Morris Harmor @ Global Market Hub

"The Enterprise of the Future"

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 00:33:18 GMT

IBM just released a study that should be studied by every CEO and VP of Marketing in mid-sized companies. Yes, there findings are that important to the future prosperity of your organization.

The study is titled “The Enterprise of the Future” and was released on 4 September 2008. A total of 1.130 CEO’s from 40 different countries were questioned in face to face interviews. IBM focuses on the enterprise of the future and tried to identify the significant challenges that mid-sized companies face regarding change and their past success in dealing with it. What they found was that 86% of midsize businesses anticipate SUBSTANTIAL change and are making strategic investments to prepare their business to succeed in the future.

What was cited most were investments for “growth through globalization” and better “customer service for the new breed of more demanding and informed customers” – the “information omnivore”. Both of these areas are the primary targets of GlobalMarketHub!

The “information omnivore” is a new breed of customer that is seen as a positive for their businesses by the CEO’s in the survey. This type of customer “craves all types of information and often broadcasts its views worldwide via the Internet”. This is the active participant in social media sites having to do with consumer products. An IBM survey of retail customers found that “53 percent said they used the internet to compare product features and prices” and a good number of them sent out text messages to friends and family to share product information. The IBM report even suggested that these “ ‘Consumers’ are becoming ‘producers’ often creating entertainment and advertising content for their peers.” They are vocal advocates or opponents of products in the market and make their views known through social media sites. Seth Goodin in his book "The Purple Cow" refers to these consumers advocates as "earlier adopters and sneezers."

These are the customers that GlobalMarketHub attracts to your website through its Inbound/Outbound, Viral Marketing strategies. By participating in the ongoing conversation on these sites, businesses can attract these individuals to their company website and trap their contact information to be used in sales campaigns. These are educated customers that have an interest in your product and are purchasing in the near future.

Virtually no one questions the value of expanding into new markets that are opening up around the world. GlobalMarketHub enables companies to take websites and internet marketing plans and translate them into the languages of emerging markets to increase market share and revenues.

These two areas were mentioned as most important to the CEO’s survey and GlobalMarketHub is here to help capitalize on both these trends!

The Times They are a Changin'

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:23:27 GMT

I read something this week that just "blows my mind": 95% of B2B purchases begin with the purchaser doing a web search and doing his or her own research. This means that the purchaser determines his or her requirements and narrows the field before ever contacting a company or speaking with a sales representative. They do this on their own, without any influence from the company, guidance from a third-party, or pressure to make a quick decision.

Couple this idea with the fact that topic-specific social media network sites exist for individuals to share their experiences with various companies and products, and you can clearly see that the manufacturer of a product is no longer in control of the message that defines their product. The internet and social media sites have clearly put the buyer in control more than ever before. This situation also makes it increasingly more difficult to access decision-makers: especially during the critical requirements definition phase of the process.

A company selling in today's marketplace really has two choices: (1) continue selling the old way while watching market share, revenues and profits decline, or (2) adapt to the new environment and implement Inbound/Outbound, Closed-Loop Marketing strategies and see profitability grow.

The concept behind, Inbound/Outbound, Closed-Loop Marketing is that your people are actively sharing their expertise online through Social Media sites and thereby defining themselves, and your company, as an expert in your field while the prospect is doing his or her due diligence. By doing so, you help shape the prospect's requirements even before they know they are looking for a new product. This also allows your company to differentiate your product and start the sales cycle on the prospect's short list -- which could be a single vendor.

How to improve the appeal of your Press Releases

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 15:34:39 GMT

How to Make Your Writing More Visually Appealing

By Charlie on November 7th, 2007 | Filed in Writing | 2

If you use the tips in this post you’ll see a rise in the amount of time people stay at your site. Guaranteed.

Writing well is important, but so is dressing up your writing so it looks good.

Even if your writing is Shakespearian in quality if it looks too clunky it may not be read at all. Huge chunks of unbroken text just look too scary, too long, too hard to read.

Online, most people read by scanning. Our eyes hop from headline to headline, to a word in bold, to an image, to a bulleted list, etc.

