Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Thou Shalt Not Facebook

Thought this was interesting.

"The Rev. Cedric Miller says much of his recent marital counseling has included infidelity stemming from the social-network website."

Probably online porn is another problem for his parisoners. I can see where Facebook is a problem -- mostly because people get sucked into it and it slowly eats away their life. But also I'm sure old flames are rekindled so to speak. I've found old friends on Facebook that I haven't seen for 20 years -- but no ex-girlfriends.

I liked the comment following the news post: "Facebook doesn't cause adultery - People cause adultery."

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Why blog?

Sometimes I get in a blogging funk. Heck, just look at how often I've been posting to this thing! Sometimes I blog in a flurry, and then I ignore it for awhile. Sometimes I wonder why bother -- is there anybody out there?

Well, of course there are. Last night someone responded to a critique of the movie Happy Feet I wrote years ago on another of my blogs (a blog I haven't posted to since 2007!). That one little movie review occasionally inspires people to pop in to tell me how moronic my views were. And it proves that people do find you and are listening!

Today I saw this nice post on reasons to post -- even IF no one is listening to you. Here are my favorites:

1. Search engine benefits. This may be the most obvious business benefit of blogging. Search engines give preference to websites that have fresh, relevant content. HubSpot research shows that sites with blogs get 55 percent more traffic than sites without blogs—even if there are no readers! 

3. Infinite search life. A few weeks ago I received a call from a potential new customer in the Middle East looking to me as a possible marketing consultant. I had to wonder how in the world they found me! Turns out they were looking for somebody who could help explain where the future of social media was going, and when they entered this into Google, a blog post I wrote a year ago popped up! Your content keeps working for you month after month! 

8. PR. Blog posts have the opportunity for massive reach. When one of my posts gets picked up by an aggregation service, my message has a chance to be heard by hundreds of thousands of people. That opportunity would not occur with a press release or status update. 

Friday, November 12, 2010

Making Money with Mobile Apps

Computerworld has a good article on the challenges and how-tos of making money with mobile apps. Since so much of my business is helping mobile app developers make money of them (by getting as much publicity as possible for their apps), I thought I would share this great article on my blog.

It is useful in that it discusses the three models of making money (monetizing) mobile apps: freemium (giving away a less functional version to entice people to pony up for a more feature-rich version); service-and-subscription model (providing a reader for instance, then selling the content on a montly basis); ad-funded model (free version with ads, or pay for a version that is ad-free); pay-for-product (sold!).

The article mainly lacks in how you actually make your app stand out in such a crowded marketplace. What advertising to use, what forms of social media, how to maximize PR (news and reviews), etc.

From the PR perspective, I'm finding it increasingly difficult to cut through the clutter of others asking writers to do the same thing I'm asking them to do -- namely, write about my clients' apps. So I'm getting as much as I can and then helping companies to distinguish themselves in the app store with keywords, well-written copy, and managing social media.

Thursday, November 04, 2010

Counting ticks on Twitter

I've said it before, but I'm not much into Twitter. It's a huge deal and shouldn't be ignored as part of a marketing communications strategy, but I've always wondered how much impact a tweet I make might have.

Let's say I have 1,000 followers. If I tweet something, not all of those thousand people will see it. It will likely scroll off their main Twitter page before they see it and how many dig deeper than the first page -- especially if they follow a large number of people? Of those who see it, a chunk of them won't care about it, and of those who may care about it, not many will probably click on a link to explore further.

In an article I saw on Ragan, Katie Paine said "how many of your followers really respond to anything you put out there? I figure it's only 10 or 20 out of the 330,000 people I allegedly 'reach' according to most influence analyzers."

To be effective, you not only need to increase your followers to increase your odds, but you also have to build a base of "quality" followers to target with your tweets. Be sure you are including your Twitter address on your website, forum posts and anywhere else where people who are most interested in what you have to say are hanging out.