Mitch Joel on Marketing Made Simple TV

About Mitch Joel

When Google wanted to explain online marketing to the top brands in the world, they brought Mitch Joel to the Googleplex in Mountain View, California. Marketing Magazine dubbed him the “Rock Star of Digital Marketing” and called him, “one of North America’s leading digital visionaries.”

Mitch Joel, President of TwistImage

In 2006 he was named one of the most influential authorities on Blog Marketing in the world. Mitch Joel is President of Twist Image – an award-winning Digital Marketing and Communications agency (although he prefers the title, Media Hacker). He has been called a marketing and communications visionary, interactive expert and community leader. He is also a Blogger, Podcaster, passionate entrepreneur and speaker who connects with people worldwide by sharing his marketing insights on digital marketing and new media.

In 2008, Mitch was named Canada’s Most Influential Male in Social Media, one of the top 100 online marketers in the world, and was awarded the highly prestigious Canada’s Top 40 Under 40. Most recently, Mitch was named one of iMedia’s 25 Internet Marketing Leaders and Innovators in the world. Marketing Magazine has named Twist Image one of the Top 10 agencies in Canada for two years running (and the only digital marketing pure-play to make the list).

Twitter to SPAMMERs “We’ve Had enough!”

If you’re like me, you’re fed up with these Twitter DM’s from strange egg-shaped ID’s that offered “Work at Home” offers and other similar SPAM.  They come with increasing frequency and no flagging as SPAM seems to stop it.

c/o intledtech.com

It’s seems that Twitter listened and is doing something about it.

Twitter just filed a lawsuit against five companies. The defendants in the suit are TweetAttacks (tweetattacks.com), TweetAdder (tweetadder.com), TweetBuddy (tweetbuddy.com), James Lucero (of justinlover.info) and Garland Harris (of troption.com), and are allegedly in violation of The Twitter Rules.

In a statement Twitter said ““Twitter now has more than 140 million active users, and we continue to grow at a record pace. As our reach expands, we become a more attractive target for spammers. Even though spam is a small fraction of the content you can find on Twitter, we know just how distracting it can be.”

Twitter is not the only social media to combat SPAM. Earlier this year, Facebook and the Attorney General of Washington filed suit to combat “clickjackers” who spread SPAM on Facebook. In 2009 Google fought Google Money schemes and online pharmacies.

Not only are these firms using legal methods, but they are making investments.  Twitter recently purchased the security firm Dasient and is expanding their anti-SPAM engineering team.

Author:

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is the founder and president of Find New Customers. He also hosts a weekly marketing show, Mad Marketing TV, in which he interviews top marketing experts each week. He was recently named as one of the Top 50 experts in Sales Lead Management for 2011. He’s also a professional writer and keynote speaker. To contact Jeff, please visit him at http://www.findnewcustomers.com or call (516) 495-9350 (office/mobile)

Sources:

• Twitter Sues 5 Major Spammers. Mashable
• Twitter blog, the State of Twitter SPAM
• Venturebeat, 4/5/2012, Twitter sues spammers to beef up security

Why Every Business Executive Needs to Create an About.Me Profile

If you are like most business executives, you’ve worked long and hard on your Linkedin profile. You have keywords, recommendations, and even (as I do) common misspellings of your name. Check out the profile of Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers.

But there’s one big problem with Linkedin – it’s really wordy.  And it is not visually compelling.  What you really need is something like an online business card.

Think about this challenge. Where can you send people to learn about you?

• Your Facebook profile? Nah, too informal.
• Your Twitter bio. Nope, too informal.
•  Your Linked profile. Duh, too buttoned down. Where can they go?

I suggest you head over right now and create your profile in About.me. (http://about.me) Make it visually stunning with images and graphics. Create hot-links to key online sites. And add buttons for your keys social media links.

Once that is done, add the URL to your signature – like http://about.me/jeffogden. Then share it on social networks. Add it to your byline on your blog too.

About.me is a very slick online business identifier. We highly recommend it.

To see a quick intro on About Me, click this link. http://vimeo.com/19914735

Author:

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is the founder and president of Find New Customers. He also hosts a weekly marketing show, Mad Marketing TV, in which he interviews top marketing experts each week. He was recently named as one of the Top 50 experts in Sales Lead Management for 2011. He’s also a professional writer and keynote speaker. To contact Jeff, please visit him at http://www.findnewcustomers.com or call (516) 495-9350 (office/mobile)

 

Sources:

• Jeff Ogden of Find New Customers
• http://about.me
• Mad Marketing TV

Are You Alive? Why Your Blog is the Heartbeat of Your Business

As part of my day to day activities at Find New Customers, I research the websites of lots and lots of companies. I find typically a Resource Page with eBooks, white papers, webinars, etc. Nice stuff. Sometimes (not very often) they have a decent sign-up form. But there’s a problem.

