How to Promote Offline

People still respond positively to material marketing means. Whether it’s an aspiring blog business, consultation service, SEO strategy, or simply good old fashioned goods and services, your online business could always use the boost of promotional gifts, guerilla marketing tactics, and classic advertisements to shine a little brighter in the sky of online opportunity.

The Best Promotionals Promote Indefinitely

The biggest reason nobody online wants to invest in material marketing is that most online business spans across states and even national borders so there isn’t much incentive to spend the limited money you have on such techniques. But if you send out practical promotional gifts to new customers these items can continue to sell your company for months and even years. The trick is you have to offer things that other individuals are likely to see, like personalized bags, flash drives, pens, et cetera. The tactic here is that you’ll have an item that invokes an observer to comment to the owner i.e. your customer, who in turn will act as an unpaid salesperson for you and your business. It’s important to provide practical long-lasting items though such as the ones just mentioned. T-shirts, key chains, magnets, and other super-cheap promotional gifts tend to not get seen by enough people.

Give People a Question They Must Answer

Guerilla marketing, where advertising is often focused in an urban area through alternative and seemingly ruggedly radical means, is ingenious in that it often catches people off guard and lures them into further investigation. Chalk art grabs peoples attention and when it comes to an online business something as simple as posing a question or fact related to your business and then your URL. For example writing “Did you know 8 out of 10 people choose who they do business with based on Google search results? Learn more at (your URL).com” is a great way to inspire someone to look into SEO by visiting your site. The only thing you have to worry about is getting you or your street marketing team mistaken for terrorists.

Viral Marketing Applied to the Real World = Chance for Catchy Creative Marketing

The bottom line is when you’re able to successfully integrate the techniques of online marketing into real world marketing you’re going to combine the best of both worlds. People love the interactivity that online viral marketing provides, but they also love materials and products and gimmicks tied to their reality. For example I just read a blog recently where the writer mentioned a pretty fascinating business strategy developed between a Thai restaurant, which promised a free cupcake after every meal, and a second-hand store next door. The store next door gave out cupcakes despite selling vintage clothing, which could be claimed with a voucher from the Thai restaurant. This caused folks to unintentionally go vintage clothing shopping. What if a real world restaurant offered a free (blank) your business could provide, which is redeemable on your website?

Online marketing is certainly the way of the present and surely the way of the future, but don’t forget about the real world that your customers and the money you earn, exist within. Especially with the advent of online marketing, real world advertising has never been a more powerful method of getting customers, because less and less businesses are taking the time to execute it effectively. Allot some of that start-up cash toward an ad campaign set in reality and see for yourself how material marketing still sells.

This has been a guest post, to blog on this send send me an email, andrewufl @ gmail D0t com

The Seinfeld/Microsoft ads had artistic flair, something that kept you wondering, or at least confused. You thought, maybe Microsoft has a secret behind all this madness, this genius plan that is going to make me love them or at least not hate them as much.

These New Commercials Sucks

What makes the Mac ads great are a couple of points: the humor, the truth, and the nice little jabs.

The Humor

John Hodgman is a lovable PC character, and there are definitely ‘PCs’ like him all over the globe, just hop into your IT department and you can find one. Seinfeld brought this quirky humor, these new commercials just make you feel like you’re watching an insurance commercial, “you’re not a number, blah blah..”

The Truth

Windows Vista really does suck. Perhaps these new commercials, showcasing normal people, are most likely using XP. The group in Africa? Think they can power Vista machines? I think not.

Windows does have their operating system everywhere, but that doesn’t make ME want to use it. Think about it, do you want to know that Microsoft can be used for EVERY case on Earth, or do you want to know that it can handle your pictures, music, etc. — the stuff that people care about.

Jokes Are Funny

Nothing about these new ads are funny. They’re obviously a direct, pathetic, response to Apple’s commercials.

Why not continue to poke fun at yourself, which I think Microsoft thinks they’re doing with these new commercials.

Please Send Me Your $300 Million Next Time

For the next huge waste of money, Microsoft, please don’t hire another nerd Scoble to sell your product or pull the plug on Crispin early, why don’t you invest that $300 million into making your damn software better so I don’t have to pirate it, and actually consider buying it.

Here are the 3 commercials:

Watching the different strategies of the two candidates sometimes is sickening to me, because they just seem to be missing the point. The Obama campaign, up until recently, I felt was being too soft, they weren’t attacking bad at McCain.

McCain, his handlers had him going through the damn grocery store knocking over pickles or picking out tomato sauce.

Advertisers Know How to Sell

You want to know how to win an election? Win the hearts and minds. If advertisers can convince you you need to buy expensive sunglasses you can’t afford, or 47″ LCD tvs, they can probably convince you who you should vote for president.