This document was written to help you make your writing look more appetizing for those who scan. If you’ve put in the work to write something, you better make sure it gets read. Here’s how you do so.

Headlines

In the advertising world, ads without headlines are invariably less successful than those with headlines. This is for the simple reason that without a headline, someone might not even notice there’s writing there.

Imagine you’re flipping through a magazine or click wildly through a list of websites. You come across one that is all monochromatic text with no headline. To someone scanning, a page like this registers as a solid field of gray.

So, yes, you’re writing should have a headline. And as a simple general rule for headlines, they should be bigger than body text. The headline doesn’t necessarily have to be darker, a different font type or an entirely different color. Its size sets it apart already, but those things often help as well.

Section Headers and Sub-Headers

If there’s any question as to what a section header is you just read one.

Many of your readers aren’t going to read your post word for word. They’ll scan it and see if some of it looks appetizing.

Bold type

Bold type looks good too. It will help your readers scan for important and interesting words/subject matter within a body of copy.

Lists

Ah, the list! People love lists! That’s why you see so many articles with headlines such as:

“Top 10 Fastest…”
“101 Ways to…”
“5 Things That Will Destroy…”

Not only do lists make great headlines they’re also easy on the eyes. They’re full of whitespace, have plenty of breathing room and are bite-size. Readers love all of those.

There are two different types of lists that you can use to excellent effect. And from what current research is telling us it’s nearly impossible to either.

The ordered list

Like its name implies, an ordered list is a list. And it’s in order. You can use it for sequential lists, like so:

Get in the car
Go to the store
Pick out your groceries
Run away without paying for them
Just kidding. Always pay for your groceries

The unordered list

This is also a list but is not in order. Instead of numbers there are bullets. An unordered list looks like this:

Wilma Flintstone
Betty Rubble
Dino

Use Smaller Paragraphs

Even if you don’t use lists, never use section headers and refuse to use bold text, there is still one thing you can do to make any writing look drastically better.

Break up your writing into smaller paragraphs.

The more paragraphs you use the more whitespace there will be in your text and the more palatable it will seem to your reader.

Smaller paragraphs just seem more inviting.

Like this paragraph here.

And this one.

Again, yummy whitespace.

Do you feel more at ease with all that air in there? And doesn’t it actually make it seem there is less text than there really is? Less text, even if it’s only apparently less text, is much more likely to be read.

Columns

Similar to using smaller paragraphs, you can also break up one big text field into two (or more) columns of text. Look at the difference it makes…

Doesn’t the two-column layout seem more appealing to you? These two-column layouts aren’t something you’re necessarily going to use on the web much, but keep it in mind for those non-web projects.

Blockquotes

Tell your friends there’s a new sheriff in town.
His name is Roscoe P. Blockquote.

There’s another element that newspaper and magazine editors use all the time, and for good reason. If your medium is 99% text, making the words themselves appear more interesting is a very good idea.

And that’s exactly what blockquotes do. They’re great for breaking up a monotonous page.

Dialogue

Dialogue is brilliant for breaking up writing. It’s fast, it tells a story and it’s engaging. More than that, it’s also inherently full of whitespace and small chunks of bite-size writing. Look:

“I don’t like toast,” he said.

“What?” she asked, obviously surprised.

“I don’t like toast.”

“But everyone likes toast.”

“I don’t like toast,” he repeated.

“Yes. You do. Even people who don’t like toast like toast.”

“Not me,” he said. “I don’t like toast.”

See how that flows? See how all that whitespace and the small text chunks seem so easy to read?

Images

If a picture’s worth 1000 words, why not use an image and get rid of all that bastard text? What better way to break up text than to get rid of it completely?

Special Code

If you’re a programmer or web guru you can also include code snippets into your text.

The cool thing about code snippets is that it is almost always formatted in a completely different fashion from the surrounding body copy. Not only is it a different font-style, Courier usually, it’s also often formatted with a completely different color.

Summary

These are really only a few of the ways you can increase the visual interest of your writing, be it online or in print. I’d recommend trying a few of these for yourself. Before you do, take a look at your web stats, specifically at the “time spent on site” stat, and make a note of it. Check it again a month or two from now, after using some of the tips in this post. I can pretty much guarantee that number will increase, as your visitors will simply find your content more appetizing.

