I came across an article today through a friend and I thought it was really interesting so I thought I’d share it this week. It is especially interesting for me, because I like understanding how to bring awareness to something wether it be a product, service, website, brand, or etcetera. Basically, I like understanding what attracts people to something and how they engage in whatever it is.

Here at Yovia, we focus on this and the fact that advertising and the way we communicate with people is changing. Yovia is a social marketing company that bridges the gap between people and products. Yovia strives to avoid an annoying message or an advertisement that just doesn’t register with an audience. You can check Yovia out more here or even join the network and boost your own traffic for your site.

I hope you find Seth Godin’s article below as interesting as I did.

The first law of mass media
By: Seth Godin

Organizations will work tirelessly to de-personalize every communication medium they encounter.

Radio ads used to be live, personal and spoken by an individual. TV ads used to feature actual people, demonstrating something, usually live. Phone calls involved a live speaker, talking, with permission, to another person. Email used to be honest interactions between consenting adults. Facebook pages (and Wikipedia, too) were built by people, not staffs. Twits came from real people, and so did instant messages.

One by one, the mass marketers have insisted on robocalling, spamming, jingling and lying their way into our lives. The pronoun morphs from “you” to “me” to “us” to “the corporation” …

The public works tirelessly to flee to actual interactions between real people, and our organizations work even more diligently (and with more leverage) to corporatize and anonymize the interactions.

The irony, of course, is that an organization with guts can go in the opposite direction and win.

My name is Seth Godin and I approved this message.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/the-first-law-o.html 

By: Matt Hite
Marketing Manager
Yovia.com

I often get hung up on what I am learning as a communications major/business minor in college and what I gain from interning at a marketing firm. I realize that in some cases experience is better than others, but honestly I wish my education in the classroom more than just scratched the surface with advertising. In class I often learned about the basics of topics like demographics, ethics, theories, behaviors, writing, and very basic Photoshop skills. I sometimes get frustrated because, in class I wish we went more in depth on topics and analyzed exactly how different types of medium and vehicles work in today’s market.

As an intern sometimes I feel like I am getting my lunch eaten because I don’t know how to do things or how something operates on a program or at the tech level. I often have to teach myself and just fight through it. Here at Yovia we often work on the internet and therefore use computers all day long even for our end results in advertisement. What frustrates me about this is that in school everything has to be tangent and in paper or on a poster. I mean yes I’ve made a video and done a couple radio spot for class but we never learned the brute skills of actually doing it. If we had an idea we would just make a poor version of our thoughts with out hardly any direction or help on setting it up. For example if we made a T.V. commercial we would make a three by three picture display of what would happen if it was an ad. In some ways I think this is good because we are being creative, but we are missing out on how the actual process works and how we can tweak the idea to make it better. We are missing out on working side by side with someone to share ideas and develop them into something even better using technology.

I understand that my internship might be a bit more involved with computers and the web, but I wish my school scratched the surface a little bit more in relationship with how advertisers use the web and different mediums to maximize their impact on their target audiences. There is a lot to learn about advertising especially within the internet.

By: Matt Hite
Intern
Yovia.com

Aesthetics can be really relevant in social marketing. As I have been working here at Yovia, I have been learning more and more about the blogging realm and social marketing. I often find myself thinking about what is new or interesting about how the internet works and how the world uses it. My thoughts often spin in a direction of how social marketing is doing something truly unique in the way we advertise. From these thoughts I wonder what the world of advertising entails and what it will look like.

Advertising with the radio, television, signs, fliers, and etcetera all strive for an edge on standing out to their audience. In some ways social marketing does this, but it is not as bombarding or saying “look at me!” or “listen up!” Although it works I think people are becoming more and more familiar and in some ways numb to some of these things.

