“Like gravity, karma is so basic we don’t even notice it.” – Sakyong Mipham

That little golden rule of treating others how we would want to be treated is a simple yet revolutionary concept in our current era of beating celebrities and politicians to a pulp in blogs. In media and marketing, we stand in line to hop on board the latest bash fest of whatever product or person has made a bad judgment call or seen better days. This little billboard campaign out of Denver made headlines this week for making fun of Domino’s. Domino’s? Really? While it provides some chuckles, the old “kick the big money competitor in the groin” tactic is pretty exhausted at this point. Nevertheless, our current snark-as-default-setting climate got us thinking about using our marketing powers for good. After all, small businesses rely on positive word of mouth and feedback, so shouldn’t we take positive actions to insure good marketing karma?

The road to marketing enlightenment is one paved with little, selfless acts of kindness that over time prove your company has heart, integrity and a good sense of humor. For instant karma in action, take a look at Twitter marketing. On Twitter, by re-tweeting blogs in your same industry, you’re giving props to your comrades while winding up in their newsfeeds. Things like “Follow Friday” and mutual following are other ways to get good Twitter juju. Another great way to perhaps gather more followers is by doing an old-fashioned Twitter shout-out. The shout-out consists of naming an author of a blog or an entrepreneur who has posted something worthy that deserves more than a simple retweet. By name checking folks with big followings, I have found almost immediate retribution wherein the person in question either follows me in return or returns the name-check in a separate tweet. Think of it as tweeting how you would like to be tweeted.

E-mailed newsletters are another outlet to increase your marketing brownie points. Slipping a quick customer questionnaire into your newsletter that in turn offers free goods or discounts is a nice way to reward your readers while gathering their thoughts about your company. It’s another old-fashioned mutual back scratching technique that also builds goodwill.

You also can show that your business gives a damn by providing links to causes and non-profits that are important to you on your website and social media pages. No, we can’t all be Bono — but we can do little things to help out fellow do-gooders. Plus partnerships of this kind are PR gold that almost always yield new customers.

With all of this spreading of happiness around, let’s not forget to have a laugh, either. Infusing (ahem, clean) humor in your Facebook pages, website and blogs is doing a good deed. First off, everybody loves a good laugh. Secondly, posts with humor and the “you gotta see this” factor get forwarded like nobody’s business. This can be in the form of a great video or weird news story — whatever. Have fun with it and your readers will, too.

Now it’s your turn to tell us, gentle readers: How have your acts of kindness helped your business? Enlighten us in the section below (and increase your good comment karma)!

As we update our company’s Facebook page and tweet our days away, it is easy to neglect our blogs. After all, blogs have been around forever and they can easily slip to the bottom of our online branding and social media marketing priority lists. There are bigger, trendier digital fish to fry. Yet blogs are still being read, forwarded and passed. Blogs remain an instant and easy way to re-launch our brands. I was reminded of this recently by an unlikely personality — Pee Wee Herman.

Yesterday, Herman launched his first-ever Huffington Post blog. Herman is a cult icon; though his checkered past helped get his popular Saturday morning show cancelled, he’s still a brand — and, seemingly, a brand on the road to a comeback. His blog at HuffPo is the humorous kind of fodder you’d expect from the originator of dork chic. The requisite “Pee Wee speak” followed by a Funny or Die viral video are all included in his blog adventure. Yet right at the bottom of his post is a funny and shameless plug for his upcoming stint on Broadway. So while there is still no basement in The Alamo, there is still marketing moxie left in the world of blogging.

What Herman and others have tapped into is the power of forwards and links. The moment his blog appeared, postings at IMDb.com announcing its arrival showed up on the Herman message boards. His official Facebook page announced his blog’s arrival to his 100,000+ fans (and, naturally, Herman tweeted about his blog, too). And, like clockwork, his blog ended up in Google newsfeeds and at the top of search engine lists.

Today’s online marketing calls for blogs to be put into action in social media while taking on the task of expanding a brand. In short, we don’t have to be loners or rebels to get our blogs noticed. We just have to be persistent and creative.

So what are we waiting for? Let’s get out there and produce blogs filled with the language of our brand. Let’s use every available social media outlet to market our blogs, too. And tell ‘em Large Marge sent ya!

