By Jonathan Trenn
T. Boone Picken’s, Texas oil man, 1980’s corporate raider and current manager of BP Capital Management has something new up his sleave. And it features an internet strategy.
In 1997, he shifted his focus to natural gas. and 10 years later, in 2007, on wind energy. He formed Mesa Power LP in west central Texas and is constructing what will likely be the world’s largest wind farm. The project will feature thousands of wind turbines and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. This follows his belief that natural gas remains the best alternative to oil for motor vehicle fuel. That’s why he formed Pickens Fuel Corp eleven years ago.
Now, with $4 a gallon gas prices, he’s funding a public affairs effort to help us cut out oil as a our primary fuel for transportation, substitute it with natural gas, and then substitute the use of gas for other types of energy needs with, you guessed it, wind energy.
Today, he’s launched an online public affairs effort to convince Americans to look to natural gas and wind as proper alternatives. He points out that we currently import 70% of our oil - up from 24% in 1970. What’s new about his effort, is that much of it is bein launched online.
He’s got a YouTube channel.
They’ve got a page on Twitter.
A fan page on Facebook.
And a page on Mypace.
They even have an online community that they’re building.
Pretty neat concept. I’ll be following this campaign to see how effectively they use social media.
No Comments » Posted on July 8th, 2008
By Saul Wainwright
The CEO at Abraham Harrison, Mark Harrison, brought this post to my attention over the weekend over at Irfan Kamal’s blog, Digital & Social Media Strategy. This post speaks to the ongoing and continuous debate on issues around Returns on Investment (ROI) for conversational marketing. The problem is we all know it works it is just how do you prove it to the bean counters.
Two firms that do a lot of work in this arena, BzzzAgent and ChatThreads are quoted by Irfan in his blog. The research that these two organizations have performed shows that the cost of a converted sale driven by a conversational marketing campaign costs around$2 to $3 per sale. Depending on the product this is not a huge amount of money. I do not know off the top of my head how that looks in relation to other forms of marketing.
What this shows is that conversational marketing is a very viable alternative to search engine advertising - and Irfan points this out and I have to agree. However the two elements that he points out that could change this equation are issues of audience targeting and costs of scaling up a campaign.
Like any online campaign the audience you target is critical and where and how you find that audience is one of the harder elements - in addition the need to create conversations with many different audiences require knowledge and time. This is where the scaling up issue comes into play - scaling up means more conversations, a larger audience and more time. If one can keep labor costs down and if the conversations are managed efficiently and are long lasting then the ROI grows.
I believe that ultimately we are all going to get a little weary of regular in your face advertising and that the future will be grounded in social networks of information and recommendations. The value of the conversation will grow and grow in importance. We value our peers and their opinions and as we get bombarded with more and more information and advertising the need to turn to the conversation for value and information will grow.
3 Comments » Posted on July 7th, 2008
By Chris Abraham
Jennifer Mattern just wrote a great post answering some of your questions regarding the important question, Should You Jump Into Social Networks to Promote Your Business? over at RedFly Marketing via Chris Abraham:
There’s a lot of buzz in the online PR world about social networking, whether that be traditional social networks like MySpace and Facebook or social networking through microblogging services such as Twitter.
Should you jump into social networking to promote your business? And if so, with so many options available, how do you choose which social networks to participate in?
Read more…
No Comments » Posted on July 6th, 2008
By Chris Abraham
I just discovered another very interesting article written by Jennifer Mattern over at RedFly Marketing, Online PR vs. Internet Marketing — here’s an excerpt:
Internet Marketing Tactics:
- Paid advertising (banner ads, text link ads, etc.)
- Link exchanges, free Web directory submissions, blog comments (link-building activities)
- Affiliates
- Sales letters (and other sales copy)
- Article marketing (to drive affiliate sales, traffic, or backlinks)
- Search engine marketing (paid search placements)
- Blogs
- Social bookmarking sites
- Social networks
- Podcasts / Internet radio shows
- Sales, coupons, or other discounts
- E-books
- Reports / white papers
- Direct mail campaigns via email (for promotional purposes)
Online PR Tactics:
- Press releases / news releases
- Op-eds / letters to the editor (for online publications)
- Online newsrooms and media kits
- SEO (to build awareness through organic search engine placements)
- Interviews
- Blogs
- Articles (used to build exposure and expert status more than directly pushing sales or traffic)
- Podcasts / Internet radio shows (if not purely or mostly promotional)
- Reports / white papers
- Email newsletters
- Social networks
Via Chris Abraham.
2 Comments » Posted on July 6th, 2008
By Chris Abraham
While very many media outlets support del.icio.us in their bookmarking and social media strategies, there has been very little innovation in the del.icio.us social bookmarking platform — this has been a major problem with properties that have been acquired by big firms such as AOL, Google, and Yahoo!, in the case of del.icio.us. Allen Stern wrote a very insightful post, Did Delicious Lose Its Chance To Be FriendFeed?, about how FriendFeed has started to take del.icio.us’ lunch based on innovation and creativity:
[…]
Had Delicious (and Yahoo) moved faster on the release could they have become what’s hot with FriendFeed today? I get that FriendFeed allows you to share your delicious bookmarks. But what I am talking about here is something much bigger strategically. By “sitting” on the release, the team lost their chance to move the strategy forward.
[…]
Had Yahoo wanted to actually take their Delicious investment and do something with it, how hard would it have been to add the same functionality? If we look back a year, Delicious had a much larger “buzz share” than they do today. When I look at the CN logs, we rarely see any traffic from Delicious and haven’t had a frontpage link in probably nine months. Yet in the last week, I’ve seen way more traffic from FriendFeed. Yahoo’s Delicious service has a “close to mainstream” userbase and sure missed a golden opportunity to move forward - a fail whale if you will.
[…]
If you look at the topic I’ve discussed here, it’s basically what Fred Wilson discussed when he wrote about stagnation when companies acquire startups. Who will come up next and displace Upcoming and/or Flickr as the techies choice?
Oh, and be sure to join me on FriendFeed as well as del.icio.us! Via Chris Abraham.
No Comments » Posted on July 6th, 2008
Loading ...