New Marketing Thinking Required for Second Life?

New Marketing Thinking Required for Second Life?

Mobil Avenue accuses me of 20th century marketing thinking. I'm not quite sure what he has in mind, but it seems that my Second Life posts ticked off some people.

Now, don't get me wrong, I see alot of development potential in virtual worlds, but Second Life as it is simply does not cut it.

I won't go into the details again, but the sheer lack of economy of scales shows that something is wrong when you compare the investments in Second Life and the actual virtual world penetration. Not to mention the difficult user interface.

Second Life is a good beginning, but virtual worlds have a far way to go before they deserve to be treated as seriously as some are treating them today. Yes, Second Life should certainly be treated as a marketing/communications playground, but not as a high importance marketing channel.

If you want to call this 20th century thinking, go ahead. It is. As are economies of scale, profitability, sales conversion, cost per order and other business "relics".

And as you'll notice, 20th century thinking still works, even in 2007. We've all heard stories of the demise of advertising, the death of PR, the death of e-mail, the death of postal direct mail and so on ... but they're all alive, well and kicking still today, and will remain so.

Actually, intrusive direct response TV advertising is still one of the most effective tools to generate sales. And it gives you more bang for the buck than almost any other marketing channel, including online.

Do I like this? No. I'd love to believe that the internet is the alpha and omega of marketing. But it's not. It's the key connector, but not the key driver. That's the way things are, and as markters we need to employ 20th century thinking and use what works best ... and the numbers tell us that.

But this doesn't mean we shouldn't play and test. Quite on the contrary.

OK, this conversation is getting somewhat beyond the original topic, and it's quite possible I'm not even getting what Mobil Avenue is trying to say:)

And please don't get me started on 3D virtual webstores ...

Of course, I might be wrong. And if I am, I'll be the first to change my stripes the next day. It's what marketers do. If a new thing comes up and works better than what you're doing, change. But every change first demand proof. Unless you're just testing ... because when you're testing, the rules of the game change.

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

Using RSS Radars in B2B CRM

RSS Radars are not just a tool to help you enrich your website content and allow you to easily conduct business intelligence, but can also be used as a B2B Customer Relationship Management tool to help you maintain customer loyalty and provide your customers with some additional added value.

Just recently I received an e-mail from David Koopmans of Mokum Marketing, who gave me the idea for this post.

David's idea is simple:

• Tag articles of interest to your customers using a service like Diigo or Del.icio.us
• Provide them with an RSS feed to deliver them the articles as they are updated

This is how David sees the usefulness of such an application:
"The idea is very attractive though; in B2B we often manage a relatively small number of relationships, but they are deep and we want to make them deeper."

But, there are two problems:

• Tagging the articles using a public service like Diigo or Del.icio.us would make the feeds publicly available, making the service less value due to lack of uniqueness, as also noted by David
• Tagging relevant articles every day takes time ... time that busy B2B marketers usually don't have, especially if you want to cater a tag-based RSS feed for each of your clients

This is where RSS Radars can come in, enabling you to aggregate dozens or hundreds of RSS feeds, filter them for the relevant keywords to get only the most relevant content for a specific client, and provide that client with his own customized RSS feed, using a service like MySyndicaat.com or pipes.yahoo.com.

Plus, using .htaccess you can easily password protect each feed for each individual client.

More details in the 2007 edition of the RSS e-book:)

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.

Quick RSS SEO Tips

WebProNews has a short summary from Amanda Watlington's tips for SEO optimization of your RSS feeds:

1. Subscribe to your own feed and claim it on blog engine Technorati

2. Focus your feed with a keyword theme

3. Use keywords in the title tag; keep it under 100 characters

4. Most feed readers display feeds alphabetically, title accordingly

5. Write description tags as if for a directory; keep them under 500 characters

6. Use full paths on links and unique URLs for each item

7. Provide email updates for the non-techies

8. Offer an HTML version of your feed

9. For branding, add logo and images to your feed

Now, let's add some tips from Stephan Spencer and continue with the numbering:

10. Full text, not summaries

11. 20 or MORE items (not just 10)

12. Multiple feeds (by category, latest comments, comments by post)

13. Keyword-rich item [title]

14. Your brand name in the item [title]

15. Your most important keyword in the site [title] container

16. Compelling site [description]

17. Don't put tracking codes into the URLs (e.g. &source=rss)

18. An RSS feed that contains enclosures (i.e. podcasts) can get into additional RSS directories & engines

And to round this off, a summary of my own tips [part 2 here] for using RSS to drive traffic to your site:

19. Get your RSS content (proactively) syndicated on other relevant websites [just the headlines and summaries of course]

20. Submit your RSS feeds to all the RSS search engines and directories

21. Use RSS to add relevant third-party content [again, just headlines and summaries] to your website to gain additional SE weight for your keywords

22. Use RSS to deliver all of your frequently updated content, not just for your latest blog posts

23. Whenever the content in your feed changes, ping the most important search engines and directories [yes, you don't need a blog for this]

Do you have more tips?

(a) Post them in the comments form below.

(b) E-mail me at info@marketingstudies.net and let's set-up an interview

How Can RSS Power Your Internet Marketing and Publishing? Find out more in the most comprehensive and best guide on RSS for marketers, as acclaimed by leading RSS experts, developers, marketers and publishers. Click here and get the step-by-step guide to taking full marketing advantage of RSS.