As brands go, Apple is that rare breed that goes beyond. Apple makes… no, let me rephrase that…Apple creates consumer products that people don’t just want, but desire on a very primal level that borders on religious.  Consumers that purchase Apple products simply feel that they can’t live without a particular Apple product – they need their Apple “fix.”

The latest problem they’re having with their new IPhones is meaningless. Why? Because facing this type of consumer desire, Apple can do no wrong.  Apple, so far, has devised the ultimate brand. And they’ve arrived at the “Holy Land” of a brand – creating an obsessive desire within a consumer’s heart and mind for a particular product or service which only “they” can fulfill. Look at the pilgrimage that all the Appleites make to their favorite church (the Apple Store) to get the latest products. (By the way I just added Appleites to the dictionary on my word processor.)

The obsessive – albeit positive relationship consumers have with Apple, and human nature being so “human” makes it difficult to exactly identify what Apple does to make them what they are. (If it was easy all product makers would be doing it.) One of the things that I believe makes Apple different is in their having an exceptionally relevant knack for creating and delivering on products that touch the heart of the people who feel they “think different” while validating that “different thinking.” And really, who deep down doesn’t like to believe that they think different - in a good way, regardless if you use Apple stuff or not.

With all the social-this-and-social-that hoopla, Apple seems to know “social” maybe better than any other company. An example would be to simply look at the “app” craze; Apple has mainstreamed the term. It’s part of our culture and our language now.  There are apps for so many of our own personal tastes that one really can’t help but think any other way than “hey, that’s an app for me.” Take a peek at an app called Bump.  It takes the personal side of social to a whole new level.  Apple’s apps are about as viral (and consistently so) as viral can get.

One of the most over-used and over-hyped marketing terms has been “user experience.” Apple is one of the few brands  who truly delivers on this term. They’ve done this by capturing, holding and tantalizing not quite all, but most, of our 5 senses with their product offerings in tandem with an aura of longing for more. Apple products take the user somewhere. The majority of consumer products out there are lucky if they deliver a positive engagement to even one of our senses.

Apple, you could say, is the Di Vinci or Michelangelo of the digital age. You generally don’t look at the work done by these guys - you experience them. So don’t be surprised if someone finds an IPad in one of the Vatican’s vaults under Divine Artifacts somewhere down the road.

But, like anything else, powerful brands and religions have come and gone, so we’ll see.
For now though, one thing is sure, Apple does “think different” and millions of consumers love it.

By the way, I read that Apple’s market cap has surpassed Microsoft’s - how about them Apples.

This useless observation brought to you courtesy of Blackball Online Marketing, home of the Pittsburgh Online Marketing Technologist.

Not long ago we read an article about measuring ROI for Pittsburgh Social Media campaigns. We think ROI is a term meant for advertising, marketing, or branding initiatives and we aim to explain why.  If you're measuring for ROI, you've got to call it advertising, marketing or branding. If you call it advertising, marketing, or branding it's not social media even though that may be the platform used to deliver the message. That’s the fundamental difference between Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing and why the distinction in terminology. We measure Social Media campaigns in conversions.

The term ROI stands for return on investment. The only way to measure the ROI for anything is to separate the return and the investment costs from all other factors including all other advertising and marketing. The sum total of everything it takes to achieve your goal is by definition your investment. Time, money, internal resources, outsourced solutions, and opportunity cost are all factors that must be included to determine investment. If you define “return” in other ways such as website traffic, blog traffic, or hit counts it’s not ROI it’s a conversion rate. We think the author gets ROI and conversion rates confused.

Another reason ROI is a bad measure for Social Media is that business is not static, neither is your competition. There are too many factors that change too frequently to measure ROI for social media campaigns. Business cycles, geographic, seasonal, and climatic factors, as well as other external reasons all affect your results and bottom line. To nail down a number is a pursuit in futility. If your going to come up with a measurement metric make sure it’s valid before you base investment decisions on it.

It's the sum of the parts not the measurement of each part that matters in our opinion. Conversions, however they come, are cultivated through the whole marketing plan.

Social Media Tips:

1. Use your skills and resources wisely as they are all finite.
2. Give campaigns, social and otherwise, a fighting chance by planning a prolonged dedication of resources and don’t waver.
3. Only after a defined period of time can you look back and determine where you’re campaigns are successful and where they need work.
4. Be persistent.
5. Have Fun.

Blackball Online Marketing is the home of the Online Marketing Technologist. Liven up your online presence by contacting us. “Helping People is Good Business”

Have a different take on this subject? Do you think we are getting this all wrong? We’d welcome your thoughts.

Meet the New Corporate Boardroom – But Not Yet

As a result of the Web, Social Media and all its parts have taken us by storm. They’ve caused an unprecedented shift in transparency, ease, speed and reach in the distribution of a message in almost any form you want. But I think the biggest shift is in the level of transparency that’s come out of it. So powerful is this shift that all the brands we know so well are feeling the heat to comply to survive and grow by being a “part of” rather than “aloof to” the consumers and people in general – and really mean it. They had to change.

All Great Causes Begin as a Movement, Degenerate into a Business, and then end up as a Racket.

Like most other enterprises in the beginning, these hyper-successful Online products and services ala’ Social Media were not the makings of a corporate boardroom. Then somewhere along the way they thought they should develop a corporate board.  In came the Venture Capitalists with the boardrooms and the meetings. The different and radical thinking that got these startups to where they are gave way to acting like all the other guys.

