The effort to reach consumers has gone up a few notches, escalating especially in the online environment. One of my friends emailed me that her son had submitted a jingle for the American Idol Pringles contest. To go vote for his jingle to be the Grand Prize Winner, I had to sign in to vote, providing my name, email address, birthday and zip code. I gave ten minutes of time to Proctor and Gamble dealing with Pringles. (Go here to vote for the Pringle Jingle - his is the "United States of Pringles" and it looked fun and creative). A bunch of people spent a lot of time and creativity for just for fun (or to win the award). The audience reach is much higher, the engagement is much deeper and the cost is - I presume, much lower than traditional advertising.
What a way to get people to connect to your product for free and encourage others to spend time engaging with it, too.
John Edwards is the fifth-ranked Twit (or was when I wrote about it last month - the NYTimes is just now writing about Twitter) and has a lot of MySpace friends, too. News of his $400 haircuts hit the news and a YouTube video of him primping his 'do became viral. Like Hillary's off-key singing video, some of this is reverse marketing but it is a new way of reaching audiences -- very different from billboards, tv and radio commercials. New media is changing political marketing and communications -- there will be a default line in this presidential election dividing old media marketing impact and new media marketing in influencing outcomes.
The blog MotherTalk is promoting Arianna Huffington's new book, Fearless, encouraging every mother blogger to write about a time when fear was overcome and linking to Huffington's book. My blog friend Lauri takes up the promotion and encourages others to think about the challenge. All of this is completely free promotion for Huffington's book by creating a meme for bloggers.
The Webby Awards are voted on by people. I got an email from the Cooper-Hewitt Design museum in my NYC neighborhood letting me know their website has been nominated and encouraging me to go vote. Verizon is the sponsor of the awards. In order to vote, you have to sign in to access the site and that first page is a marketing trick for Verizon. After spending ten minutes trying to register and giving emails and setting passwords, Verizon had a lot of my attention but now it has my frustration. I'll stick to Sprint. After trying three times to get past tech glitches, I quit. When I tried to respond to their email that sent me registration problems, techsuppport_pv@webbyawards.com, it bounced back as an unknown user. But if you want to go register and vote for the webby awards 2006 People's Design Awards, go. Tell me if you had the problems, too. It might just be my computer.
My brother is coming from Colorado this weekend and he'll help with some of my tech woes. I can't comment on some blogs after I deleted all of my cookie files (my anti-virus was deleting 60 harmful cookies daily so I just deleted them all).
My study found that most mom blogs were not interested in monetizing their blogs. The marketing effort is sure moving online like a tsunami this year.
Very very interesting; you're getting me to think outside the box, or rather to consider how very powerful the box in front of me is. Blogs can have so many ramifications.
by the way, I got on the Webby website with no problems. It took just a second. Didn't see Cooper Hewitt, though the Smithsonian was up for something or other. Could that be it? I spent time when I was in high school at the Cooper Hewitt. It's nice up there.
Posted by: tut-tut | April 24, 2007 at 12:24 PM