I’ve never heard of the firm. They’re invisible.

I’ve come to the inescapable conclusion is that the reason they are invisible is their business had no heartbeat. A heartbeat happens continually as long as you are alive. By the same token – marketing in business to business needs a heartbeat too. That’s your blog. Blogs are regularly updated, like a heartbeat.

Buyers are looking for companies with a heartbeat – regular publishers of content. They need to be constantly reminded that your business is alive.  Unfortunately, so does Google and Bing. When they ping a website, they look at how recently it was updated. So that heartbeat is important in search rankings too.

The Problem with Websites

They are static. They rarely, if ever change. I hear people say “Our website is outdated. We need a new one.”

I think that’s a wrong position. Instead, they need to think about publishing daily and weekly – good content that answers buyers questions.

A good, robust blog is updated several times a week – at least. It contains your keywords and links back to your website. It demonstrates to the world that your business is alive and alerts the search engines to your presence.

Seed Nurturing

Jon Miller, VP of Marketing at Marketo talks about the importance of seed nurturing – plant “seeds” all over the internet to make it easy for people to find and engage. Jon is right – a blog let’s you share content, such as eBooks, webinars, thought leadership and more. By continually publishing, your business has a regular heartbeat that prospective buyers see. Your business is alive.

The Importance of Syndication

Another way to show your heartbeat is to syndicate your blog. Our blog publishes to Evan Carmichael, CustomerThink, B2Community, LinkedIn, Facebook and many other sites. By syndicating your content, you are planting seeds for your business all over the internet – seed which, if they germinate, lead right back to your business. Where can you syndicate your blog?

Blog as a Sharing Vehicle

Let’s say you regularly publish content. Webinars, e-books, white papers, videos, etc. How do your share the word about your content? Let’s look at how a blog can help you promote a white paper.

Let’s say you have a brand new white paper, such as “The CMOs Guide to the Crazy New World of Marketing” (the actual title of my next white paper for Silverpop). Do you simply post and pray?

Let’s say instead you sit down with the author and record a video interview with him on the ideas behind the white paper. Then you post those video clips to YouTube and Vimeo.  Next, you can write a series of blog articles about that interview and attach the videos. Those blog posts will be shared with your syndication network too. Bingo! You and your content are all over the internet. Your business is alive and everyone sees you’re alive.

Our Personal Story

While we’d love to update our website, we spend quite a bit of money to update our blog, Fearless Competitor for the New Year. We felt that since our blog is updated frequently (almost 365 times a year), having a professional-looking blog would be the very best way to grow Find New Customers.

Are you ready to show the world that your business is alive?

P.S. In addition to being the President of Find New Customers, Jeff Ogden is a professional blogger who writes for companies such as Silverpop and Aprimo. He is also a professional writer and speaker.

Author:

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is the founder and president of Find New Customers. He also hosts a weekly marketing show, Mad Marketing TV, in which he interviews top marketing experts each week. He was recently named as one of the Top 50 experts in Sales Lead Management for 2011. He’s also a professional writer and keynote speaker. To contact Jeff, please visit him at http://www.findnewcustomers.com or call (516) 495-9350 (office/mobile)

Sources:

• Find New Customers
• Fearless Competitor
• Why Blogging is Important to Your Business

What’s the Real Key to Success? It’s Failure

The World’s Greatest Successes are the World’s Biggest Failures

An article at Harvard Business Review by Jeff Stibel, Chairman and CEO of Dun and Bradstreet Credibility Corp entitled “Why I hire people who fail.” – described the efforts of a hiring executive to uncover failures in people’s backgrounds. His point? Only by failing do people learn, therefore those who have not failed have not learned.

In his article he cited Apple, who created a “Failure Wall” to learn from mistakes.

Here are three great quotes about failure:

• “Success is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
• “I have not failed, I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison
• “Mistakes are part of the dues one pays for a full life.” – Sophia Loren

This got me to thinking of the risks I personally took in founding the B2B demand generation company Find New Customers in 2009, our many months of failure, and the great successes we enjoy today – delighted clients, Mad Marketing TV and more.

The light bulb went on. Had I not been willing to fail over and over, the success we enjoy today would never have happened.

There’s a lesson for business leaders here. Don’t reject failure – celebrate it. Champion the risk-takers. They are the ones who make great things happen.

Sources:

Why I hire people who fail

Failure Wall

Find New Customers