More Valuable Than Gold: SMM & Buyer Desire
“Rivers of Revenue” is one of the many books I keep on my bookshelf. I highly recommend it. In Chapter 3, Kristin Zhivago writes about tapping into buyer desire through customer interviews. In the current marketing environment, the growing adoption of blogs and social media tools make this easier and more effective than ever before. Through Technorati, BlogCatalog, and Google BlogSearch you can identify bloggers within your target market, and by commenting on these blogs, by truly adding to the conversation, you can overtime, obtain valuable “buyer-centric” feedback.
Let’s review a few of the reasons Zhivago outlines for conducting customer interviews and frame them in social media marketing terms.
“(Interviews) Are your best source of information”
If you have immersed yourself in business blogging or other social media tools like Twitter, your readers and fellow bloggers (those where you regularly comment on) are indeed your best sources of information. By actively engaging, reading, and writing on subjects similar to your business, they are in a position to provide you with feedback and, if your product/service is good enough, generate buzz by recommending it to their readers. Read more
Business Blogging - A $13,000 Investment.
Time, The Key Issue in Social Media Marketing (SMM).
Last month in her book review of Now is Gone, But It’s Not Too Late, Brandy Cummings wrote about SMM resource requirements. While I have not read the book yet, is has most certainly been added to my reading list.
The major resource that will need to be tapped in order to be successful with new media is time. This is something that I have said often before. Livingston suggests that a small business should be able to dedicate 8-10 hours a week to their blog or other social network activity. That is the minimum that you will need to be able to develop quality content and make quality contributions to your community. If you can afford that, you can afford to start your new media efforts.
An Approximation of SMM Costs
If as a small business you do engage social media and do follow the resource allocation Livingston suggests, you would have to contribute about 520 man-hours over the course of the year. Read more
Business Blogging - Does It Really Make Sense?
As a small business owner, I often wonder if the time commitment required to maintain a blog is worth the effort, especially in the very early days of a business. Can it really help you hawk your goods? Let’s face it, when we create a blog that compliments our business (vs. a blog that IS a business), our goal isn’t to blog for bloggings sake, but to support our revenue generating activities. If we firmly believed that blogging could not meaningfully impact our business, we probably wouldn’t do it.
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Interesting Comments
Here’s a comment from a recent post on CalculatedRisk that I found pretty interesting…
http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2008/03/delong-sounds-alarm.html
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What a Week!
Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF)
On March 11th, 2008 (Tuesday), the Federal Reserve, in response to the most recent incarnation of the credit crisis announced the creation of the TSLF. From the press release:
The Federal Reserve announced today an expansion of its securities lending program. Under this new Term Securities Lending Facility (TSLF), the Federal Reserve will lend up to $200 billion of Treasury securities to primary dealers secured for a term of 28 days (rather than overnight, as in the existing program) by a pledge of other securities, including federal agency debt, federal agency residential-mortgage-backed securities (MBS), and non-agency AAA/Aaa-rated private-label residential MBS.
Rough Times Ahead, Part II: An ‘Austrian’ View of the Great Depression
Economic Cycles & The Money Supply
According to proponents of the Austrian School of Economics, boom and bust cycles are caused by inflationary monetary policy; that central banks “create the business cycle by inflating the supply of money in a fiat monetary system.” They argue that policy expanding the supply of money ultimately lowers the cost of borrowing and results in speculative investments and a misallocation of resources. “A correction—commonly called a ‘recession‘ or ‘bust’ — occurs when resources are reallocated to their best uses.” Furthermore, government policies to minimize the impact of a correction only delay and exacerbate the inevitable bust. Austrian economists Hayek and Murray Rothbard, for example, blame the Federal Reserves’ inflationary policies during the Roaring Twenties for the Great Depression. If you follow this school of thought, the current housing and financial crisis should come as no surprise - we are, as they would say, paying the price for Greenspan’s reckless reduction of interest rates. The M3 money supply, which the government now refuses to publish, literally doubled from approximately $5 trillion to $10 trillion between 1998 and 2006, and if the slope of the line remains unchanged, should be well over $11 trillion today. The only ways to correct the imbalances are to either (1) allow deflation to occur, or (2) continue providing cheap credit to stay one step ahead of deflationary pressures and as a consequence, continue expanding fiat money supplies.
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Rough Times Ahead, Part I: Revisiting the Great Depression
The recent economic events have piqued my interest in The Great Depression and Crash of 1929. Out of concern over the resiliency of the US economy, I began reading historical accounts of the depression era, and while browsing through books on the subject, came across Robert S. McElvanine’s aptly named “The Great Depression: America, 1929-1941.” The book has an eye-opening and intriguing section on the origins of the Great Depression.
Origins of the Great Depression
While most informational websites or articles attribute the Depression to income inequalities and the maldistribution of wealth, it should be noted that this particular problem was merely symptomatic of other structural economic flaws and was the one that ultimately broke the camel’s back.
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If Bernanke Was Blunt -
Here is an excerpt from a post on SeekingAlpha on what Bernanke would say if he did not have to sugar coat things.
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About
My name is Arpan and this is my blog! I'll be writing about things I find interesting, and hopefully some stuff that you might too. Some posts are intentionally controversial and are intended to provoke discussion. Don't be shy!
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