Happy Earth Day! There has been many a blog this week discussing all things green and going paperless and whatnot. Blogging itself, after all, is a pretty green concept when you think about it. There’s no paper involved or cars used to distribute the darn thing or child laborers forced to write about Kate Gosselin for more…

I think it’s time for a bloggervention. Your company’s blog gets zero hits, illicits little response and seems to collect dust as it sits there online just waiting for readers to show up. The countless articles that say youngsters don’t blog anymore don’t exactly more…

It is always intriguing in this new age of marketing who “gets it” and who doesn’t it.

There are brands that you are sure would utilize the latest and greatest in social media marketing, blogging, online PR, intelligent brand marketing but they seem to miss the boat entirely. And there are those who smartly play the whole game and are willing to change along with latest techniques while still remaining uniquely themselves.  So I would like to salute more…

OMG! Is blogging DOA? Last week the Pew Research Center released a report that found blogging has slipped in popularity with teens and young adults. The 28% percent of teen Internet users that said they blogged in 2006 has now slipped to 14%. The study cites social networking and micro-blogging as the cause for the drop in popularity. Basically, kids these days can’t be bothered with long blogs about how their best friend stole their lip gloss when they can just post a quick status update on their Facebook that efficiently describes all of their drama in just a few words.

The study goes on to note that the majority of bloggers are ancient types (over 30 to be exact) who also read other blogs. It’s suggested that the over 30 set has the time and attention span to devote to reading and creating blogs. With specialized and professional blogs seemingly on the rise, it is hard to dispute the reports findings. This being said, let’s not shove blogging in the more…

I came across this really cool advertising stunt by Coca-Cola. The marketing geniuses responsible for the event rigged a Coca-cola vending machine to gave out extra goodies to college students who put their hard earned college coinage into the machine.  Students who visited the machine got a bevy of freebees designed to make people smile: free bottles of Coke, a pizza, a bouquet of sunflowers, even a very large sub. Imagine if your blog, website or social media campaign followed this same format. Instead of just regurgitating the same stuff over and over, what if a blog or a website or a social media campaign gave you doses of happiness. Okay, you don’t have to spread happiness, but you should strive to make people feel something. Whether you make them laugh, cry or get angry, you are doing what the Coke Machine is doing. You are getting people to engage with your brand. When people come to your site, blog or Facebook page expecting the same-old stuff and you give them a dose of something more…. bonus! And what do you get in return? You get loyalty, readership, engagement and possibly one more person out there who likes you. It’s a simple yet powerful lesson, one that i will aspire to practice as a marketer. So what have you done to spread the good stuff around?

Blog marketing has, in a certain very real sense, become the new SEO. The old SEO revolved around keywords and back links. The new SEO revolves around strong content and link bait. What’s the difference?

With the old SEO, webmasters wrote keyword-based content designed to get their pages ranked in the search engines based on how they used the keywords on the page. Then they market their web pages by building links to those pages using approved link building tactics. These tactics still work today but webmasters can achieve the same thing in less time by engaging in blog marketing.

Blog marketing is about adding new, fresh and original content to your website often. The more often the better. The more original your content the better. The higher the quality of your content the better. See a trend here? Let me explain:

• The reason more content is better is because it brings the search engines back to your website to crawl it more often. More robots on your site means more chances to get your pages ranked. Plus, every blog post is a unique web page with its own unique permalink. More pages rank in the search engines for your keywords.

• The reason original content is better is because duplicate content won’t get ranked. Don’t copy someone else. Be original. Add your own content with your own thoughts and ideas.

• And finally, the reason quality is important is because higher quality content draws more links. When people see that you publish highly relevant and authoritative content on a consistent basis they will link to you

And that’s why blog marketing is about quality content and link bait. It’s the new SEO.

