2010 Marketing

Patients: More doc input in online forums

Do MDs really know who their patients are, what they need, and do they really ask patients what they need from them? 2020 Public Relations work with docs on their internal and external communications to ensure they best connect with patients.

Patients who look to social media sites for help with their conditions want more input from physicians, according to a recent wool.labs study. "I wish I had a physician who would come on to my social network and answer questions honestly and straightforwardly," Michael Scott, the president and co-founder of Prostate Cancer International, told the wool.labs Cocktail Convention on medical adherence. However, greater physician involvement in social media may not be enough to increase adherence, panelists said. Full story.

Social Media Sell or Solve?

Are you a twit if you don't tweet? Clients of 2010 Marketing and Public Relations in the New Haven, Connecticut area understand social media can be valuable, but often it merely underscores your message. For some businesses it is vital, for others it is like a fifth tire on your car. 

A recent study, referenced in Promo Magazine, from Burson-Marsteller revealed that 54% of Fortune 100 companies have a presence on Twitter. Also, 30% are active on Facebook and maintain a blog. It's no longer an issue of should companies use social media, it's now a matter of how they should utilize social media. Pete Blackshaw, executive VP at Nielsen, says Social Media "is a catalyst for fresh thinking on how companies can improve customer service." Twitter is still the shiny new object every marketer is talking about and it's gaining clout as a customer service channel.

TV Time Steady Against Net

The media is dead, they say. Not say fast, reminds Ken Warren of 2010 Marketing. This brief story in The New York Times is a reminder that new media isn't the best always. "Who are your clients and what are their habits," is the real question. Click for story.

In the past five years, Americans have dropped their time spent with radio and newspapers by nearly one-fifth, according to Forrester Research’s latest Internet use survey. In return, they’ve more than doubled their Internet usage, jumping from six hours per week average to more than twelve. But the 40,000 American adults surveyed by Forrester haven’t changed the amount of time they spend watching TV. U.S. consumers average 13 hours of TV per week, a figure that hasn’t changed since Forrester began collecting data in 2004.

Ad $ From the Web? No Sure Bet

Where to spend your advertising dollars? Oh the web of course? Think again. 2010 Marketing reminds business that the toolbox of advertising options includes many options, and some work better than others for different businesses. For the full story from the New York Times, click here. For anyone with a crazy idea for a Web business, the way to make it pay was once obvious: get a lot of visitors and sell ads. Since 2004, venture investors have put $5.1 billion into 828 Web start-up companies, and most of them are supported by ads, according to the National Venture Capital Association. Now advertisers have cut back their online spending. So Web start-ups are searching for new ways to make money, like selling real, or virtual, goods or asking customers to buy subscriptions.

Internet Privacy?

The FTC had some sharp words for Internet companies, saying that they are not explaining to their users clearly enough what information they collect about them and how they use it for advertising. For now, the commission is sticking to its view that the Internet industry can voluntarily regulate its own privacy practices. But the tone of the report, and comments by several commission members and staff officials, indicated that if the industry does not move faster, the agency would increase regulation or call for Congress to legislate stricter online privacy rules. .Click for the full story from the New York Times.

Tracking the Online Election

The web has changed the political landscape, so how can it change your company and its potential customers?...Ken Warren, 2010 Marketing. Click here for the full story of the following.

Nov. 4 - Today's election, the culmination of a two-year campaign that has generated unprecedented media attention, has lit up the Web in a way that would have been unimaginable in 2004.

The proliferation of online polling and politically-themed social-media content -- from the candidates' own Web sites to the ceaseless barrage of micro-rants on Twitter -- have stamped this election with an unmistakable Web 2.0 imprimatur. Consider YouTube, Google's popular video-sharing site. YouTube staked its claim in the political arena during the primaries, when it partnered with CNN to host a debate among the candidates of the two major parties. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Media Begins Coupling Hyperlink

“Thou shalt not link to outside sites” — a long-held commandment of many newsrooms — is eroding. Click here for full story in the Oct. 13 NY Times. Embracing the hyperlink ethos of the Web to a degree not seen before, news organizations are becoming more comfortable linking to competitors — acting in effect like aggregators. The Washington Post recently introduced a political Web site that recommends rival sites. This week NBC will begin introducing Web sites for its local TV stations with links to local newspapers, radio stations, online videos and other sources. And The New York Times will soon offer its online readers an alternative home page with links to competitors. These experiments exemplify “link journalism,” an idea that is gaining traction in other newsrooms across the country. “It is a fundamentally different mindset” for journalists, said Scott Karp, chief of the Web-based newswire Publish2, who coined the term. For years, newspapers, television station Web sites and magazines have hesitated about linking to outside Web sites because, the logic goes, they want to keep the users on their own site. More internal page views and longer time-spent-viewing can equate to larger advertising revenue for Web sites.

Paper Web Revenue Stalls

Newspapers, already facing a grim economic forecast, are digesting another piece of bad news: the growth in online advertising they saw as their salvation has slowed to a crawl. Click here for the full story in the Oct. 13 NY Times. In the last few years, newspaper companies have been rapidly expanding their Web presence — adding blogs, photo slide shows and podcasts — in the belief that more features would bring more advertisers. But now, after 17 quarters of ballooning growth, online revenue at newspaper sites is falling. In the second quarter, it was down 2.4 percent compared with last year, to $777 million, according to the Newspaper Association of America. It was the only year-over-year drop since the group began measuring online revenue in 2003.

E-mail Marketing Effective?

On a recent survey performed by Forrester Research, about 92.1 percent of online merchants said they used email marketing to reach their own customers and of those, a little bit less than 93.5 percent said they planned to make that channel a higher priority in 2008. Some observers say that email marketing is commonplace, and unless something makes it stand out, it's often ignored, if not outright dreaded by recipients.

While e-mail marketing still works, consumers are increasingly demanding that ads be relevant, said eMarketer analyst David Hallerman. He noted that recent consumer surveys showed that half of online buyers had made purchased based on e-mail marketing. That may mean being timed perfectly for a buyer or that the message contains a compelling offer, Hallerman said.

Because what merchants think is relevant and what a consumer finds relevant may be different things, accurate tracking campaigns to see what triggers purchases is an important part of any e-mail marketing program. Today's email marketing landscape continues to evolve and with less attention on the e-mail and more on the marketing part of the equation.

Web 2.0: Hollywood Loses Control

Movie and tech folks met in Los Angeles in May to deal with this potboiler: Hollywood losing control over consumers. The rise of social networking, video sharing, blogging, Internet TV, mobility, instant messaging and more have given consumers tremendous sway over how they consume and share content. "Consumers have more control than ever," said Derek Broes, senior vice president of digital entertainment at Paramount Pictures. "You no longer have an environment where you had them in one spot, like in front of the TV set." Broes spoke on one of the 75 panels put together at Digital Hollywood.

One thing to do, many of the 1,800 attendees agreed, is to work with the consumer. New technologies let users access and manipulate video and audio content in ways not possible just a few years ago. This change started with the arrival of Web 2.0, the second generation of Internet technologies that emerged after the end of the first dot-com boom in 2000 or so. And the explosion of blogging and social networking sites let many individuals influence mainstream media and public opinion more than ever. From Investor's Daily, May 8