Here’s an excerpt from an editorial by Ken Wheaton:

And while McCain is trying to appropriate the “change” theme, he’s proposing what? A panel modeled after the 9/11 Commission to study the issue. Now, not only does that sound like the same old politics, it almost sounds like the same old Democratic politics from back in the early ’80s. Let’s conduct a study and throw more government money at it. That allowed Obama to come back with this response: “The last thing we need is a commission to study a problem that everyone but John McCain knows is the result of the failed economic policies he has championed for the last 26 years.” Ouch.

While we full-well expect the American automakers to get bailed out via Government bonds, hopefully GM can stem the tide and turn things around, starting with the Volt.

Production is scheduled to begin late 2010 for models in the United States

The actual vehicle looks extremely polished, and hopefully this won’t be a “prototype” and this vehicle will actually ship in 2010. And to potential haters, cars are typically released ‘late’ in each year. 2009 models are being released right now, so this Volt will most likely bear the 2011 model edition.

The actual vehicle is expected to have 40 miles of gas-free driving you get after charging the car’s 220 internal lithium battery cells.

And, as far as charging goes, “Charging the Volt about once daily will consume less electric energy annually than the average home’s refrigerator and freezer units.”

Take a look around the interior in this video below, I’m pretty excited about this bad boy:

MoveOn.org Where’s Our Swift Boat Veterans?

The Republican activist groups know how to win an election. Setup some bogus organization dedicated to questioning John Kerry’s heroics in Vietnam (honestly, why would you ever join this ‘organization’).

Did John Kerry kill 3 people or 10? Who the fuck cares. He was in the war, George Bush was in the National Guard. End of story.

So MoveOn, start an organization questioning McCain’s financial prowess or an organization that questions McCain’s character. He left his wife and three kids to marry this rich guy, Cindy McCain, who owns 10 houses and lives off her daddy’s money.

Don’t Worry About Bias

Just saw you’re not endorsed by Obama for the ads, simply that you’re an organization that’s questioning McCain’s character.

Is he going to leave Cindy McCain for Sarah Palin? He sure does like to hug her, without Cindy’s approval.

Microsoft and Ronald Don’t Mix

Why Microsoft, are you releasing such an anemic Zune offering? This thing has no browser, it’s impossible to browse the Internet, it has no touch-screen (which should be a good thing), and every ad you put out makes the Zune look even worse.

Why don’t you spend more time porting Windows XP onto a mobile device, it will be more stable, and will have endless amounts of 3rd-party developers already built-in. I love to run Windows 98 games to relive my childhood, why not cut out the MIME emulator and do it yourself.

All the Music You Could Ever Want

Online music sites have the solution: they have pretty much every song out there, and most sites give you the listening experience for free, or very little cost.

Grooveshark, in particular is amazing if you haven’t yet been exposed. The library is built from user generated content from across the globe, giving it a catalog that is essentially, limitless. Searching, navigating and playing is music is as easy as navigating an iPod.

Autoplay is Genius!

The true genius in Grooveshark lies in the Autoplay feature, which was Genius before it was an Apple-feature.

You put the songs into your playlist (queue) of your choosing, hit Autoplay, and you will receive new music inserted into your queue, based on the similarities of the songs currently residing in your queue.

You can + (smile) – (frown) and <3 (heart) songs based on how good the recommendations are. The more you contribute to the system, the better it gets, and the better the Autoplay session is.

iTunes + Grooveshark = Heaven?

Okay, so if we can figure out how to mashup Grooveshark into iTunes it would be the ultimate slice of heaven, perhaps via a plugin that lets you insert songs into your playlists for any tracks you’re missing?

Ideas are a plenty, so let us know your thoughts on the perfect music mashup.

I didn’t see this latest edition of the commercial on TV, as I’ve been catching up on TIVO, I did get the privilege of watching this newest edition this morning, and after 4 minutes and 30 seconds, I felt like I was watching a skit of Seinfeld.

Good writing is amazingly contagious and I almost feel like Larry David had something to do with writing this commercial or perhaps it was Seinfeld’s influence.

Seinfeld Still Has It

Despite my original thoughts that Seinfeld was washed up and just coming out of retirement do to Bee Movie and now this, I didn’t expect a very good performance from him.

Boy was I wrong, after watching this clip I really wish he could get the gang back together and start doing more Seinfelds. There really isn’t any show that lives up to it right now, minus maybe Curb Your Enthusiasm, but even with Curb, you enjoy it only because you loathe Larry and his antics so much.

Seinfeld had great characters, a lovable cast, and amazing writing. Bravo Crispin-Porter, on a job …done.

He’s eloquent, articulate, and pretty much everything you could ask for in a president. And watching this video really highlights what a unique talent he is.

The Democratic Party should not be forgiven if they fail to land Obama in the White House in this election, and they should probably look to disassemble and figure something else out, he’s that good: