Marketing Blog

When my invite to the Pinterest community was first accepted, I spent most of my time repinning quotes, decorating ideas, pictures of mustaches (long story!), and funny pictures like this one about “The Google.” Although I still repin those sorts of things for my personal entertainment, I also see how businesses can benefit from incorporating Pinterest into their social media plan by driving traffic to their website and getting in front of the site’s 7.51 million unique visitors.

First things...

Although nearly 1.5 million people visit Pinterest every day, terms like “pinning” and “repinning” sound as foreign today as “tweeting” and “retweeting” did three years ago. As this site gains popularity, understanding this site will become even more important for marketers, especially in the B2C space.

Before we define some basic Pinterest terms, let’s start off by describing the site – it is a social bookmarking site that allows its users to organize images they find online.

• Pin: A pin is an...

As a Colts fan, Super Bowl XLIV was a huge disappointment (Peyton agrees, he did say “disappointing” 18 times during his 11-minute postgame interview). And even though there were more commercials about underwear than many of us may have liked, there were some pretty good commercials…which is nice.

How much did these commercials cost advertisers?30-second spots cost up to $3.01 million this year which is just slightly above the max cost of $3 million in Super Bowl XLIII. The number of viewers...

As of today, over 913,000 people have demanded that Paramount Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures show “Paranormal Activity” at theaters nationwide.  The film that’s being dubbed the next “Blair Witch Project” originally opened in select theaters with promoters telling us to go online and request that the film be released nationwide or, at a minimum, be shown at a theater near us (Quick sidebar for scary movie lovers in Cleveland, this film is now showing in our area).

What does this tell us? Aside...

Shortly after being drafted, Lebron James signed a seven-year, $90 million endorsement deal with Nike. In 2006, Tiger Woods earned $20 million from Nike for promoting their golf division and that deal was just one small portion of their $1.7 billion advertising budget – that year, they spent $476 million on endorsements.  And, in 2009, Catherine Zeta-Jones will earn $20 million for encouraging us to undergo a mobile makeover with T-Mobile. 

Considering society’s fascination with celebrities,...

While “they” say there’s no such thing as bad publicity, I’d say there is such a thing as bad Tweeting. Companies can use Twitter as an inexpensive way to reinforce their brand, respond to customer needs and keep customers informed of promotions, new product offerings, company news, etc…or, if done improperly, they can use Twitter to annoy followers.  Clearly, the former is the intended goal. 

In addition to not constantly posting updates (my biggest Twitter pet peeve), ways to be Tweet-ppropo...

The dummy here is me.  Or was me up until just a couple weeks ago.  While Twitter has approximately 4-5 million users, about 70% of whom are estimated to be active users, the concept was still somewhat strange to me.  Twitter allows users to answer the question, “What are you doing?” in 140 characters or less and, even though I can’t imagine why people would care that I am “Now contemplating marathon #3…” or was “In the middle of a nice little weekend =)” last Saturday, the site still grew 974%...

According to Nielsen, social networking has overtaken e-mail as the most popular Internet activity.  Nearly two-thirds of the world’s Internet users visited a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace in 2008 and almost 10% of all time spent on the Internet was spent on social media sites, with Facebook being the most popular of these.

This time isn’t just being spent posting pictures and SuperPoking people.  Businesses are creating fan pages and using them to market to and communicate...

How many news stories have started with, “in these economic times” over the past several months?  Too many to count, in all likelihood – here’s another one: In these economic times, companies need to be more creative with how they communicate their marketing message to their target audience. 

One inexpensive way to ensure positive things are being said about your company is by keeping your employees happy. While they may not spend their Saturdays sharing the virtues of your company like...

www.skodaminotti.com/services/marketing.htmlFor someone who doesn’t like football, the best part of the Super Bowl is often the commercials.  For a Browns fan watching this year’s Super Bowl, they were the best part, but I digress… 

The cost of commercials in 2009 was $3 million for a 30-second spot – up 10% from $2.7 million in 2008 and up 17% from $2.5 million in 2007.  Companies like Pedigree, Castrol, Denny’s and 25 other advertisers spent this huge sum because they know that it serves them...