Chapter 6 of THE NEW RULES OF MARKETING AND PR

Chapter 6 of The New Rules of Marketing and PR, by David Meerman Scott, is about using audio and video to market products and services. The primary goal of making a video, he says, is to create goodwill with your customers.

What should your video include?

• Create a mini-documentary that tells an incredible story that is ultimately about your services/products.
• But make sure that it doesn't include product placement or interviews with employees, which gives the video authenticity.
• Allow your viewer to get lost in the story (of your making). 
• Use humor and/or drama in a video to give it the tone that makes it great for sharing. 
• Timing and originality is crucial. 
• Finally, treat buyers as human beings, whether they are customers or businesses.

Why is sharing important?

Sharing is important because when you have a video that is good for sharing--say it's funny or timely or in some way appealingly dramatic--that video can go viral, which means it can have millions of eyes on it. Which means millions of eyes on your company and its products. A resort in Queensland posted The Best Job in the World and encouraged applicants to send in video applications. This went viral and caused the whole world to stop and focus on Queensland for a moment. The resort didn't even post a video of their own. They had others do the work for them! All in all, there was a 34% increase in flight traffic to Cairn after the videos.

What can you do with podcasts?

Audio can be great, especially for obvious industries like the music business. However, it can also be used for average companies or people to market their products. Take the Grammar Girl for instance, she  has a podcast along with social media, which all help her market her book. She sells out of books at many of her talks/presentations by spreading the word online.

One important thing to take away from audio and video marketing is that it should be part of an integrated strategy, where you have outlets like Facebook, Twitter, a website, etc, for sharing.

Internet policy on identity

Aside from privacy policies, which are extremely important, internet policy on identity would be helpful. As it is, on many sites, people can post comments anonymously, which leads to trolling and people saying things online that they wouldn't in person. The problem with non-constructive negative comments online is that studies have shown the recipient of the negative comments can develop low self-esteem and in some cases can even become suicidal.

In The Circle, by Dave Eggers, a man develops TruYou, which standardizes all identity online. It puts an end to trolling and makes people accountable for all of the things they say or do online. In some ways this is scary, but it makes a lot of sense and solves a serious problem. Currently, some sites use things like Discus so that anyone who comments has to have an email attached to their comment. The downside of this is that anyone can set up a burner email account--even though it's a lot of trouble to go to for an anonymous comment.

Internet policy on identity could also lessen crimes that take place online. For example, uploading and downloading child pornography or selling sex on craigslist (these are things that happen!). What would you like to see included in an internet policy on identity? Do you think it would be a good thing to have?

Prompt for blog 6: Discuss one important policy issue for the Internet.

Ineffective Websites

Ineffective websites usually suffer from a couple of the 10 website design problems. The website design problems that I cannot abide by are busy color schemes (because they are distracting) and posts that look like advertising.

Hashtag Feminism

I'm a big reader of feminist blogs and websites. In my active pursuit of new things to read, I have found a couple of sites that are suffering from poor design. For example: www.hashtagfeminism.com. This is a blog devoted to feminism from "others" voices using hashtags to create topics, which is a great idea with so much potential! However, the creator of this blog has broken the ultimate design rule: Never have white text on a black background. It is difficult to read and distracting.

Hashtag Femism also has posts that look like advertisements. I think some of that is because the blog is on a black background, and a lot of the images are also on black backgrounds, so the spacing is erratic. Also, the section on the right of the page is all streaming content from social media, which is a good idea, but the interface makes it look busy. There is simply too much information on that side.

Africa Calling

I work in communications for a maternal health initiative, and I'm constantly exposed to poor designs for non-profit companies that don't have much to spend on a website. They don't know seem to know that simple is better! Www.africacalling.ca suffers from a similar problem as Hashtag Feminism in that the background is busy and distracting. There also is no search function, which is a huge mistake for all websites. People tend to want to search rather than browse when they are online. Any site without a search function is missing out on substantial traffic. 

Do you have any examples of bad websites? What would you do to make them better?

Prompt for blog (5): Find two examples of ineffective websites. What makes these sites ineffective?