The transparency that has “gingerly” nudged brands into conducting themselves with more responsibility and sensitivity in regards to the consumer has yet to reach the boardroom level with the old school “behind closed doors” approach to things. Money changes everything so things can stay the same – but times they are a changing.

Because the speed, reach, and transparency of a message is only going to continue to accelerate and evolve , I believe an entire new breed  of Venture Capitalists are going to emerge that’ll look through different eyes and take different risks and find a way to use the transparency and everything else to their advantage. They’ll adapt and change out of sheer survival.  In other words they won’t fight this paradigm shift created by Social Media and they won’t want to. They’ll leverage it.  They’ll think like the very people that created these game-changing products and services. The end users will become the boardroom.

Understanding the name itself, “Social Media” tells the tale. It is “Social” meaning involved, part of, engaged, responsive, mindful, and eventually transparent. All parts of a solid relationship. One Tweet can alter a business’s approach drastically in action – or non action at their peril, (depending on if they are even paying attention.) The corporate boardrooms are holding on for dear life to protect the status quo.  But how long do you think before the boardroom has to do the same as other aspects of their brands and become Social on a level I don’t think they want to look at yet?

Blackball Online Marketing provides SEO Pittsburgh Services and Pittsburgh Online Business Consulting services.

Search Engines are Brand Blind

By marketing your services or goods via the Web, Search Engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo do not care if you’re GE or Joe’s Electrical Service on the corner of Main Street, USA. What matters to the Search Engines is whose site has the best content tailored to their particular target market. The Search Engines see the content and text you’ve provided for your particular offerings, not the brand name, or how big you are.

Let me pass on to you a story: Mr. Patrick Cray has a small electrical contracting and HVAC business, South Hills Electric Heating and Cooling. He built his business on being trustworthy and quality workmanship. He wants to keep the ball rolling but doesn’t have the ad budget to spend on billboards, TV spots, etc like his bigger competitors.

This dilemma was solved by successfully delving into something unknown to him at the time which was Search Engine Optimization or SEO. For Mr. Cray, this was something he was a bit skeptical of in the beginning, but the cost for marketing his business using SEO to compete was well within his comfort range and worth a shot. SEO is now and continues to be the main driver of his business. He’s found a successful recipe for promoting his business that’s very cost-effective, flexible, and puts him in complete control.

Mr. Cray has also integrated Social Media into his SEO strategy to build on his current SEO success.

So, if you’re looking for an electrician or a heating and cooling specialist  Online in the Pittsburgh area or in your particular part of the city and surrounding area there’s a real good chance Mr. Cray’s South Hills Electric Heating and Cooling company will be consistently on the first page, if not on top – and it’s been that way for the past year or so for him.

When they say the Internet has leveled the playing field for the small to very small businesses they were not kidding.  Mr. Cray is now a believer; he’s got the calls for service to prove it – courtesy of a well executed SEO strategy made just for him.

If you have some questions you’d like to bounce off us about how SEO can help your business just drop us a line. We’re Blackball Online Marketing and SEO and we’re on the Internet.

Personal Brand Management - The Digital Dilemma - Privacy vs. Usability

We all want to be ourselves and express ourselves accordingly but a problem exists with social media, aggregators, Google and the whole digital world today. There is no privacy. In order to use these mediums to communicate, we waive our rights on different levels. When was the last time you read Twitters Privacy Policy or Terms of Service? What is the security risk in using Google Buzz? Ever looked at the top of your Gmail account? That's right - targeted advertising because Google crawls Gmail accounts gleaning every demographic tidbit it can about us. That's how they make money - through targeted advertising like Adwords. Ever look at your Google profile only to see your purchase history and credit card information? Ever wonder how these companies pay for all the neat gadgets and processing power used for all of us. That's right campers, by selling our information.

“Branding” ourselves by our “social graph” and demographics via where we’re from, what school we went to, who we know, where we work, etc. has been around as long as marketing, but there are now companies that use our information we give away without a thought - because it so ridiculously easy to do. Targeted information gathering through social media cuts through all the fluff and gets to our core habits, needs, and desires. It’s the “rich data” about us. That's why it's so valuable and that’s why we should all pay close attention to it.

I've been seeing posts about students who search out schools based on their social media presence. That is the way of the world today and that's fine. But think about it in reverse. Your school basing your entrance on your grades, your associates, and your social media profile. Or how about a job interview that, as part of your background check, buys your social media history. Don't be afraid - be very afraid. Now get scared - get real scared.

Our digital history resides out there on a server somewhere, be it the cloud through everything you do with Google Docs, a post to a friend on Twitter that you think has gone away, an old MySpace account and the list goes on and on. Businesses are packaging and marketing these tweets, posts, and pages and making a tidy sum by selling the information in aggregated form. So just remember your personal brand and your good name that you need for credibility now and in the future could be in jeopardy because the cat got away again, or the dog ate your homework. Then you tweet or post something that's not normally you and Walla, it shows up on Bing as the best search result for a key phrase.

I suspect business has been doing this kind of thing for many years, but with the digital marketplace exploding and the meteoric rise of social media, we are more lax than ever about our personal brand. We advertise Pittsburgh Brand Reputation Management for small business all the time. So think of yourself as a brand. Or, think about yourself as being a celebrity with a reputation to protect. Why risk being labeled a troublemaker or much, much worse.