I recently attended the OMMA Video (#ommavideo) event at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Los Angeles. A lot of our customers ask us about viral video, so I hope this post sheds some light on the subject. The panel “The Art of Being Discovered: Is Viral Video a Strategy” was moderated by Bob Heyman, (Managing Director, The Digital Engagement Group) and included the following panelists: Andrew Budkofsky (SVP Sales and Partnerships, Break Media), Benjamin Carlson (Chief Strategy Officer, Bradley and Montgomery), Gregory Markel (Founder/President of Infuse Creative), Matt Martelli (CEO/Creative Director, Mad Media) and Bret Wilson (Co-Founder/CEO of TubeMogul). Here are some of the talking points I walked away with that I found interesting:

• The best techniques for driving “virality” starts with content. But it doesn’t end there. Then you have to promote your video via SEO, social media (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace etc.), social bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon etc) and  getting bloggers to review and talk about your video.  Oh, and it can’t hurt to launch a full PR campaign to get a reaction from appropriate media outlets that are relevant to your audience.

• Getting a video to go viral is getting harder and harder because there is currently a glut of video out there and it’s harder to stand out. Video is following the same trajectory as banner ads; at first everyone clicked on them and thought they were novel. But today, people pay less and less attention to them. The idea of going into a teen chat room and asking them to check out your video and expecting a response is kind of creepy and pretty much over.

• Want to spread your video effectively? Consider hiring a Weblebrity (a web celebrity that has a following of a million plus fans). Pay them to review your video. Or, even better yet, have them make a video in response to your video. This practice is becoming popular among viral video marketers and weblebrities seem more than willing to participate.

But at the end of the day, it still comes down to the quality of your content and being relevant to your audience. As one of the panelist said, “sites want good content. They’re going to start banning people who flood them with crap.” Woudn’t that be nice.  If you couldn’tt make the OMMA video event, you can see highlights at the MediaPost Raw >> OMMA Video .

I’ve done my fair share of print advertising. Back in the days of yore, clients and media planners alike were attracted to magazines for their ability to target niche audiences. Print newspapers, too, were attractive mediums when you were targeting geographically specific markets. But the days when print could deliver hype-focused niche markets are fading away. Today it seems that advertisers are taking a serious look at blogging as a platform to get their brands in front of niche markets. But not just any kind of blogs. We’re talking blog networks. A recent NY Times article suggests that blog networks may be the next big medium for advertisers. According to the article, most advertisers shy away from the blog medium because they have no control of the content and may be frightened away by edgy content. But when you’re dealing with a blog network like Sugar Inc. or Gawker Media for example,  advertisers tend to let their guard down because the editorial content is all being handled from a single, reliable source; just like traditional print pubs once did. On Gawker’s home page, for example, they define themselves thusly;

“Gawker Media marries a traditional publishing model and an all-star editorial masthead with the audience engagement borne out of the candor, frequency and hyper-linking of the blog format.”

Sounds legit, right? Who wouldn’t want the safety of the traditional publishing model cross-pollinated with the targeting ability of the blogosphere. Traditional publishers focus on content. Digital publishing does the same, but with the added benefit of speed, distribution and hyper-focused targeting.  Here are my top five reasons why I think advertisers will continue to consider blog networks:

1. They offer lightening in a bottle. Blogs can be updated on the fly and can deliver information, news, opinions at Internet speed. Blog networks often employ a stable of writers that are at their keyboards 24 hours a day.
2. Tapping vast resources. In addition to tapping into great writing talent, blogs have loyal audiences that can interact with the writers. Often times, readers feed stories or leads to blog authors allowing the blog to get a scoop on a story before a traditional print pub can.
3. Stickiness. If you have a network of fashion blogs, chances are that if you offer fashion products on your blogs, your audience will click through. They’re already there for fashion content. All you have to do is entice them.
4. Original content. The beauty of creating original content is that you can use it as you see fit. If your original content is highly sought after, there’s no reason why you can’t spread it across your blog network and break fresh content before your print publishers even get their ink rollers wet.
5. A mention is worth a thousand clicks. A mention in a story or a hyperlink to a brand name may mean a significant spike in traffic, depending on how good the content is. While a banner may do little, content can increase sales if done right. Try doing that in print.

I believe that blog networks will continue to gain momentum and increase their clout among advertisers. The image of the blogger clad in pajamas at the typer pouring his/her heart out to the world has given way to real money-making platforms that are both powerful and interesting ways to reach an audience.