Social media marketing miracle!

Balderdash. If social media marketing works for you, great. Show me the money! Thus far, nobody has. That’s why I chuckled a bit this morning when the Industry Standard Weekly Edition newsletter arrived.

Lately it seems I can’t go anywhere without running into a gaggle of social media consultants bloviating about the wonders of social network marketing. Sure, you’ve seen ‘em, too. Slick shake-and-bake “experts” promising to help you leverage the power of Twitter and Facebook to raise your profile and, inexplicably, boost your profits. But scratch the surface on most of these claims and they instantly crumble. Meanwhile, it seems the only people making any money in social media are the consultants themselves.

Monetize your web app.

Last week, I attended a Think Tank session sponsored by NWEN, the Northwest Entrepreneur Network. The panelists discussed the iPhone ecosystem and marketplace. The three panelists had very different business models and app focus.

This morning, one of my fellow Think Tank committee members sent a link to a blog post by Box UK that analyzes and compares business models for web apps in general. Since “marketing” in its broadest sense includes all aspects of developing and delivering products into the marketplace, I offer the link here.

By far, the most successful business model thus far is based on advertising, where third-parties place clearly defined advertisements within the website/application. Variations include banners, text, inline, pop-over, interstitial, etc. Advertisers are charged by cost per click, cost per action, or cost per thousand impressions.

The Conversation Prism

The Conversation Prism

Originally uploaded by b_d_solis

And here’s what Web 2.0 looks like if you’re not one of the world’s largest, most recognized names in corporate consultancy.

See what Brian Solis has to say about his conversation prism.

Launch your video with TubeMogul

“Thanks to TubeMogul, launching and tracking a video marketing campaign to multiple sites at the same time can be both feasible and easy. TubeMogul gives publishers a single platform for mass video distribution to all the top media sites. Upload (up to) 12 sites at once, including YouTube, Google Video, Myspace, AOL, Vimeo, and more. Then, monitor when, where, and how often a video is played through your TubeMogul dashboard.”

Launch your video to multiple sites and track performance with TubeMogul | feed growth!.

Customer input from the social web.

Several months ago, I looked at some corporate initiatives to use social networking tools to interact with customers and learn what they have to say about a company’s products and services. I thought they were a bit pricy for midsize companies and predicted we would see lower cost options in the near future. The future is here.

SuggestionBox.com is currently in beta. It offers a simple, easy to use, online tool that makes it easy for customers to communicate their opinions, wants and needs and empowers companies to take action.

The pricing is right for midsize companies at $50/month or $495/year with a 30 day free trial and money back guarantee. The feature set is pretty basic on the “suggester” side. Anyone can make a suggestion or rate suggestions made by others. The company can respond to suggesters with a thank you or request for clarification. And each suggestion can be marked as implemented, coming soon, under review or filed away.

in a comment to my earlier post, an IdeaStorm manager suggested the power of their solution was on the back end. This may be so, but at $5 per user, this power requires a significantly larger investment.

Vivek Bhaskaran, CEO of Survey Analytics, developers of QuestionPro and IdeaScale commented on one of my earlier posts. He said, “I think the model of charging per user (or per idea) is NOT how we plan on marching down. We’ll have flat fee of anywhere between Free (yes), $15/Month and $199/Month.”

Here are some examples of who/how IdeaScale is being used:

www.askthespeaker.org (Politics)
www.choicehotels.ideascale.com (Large Biz)
www.buglabs.ideascale.com (Small Biz)

Selling marketing services to entrepreneurs.

So, I’m reading Seth Godin’s blog about how to read a business book. He linked to the 800-CEO-read blog for May 16, 2008, What is Wrong With Business Books?! – Part II which quoted rather freely from the anonymous “Uncle Saul” at socaltech.com.

And I’m thinking, Seth Godin writes/sells books. I get why this is important to him, but it’s also important to marketing agencies, consultants and service providers who are selling to entrepreneurs.

Bottom line: know who you’re pitching before you make the pitch. Entrepreneurs are different from serial entrepreneurs, who are different from professional managers or second generation owners.