Retro Ads from Ad*Access by Duke University Libraries

Whether they prompt you to scratch your head and ask "They said what to sell that?!," or incite your inner-vintage-monster to go on yet another Mad Men bender, the high quality scans of advertisements in Ad*Access are worth a look back in time.  Chock full of thousands of printed ad spanning the early-mid 1900's, this database's five primary categories are Beauty & Hygiene, Radio, TV, Transporation, and WWII. Because I can't state it any better, here's what the About page says:  "Ad*Access is a pilot project to make a selection of historical advertisements available for study and research. The project draws on part of a large collection of magazine and newspaper ads within the Duke library's J. Walter Thompson Company Archives." (I especially recommend reading the Preservation paragraph if you want a bit of perspective on how Duke's archivists managed these materials.)

Simply put, this is a major tool for those doing advertising or marketing research through an historical lens.  And this database, an end-product with hundreds of hours of work behind it, is free for anyone to use.  Sold!

You'll find more free advertising resources here.

Enchanted at SLA 2012

Guy Kawasaki was the keynote speaker at the SLA 2012 conference in Chicago this week. Guy is the former chief evangelist of Apple -- he was one of the original marketers of the Macintosh. He is a venture capitalist and now the co-founder of of the news site Alltop.com. I was among the thousands of information professionals that got to hear Guy tell us what it takes to really enchant. Will you only fly Virgin? Do you tell all your friends how Apple has changed your life? That is enchantment! Kawasaki's new book Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions is about how you can have that same effect on others. Whether you are an entrepreneur with a new idea, trying to get your dream job, convincing someone to write a check to your favorite charity, or selling the services of your library, you can use the power of enchantment.

It's not the same as being enchanted by Guy Kawasaki live and in person, but you can see him on YouTube and you can find his Enchantment PowerPoint deck on Slideshare.

LOHAS: Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability

LOHAS is an acronym for Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability. According to the LOHAS.com website, the organization "focuses on educating and building community around the central theme of healthy and sustainable lifestyles for individuals and societies." Even more importantly to bizologie, they offer business resources on the growing $290B LOHAS market. LOHAS not only shares information but also provides practical tools and techniques for people to implement into their businesses. The website has tons of news and aggregates data on the industry. For example, they have info on green marketing, sustainability trends for 2012, fair trade, and green consumers.

The HUB by LOHAS is a business network for companies in the LOHAS industry to connect, collaborate and seek opportunities. They say it's like LinkedIn for LOHAS companies and organizations. You can see the online business directory of over 600 companies, but to get detailed info and to be able to connect you must become a member. Companies can apply online and have to be approved.

Free Webinar: Beyond Newsletters

Beyond Newsletters: Better Ways to Inform Your Users Tuesday,  January 24, 2011, 9 am CST - No Charge! - Register

Whether you use newsletters in your marketing mix today or are considering them for tomorrow, there are innovative new ways to simplify the internal newsletter creation process. Also, there are a few newsletter alternatives that you may want to consider when deciding how best to accomplish the goal of keeping users informed. In this webinar, you'll learn some tips and tricks you can apply today to give your newsletters the lift they are looking for.

Webinar hosted by FreePint - Family of sites and publications reaching over 100,000 information workers monthly

Social Commerce: Monetizing Social Media

Social Media, everyone is researching it these days and everyone wants to know how to make it pay. I ran across this white paper from syzygy group that describes social commerce as a "fusion of social media with e-commerce." Social commerce includes 6 dimensions: social shopping, ratings & reviews, recommendations & referrals, forums & communities, social media optimization, social ads & apps. The simple definition is "helping people connect where they buy, and buy where they connect." Amazon has been bringing customers together and getting ratings and reviews in their online store for years, and now stores are popping up in Facebook. 1800Flowers and Gilt Groupe now sell their wares right there so you can more than just "Like" them. There is also potential for brand building by creating associations in the minds of customers. Researchers are using psychology measures from social intelligence to gauge brand worth (see chart below). Next week I'll cover more on the new subject of a brand's social currency. The report is available from Social Commerce Today. Their site is full of the latest news on the subject. Check out all the companies making social commerce a reality and see if they are  cashing in.

GrowthPanel is a Good Thing

While free fashion advice from your geriatric aunt would likely be unwelcome, free business advice from professionals with decades of experience in leading SMBs/SMEs would likely be met with open arms.  Enter GrowthPanel.com, a “web-based marketing platform that blends marketing content with project management for intelligent marketing management.” I give them major kudos for giving away a significant host of free learning materials and tools to potential customers.  You can download their Strategic Marketing Process ebook at no charge, plus their Marketing Exercises, spanning over two dozen functions that any business should be doing well, e.g. search engine optimization, developing brand architecture, etc.  (Full disclosure: I did not discover GrowthPanel myself.  Dr. Bailey at UT’s School of Information assigned the Develop Your Media Kit during a graduate Administration course I took from her.)

