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Download the entire "Social Media Toolkit" »
AMA TechnoMarketing Workshop & Podcast
if you're looking for a comprehensive 2-day event on all things social media & marketing technology, look no further! The American Marketing Association is running the TechnoMarketing workshop this September and is still accepting registrations.
Register for the AMA's TechnoMarketing Workshop! »
Listen to a 5-minute podcast that I just recorded on social media and "technomarketing" for the event. »
August Marketing Links: Social Media & Thought Leadership
Want to see the cream of the crop in marketing, thought leadership and social media articles? Just look at what we're linking to!
Hit the Links! »
When you develop a social media policy, process and system within your organization, it's important the you have the right roles setup to ensure success. You don't need to have more people, but you do need to determine who will play the required roles for a successful social media effort.
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Upcoming Speaking Engagements
9/29 - 9/30 - AMA TechnoMarketing - Chicago, IL
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Tuesday August 18, 2009
NEW e-Book! The Updated MarkeTech Guide to Marketing Technology!
In 2007, we wrote the "MarkeTech '08" guide to marketing technology as an American Marketing Association members-only e-book to guide marketers through the most practical, useful and marketing-friendly technology tools like blogs, e-mail, widgets and video. It was one of the most popular e-books we've ever created with several thousand downloads over the past 18 months.
Much has changed since then and we've updated the guide for 2009-2010 with a few new chapters, an expanded list of resources and the most comprehensive social media and marketing technology glossary that you'll find in any e-book of it's kind! New stats, new examples and new ideas that you can use today!
The best part of all is that it's all yours to read and share!
Some of the topics covered in this year's 80 page updated guide:
- Autoresponder email
- Blogging
- Social media optimization
- Photo, slideshow and document sharing environments
- Honorable mentions in marketing technology and lot more!
Download the "MarkeTech Guide: Tools and Trends in Marketing Technology" e-Book! [7 MB PDF]»
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Marketing Classics: Exploit the Product Life Cycle (Theodore Levitt, 1965)
In case you haven't noticed, it's Ted Levitt month in the marketing classics section.
This was not actually by design, but as I'm digging into the marketing classics file, his work is critical to understanding the fundamentals of good marketing. Sure, this stuff is buried somewhere on page 73 of your old marketing textbook, but that doesn't mean it's not important.
The real innovation that the Product Life Cycle (PLC) concept brought to the world of marketing was that it introduced a formal set of stages and a process for marketers to follow in planning the extended lives of their products and for recognizing the transition that products were making through the various stages, allowing them to acknowledge where the product was in its life cycle and gave them ample time to cue up the next life-extending maneuver before it's too late.
Moreover, the PLC is an integral discipline in thought leading companies and is even more critical in the age of social media. What do thought leadership marketing, social media and the product life cycle have in common? Without going into great detail, thought leaders and marketers with a strong understanding of the PLC's within their company are both pro-active, playing offense, rather then being reactive and playing defense. They're not going to be taken by surprise.
Social media plays in a little differently, but already you see smart companies like P&G bringing social media into the product development process in a very big way. Levitt explained that "properly customer-oriented new product development is of the primary conditions for sales and profit growth." According to a recent article in Chief Executive magazine, P&G now boasts that more than 50 percent of the company’s new product development is crowdsourced from outside the Company." That's social media and the PLC at work right there!
Imagine what your average product life cycle would look like if you involved customers through social media.
There's more to the product life cycle story. Click the link below to get the whole article from the Harvard Business Review.
Oh, and if you're interested in the snazzy product life cycle diagram in this article, I borrowed it from my friend Paul Williams at Idea Sandbox (with his permission, of course). Check out his site for a dose of marketing inspiration!
Read the the entire article, "Exploit the Product Life Cycle" »
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Cool Resource: Feed Your Friends With FriendFeed
 When I first scheduled FriendFeed as the "cool resource" for this week's newsletter, they were still a standalone company. Well, as we have all seen, nothing stands alone or stands still for long in social media, as FriendFeed has since been acquired by Facebook!
Nevertheless, FriendFeed is still and extraordinary tool and something that I include in my "daily driver" social media toolkit.
As a "social media aggregator", FriendFeed is really the glue that holds a good social media presence together. FriendFeed is the "catch all" tool that captures everything you do in social media. Twitter updates, delicious bookmarks, blog posts, you name it FriendFeed sees it. In fact, FriendFeed can connect up to 58 different social media services! You can also create different "rooms" in FriendFeed to share content with different groups.
Todd even uses FriendFeed as a prominent widget on his site to let visitors know what he's reading.
Sign up for FriendFeed, invite some friends, and get an instant, customized feed made up of the content that your friends shared — from photos to interesting links and videos to messages just for you. And your friends get their customized feeds, full of the cool stuff that you've shared.
Learn more about FriendFeed »
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TechnoMarketing Master Class "Hit the Ground Running" Social Media & Thought Leadership Marketing Course
This is the most significant undertaking that I've ever put together for a course in social media and thought leadership marketing. Based on the success of the AMA TechnoMarketing Training Series, I've had numerous requests to "take it to the next level." Well, this is the next level.
Here’s how it works. Let's begin with the end. On the 25th of September, we'll do a day-long debrief and strategy session at the Aloft O'Hare hotel near Chicago, IL. Bring your laptop, bring your homework and you'll leave with a complete and action-ready social media strategy, policy and launch plan to position you as the trusted thought leader in your industry.
The TechnoMarketing Master Class is a 30-day program consisting of 10 assignments that you complete before our Friday debriefing & strategy session at the aLoft near O'Hare. Led by Dana VanDen Heuvel, this session is limited to 15 marketers who are ready to take their social media and thought leadership programs to the next level. The accountability, intimacy and methodical approach that accompanies this small group setting produce profound marketing results. Guaranteed (if you're not happy, I refund the course fee)
This program is not for the faint of heart, but rather it is designed for those organizations who are ready to commit to a serious strategy for their social media and thought leadership marketing.
Learn more and sign up for TechnoMarketing Master class "Hit the Ground Running" »
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