Marketing/Promotions

You've probably seen the commercials for Dos Equis beer: The Most Interesting Man in the World. The ads feature Jonathan Goldsmith, who plays an older, suave character that has many fascinating traits about him, such as:

• "Sharks have a week dedicated to him."
• "He is the life of parties he has never attended."
• "If he were to punch you in the face, you would have to fight off the urge to thank him."

And my personal favorite: "His business card simply says I'll call you."

You get the idea.

Imagine a website that has tens of millions of users that you can access for free. This is the idea behind the social networking site Facebook. The site isn't just for giddy teens and college students looking for a good time either. Facebook is also a great way for small businesses to reach out to their customers and potential customers.

Chris Anderson says in his new book Free: The future of a radical price (page 163) says:

Sigh. I thought it couldn't get any lamer than the Windows 7 launch party videos. But I just came across this promo video for Windows 386, made in the glory days of corporate fashion for women circa 1987.

As the original poster said, "boring until the 7 minute mark when the production is taken over by crack-smoking monkeys."

Sometimes I wonder if Microsoft's marketing department isn't just big fail party. First, they blatantly copy Apple and are launching their own brick-and-mortar stores (complete with Answers Bar!). Now they are trying to convince groups of diverse people to hold Windows 7 launch parties with a series of lame videos posted to YouTube.

No, you didn't read that wrong. Apparently even bad products reviews can help increase online sales.

Twitter is becoming one of the fastest growing social networking and micro-blogging sites on the internet today. The whole idea is to say whatever you have to say in 140 characters or less. So the question becomes: If you already have a business website and a blog, then how do you incorporate Twitter into your business's marketing plan?

Say you owned a small retail shop (some of you may already do that!). You wouldn't dare think of doing business without asking your customers how they found your store, what they are looking for, or why they were there, would you? No, you wouldn't. But many companies do this exact thing with their online stores.

The easiest way to track what your customers want is to watch what they do online. But since you can't look over every customer's shoulder as they use your website, the next best thing is to watch them virtually through web analytics.

In a recent blog post at Ars Technica, they detailed how a cosmetic surgery company got slapped with a fine for paying their employees to post glowing reviews of the company's services. The reviews, of course, were online and anonymous. The company, Lifestyle Lift, also went as far as to pay employees to attack legitimate negative reviews, believing that those negative reviews hurt the company's reputation.

There's a ton of companies that will print pretty much any design on just about anything you can think of. There are some really creative ideas out there for self-promotion. Here's a roundup of a few of our favorites.

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