SmartMarket Media Blog

One of the things I like to do is go to LinkedIn and answer questions and take part in different discussions that are going on. It’s a great way as a business owner or specialist to show their expertise, take part in interesting conversations and build stronger networking relationships.

I recently was shocked to see people using the discussions on LinkedIn…to give a sales pitch. Some of them were advertising webinars but most were direct sales pitches starting with a question like Do you want to save your marketing dollars and revolutionize your online marketing? which after you clicked on it was a big sales pitch about how awesome this marketing firm is and how they will revolutionize your online marketing.

Out of the 20 “discussions” appearing on the first page, 18 were direct sales pitches either about events or services offered by these companies. The thing I really found disturbing about this was that it was a marketing group on LinkedIn. These are people that are supposed to help other businesses with communication and engaging online if the title from the above “Discussion Topic” is any indication. This may be a news flash but one sided communications are not discussions.

Having a discussion is all about sharing your knowledge, appropriate links and opinion with others. It’s about engaging. However using the discussion area as a personal bulletin board to advertise your services is not only tactless…it’s also destroying the art of conversation within your social media group. This comes down to moderation by the Group Owner to make sure that people are using the discussion area to actually have discussions and not diatribes about how great they are but think about this for a moment – if everyone within your LinkedIn group is shouting BUY FROM ME! YOU NEED ME! in the discussion area…who is left listening?

Instead of shouting how great you are, show it by engaging in meaningful conversations and letting your obvious expertise shine through. People probably aren’t going to hire you because you say you’ll deliver amazing results. They’ll hire you because through conversations and relationship building discussions you clearly show that you know your stuff and have built up the trust so they can rely on your brand.

What are your thought on this? I’d love to hear from others about their experiences and get a discussion started here about your experiences with this, how you’ve dealt with this or how you think this can be fixed.

Or what the movie industry could learn by listening to conversations and engaging further on social media.

The Academy Awards are a once a year experience that is exciting to the movie industry insiders and fans alike. Although a lot is made of who wore what on the red carpet or what surprise winner there was — the Oscar’s isn’t just an event…it’s business. It’s important to keep in mind that the Oscar buzz and awards can affect many movie production studios who have a lot riding on their movie…for this year and, particularly for small studios, to get funding for projects in the year to come.

Which is why I found the following information from eMarketer so incredibly interesting. According to Nielsen, the five Best Picture nominees spent a combined $64.3 million on advertising in the US.

The film with the largest advertising budget was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which spent more than almost all the other Best Picture nominated films combined.

So with that kind of marketing blitz you’d expect the majority of online buzz to be centered around The Curious Case of Benjamin Button…right? On Oscar night however, all that spending had no effect on the conversations people were engaging in online.

According to New Media Strategies, who tracked the online conversation buzz for the 24 hour period surrounding Oscar night and produced two reports: one covering Twitter posts (lead by @leslieann44) and one covering blog posts (lead by @simonowens of Bloggasm).

On Twitter of the Best Picture nominees, the movie with the most mentions was the Best Picture winner, Slumdog Millionaire, followed by Milk, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Reader and Frost/Nixon, in that order.

• Slumdog Millionaire: 6,369
• Milk: 3,617
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: 1,110
• The Reader: 814
• Frost/Nixon: 543

The most tweeted about individual was Best Actor winner Sean Penn followed by Best Supporting Actor winner Heath Ledger, Mickey Rourke, Best Supporting Actress winner Penélope Cruz and Hugh Jackman to round out the top 5 individuals.

According to their analysis of blog mentions, Slumdog Millionaire, was also No. 1, with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk, The Reader and Frost/Nixon behind.

• Slumdog Millionaire: 28,909
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button: 20,939
• Milk: 20,676
• The Reader: 16,123
• Frost/Nixon: 8,341

The most mentioned individual on blogs was Angelina Jolie followed by Best Supporting Actress winner Penélope Cruz, Mickey Rourke, Best Supporting Actor winner Heath Ledger and Best Actress Winner Kate Winslet in that order.

It’s interesting to note that while heavy spending is required by the movie industry to get people into theatres; it had virtually no influence on the conversations being held online in the social media world. Was all the talk on Twitter about Sean Penn’s somewhat controversial acceptance speech? Were people cheering for the underdog story by talking about Slumdog Millionaire? Could more social media engagement by the movie industry and production studios on Twitter, Facebook and blogs help bring a happy Hollywood ending by creating more buzz about these movies? What do you think?

How do people discover videos online?

How Twitter Can Save The World

According to comScore, (as published by eMarketer) the number of online shoppers who watched retail videos grew 40% in a single year. One of the biggest problems online retailers have is what gets left in the shopping cart. How do you stop them from abandoning?

According to these statistics, education about the product using video is one of those steps. Even with tighter budgets in this sagging economy, SLI Systems found retailers reluctant to cut online video budgets. Only site search capability, e-mail marketing and search engine optimization & marketing were considered less dispensable than video. “Once retailers build up the video content on their sites, they will focus on turning their video assets into customer acquisition tools by pushing video to other sites, such as affiliates, social networks and video-sharing destinations,” says Mr. Grau. “Retailers will also place community elements around their videos to make it easy for consumers to upload them to social networks, blogs, bookmarking services or e-mails.”

While this sounds easy in practice, Mr. Grau points out one of the most difficult challenges retailers have. If a video is produced correctly it should be entertaining and informative enough to encourage sharing. However if it is a flat sales video about the product and its functions…chances are no one is going to post it on their Facebook page. What aspects of a product video would encourage you to share it with others? Is it a product or brand you already love or is it the video content done creatively that encourages you to share it? Share you thoughts & keep the conversation going below in the comments.

Stop Trying to Force Monetization of Online Video

Marketing Eye on Online Video for 2009