One thing’s certain- GrowthPanel loves lists.  Bulleted overviews, check lists, short answer lists, these exercises are broken into readily comprehended and tackle-able segments that will have a working group thinking without being overwhelmed.  The resultant material generated from the exercises can be applied by almost any institution, commercial or non-profit, for real world self-evaluation and use.



Casual Friday: Live Purchasing

In case you needed another way to spend your free time, here’s one interesting way: live purchasing.  The Zappos.com website has a Real-Time Order Map that it dubbed Mappos, which allows you to see what individuals (kept anonymous of course) are ordering in real time all over the country.  You gaze at a map of the U.S. as images of merchandise, pointing to an originating city, pop up on the screen for several seconds before winking out.  If you feel so inclined, you can even vote thumbs up/down on the merchandise that was purchased, though Zappos doesn’t detail how that feedback is used.  Not only is Mappos addictive to watch, but it arguably exemplifies the oldest selling ploy in the book, aka, “Everyone’s doing it.” They are not the only company to have employed technology to track live purchasing.  In an excellent Vogue article from the June 2010 issue called “High Clicks,” Sarah Mower interviewed Natalie Massenet, the founder of swanky luxury clothing etailer Net-a-Porter, a company which also tracked live purchasing behind the scenes, and presumably still does today.  Mower had the following to say about Net-a-Porter's live purchasing system:

“…The whole office is wired for sound and video. Everyone in the company here, in New York, and the distribution centers can see what's selling, when, where, what the turnover is. Go look at the screens.  They're mesmerizing.

Positioned in the sight lines of every desk, they display a visual of Google Earth, and every time someone makes a purchase, a Net-a-Porter bag pops up on the location. On the screen above, the shopper's order is pictured, along with how much she spent, where she lives, and a running tally of the day's takings. It's 11:00 A.M. London time now, and someone in Yekaterinburg, Russia, is buying towering $1,200 Fendi shoes. In NYC where it's 6:00 A.M. a woman drops $3,600 on Isabel Marant. A pair of $1,290 Bottega Veneta sandals is being ordered up in Athens (though the country's nearly bankrupt); a plunging, multicolored $600 Melissa Odabash swimsuit is going to soccer-wife country in Altrincham, Manchester.”

Needless to say, it seems that live purchasing could serve multiple functions, acting also as an ongoing morale-booster for employees who sell and process merchandise.  It will be interesting to see the extent to which this trend catches on and evolves in the future.

Itty Bitty Bit of Branding

For my first contribution to this blog, I figured it would be fitting to start small.  Really small.  16x16 pixels to be precise.  The favicon, or bookmark icon has become a somewhat ubiquitous visual moniker for that we rely on and appreciate when browsing through multiple open webpage tabs or a long bookmark lists.   A few examples are the favicons for Wired Magazine website, the Amazon website, this bizologie blog, and Google Calendars (which features the date). I say somewhat ubiquitous though because while many established institutions, especially those with popular recognizable brands have been using favicons for some time, small businesses sometimes overlook this opportunity to display their brand image.  In a deeply sweeping and precise scientific survey, I did a Google search for the words: Austin coffee, and opened 10 pages from the first Google results page.  Four of the cafes had a favicon and six of the cafes did not.  In a second search for the words: San Diego pet boarding, only two of the 10 boarding centers from the first results page sported favicons.

How does a small business go about remedying this?  Visit an icon generator page like this one from Project Fondue.  Upload an image or logo, or use their editor to create one from scratch, download the finished product, and use a website editor to embed the code.

As Harvey S. Firestone, founder of the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, said:  “Success is the sum of details."

SMBs Double Use of Twitter

eMarketer reports that small and medium-sized businesses doubled their Twitter usage from 2009 to 2010. According the the “Local Commerce Monitor-Wave 14” study from BIA/Kelsey and ConStat, last year 1 in 5 SMBs used Twitter for local marketing.  SMBs' overall use of social media is growing. "Twitter was still behind many other social media tactics, with nearly half (48%) of respondents using Facebook for marketing and a quarter using some other social network."  35% of the SMBs surveyed had increased their use of links and ads on social media sites over the past year, and "46% planned further increases in the next 12 months." 25% of SMBs increased their use of customer ratings and reviews in 2010 and 39% expected to increase usage of reviews before the end of 2011. Not surprisingly, younger businesses (those under 7 years) were more likely to use social media for marketing.

For more on corporate uses of social media, stay tuned to bizologie. Later this week Laura will cover The Global Social Media Check-up 2011 report from Burson-Marsteller.