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Author Archives: John Walker
John Walker, Manager, Digital Marketing
Know Your Customers by their Digital Footprints
“By 2017, the chief marketing officer will spend more money on information technology than the chief information officer,” according to Gartner1. Why? Because a “data explosion”2 has suddenly given marketers the information they need to understand customers with a level of intimacy never before possible. This data comes from website analytics, social media platforms, call [...]
Video on the Web- Its Value Is More Than Viral
Let’s be honest. Your next video probably won’t go viral. In fact, it’s likely that no videos that your organization produces will ever get a fraction of the views of Old Spice “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” (35 million) or Evian “Dancing Babies” (46 million). But does this mean that video on the [...]
Google Lets Marketers Target Prospects by Behavior
Recently I visited the J. Crew website. I browsed some pages and left. Later that day I visited Yahoo.com to check my email and right there next to my inbox was a J. Crew ad. How did they do that?! “Remarketing,” that’s how. Remarketing is what Google calls its online ad targeting service that delivers [...]
Tags: remarketing, retargeting 1 Comment
Roller Babies Gets 39 Million Views – Web Video’s a Game Changer
The relationship between consumer and marketer has been like hide and seek for the last 50 years. The consumer hides; the marketer seeks. The consumer watches her favorite show and the advertiser interrupts with a commercial. It was kind of fun for a while. But as the number of seekers grew and the hiders increased [...]
A World with 60+ Million iPhones
How does your 2011 marketing plan account for 60+ million new iPhone users? Apple is projected to sell 60 million new iPhones in 2011. If you stacked all these phones one on top of another you would create a column 350 miles high. But of course these phones aren’t going into a gargantuan stack; they’re [...]
Tags: Marketing, Mobile, video No Comments »
How to Get 100,000 Online Video Views (without using Chimpanzees)
A client recently asked me if I could help her develop a “viral video” for her large industrial parts business. I asked what she meant by “viral video” and she said she meant a video with a low production budget that gets passed around the web and seen by thousands of viewers. I joked that [...]
Tags: Advertising, video, Viral Marketing No Comments »
Using Social Media to Create Transparent, Accessible Government
The Governor of Rhode Island, Don Carcieri, and his staff spent $2,670.30 on cell phone charges last quarter. How do I know? He told me right on his website. Visit www.RI.gov, the website of the Rhode Island state government, and you’ll see a brave use of social media to create remarkable transparency and access. Here’s [...]
Tags: Social Media No Comments »
Social Media Use: For the U.S. Air Force it’s a Benefit, not a Threat
In 1989 I asked my first boss, Rich, what he thought about the idea of communicating with clients through a technology that was the precursor to email. He told me that he did not think it was a good idea- it would prevent communication with clients from being properly screened. Hmmm? I wonder how many [...]
Tags: Social Media 2 Comments
Facebook Launches “Like” Button: Marketers Get Powerful New Tool
On April 21, Facebook announced a new feature which is big for marketers- it’s the new “like” button. This is a button that website owners can put next to products, articles, or features on their sites. When users click the button, a link to that page, article or product appears in their Facebook newsfeed for [...]
Tags: Social Media No Comments »
Wanamaker’s Dilemma: Using Marketing Intelligence to Stop “Wasting” Your Marketing Budget