It’s a little later on Saturday than I typically aim for, but here’s my weekly roundup of savory marketing and PR reading material for the week — and a weekly random photo.
1. If Googling were over. And Chrome. And Gmail. And Google Reader…oh wait, that’s gone already. Even so, author Ken Hammond wrote a pretty though provoking post titled: A World without Google.
The world is forced to return to their Yahoo! and Hotmail (now Outlook) accounts they haven’t used since 2004. They go to retrieve their email passwords and realize that their backup email where their password will be sent is their Gmail.
Don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone. It’s easy to beat up on Google, but it’s a good perspective to keep in mind where things would be without the company.
2. Turn that funnel upside down. Usually this ditty is reserved for a frown. In this post, it’s about the sales funnel. In a post titled, Why I hate funnels, writer Ben Chestnut equates the conventional sales funnel to a grinder:
The idea is that you need a ton of website visitors, then some of them become become leads, and then after you do something (the usual recommendation is to bombard the leads with marketing automation) they relent and pay you money, thus becoming a “customer.”
Chest nut literally wants to turn a funnel upside down – there’s a good visual on his post – and start with love. Love for the customer. Who then spreads out and tells everyone he knows. It is “stable” he says.
Take that passion and point it at your customers. Deliver awesome customer service. Delight them. Empower them. When I say “empower them” I mean empower them for free, with “no strings attached.” Because when companies make people sign up and register to download their content, we all know they’re about to feed us into the automation meat grinder.
“Delight” your customers. I’m beginning to hear that word over in over in multiple places – I think there’s something to it.
3. Add fries; get buzz. PRNewser gave a PR shout out to Burger King’s publicity stunt of adding some French fries to a burger, giving it a name, a price and calling it a product launch. While there’s definitely some criticism, which is to be expected – if we could just make the economics, of creating cheap food, that’s both fast and healthy, while paying staff a handsome salary, work — then we’d have nothing left to criticize. However, as PRNewser sees it:
And that’s why we can say with complete confidence that Burger King has managed to implement one of the greatest and most profoundly simple PR strategies ever seen on the planet earth.
Why is that? Because while the new product launched on September first, it was widely available with a flick of a few fries before then.
4. Goat becomes Raleigh-Durham publicity hound. You don’t have to be an old goat to get some local buzz, but being an old goat certainly helps. Local NPR station, WUNC reported: Ram Named ‘Bubba’ Still On The Loose In Durham. Bubba is “thought to be a either a Barbados/Mouflon sheep or a Toggenburg goat.”
I had a Toggenburg as a kid. Yep, I wanted a dog, so my parents got me a goat. A completely random story for another day, except to say that goat grew to whopping 180 lbs. He was big and Bubba appears to be big too.
No one knows where he came from, he’s spotted near some rather urban areas, he’s completely eluded the local Sherriff and he’s still out there… Andrew Kenny, a reporter for the Raleigh Observer and The Cary News calls Bubba a “folk hero.”
I think that old goat is just a publicity hound.
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