So my point is, if people use social marketing they must be sure to go about in the right way. You have to understand how it works before you start talking to people because people could possibly be completely uninterested and you could be spam like all the other poor ads out in the world. I think what many people who use social marketing sometimes forget that in social marketing visual appeal is still important because this is still part of your message. Visual appeal follows over into the quality of the site you are posting or the button or widget you’re trying to get passed around. Visual appeal in some ways has a value proposition to it. An audience is not dumb and they can easily recognize spam. If you’re don’t care about the way your message appears sometimes and how it comes across, it mine as well be spam. So, to wrap things up they way you communicate your message is important dealing with visual appeal and even more essential on how you engage your audience.

By: Matt Hite
Marketing Manager Intern
Yovia.com

As an intern here at Yovia it’s interesting what you can learn about the internet and advertising. The reason I say all this is because in school we cover how the internet plays apart in advertising. Although, I think the material we actually cover hardly scratches the surface dealing with internet advertising. In my classes we briefly discuss how the internet works, what banner ads are, and the internet’s advantages versus other media.

I think the thing that really hits me the most is how in internet advertising you can see exactly what your viewers are doing. For many other types of media such as billboards, the radio, television, direct mail, and others all have room for error to creep with their numbers. These media can be tracked to a certain extent, but only with the internet can you really see what’s working and how to tweak and fine tune your campaign.

For example, Google Analytics can tell you where your people are coming from, how long are they staying on your site, and more. Basically from here you can figure out what your true value proposition is to your viewers.

For some this might seem like a basic topic, but for others the reason I say all this is because I believe experience is key in internet advertising. As you get your hands more and more soaked within internet advertising not only do you learn from your mistakes, but you learn what people are catching on to. The founder of Younglife Jim Rayburn said, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care, earning the right to be heard”. I believe that is the definition of good marketing, and social marketing is just that, earning the right to be heard.

As technology is ever increasing and resources like Google Analytics are playing apart in the internet, it will be interesting to see how advertisers capitalize on all this especially within social marketing.

By: Matt Hite
Marketing Manager
Yovia.com

This week as I was surfing the net and working I learned about the website Ning.com. I crawled through the site for a while, trying to understand how it completely works and the advantages it has if any. As I was in class I pondered more on the whole concept of Ning. It blew me away as I thought about how useful a tool it is.

Currently as the internet is now and becoming more of a social place having user engagement is crucial to a site. Ning hits on this factor because as people surf a site where Ning is applied it makes a website more personal, adding to the equation of allowing the site to increase in their page views.

Imagine a store that used Ning were people who were interested and somewhat brand loyal in the product could comment on things and engage with other users who shared common interests. I know I often use a site that already has some value to me, but if Ning was applied the value might increase because I might be able to gain more information and see how other real people are interacting.

It will be interesting to see as the internet changes how the role of Ning and other social sites will play apart in the adaptation to the constantly changing realm of advertising and marketing. Is Ning just another social site or the future of social marketing?

Matt Hite

Intern

Yovia.com

This week I read a few articles about how people see social marketing. One article said, “Social marketing, as with any marketing , is always going to be trial and error. However, with social marketing you can be a little more proactive in your approach by being a part of the social scene that you are trying to engage.” Another article I read stated, “marketers just don’t get the new technologies and the fundamental changes in the ways people interact with brands.” This led me to think about how as social marketers relevance is huge. You can’t talk to a young kid about something that would go right over his head. The message on what your focusing on is king in this aspect. For social marketers to get things right they must realize this and concentrate on their target audience. To engage these people you must put them and the message at the forefront. Your content needs to connect with the right audience, community, network, or etcetera where they are at other wise you could be talking to no one. You could be just wasting your time and money. 

