Digital Marketing Orange County

Sheer genius! In a recent publicity stunt the CDC (Center for Disease Control) garnered national attention by Tweeting about its zombie readiness protocol. This Social Media madness was designed to focus attention on disaster preparedness. In this case the disaster was an onslaught of the un-dead.

Disaster preparedness kits are something that we all know we should have, but few of us do. Not exactly sexy or interesting to most of us. Zombies on the other hand… well, I personally find them interesting (excluding my staff on a Monday morning).

The angle was to instruct you on what you need to do before a zombie invasion and before you can locate a zombie-free refugee camp. And by the way… these instructions are also good for natural disasters as well.

The irony of great marketing? Well it worked so well that all the additional traffic crashed their servers. I guess they weren’t that prepared after all.

-Chuck Bankoff

Once again Betty (a composite of several of our actual clients) has a mistaken impression of what Digital Marketing is all about. She thinks that just having a Facebook page is “doing” social media marketing.

It is true that social media and search technologies are currently the most powerful advertising options that are available to all business equally today.  However like anything else, it doesn’t just happen without a strategy.

Betty’s strategy is a little weak…

For those of you who don’t know Betty, she is a composite of actual clients we’ve had over the years. In fact, you might actually be Betty.

I pride myself on being a patient person and a good listener, but sometimes I have to question the logic of my own clients. We typically work with professional organizations with professional expectations, yet on rare occasions I find otherwise savvy business people trying to cut costs in the most inappropriate places.

For example, a company website WILL eventually be seen by all of your existing customers, and if you are marketing it properly, by all of your future customers. Is it really a good business decision to hand that responsibility over to a relative or the lowest bidder?

Don’t be a Betty….

Who is Betty you might ask? Well in fairness, there is no Betty. She is a culmination of a few of our clients who underestimate the expertise and time commitment it takes to successfully market their business on the Internet.

I recently had a light hearted moment with a client who informed me that he wanted to try a $29.95 per year “do-it-yourself” product to optimize his website on the search engines. Even after informing him that it doesn’t actually optimize anything…that it just submits his site to the search engines and points him to some articles about search engines, he still wants to give it a try.

It’s one of those “you had to be there” moments but it prompted me to take a few minutes and create this animated video recap of our conversation. In fairness, I may have embellished a bit…. But you get the idea.

In fact it prompted me to start a monthly animated Digital Marketing movie series about my observations of things doomed to failure. Become a fan of my Facebook page you can witness my next rant on “do-it-yourself websites”.