competition will try to establish a foothold, but you will have entrenched yourself.  And if all goes as planned, you will be able to fend off the competition into perpetuity.

If you are launching a mobile website, it is important that your website can be found when your target audience performs a search in Google from their phone. This can be quite a complicated topic, but a simple review of the steps required to pay for placement in Google search results is included below.