One of the things that irks me these days is the tendency for people to pronounce things dead. The idea being that some radical change is occurring  or has occurred rendering something obsolete. This old something must now in fact be pronounced dead. This pronouncement is given even though this old something has been so powerful in the past. In fact compared to this new thing the old thing has a demonstrated track record of high performance.

I’m sure there is a reason to think major changes are ahead that might permanently change things, but pronouncing things dead? Especially those things that have been mainstays for such a long time. Isn’t that taking things a bit too far.

So, here is a list of marketing tactics, techniques, ideas and thoughts that have recently been pronounced dead:

Jeff Gomez pronounces that “Print is Dead”

Marc Miller and Jason Sinkovitz pronounce that “Selling is Dead”

Michele Eggers asks “Is Marketing ROI Dead?”

Rick Aristotle Munarriz asks or states (can’t tell) “Death of Affiliate Marketing?”

And these are just a few examples. Over the years I’ve also heard the following:

• 60 second elevator speech is dead
• Personal Computer is dead
• Microsoft is dead
• Resume writing is dead
• Cover letter writing is dead

And recently I’ve heard a few people already pronounce that social media is dead.

And the biggest one of them all is when German philosopher Nietzsche announced that God is dead. Last time I checked he was the one that was dead.

photo credit: Shahram Sharif

A new study from Ipsos Mendelsohn shows that those with higher incomes (greater than $250K / year) spend more time online, watch less T.V. and listen to less radio:

Further reading at eMarketer.Com.

A picture can say a thousand words. This one shows how Wiki collaboration is much more efficient than e-mail collaboration. It makes e-mail collaboration look archaic.

Photo from lafabriquedeblogs

Hat tip: Beth’s Blog

Yesterday I attended a program organized by the AMA Phoenix Direct Marketing Shared Interest Group (SIG). The topic was “Personalized Marketing Using Cross-Media & Multi-Channel Campaigns Delivers Superior Results”.  It was a presentation from Executive Vice President of Mindfire Inc, Joe Manos. He began the presentation by discussing how important analytics and measurement were in marketing. He cited the fact that the average tenure of a CMO has fall from 33 months to 18 months in the past few years. The main reason for this revolving door is CMO’s are, for the most part, unable to adequately quantify the success of marketing programs.

With that in mind he presented the PURL (personalized URL) and CURL (campaign URL) technologies which Mindfire Inc deploys to deliver a personalized marketing message to a target audience. The benefit of course being that you are able to then track the results from this. I was impressed.

The driving force behind the success of PURLs is of course that according to a DMA study 1 out of 3 consumers have said they want to respond to messages online. Online is preferred over 800 numbers or business reply cards. I personally think this number will only grow with time (but he didn’t say that in his presentation and I am sure he would agree). Mr. Manos pointed out that the weak point for many companies is that their websites are not designed to be response vehicles. So, when a potential customer wants to respond to a message and goes to the website the proper vehicle is not available. Hence they abandon their quest.

He had one case study of a Honda dealership in upstate NY that used a PURL campaign which was highly successful. The thing about this campaign he said was that on the creative end it was very weak. In fact he showed us their materials and I agreed it was VERY weak. However, the results were stunning. The dealership sold 40 more vehicles on the promotional weekend using PURL’s than they did the prior year when they didn’t use PURL’s.

Bottom line: As a marketer you need to consider using PURL’s in your marketing mix.

The term “social media” has been thrown around a lot these days. So, what is social media? Well, here is a video the puts it in plain English:

Social Media in Plain English from leelefever on Vimeo.

When it comes so social media, one word defines your level of success. That one word is “engagement”. It’s easy to go to the various social networking sites and set up a profile. All it takes is a few minutes out of your day, and as long as you have a decent picture you can pretty much have a great presence right away. It’s the same when it comes to blogging, micro-blogging or any of the photo and video sharing sites on the web.

The real work comes after you have the profiles open. Despite what many say, they will not necessarily come just because you built it. You will need to start putting in a lot of work into your little corner of the Internet. And when I say work, I don’t mean adding widgets to your blog and uploading a bunch of pictures either. I mean, actually going out into the social network and starting to engage your target market.

This is the part where you need to roll up your sleeves and start thinking of the ways in which you can start the dialog. Companies across the net are doing it with different levels of success. The bottom line is making your engagement strategy compelling. It must be creative and the user must feel like they are getting something out of the interaction.

Take a look at these two examples of customer engagement:

• eBillMe (YouTube) – a shopping confession video contest
• Colgate (Gather.Com) – sharing your smile

Both of these engagements are very creative and well put together social media engagements.