By: Matt Hite
Intern
Yovia.com 

  http://thenextweb.org/2008/05/15/social-media-marketing-might-have-a-limited-future/
http://socialmarketingjournal.com/2008/05/15/should-you-spend-more-on-social-marketing/

I read an interesting article this past week about how social marketing is making more of interest in the marketing arena with advertisers. The article by Adage.com stated that, “While marketers may not be spending huge marketing dollars on social media yet, they know they should be using it to reach consumers.” Advertising Age also said a study, “found that 78% of marketers see social media as a way to gain a competitive edge, but fewer than 8% have budgets devoted to it.”After reading this I thought why and how this form of marketing still has not caught on. I think the biggest impact of this is because of the growing internet and the fresh social networks that are still developing. We as advertisers need to catch on to this aspect of marketing, because as things are changing within technology and the internet, the people around it are also changing. As advertisers we are always looking for the edge in advertising with being creative, but we also need to look at it as just simply engaging them in social networks.The article went on to talk about how it is an important way to build your brand, but people still aren’t sure how to use it properly. They states the question that, “Where should a marketer spend to reach its consumers — and how does a marketer know if its consumers use social media?” This is really the important focus of social marketing, because if you do it wrong you may never make a connection to your consumers and you could just be talking to the wrong people. Although, it is really important to get your feet wet with this form of marketing, social marketing can be highly effective. It engages the consumer, isn’t yelling, and it reaches them on an individual level.

By: Matt Hite

Yovia.com

Community Development Intern

Source article: http://adage.com/opinion?article_id=126828

It’s obvious, with the advancement of the computer, the way we communicate and the way we think is also adapting to the current times. It’s interesting to think about the people who run our world today and what the people of the future will be like. I have been thinking about this aspect in marketing and our society. Today people my age are constantly socializing. We are constantly plugged-in, communicating with all the technology we have been provided with, whether this is with our friends, family and acquaintances. It is known that humans are social creatures.

We want to hit the level of love and belongingness in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. But, with the changing time, this niche in communication in our lives is, I think, growing. More importantly, it is growing in an interesting and sometimes different way. When we look at kids compared to adults, I think we could say that this difference is definitely present.

I read this week in an article from Economist.com that, “[a] psychologist at MIT who studies the nexus between people and gadgets, believes that the tools of mobility are leading to ‘the emergence of a new type of person’. In the distant, landline-dominated past, she says, people thought: ‘I have a feeling so I want to make a call.’ Young people today, including Ms. Turkle’s teenage daughter, seem to be thinking instead: ‘I want to have a feeling, so I need to make a call’.” So as advertisers we should want to understand and possibly intersect this. What could be more appropriate than social marketing? 

I have been thinking about how influential this is compared to other forms of advertisement. If the people of tomorrow are communicating differently and in different forms we should try to understand the importance in it and cater to it. If the people of tomorrow are thinking and using sentences that are structured differently we should try to understand this. And if advertising continues, don’t you think social marketing will eventually take a bigger piece of the pie in advertising? What do you think?

By: Matt Hite

Community Development Intern

Yovia.com

 Article Reference: http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10950487

Yesterday I was thinking about where advertising and marketing is headed. Now that the writer strike has happened I am so bored by what is on television and in the movies. I can’t really remember the last really good movie I saw. I thought about some of this stuff because it was brought up at one of our weekly work meetings. I know in school my teachers’ emphasis is always on how advertising is all around us even when we don’t realize it. I don’t know if it’s me and being part of the younger generation, but I think I am becoming more numb to advertising and creative things in the media. I think this is because I am being constantly presented with this stuff.

In advertising they say that being creative is one of the most important factors in a campaign. I don’t think being creative will ever run out, but I do think, when it comes down to it, people are getting used to the advertisements all around us. Being creative means you always have to push the elements. This lead me to ponder how effective is word of mouth advertising? When I look at how social people are and how I communicate with everyone, I think this could be a huge form of advertising that might become even more influential. When I look at it, I can see how checking my Facebook, Myspace, texting, emailing, making calls and just hanging with my buddies can definitely be an influential form of penetrating an audience with a product, service or message. Social Media is the only factor that isn’t seen so much as being annoying and trying to get my attention. So I wonder what will the future of advertising look like? Will we stray more from this look at me concept, or will become more engaging with the audience socially?

By: Matt Hite

Community Development Intern

Yovia.com