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The new online “market me” tool VisualCV is addicting. I keep adding and tweaking. It’s just fantastic. I’ve added the VisualCV badge at the top of my blog sidebar (and copied it below for easy clicking). Take a look. Give me feedback. Start one of your own!
Guy wrote a post pointing to other examples. See here.
Use it as your online resume, a marketing tool for your consulting service, an announcement for an event, or well, anything you can think of.
The WSJ ran a story today on LoudounExtra.com, a local news website owned by The Washington Post Company covering Loudoun County, Virginia and its 270,000 residents. The site offers hyper-local news, events, and commentary and employs a great deal of new media (blogs, feeds, video, etc.). In fact, it’s exactly what you would expect to be a huge success, but apparently traffic has been abysmal. Russell Adam’s story attempts to dissect the problems.
However, the problem isn’t the people who built the site, or their knowledge of the community. The problem is simple. You can’t just build a site and hope people come. Sure that works sometimes, but that can’t be your marketing plan. LoudonExtra.com is a great site and I think a few marketing ideas might get it going.
1. Do a better job pulling people at real-world events to the site and people on the site to real-world events. You have to be in the community creating buzz, handing out t-shirts (think more like a radio station).
2. Turn your staff writers into personalities. Make sure they blog, quickly return comments from readers, and make themselves visible at local events (think Anderson Cooper/CNN). And post prominent pictures of them on the site. And while you’re at it, do the same thing for local bloggers.
3. Build a little more community into the site so that readers can talk to each other and build databases of information that are valuable to everyone else (comments on local services, local politics, fun for kids). Then run a promotion targeted solely to getting lots of people registered, reading the site, and commenting. American Airlines is currently running a Beijing promotion designed to create community. You can enter to win a free trip if you register on their site and post a travel tip (and every post is an additional contest entry). Good idea.
4. Set up a loyalty program where visitors can earn points towards small gifts (tickets to shows, free restaurant meals, etc.) if they bring others to the site, comment on blogs, or post tips. Make it a little more fun and interactive on the site.
5. Add more video and more pictures. Let people upload their videos and pictures of local events. Let them vote about what they think is the most important or interesting news or pictures.
6. Make it about the PEOPLE not just the events. Hyper-local actually means hyper-personal. Everyone in the community wants to see their name, picture, event or company highlighted. Make it so that people come to the site just to see if they made it in the news because they attended the event or blogged about it or sent in a video clip!
Looking for business advice online? There are dozens of websites aimed at helping small businesses and entrepreneurs. Some of them answer quick questions, others develop long-lasting mentoring relationships, and a few help entrepreneurs raise capital. Here is a list of sites I found in the WSJ you can check out.
I’ve always considered myself pragmatic, logical, and clearly even-keeled. Then, Ori Brafman sent me his (and brother Rom’s) book Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior. It’s a magnetic read and I zipped through it in 2 quick sittings.
I rather like books that make me think twice about truths I hold self-evident. And Sway certainly made me think. Did I pre-judge my employees based on what others had said about them, or their previous jobs? Do I make rash (and possibly dangerous or stupid) choices when I’m committed to a certain plan of action and feel any diversion would be a loss? I certainly look for fairness in my business and personal transactions. But is fairness the key metric? Maybe not.
The book has opened my eyes and mind to new ways of approaching my business activities and relationships and family interactions. Hopefully I will recognize in advance a moment where I might act rash or choose the wrong — irrational — path and think again about my choices.
Anne Bezancon, CEO of 1020 (developers of Placecast), describes the geo-targeting ad service they offer that delivers a relevant message based on a person’s location plus events, weather and other activities at that location. The Placecast Advertising Network infers what someone might be doing, needing, wanting based on the expanded location information which they call “place.”
1. What is the technology behind location-based advertising? Is it GPS? Do you target laptops or mobile phones?
“Location-based advertising” as it is called in mobile or “Geo-targeting” as it is called in the Internet world, refers to advertising that is relevant to the viewer’s location. Placecast starts with the location of the device’s internet connection and adds an entirely new dimension called “place” to infer what type of person would most likely be viewing the ad at that time and location. Placecast works with any type of location technology (GPS, WiFi triangulation, user-entered ZIP code, etc.), across any type of device (laptops, mobile phones, portable GPS devices, etc.) and any ad type (display, text, Flash, audio, etc.).
2. Does the service work everywhere across the U.S.? What about internationally?
Placecast is currently operational in the US and is focused on continuing to build on the momentum we have here. However, the technology platform which makes Placecast’s place-based advertising possible already supports more than 70 countries.
3. Do advertisers create special campaigns for the location-based market or do they use their standard ad campaigns?
We work with advertisers to create campaigns leveraging Placecast’s unique dynamic messaging tools to allow agencies to produce their own creative one time, and have the message for that creative be customized at the time of delivery to be place-relevant. For example, with one piece of creative an airline can advertise “Tickets from [name of airport the user is connecting from] to Maui for [price of the ticket from that airport]” to travelers in airports across the country.
4. Placecast is another ad network. How do you stand out from your direct competition?
Placecast is built around a proprietary technology platform based on supply chain management concepts. Without this technology, online place-based advertising is not possible. Accordingly, Placecast is the only online place-based ad network today, and has been in operation since early 2007. Placecast offers targeting, messaging and engagement capabilities never seen before.
5. Is location enough information to help you strategically target ads to the right person at the right moment? What other information do you gather?
Placecast leverages the knowledge of where someone connects to the Internet, and a rich database of information about that location at that time including census data, events or weather to infer audience behavior and produce a highly relevant ad. Placecast does not need and does not collect any personally identifiable information. Everyone in the same place at the same time will see the same ad.
6. How does location-based advertising help publishers?
Publishers want to maximize the revenue from their inventory while complementing their brand. Before Placecast, publishers of location-relevant content sites like travel information, weather, traffic and events had few effective options for monetization. You are always in one place at one time. While everything else is subjective, time and location are absolute. Placecast uses this information to add the crucial missing ingredient to online advertising — real world relevance. As a result, ads perform better, publishers make more money and have more relevant ads on their site.
7. How many advertisers do you have in your network? How many publishers?
We do not disclose number of advertisers and publishers.
8. You say with better targeting you get a better return and can pay advertisers more. What percentage do you pay out to advertisers?
We do not disclose percentages. As evidence of our advertisers’ satisfaction, to date 100% of our advertisers have returned for additional campaigns.
9. Do you keep information on customers who click on ads so that you know frequent travelers and can target them better over time?
We do not do behavioral targeting, or collect any customer or web surfing history data.
10. What technology or business process will drive your industry in the future?
The increasing adoption of location-based services like events, mapping, travel and weather across both web and mobile.
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VisualCV is Addicting |
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Hyper-Local News at LoudounExtra isn’t Hyperactive |
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Find a Mentor or Money Online |
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Am I Irrational? |
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Relevant Ads Wherever You Are |
© 2008 Denise Shiffman. All rights reserved. |
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