Now, I know this was a brilliant post and you hate to see it end. That’s why you should come back. Subscribe now and you’ll be first to know when there’s a new post. Well, first along with all the other subscribers…

http://www.igniteliving.com/writing/how-to-make-your-writing-more-visually-appealing/

Ideas from Copyblogger.com

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 20:21:06 GMT

Three Sticky Ways to Hold Reader Attention

by Sonia Simone

Your copy might focus on benefits instead of features, have the right balance of emotion to logic, and maybe you’ve even snagged the reader’s attention with an arresting headline. But after your reader clicks through, does your copy hold her interest?

If you can’t keep the reader’s attention, nothing else matters. And the online world demands your best techniques to hold reader interest, because tempting distractions are always just a click away. All writers and marketers have their favorite tricks to glue reader attention to their content, so here are three of mine.

1. Pair your copy with an arresting image

Some images create a strong emotional reaction in your reader, which creates a much more receptive mindset for your persuasive copy.

My Copyblogger post on personal elements in blogging was accompanied by an image that created plenty of interest before readers ever got to the words.

My post on my own blog about how to be an authority and a nice guy used an image that created a very different feel (I hope), but it also primed the reader for a particular emotional connection to the post.

Strong images are strong because they inspire strong emotion. Whether that emotion is lust, tenderness, awe, sympathy, or just plain curiosity, a powerful image alters your reader’s consciousness for just a few moments. That split second of emotional transformation allows your message to sink in much more deeply.

2. Use questions to capture and keep reader attention

Smart copywriters use questions to get the reader’s train of thought moving in the right direction. Ask questions that uncover pain points or explore insecurity.

Ask questions that enlarge your readers’ dreams, questions that get them to paint a mental picture of the fantastic rewards your product can bring.

We humans are the most curious animal on the planet, and questions are irresistible to us. When we hear a question, we want to answer it. Keep your readers’ interest up by setting their curious minds in motion with questions about how they can solve their problems with your solutions.

3. Get nitty gritty

Abstraction is boring. Ever read a psychology textbook in college? The theoretical discussions and clinical descriptions made for an excellent sleeping aid. But the case studies–real-life stories of crazy people and how being crazy affected their lives–woke you right up again.

Content with lots of specific details will hold reader attention much better than content that waffles on about general concepts. Vague, abstract generalities are hard to relate to. But when you get down to nitty-gritty specifics–exactly what goes into a technique, or the scary details about how you were almost homeless before you discovered this new business strategy–your reader wakes up again.

Use details and narrative to show the reader what really happened. Get nitty-gritty with your reader and she’ll reward you with her sustained attention. And that attention can be profitably turned into sales.

What are your favorite attention-holding techniques?

Feel free to bookmark this page at del.icio.us for future reference.

About the Author: Get more online marketing advice from Sonia Simone by subscribing to her blog today.

"It's Time to Socialize, People!"

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 17:06:51 GMT

Mack Collier: Broadcasting with 'Social' Media

"If you work with colleagues who resist the idea of social media, you're not alone. In a post at his Web Ink Now blog, David Meerman Scott says he often encounters marketers who insist their customers simply aren't online. According to their claims in recent conversations, tech-averse audiences include:

Those who donate to humanitarian non-profits
Workers for government agencies
Senior executives at large companies

Scott believes this argument tends to serve as a cover for those who feel most comfortable with traditional marketing channels like direct mail or billboards. And, should you encounter this rationale, you might want to borrow his standard response: "Nonsense! These days everyone is online. Executives use Google, government workers read blogs, people who donate money watch YouTube videos. And even if they don't go online at work, they do at home. Stop making excuses and reach your buyers in the way they want to be reached."

The post includes an amusing video, shot in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where Scott admits he found a market that really isn't online. "If you're selling camels at the Riyadh camel market," he notes wryly, "then keep marketing the same old ways."

David Meerman Scott provides a great piece of Marketing Inspiration by stating this fact in unequivocal terms: The time for finding reasons not to engage customers through social media is long past.

More Inspiration:
Mack Collier: Broadcasting with 'Social' Media