Letters From Dan

John Morgan’s book “Brand Against the Machine” is really a full length definition of branding itself. Sure, there are examples of small business branding mistakes and a whole lot of what you should be doing. But as a whole, it’s what the dictionary should reference when you look up “branding”.

Blockbuster is an example of a company that didn’t see it coming. Coincidentally in Chapter 13, titled Extra Ordinary (not Bankruptcy Court), Morgan talks about the rise of Netflix and Redbox in the wake of Blockbuster’s meltdown. He makes the point that it wasn’t Blockbuster’s failures that made Netflix great. In fact, Netflix became great because they did something “extra ordinary”. They took something mundane like renting a video and added a spin no one had ever tried before. Redbox is now doing the same thing.

No matter how big you are, you aren’t immune to making mistakes automating social media.

Fox Television has joined the Social Media game in a serious way. In fact each show has its own Twitter account, Facebook page and overall social media presence. If you’re a fan, Fox makes sure that you can show your love everywhere.

But. . .

But the problem is Fox Television automates their social media profiles. And that problem became glaring and apparent during the 2011 World Series when their top rated show Terra Nova was bumped for Game 5.

Since they failed to take the World Series into account when they were automating the system, several tweets that day and the day before announced the upcoming show. In fact, just two hours before the show would have begun, @terranovaonfox reported that the next new episode was only 2 hours away.

Coupon Strategy is one of the most common small business mistakes to avoid. Your coupon strategy should be more than just a way to get new people in the door. And it doesn’t have to cheapen the place.

Take a look at this coupon we received from Laser Quest Nashville after attending a birthday party recently. You can probably argue that the copy isn’t good and the 4″ x 6″ size isn’t perfect. And if this were a marketing piece we received in the mail – I’d listen to your argument. But that’s not what we’re looking at today.

Hank Williams, Jr. recently turned what seemed like a marketing mistake into a marketing success story. And in true Hank Williams, Jr. fashion he did it by recording and giving away, what I call, his “Fox/ESPN” song (aka Keep the Change).  In the end, you can decide whether the unfortunate incident was a mistake or not.

After using the word Hitler on a Fox morning TV program, ESPN pulled Hank’s Monday Night Football theme song from their broadcast. In what started as a typical morning for the super country star, a little politically incorrect remark turned his world upside down in a matter of hours. Fortunately, today’s technology gave Hank an opportunity to capitalize on the moment.

I just completed Dodge’s grand marketing event the Dodge Journey Challenge (#journeychallenge on Twitter). It was a ton of fun following clues online to try and find a Dodge Journey in Oklahoma one week, then the next week driving to Albany, NY to start their east coast challenge.

Being the marketing guy I am, I was very excited to see Dodge put together an online/offline marketing expedition to help sell their Dodge Journey truck. While I had a great time searching the “world wide world” for the truck, I thought Dodge made a few marketing mistakes that will surely result in far fewer sales.

Today I experienced a Ruby Tuesday Marketing mistake. You might consider it an operations mistake or just a miscommunication, but you’d be wrong. While birthday promotions involve the restaurant staff and the operations department, they are a type of “rewards program” designed by the marketing folks.

Today’s my birthday so I took a couple of my friends to Ruby Tuesday so I could get one of those fabulous handcrafted burgers. (You get a handcrafted burger on your birthday for free!) I checked my e-mail for a coupon from their SoConnected email club, but didn’t get anything. So I took my driver’s license that showed my birth date.

So I saw that Janet Slack was doing a teleseminar on the top 10 Facebook Marketing Mistakes – but I didn’t get to attend. So I asked her if she could send me the recording or a transcript or something which I could learn from and then share here.

And she did just that.

In her own words, here’s Janet Slack talking about the top 10 Facebook Marketing Mistakes.

Marketing your small business on Facebook is the latest hot marketing trend.  But recent research shows that only 37% of businesses are getting new customers and revenues for their efforts.  Here are some of the mistakes you just don’t want to make with your Facebook marketing or you risk wasting time and effort.

One common marketing mistake small businesses seem to make is not leveraging operations activities for marketing purposes. As I highlighted in my “Dog the Bounty Hunter” story, the average, ordinary things that you do can be used as marketing.

I recently took a trip to Costa Rica, a fabulous country, and had opportunity to zipline with the Titi Canopy Tour group in La Foresta (outside of Manual Antonio National Park). The ziplining was fantastic. It wasn’t the scenery as much as the ride that really makes ziplining cool. And the crew at Titi Canopy Tours make everyone comfortable and safe each and every time. They are a class act.

But, they’re not making as much money as they could be. . .

I’m not sure what the most common affiliate marketing mistakes are, but I saw an article by Jeff Herring today that clearly illuminated a big one. Jeff Herring (as he explains in this blog post) had the unfortunate experience of having YouTube disable his videos. Jeff wasn’t at fault and is contesting the shut down, but it clearly illustrates a common mistake affiliate marketers make.

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Flickr and all things Google are not owned by you.  You may have an account,  and like Jeff Herring, you may be doing exactly what they want you to be doing. But the reality is you’re renting space.

Failing to understand that is the common mistake affiliate marketers make. They spend time hocking their products through these mediums WITHOUT capturing the contact information of those who are interested in what you’re talking about. Failing to use YouTube, Facebook and Twitter as traffic drivers to your website and opt-in form will trip up your long term plan.

Imagine if Jeff had spent his time telling you about great products he endorses and then sent you through his affiliate links directly to those products?  You would never be able to reach these people again. There would have been no information capture.

You may be saying “adding a step between the video and the sale will reduce the number of sales”, am I right? Because that wouldn’t be right at all.

Teasing a product in a video and then sending them to your website where they can get more information about the product and be further sold shouldn’t decrease the number of sales whatsoever. But more importantly, that extra step of information capture allows you to follow-up on your original information, provide more details, social proof and benefits.

Not only that, information capture gives you the opportunity to give your audience more useful information – when you want to provide it.

Jeff is a master at information capture, thus I was able to hear about his unfortunate circumstance through an e-mail he sent out. (That’s great transparency, community building and relationship making as well)

When you’re building your affiliate marketing strategy, don’t forget that you don’t own much of what you do on the internet. There was a day when MySpace and AOL were king – but how much are 5,000 friends on MySpace and your AOL Keyword worth today? YouTube videos can create a great constant flow of income – until people start using a new site or YouTube randomly shuts down your account.

And think of all the time you spend on these sites? Without driving your friends, fans and leads to some sort of lead capture funnel – all those hours of hardwork will someday be worth nothing. (In fact, I wrote a book called TwittrGlitch to help you secure your Twitter account from hackers, shut downs and other problems to avoid this exact situation).

One of the most common affiliate marketing mistakes that you can make is assuming that your web properties are your own. Don’t make that mistake and always be planning for the next Facebook Killer to come along and destroy what you’ve built.

With permission I’m able to relay this business to business marketing mistake that one of my mastermind members made these last few months. We all knew that the change he made was responsible for the error – but it took a while to pin down the “why”.

So an autoparts wholesaler has a pretty comprehensive website when it came to the products they offered. Each part comes with its own spec that many needed but often did without.